Alt-text: Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.
source: On Tyranny (Graphic Edition)
Or the people posting online to tell everyone else “Don’t you dare do anything!”
Online spaces are too easily segregated. Already we have no control over plenty of cuntservative “safe spaces”.
The point of protests and demonstrations is to give a physical, visible mass to demands and movements. The Suffrage, Civil Rights Movement, the various protests against Soviet rule, not to mention various uprisings against monarchies or dictatorships (Frances’s Storming of the Bastille, Russian deposition of the Czar), the creation of unions that did a lot for modern working conditions and other protests with less visible results in slowing down the encroachment of bullshit.
But their success hinges on numbers. Every scab that breaks strikes is a traitor to their peers. Every cunt discouraging people from participating harms the rest of the protestors.
Now more than ever we have the tools the Internet provides to generate the will and coordinate the execution of strikes and protests. Don’t participate, if you feel it’s hopeless, but don’t infect others with your defeatism. Best case, they’ll manage to win and improve things for you. Worst case, it’s not you that’s getting hit.
Look at George Floyd, you had numbers and it didn’t do shit. If anything police are more violent and more authoritarian. This isn’t the 70s anymore. Police have trained yearly to Coral and suppress. It’s shooting fish in a barrel for them. You say you have all these tools yet weird how you show up to the things and none of that has advanced at all. Instead it’s people wandering around until someone smashes windows and it turns into a mini riot that’s then used to hurt the cause.
That just means we have to step up our game, not that we have to surrender
But that’s what I’m saying. Stepping up the game is bringing the old days into the Internet. The goal is numbers and awareness. That’s achieved online where every single major group is doing it. Doesn’t mean you stop showing up in the streets but that the physical presence isn’t the main driver. Opinions and culture need to be shifted and to do that we need content. Without it there’s no point showing up anywhere
Then we were talking past each other. My point was that we need both that online presence and a physical one to give it real-world visibility, but as I understand you now, we need something to give visibility to. It seems that our points are more or less the same and we’ve been arguing different nuances of the same opinion.
My point is not that we need to be less reliant on protesting because policing has evolved to make it practically impossible to get any traction. We’re only allowed to protest because it is ineffective the way we currently do it. If a protest is actually going to create change, they have the playbook from decades of training and adapting and studying. At this point it’s farmers moving cattle. It’s referees watching guys fight and letting them get tired before stepping in. It’s giving us the illusion that showing up is doing something. If it actually did something they wouldn’t allow it.
Therefore I look at what is working. What is working is online engagement. That’s how Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes and Joe Rogan and Steven Crowder and Alex Jones and Milo and on and on and on. The Internet is the space we need to show up. Networks need to be built. Like channels between Lemmy and Twitter and mastedon to Facebook. Especially Lemmy. The reason is because Reddit might not allow certain topics for example Charlie Kirk videos right now. So Lemmy and other places should be building these channels and creating content. That’s how you get noticed. Flood the zone just like Russia or heritage foundation or Prager u does. We need people like a left version of Ben Shapiro making good arguments that are then flooded in comment sections of videos totally unrelated, which is what the right wing voters do. We need to take all that space back but we need energy and motivation to do it. That comes from content.