HOW TO BE A SOCIALIST
OR HOW NOT TO BE A JOURNALIST
Too many voices, they've made me mute…
—Minor Threat
I haven’t had writer’s block since “the smoking years” of Going For the Throat’s nascency. My abstention from writing these days is out of respect for the new new media (NNM), and my restraint an attempt to atone for the vainglorious writing of my past.
With the advent of blogging and personal journalism, and by casting myself
as hero and villain, I was able to hack writer’s block once and for all. The instant platform of social media was the greatest boon to independent writers since the invention of the personal computer. Without the middleman of a publisher we could write what we wanted. It didn’t have to be respectful, accurate or even good.
It was harmless enough, for those of us with good intentions, but we blew it. We flooded the zone and for every critical piece of street journalism there were countless look-at-mes, half-bakeds and more hot-takes than the reader could ever want or need.
The reason that we are seeing a surge in a global far right is because of social media.
—
Which says nothing of those without good intentions—the bad actors and voices of intolerance, whose sleazy and divisive rhetoric calcified into a movement thanks to social media.
Worse were the platform bosses who allowed it to happen in the first place. We wasted a lot of time trying to platform ourselves on their encroaching technologies, and subsidized their ventures with our work. There was always a price to pay when offering up our lives as a product, and no hope for redemption now that they’ve gone sideways.
I miss deadlines now and go dark. I’m loath to publish columns with more than a single autobiographical mention (this one not withstanding). If and when I’m on social media I keep my opinions to myself. I never add to the commentary or discuss. The proxy activism is perhaps worse than doing nothing. So I do nothing and stare at my cat.
The Anthropocene is ripe for populism. Our overlords are strip mining the planet and prepping for a new day, 83 million miles away. But imagine if we disenfranchised victims of interplanetary imperialism were able to find working class polemics to stop the scumbag billionaire-class in its tracks; if we supplied and were supplied with communal and people-based solutions to meet the moment, survive and even thrive in the dusk of humanity. Which isn’t to say these campaigns don’t exist.
Are they too nuanced? Not as plain-spoken or appealing as Trumpism? Are the writers failing us or is it the message that can’t compete with the bombast and ire of othering? Is the Bernie Sanders movement finally dead? Are we just out flanked and out funded? Or is our failure baked into the business model of a social media that subsumes and uses our lives as a product and anyway are so focused on it’s become essential as any utility?
Yes.
If you don’t hear from me it’s because I’m not there. I’m taking responsibility for myself as a citizen and proud member of the NNM. I fucked up as a writer and I’m here to make amends. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to stare at my cat.
I suffer from the same issues: trying to figure how to make at the end of the world. Where did we go wrong? And you’re right: everything in the end benefits the billionaire-class, even our efforts at resistance. Nice to have fellow sojourners of the end!