Lately I’ve been in a position where I can’t necessarily decide whether or not Twitter is good or bad for the Left. After roughly a year and a half of being fully ensconced in that area in the tripartite Venn diagram where Left, Weird, and Hockey Twitter meet (there’s like a dozen of us) I’ve noticed a violently shitty tendency in the discussions on the Left. There was a brilliant piece that I often see referenced in these parts (“Exiting The Vampire Castle”), so I needn’t do a pale imitation of that.
But in the last three weeks I’ve bore witness to a series of idiotic and banal arguments that were so strategically-placed at certain lynchpins of the On-line Left that if I were 4% more paranoid I’d be certain were done by COINTELPRO. Some were idiotic and absurd and ended in threads of people posting their own boobs, others disconcerting and intractable in their divides (looking at you, dumb Liz Bruenig mini-controversy). But all shared two important similarities: they were dumb and distracting from the most important goal and they were ON-FUCKING-LINE.
I’m forced, therefore, toward a conclusion that I had settled on three years ago and then tossed out midway through 2015: Twitter is actively harmful to social movements and mass politics.
By May 2014 I had the basic thesis that social media was a wholly ineffective metaphorical release valve, giving people validation without necessarily giving them a material outcome to justify that pleasure. The events thereafter, however provided compelling counterarguments. I notived Fight for 15 and #BLM getting the word out and gathering large crowds in a largely-ad hoc fashion. I saw miniature wildcat strikes and freeway shutdowns. There was an undeniable power to these new tools.
Further thought, however, has forced a distinction upon me. Fight for 15 and BLM are examples of movements or organizations that merely demonstrated the power that immediate information dissemination has–that power is only useful, sadly, insofar as there’s a material, political ask with that power backing it up.
So now we come to yesterday, March 20th. There was a talk from their ABCs of Socialism series, one that I knew would get the hackles of the “JACOBIN SMACKS OF CLASS REDUCTIONIST DUDEBRO” up as soon as I saw the topic. The official Jacobin twitter account tweeted some innocuous excerpt from the talk, and while I saw some protestations to the wording (that I agreed with, for the most part), it looked like another mini-controversy that would blow over by the time I woke up on the 21st.
That, uh, that didn’t happen. Instead, today was another fucking trench war, Leftists fighting Leftists for either being insufficiently woke or a counterrevolutionary liberal. Granted, these are the schismatic tendencies of the far radical groups of the fringe, but it seems as though Twitter is making these inevitable flare-ups easier, faster, and more completely universal–especially when the work of protest and the networks formed are digital and “blocking” someone is equivalent to them ceasing to exist.
While it is clear that my sympathies lie with the people who (perhaps overzealously) push class first–if only due to the unique backwardness of the USA in class politics–the people who make these callouts are rarely doing so in purely bad faith. They genuinely feel like the issue, person, wording, or idea at question is making the hard work of solidarity harder, and we should take concerns and critiques of this nature seriously. But Twitter isn’t real life.
The callout is undoubtedly a good tool, one that I have used and has been used on me to great effect, but each time that I can say that actual growth or understanding was achieved, I was looking another person in the eyes IRL. The callout only works because you can see the sincerity in someone’s face, either their anger, disappointment, or sadness. This may sound facile or self-evident, but think on this for a moment: has it ever worked on you, when someone on twitter is trying to call you out? No, we tend to retrench.
And so it is in these two ways–the demobilization of the electorate with the release valve of good twetes and the streamlining of calling out without the face-to-face component that makes calling out useful in the first place–that I fear that Twitter is officially tipping toward “net negative.”