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We let the normies into our spaces.
There’s a good retrospective on the mass protest movements of the 2010s called If We Burn. The main takeaway I got was that leaderlessness and horizonalism do not work.
If you don’t pick your leaders, they will pick themselves.
Anarchism is the worst social order, except for all others that have been tried.
It was never not being weaponized, and never stopped being a place to organize.
What did the Arab spring give the people in the end?
Syria? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Lybia? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Tunesia? temporary improvements now to be revoked by a new authoritarian
Egypt? temporary improvements followed by an US backed coup installing an even worse military dictatorMaybe we were just naive in thinking that social media back then wasn’t already doing the bidding of governments against people.
The conclusion: as soon as a country is destabilized, you can bet your ass the US is going to come in and fuck up any democratic progress in their own favor.
Not only the US though.
Tunesia is the only one with a success story where the mass protests were successful in creating reform (new president and constitution). In the other countries, the mass protests for reform were violently suppressed, and still are in the present day.
Summary of each country
What has happened since the so-called Arab Spring? Eight years later, human rights are under attack across the region. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, have been killed during armed conflicts that continue to rage in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The Syrian conflict has created the largest refugee crisis of the twenty-first century, humanitarian crisis.
Tunisia is the only relative success story. It has a new constitution, some justice for past crimes, but human rights are still under attack.
In Egypt, peaceful activists, critics of the government, and many others remain in jail. Torture and other ill treatment are rife. Hundreds have been sentenced to death and tens of thousands put behind bars for protesting or for their alleged links to political opposition. However, we saw that the current president was just authorized to stay in power until 2034. In Bahrain, the authorities are silencing dissent. Libya has turned into chaos. There are many armed conflicts all across the country, and all sides have committed war crimes and serious human rights abuses.
In Syria, the region’s bloodiest armed conflict emerged in response to the brutal suppression of mass protests by the government. Atrocious crimes are being committed on a massive scale. Half the population has been displaced.
Yemen is an ongoing tragedy, with a Saudi Arabia–led coalition (principally with the United Arab Emirates), but with the US supplying arms, providing refueling and intelligence, and so forth. Here’s an interesting Tucson connection. The Emirates just bought $1.6 billion of arms from Raytheon, so the Tucson economy stays strong. The Saudi Arabia–led coalition air strikes and shelling by Houthi forces have killed more than ten thousand civilians, forty thousand wounded. Ten million are now in jeopardy of famine and disease. Some of the attacks amount to war crimes.
The Arab Spring, which started out as an enormously hopeful movement for progressive change, has now largely been subjected to brutal repression and pushback from the forces of the status quo ante. It represents a poignant and tragic example of social struggle.
- Consequences of Capitalism - Chapter 6 - Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone
One could say the same about the Liberal Revolution of 1848. It failed, and yet it took many years before much of the liberal and progressive values became culturally ingrained.
“The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”- Martin Luther King Jr
Good or bad, that’s why any ideas never die. That’s why the powers-that-be love to censor.
Excellent point
It gave women significantly more rights than they had before, but we all know that shit doesn’t matter apparently.
People love to talk about how ‘the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.’
It’s easy to talk about big dramatic battles.
The truth is that it’s really a never-ending struggle that requires sweat.
How many people bother to show up for primary elections? How many are willing to get a petition signed to get a good candidate on the ballot?
if we want a breather we gotta upend the system.
not keep struggling with it.
The quote is that the tree is “refreshed” with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.
Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we’d be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won’t take even the simplest of actions until they’re forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it’s desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who “aren’t really into politics,” by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.
We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn’t enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.
Question: What is the mythical height that American “democracy” has degraded from? The country was founded by a bunch of settlers who violently kicked out the people living there. They set up the government and immediately restricted who could vote and how much influence that vote could even have. They kept some people as non-human property. They spent the next ~century arguing about it until it had to fight a war about it and the result was to leave those people being merely treated as sub-human rather than non-human. Moving on to the 20th century, it took movements of labor and minorities that were met with extreme violence to get anywhere and that’s still left us where we are today, begging for crumbs and for police not to just execute people in the streets.
Then of course there’s all the people we invaded or otherwise screwed with who never even got a vote in the first place. Were they not “doing their civic duty?”
America has never been the experiment in democracy it purports itself to be. It’s a nice ideal to strive for, but in order to do that you have to stop pretending and recognize that there’s nothing to protect or repair. Nothing to go back to. Just something we’ve yet to build.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has entered the chat…
Look up the New Deal. Pretty good blueprint for a place to start.
Refer to my comment bellow for a more expanded discussion, but specifically talking about the New Deal:
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The voter participation in this period was comparable to what we have today. Minus all the people excluded, but the comment I’m replying to was talking about people deciding to vote, so those without that option, these people aren’t included in the asserted culpability for the success or failure of democracy.
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The New Deal happened with significant context outside of the electoral system. A massive war with another looming on the horizon. A global financial collapse that threatened to incite people against the ruling class. Militant union organizing against violent state and private repression. The rise of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to capitalist hegemony and an example to show workers what was possible.
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The goal was to placate workers enough to preserve the power structure. Far from being a democratic revolution, it was a stalling tactic that kept power concentrated and allowed those in power to slowly dismantle outside power structures like unions until such time as they could claw back those gains. The later end of the Keynesian government programs can be better attributed to the weakening of unions than the failure of people to vote or vote correctly at the ballot box. Government policy obviously had a big hand in this attack on unions, but there were also the material factors of automation and globalization that greatly reduced union bargaining power.
The goal was to placate workers enough to preserve the power structure.
Nice revisionism.
There wasn’t any chance of a massive class struggle like the USSR happening. There was more of a chance that the richest would have kicked FDR out and put in their own junta. That attempt only failed because Smedley Butler wasn’t having any.
I was lucky enough to meet some old school Communists who’d been in the Spanish Civil War. They would have laughed at the idea that the US was on the verge of a Socialist takeover in the 1930s.
It certainly wasn’t as extreme or successful as the soviet union, but there was a lot of unionization going on during the industrial revolution that was more radical than the tamer bargaining unions we see in the post-war era. And then the depression happened and things got really bad. It’s not hard to see how elites would have looked out at what was happening in the world, looked at the bad economic situation at home, and concluded that something had to be done.
FDR even said that they were trying to reform capitalism to save it.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Transwiki/American_history_quotes_New_Deal
1933 “It was this administration which saved the system of private profit and free enterprise after it had been dragged to the brink of ruin.” President Roosevelt, on how his emergency actions in 1933 prevented a revolution and saved capitalism.
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The height was when the vast majority of people understood the importance of informed voting, and did so with pride. We’ve never really been great in any other way, and even back then we weren’t all that great because we kept the right to vote from huge swaths of the people, but democracy functions when people vote, and it fails when they don’t.
Ok, when was this? I tried looking in to voter turnout rates over time. https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present
As they say in the article, it’s harder to get good estimates of earlier turnout rates, but for the sake of talking about it, lets take for granted that the numbers are in some reasonable ballpark of accuracy.
It looks like turnout tops out at about 80% (presidential elections) of the VEP in the later half of the 19th century. Before this the numbers were even lower than they have been in modern times. This of course was a time when many people could not vote. It was also a period of growing inequality and monopolization. It took 2 major wars, a lot of militant unionizing, and a global financial collapse to end up with the brief period of relative prosperity for specifically white working class men.
Throughout the 20th century though, the numbers pretty consistently dropped to between 50-70% turnout. Throughout a lot of this many people still could not vote, either explicitly or implicitly through Jim Crow laws. Even post-civil rights and voting rights act, prisoners still do not have the right to vote. Considering that we know that the war on drugs was started to pretty specifically target enemies of the state like minorities and hippies, this is a pretty clear attempt to once again implicitly deny certain people the right to vote. So even through multiple slices of the population being eligible to vote over time, we’ve never really had close to a significant portion of the eligible population voting.
This is also only talking about American citizens. Again, a fundamental tenet of democracy is that it only exercises government power over those who have consented to it. US imperialism, starting with the native Americans and African slaves and only expanding from there, has extended the application of that power to countless people around the world who never got a vote on the US fucking with their country and were often denied the opportunity to participate in their own democracies. Taken from this perspective, the majority of people under US rule/influence have NEVER gotten to participate in the “democratic process.”
This is also all before we talk about the ways that the electoral system and government structure was explicitly designed to not allow the popular will to have proportional influence over the government.
The implication of the assertion that “democracy works when people vote” is that the condition of these millions of people who have been systematically denied the right to influence the government that rules over them is their own fault for not voting anyway. It’s simply ahistorical. It’s as much a call to a mythical glorious past that conservatives engage in.
Rights have never and will never be won through the ballot box so long as the US remains a plutocracy. It has always required people to work outside the system and engage with violence, whether they are doing it or it is being done to them.
This history isn’t just some bad stuff that bad people did in the past. They’re the events that created the world we live in today. We aren’t free of their influence and we haven’t even stopped all of them. You can learn from that or you can keep blaming people. You can’t have both and still be honest with yourself.
You seem to be under the impression that I think our democracy somehow makes us superior, or that it functions more often than others, when my point is pretty much the opposite: regardless of the governing system, people will not do enough to avoid a corrupt tyrant of a leader from coming into power, which they will then need to literally fight to overcome.
Rights are not earned through voting, but they are lost due to lack of voting, allowing corrupt leaders to roll back the hard-fought advancements. That’s what the quote means: the tree of liberty is refreshed with blood. White men own slaves? Fight to free them. Only white men can vote? Fight to achieve voting rights for everyone. Those were the times the tree of liberty was refreshed. We’re now seeing these rights called into question because of political leaders that we allowed to be voted in; our rights are slipping due to our insufficient use of the freedoms we fought for, inevitably leading to us needing to fight yet again to refresh them.
If democracy worked unerringly, we’d be more free than ever right now due to the fact that the vast majority of Americans can vote, and while I believe that would be true if everyone did vote, the fact of the matter is that they wont. That allows corrupt leaders to slowly achieve strategic positions in all levels of the government over time, and eventually use their power to bring in the Tyrant mentioned in the quote.
The only people I’m blaming for the regression of our rights and democracy are the tyrants tearing them down. Yes, if we had all voted they never would have gotten the power to do so, but my point has always been that that was never going to happen.
Watch the movie ‘Network.’
When it came out it was a cutting edge satire; it’s become a quaint and staid docudrama
I do those things constantly and the fact that other people don’t infuriates me.
It’s like a group project and I’m doing my part but we still all fail because nobody else gives a damn.
I hate democracy and people now.
On one hand I would love to kick the collective ass of all the people who sat the election out.
On the other, I know that I don’t have the power to change things without them.
Back in WW2 a lot of people had to accept that the British, the Soviets, and the Americans were the only thing standing between them and the Axis. They had to give up control of their forces and hope for the best.
Just took em a second to figure out how.
Turns out all it took was algorithms promoting hate speech, conservative view points and other rage bait.
As soon as the algorithm become engagement based, instead of “positive reaction” based,
ie. algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative, when it used to promote posts based on positive reaction.
So now ragebait dominates most social media algorithms.
algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative
ESPECIALLY if those reactions are negative. Rage and fear are THE top engagement drivers and engagement means retention means ad impressions means dollars.
That it also means the end of democracy is immaterial to the billionaire ghouls in charge, of course.
Yeah, it’s precisely why I stopped using every social media except the fediverse. It was toxic to my mental health.
I feel safe assuming it’s been similarly toxic to everyone else’s, just some people haven’t zeroed in on that being the problem.
Even Lemmy was like this. Especially with the default comment sort “active”, which promotes comments that lead to arguments. My experience has been better since I switched to “top”.
I still haven’t found a good post sort that works for me. “Hot” and “Scaled” literally only promote stuff posted in the past two hours. “Top” is kinda sad because you always see posts 1 day old, and “Active” has the negative engagement problem.
The best solution I’ve found is be on an instance with downvotes disabled and sort by “active” but it isn’t perfect.
I just subscribe to communities I like, then sort by “New” to read those “Subscribed” communities. When I run out, I change to “Scaled” and “All”.
I usually go by top of the last 6 hours and top of the last 12 hours. is that just a thing in my app?
No its built in and across all the apps.
Thats my preference as well (top 6/12). Thats for all though, subscribed I go new. But its pretty niche communities and not a huge amount of activity.
Voyager?
jerboa
I just sort by newest over 12/24 hours. I’ve found I tend to argue much less with idiots if I get in and out before the troublemakers show up.
I feel the same way and now typically use “Top 6 Hours”
…which is a actually how I found this thread.
I always sort by New and let the chaos chips fall where they may
Thanks for the tips. I’m going to play around with it. Mine is set to hot currently, but maybe that’s not my cuppa.
maybe we should be able to blend several of these like i’ll take 20% of top day and 30% of active and 5% controversial… lemmy would grow more of the content was more suitable.
Also strawman liberal arguments to make living strawmen of privileged but sheltered children who won’t know any better than to make fools of themselves in public forums.
In a word, commercialisation.
That’s when they noticed it could be used to topple governments and decided to use selfishly.
Monetization of human weaknesses. By this I mean our biased, emotional, prone-to-addiction brains being colonized for data and ad-revenue.
The oligarchs got scared, then they got even.
that’s part of why there’s saudi money in twitter
Bless the color revolutions! Thanks Facebook and the CIA!
Anonymity.
When you can set up thousands of bots and say whatever you want without consequence of course this would be the result.
Or maybe mediums are inherently neutral?
You think Twitter is inherently neutral right now?
No? Twitter isn’t a medium, it’s a platform.
So your comment was just completely pointless then?
Maybe you don’t understand the point? The post says that internet used to be a force for democracy and is now ‘weaponised’ against it. I’m pointing out that internet itself was never a force and it is silly to try to assign such values to it
I disagree. Few things are truly neutral. What people usually consider neutral is just what’s normal at the time. The structures within which we live and express ourselves are shaped by people and institutions.
I’m not taking about neutral as in in the middle. The medium through which you communicate doesn’t favor any message over any other. So it should only be judged based on how good it is at relaying messages, not who has more access to the medium or what they use it to relay.
It does favor messages over others though. Technically mostly anyone with an internet connection can put something out there, but what actually gets to be seen by many depends largely on the communication infrastructure. Yes, the platforms we use, and who controls them.
