(Twitter thread, Nov 4 2022)
One thing that “should I stay or should I go” discussions make clear is just how many different reasons ppl are on here for.
But Twitter being what it is, lots of ppl generalising from their own situation to What Everyone Should Do And They’re Bad If They Don’t…
A wee 🧵
I fell into this thing, taking over the a/c for an activist MA from @Theresa_OKeefe who set it up (and followed some fantastic feminist accounts).
When the course died, I eventually kept this going as a personal a/c but basically along the same lines
Follow lots of different movement / activist accounts, retweet things from a wide range of spaces that seem like they might be interesting to ppl in other movements / communities in struggle.
Plus some Irish specials, and signal-boosts for groups who really need solidarity.
Sometimes it seems like a good space to publicise stuff, but often that’s not true – the app definitely rewards “Why the Irish Green Party is bad” more than “Here’s something that might be really useful for movement thinking”
It’s not bad for idle scrolling though, and quite good for focussed news from some movements – the ones that put a lot of stuff on Twitter really.
And we do meet some great ppl on here, along with the other kind. Like @alfgunvald I can’t get v worked up about it changing or going under – I liked Indymedia more, and I liked movement small-press stuff more.
Tbh I’m quite nostalgic for Gestetners, stuffing envelopes and putting up posters. But also, and more importantly: this space was never ours (if “we” is movements).
Maybe it was a space that movements could use, and where communities could come together, and these things are important.
But capitalism does keep pulling the rug out from under us. And: our movements control so little of our own “means of mental production” that most of the time ppl don’t even notice it.
We do less of our movement thinking in spaces we own than even 20 years ago w/Indymedia, movement print, summit protests and social fora.
If you compare it to 50 years ago, around 1968, there is no comparison in terms of just how dependent we have become on spaces owned by other people.
For what it’s worth: (plutobooks.com/9780745338088/…)
So much of our movement thinking today (in the global N) happens on social media – and is shaped by algorithms.
Some of it happens via for-profit publishing (incl radical media working on a commercial basis).
Some via academia, with its own status logics.
This … isn’t good. ofc in capitalism the class that controls the means of material production usually controls the means of mental production, like the man said.
Part of the battle to make movements is the battle to seize control of those capacities for ourselves. (academia.edu/45473231/How_d…)
This isn’t to say “these are all bad”. I post on Twitter, I publish books and essays on radical spaces, I work as an academic.
We have to contest these spaces. But we have to realise that they are not ours.
These spaces are not ours. They never were. They warp the content of our discussion in entirely predictable ways.
Twitter is good for agitation, convincing ppl that something is unjust (enough to take action about).
It can help w education (pointing towards analyses of why bad stuff persists even when we know it’s bad).
Twitter, and academia, and for-profit radical publishing, are weak when it comes to organising, creating strategic relationships, networks and organisations to challenge power.
They are weak for developing thinking from movement practice.
Their relationships aren’t ours. As soon as you get into movement publishing, you realise that distribution is politics.
Who reads this? Why do they read it? What do they do when they’ve read it? What practical relationships are created through the communication?
This isn’t secondary. It is central. But the relationships created by algorithms, by commercial publishing (radical or not), by academia are not movement relationships.
They’re not intended to be.
They are markets, audiences, fanbases, communities of opinion.
Not spaces of self-organised collective action. Like somebody said, this was true when some other pack of shareholders owned this space. It’s true now.
That doesn’t mean the details aren’t worth fighting over – but it does mean being realistic about the significance of the space as a whole.
From this point of view (and there are many other reasons to be on here) the Q is really whether the space will still be useful for something relevant.
Not if it can be everything we would like it to be.
It was never that, even without the apartheid bro.
And: what else can we create that enables our movements to talk to each other as movements, to learn from one another’s struggles, to think strategically, to ground our ideas in collective practice, to create spaces where hope becomes real potential?
We really, really need that.
And the fact that so many ppl don’t even know what that looks like … is a real weakness for so many struggles today.
If we can only think together in someone else’s spaces, we can’t really think as a movement.
/fin
Learning from each other's struggles 