The Luddite
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An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.

In “If We Burn,” Vincent Bevins recaps the mass protests of the 2010s. He argues that they’re communicative acts, but power has no way of negotiating with or interpreting them. They’re “illegible.”

Here’s a “yes and” to Bevins. I argue that social media companies have a detailed map of all protesters’ connections, communications, topics of interests, locations, etc., such that, to them, there has never been a more legible form of social organization, giving them too much power over ostensibly leaderless movements.

I also want to plug Bevins’s book, independently of my post. It’s extremely well researched. For many of the things that he describes, he was there, and he productively challenges many core values of the movements in which I and any others probably reading this have participated.

  • sbvEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    If the mass protest is a communicative act, but the protesters haven’t come together to decide what exactly it is that they’re trying to say, then what the hell is it saying? What is the victory condition? How do they negotiate with power?

    Occupy had this problem.

    It’ll be interesting to see what structures come out of this.

    • theluddite@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      Totally agreed. Bevins does a great job with exactly that.

      I have this extremely radicalizing memory of being at Occupy with a friend, who was an accomplished, award-winning economist (who has since passed; drink a toast to an old and missed friend for me). A national news network spoke to him for some time, and told us that the segment would air at a certain time. We all tuned in to watch it, only for them to give him some 10 seconds of air time, and play the entire interview that they did with a probably homeless guy who was quite unwell, who was at the camp for free food, and, to the camp’s credit, was being fed and taken care of there. Not only was it grossly exploitative of that guy, but it was so dishonest as to the reality that I was witnessing on the ground. I’ll never forget how they portrayed that guy, as a representative of the protest and complete lunatic, rather than as someone society had tossed aside who was, for once, being taken in somewhere.

      From his book:

      To sum up the dynamic at work here—in Egypt, in Turkey, and indeed across the mass protest decade—Tuğal paraphrased one of Marx’s most famous lines, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Those who cannot represent themselves will be represented.”