The people downvoting you don’t want to be burdened with the understanding that their yelling at clouds in online forums isn’t just worthless, it’s the best possible response a fascist coup could hope for.
People get to feel like their shock and anger are being heard and their likes and upvotes comfort them that they’re not alone. Then they go to sleep that night telling themselves that with a post that got that much traction, surely someone out there is going to go out and change something. But they’re not, because they’re making their own posts and comments, believing that they’re also doing their part.
The Civil War, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, Civil Rights - none of these things would have started much less succeeded if social media had existed then. People would still be posting today about how it’s so reprehensible that white people can own another human, get their upvotes, and wait for someone else to do something about it.
People used to rage about the content of television being ideological.
Now we know that its ideological nature is mostly structural, not presentation: you, sitting, watching, passive, and most definitely not marching in the streets!
Personally, I downvoted because lately I’ve been devoting almost all of my energy toward trying to develop software we can use to build a true democracy. That’s how I keep myself sane and believe I’m contributing to solutions. Others have their own ways.
And while I’m waiting for scripts to run, I do make the occasional political comment in places like this. But that’s a separate thing just to connect with people and unwind. I can’t speak for the others, but I was downvoting the assumption that just because someone shows outrage at an outrageous situation, that necessarily means they’re doing nothing to try to fix it. Those things are not mutually exclusive.
The people downvoting you don’t want to be burdened with the understanding that their yelling at clouds in online forums isn’t just worthless, it’s the best possible response a fascist coup could hope for.
People get to feel like their shock and anger are being heard and their likes and upvotes comfort them that they’re not alone. Then they go to sleep that night telling themselves that with a post that got that much traction, surely someone out there is going to go out and change something. But they’re not, because they’re making their own posts and comments, believing that they’re also doing their part.
The Civil War, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, Civil Rights - none of these things would have started much less succeeded if social media had existed then. People would still be posting today about how it’s so reprehensible that white people can own another human, get their upvotes, and wait for someone else to do something about it.
People used to rage about the content of television being ideological.
Now we know that its ideological nature is mostly structural, not presentation: you, sitting, watching, passive, and most definitely not marching in the streets!
Generate action, not alpha waves.
Personally, I downvoted because lately I’ve been devoting almost all of my energy toward trying to develop software we can use to build a true democracy. That’s how I keep myself sane and believe I’m contributing to solutions. Others have their own ways.
And while I’m waiting for scripts to run, I do make the occasional political comment in places like this. But that’s a separate thing just to connect with people and unwind. I can’t speak for the others, but I was downvoting the assumption that just because someone shows outrage at an outrageous situation, that necessarily means they’re doing nothing to try to fix it. Those things are not mutually exclusive.