On January 20th, when you stay out of work, school, and shopping to take to the streets and send the President-elect a strong message of resistance, don’t forget to stay off the mainstream internet too!
The purpose of the strike is to oppose “fascism”.
And I use air quotes there because these days “fascist” feels like a buzzword suggestive of little more than an internet persona who spews bigoted nonsense. If that’s the case, then how has it affected the way we collectively employ our greatest communication platform, the internet, to oppose this “fascism”? We troll the bullies on Facebook. We post their ignorant tweets in listicles and attempt to humiliate them off our internet platforms. We pass around memes that allow ourselves to laugh at the flawed logic of the other side. We publish viral social media posts and hope that they might change a mind or two (but are also content with just reinforcing our own solidarity as the opposition).
My tone may seem trivializing, but I do believe that there is value in a mass expression of opposition online — especially when we have a President-elect who wantonly employs psychopathic social media posts and fiery oppressive rhetoric to inspire racist, classist sentiment in common people. But we should be aware that his behavior is only a symptom of fascism. It’s not the main component of that crazy -ism that we fear so much.
So when the fight against “fascism” begins too much to focus around using mainstream internet platforms to drive ridicule to an authority figure, we need to consider the broader outcomes of this fight.
DT (name withheld for keyword purposes) has provided our internet content mill with a variety of trending topics every day for the past two years. Some days, it’s immense: an unsettling rape allegation, a promise to “bomb the shit” out of Syria and Iraq, a proposed 55-foot high wall to keep Mexicans out of the US. Most days, it’s more trivial: a snarky New Year’s tweet at his opponents, a dis at a TV show, an incorrect username mention on Twitter. It’s hard not to notice how everything that comes out of DT’s mouth, smartphone, and long past as a haughty rich man seems to generate one million times its weight in reactionary content, whether it be news clips, short-lived memes, parody videos, celebrity denunciations, long form opinion pieces or even viral merchandise for sale.
The intentions are noble sometimes — to build transparency about the type of administration that’s about to be in power. To encourage dialogue about how we’re going to counter this oppressive regime. To call out and correct every sensationalist uproar that DT imparts on the American public.
The internet, for a time, felt like a great place for these kinds of noble intentions. I’ll always idealize early internet as what felt like an almost anarchic center of free information exchange. But, like many widely used low-cost resources, corporate giants soon latched onto opportunities for monetization and degraded it into the capitalist machine that it is today. Global spending on online advertising has doubled in the past four years, with media giants recording record profits from ad revenues. I’ll admit to making a broad correlative statement when I say that the monetized internet, as of recent times, has profited largely from our thirst for DT content, but you can’t deny the ever-present media frenzy over every detail of his existence. His name has dominated Google searches and Facebook trends for the past year.
And we, as individuals on a mission to counter “fascism”, have taken to the internet to express our dissatisfaction with DT. We have generated buzz over and over again and further incentivized media giants and multi-million dollar tech conglomerates to cash in on our content and our traffic. It has motivated politically uninvested parties to exploit the profitability of the DT keyword, generating fake news sites and vacuous clickbait posts. But even the thousands of dollars earned by a Macedonian teenager’s fake news site pales in comparison to the millions of dollars that Google AdWords charges its advertisers in exchange for allowing them to tap into our internet behavior.
The internet today is a hotbed of data collection, surveillance, content policing, coercive propaganda and corporate profits. Now that is fascism. And we’re not going to fight it by clicking, sharing, and saying DT’s name until we’ve run out of data.
For one day, let’s boycott the destruction of one of our most valuable mediums of communication. Let’s let the tech corporations know that we have the power to shut them down. Let’s boycott internet advertising and monetization of information in the name of capitalism.
On January 20th, let’s sign off entirely.
