Against the Internet - Reissue
On how the Left should be spending their time.
For Taurus Season, I’m reposting some of my older essays that I think deserve more love. I find myself agreeing with this even more today, having given up TikTok in January in part due to the frustrations described below.
This was also a paid post when it was originally released, so if you want to read more essays like this in the future, consider becoming a paid member!
On September 24th, 2024, Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams was executed by the state of Missouri via lethal injection. Convicted for the murder of a white woman in 2001, he has maintained his innocence throughout his life, as have many lawyers and activists who point out the lack of forensic evidence among other issues with the case. In the days leading up to his execution, his story went viral on the portions of social media we might affectionately dub “the online left”. Despite hundreds of people being mobilized to visit the Missouri governor’s office to deliver 1.25 million signatures on a petition requesting his freedom, the state carried on with his murder, forcing us all to reckon with not only the continued racism of this country, but the reality that we may have run up against the limits of what our current forms of activism are capable of. The State does not listen to The People, point blank.
We are all implicated in the murder of Khalifeh Williams. Obviously, the state apparatus that grants itself the ability to kill innocent people is to blame for this horror. However, another question we need to ask is, why did the wider American Left only learn about this execution with mere days left to act on it? It seems pretty clear that a well-organized movement for justice, one that could produce swarms of people showing up to the governor’s office and more than a million signatures, should have been able to prevent this murder. Could we have done so if we only knew about this situation months ago instead of a week ago?
Keiajah “KJ” Brooks, famous for her viral dragging of a Kansas police board, was one of the boots-on-the-ground, “IRL” activists working on Williams’ case. In a recent TikTok video, she claimed that despite reaching out to some of the largest social justice creators about his upcoming execution more than two months ago, many of them left her on read. Translation: many of the biggest names that we look to for guidance on leftist issues knew about Williams’ upcoming execution and said nothing until days before it happened (once it became popular to do so).
We can’t really say why these creators didn’t speak when they could have. We also can’t open a portal to another timeline where the online left mobilized months or years ago to check if Khalifah Williams is still alive over there. Nonetheless, it haunts me to consider the possibility that we, leftist creators, could have saved a man’s life if we acted then instead of mere days before his murder, once it was arguably too late to reverse course. It leads me to wonder: If leftist content creators are only making reactive content about what’s currently trending, rather than proactive content about things they can actually mobilize their audiences to do something about, then what does that say about our capabilities as a movement for justice?
The promise of the Internet—a method by which like-minded people could connect despite physical barriers in order to imagine new futures, create new identities, organize to make positive change in the real world, and so much more—has been knee-capped by corporate ownership, surveillance, and content algorithms. While I’ve been a TikTok creator since 2021 and a Substack author since 2022, I’m growing increasingly disillusioned with the idea that any of this is helping.
As it stands now, individuals yapping about politics on capitalist-owned platforms have completely different goals and incentive structures than organizers in real-life activist spaces. For example, in real-life activist spaces, it’s in your best interest to form coalitions with people who diverge slightly from you in your overall political beliefs. You are interdependent on each other for survival, or at the very least have some shared interest in the form of a law that needs to get passed or repealed, a body of government who should receive more funding, or the freedom of an incarcerated individual. Additionally, if someone in your activist group does something harmful (e.g., says or does something racist, transphobic, anti-Semitic, etc.) you could very well take a restorative justice approach to repairing that harm; after all, you’re a small group of people challenging the status quo, so it’s in your interest to find a way to work together despite your differences and remain in community with one another. Your group may democratically decide to cut that person off from the group if they refuse to partake in the restorative process, but this is generally a last resort.
Online, however, people are disposable. You can now find the 500 people on the planet who agree with you on precisely everything, so if anyone does harm, diverges slightly from your beliefs, or even diverges slightly in the strategies they believe you should use to make your shared beliefs more normalized, they can be cut off, dropped, blocked, or unsubscribed from without hesitation. Because you are not necessarily interdependent on your online “comrades” for food or housing, keeping anyone not 100% aligned with you around is a liability for your narrow goals. This culture of disposability, propped up by the most privileged among us, repeatedly fails the most marginalized among us, who actually do rely on a virtual network for rent money or mental health support; to quote Kai Cheng Thom’s words on the impact of callout culture on trans women, “for us, social death is real death”.
The platforms on which leftists spend their time creating and consuming “political education” unilaterally incentivize division and reactionary beliefs. We know that content algorithms favor engagement (Likes, Angry Reacts, high share counts, high numbers of comments, watch time, stitches, etc.) and are thus tuned to content that provokes Discourse, anger, desperation, and other negative emotions. The platforms incentivize addictive content that appeals to our worst impulses as a species, keeping people hooked and coming back for more, usually to the detriment of measured, researched responses. When an attempt was made at former president Donald Trump’s life at one of his rallies, it took mere minutes for left-leaning TikTok creators, many of whom I deeply respected, to weave conspiracies about how the shooting was faked for media attention, a psyop to garner respect for the far-right fascists, or some other farcical explanation. Leftists, who are supposedly on the side of science, debunking misinformation, and critical analysis of media jumped at the chance to talk about The Latest News Story and craft the edgiest, most clickable take on the event instead of following well-known guidelines for reporting breaking news.
This is to say nothing of real psyops (a la COINTELPRO) and how online discourses are incredibly easy to co-opt and contort in ways that create division. I’m not the type to claim that everyone who disagrees with me is a government agent or a robot, but it’s not unreasonable to think that some federal agent is being paid to comment intentionally divisive takes on social media in an effort to waste our time. This is to say nothing of surveillance and the ways that platforms, including ones specifically marketed as a more secure alternative, will sell your data to the cops if required to do so. Online organizing can thus never take place of real-life organizing, lest all our plans for strikes and other demonstrations be found out immediately and shut down.
Most importantly, what qualifies leftist creators to make the content that they do? Are we verifying that these people have a years-long organizing background or hold some other proof of their expertise, or do we just trust them because they’re saying things we agree with? Are these people trained journalists or educators, or are they just charismatic storytellers? Are the topics they choose to cover governed by a pure desires to educate and being forth a better world, or are they just edgelords leveraging online clout into financial and social capital? The complete decoupling between the number of people online talking about leftism and the implementation of leftist policy or action in the real world, including the freeing of incarcerated people, should give us pause when reaching for our phones to record yet another TikTok video.
It has never been easier to become a leftist. No longer do we have to wander into a top-secret meeting of communists in a musty city basement to receive diverging opinions from the mainstream media; we are now using online platforms to critique politicians and news headlines in public and in real time (go to Twitter and search “fixed it for you” for some examples). Every single day, experts on propaganda are unpacking our country’s long history of claiming its global dominance by force for a wide audience. If you want to learn about trans people, you can learn about the trans experience from trans people with a simple keystroke. Support for socialist policies and political candidates has increased in the past decade and is the highest among the younger generations, particularly younger women. I would never want to say that online leftist content is entirely useless, since it has objectively educated a lot of people.
And yet, this interest in leftist politics has not coincided with leftist changes in the real world. Trans people are more visible than ever, but this has not translated into pro-trans public policy (quite the opposite in fact). Even when seemingly the entirety of the online left pulls together, we are helpless to save even one man’s life. I would even challenge the idea that leftist ideas are becoming normalized in the public mainstream; rather, our country is being pushed to the right, while the American Left becomes increasingly sequestered into online spaces and disengaged from the material world. This is deeply concerning to me because the online world does not matter as much as the real world; arguably, compared to the real world, what happens on the Internet doesn’t matter at all. No matter what people say about being “digital natives” or to what degree we enact our relationships through the Internet, we all still live in the material world. You cannot fit your body inside the wires. You still have to eat physical food and use physical currency and be touched by physical people and breathe physical air. Content alone will never save us, therefore, we all have an interest in improving the material conditions of real-life people.
If I were to, say, write a book* on this subject—arguing that leftists as a whole need to abandon TikTok and get their hands dirty—it would probably be broken up into chapter like this…
An introduction outlining the supposed goals of leftist content online: to educate people about the follies of imperialism, racism, capitalism, cisheterosexism, etc., to get people to imagine better futures through alternative economies and belief systems, and to mobilize millions of people to create positive real-world change. A note on how “the online left” is incredibly broad and difficult to define.
Due to content algorithms, it’s rare for people to be shown something online that challenges their beliefs. When people do encounter a new belief online, they are more likely to ignore or react negatively to it when online than if they encountered that idea in the real world.
Platforms tend to uplift conventionally-attractive people from privileged backgrounds with limited analysis of material problems (white, cis, from the imperial core, etc.) while marginalized peoples are not favored by the algorithm. In fact, the people who we should be listening to the most may not even be posting at all; the most marginalized, such as those in prison, those in the global south who lack internet access, or trans people who are stealth, don’t have the luxury of posting because their daily lives are a struggle to survive and public criticism of the powerful would mean risking their death.
Online leftist media is reactive, incentivized to tackle the news of the day or the problematic person of the week, rather than being proactive, working sustainably toward specific, attainable goals. “Unsexy” but totally valid causes such as right to repair laws, infrastructure development, regulations on plastic polluters, redistricting rules, or campaign finance reform are abandoned by the online left in favor of frivolous conversations about the latest bad movie or inaccessible, high-concept “theory bro” debates about which untested economic theory is superior.
The online left lacks a unified goal or even a theory of change, leading people towards extremist/doomer ideologies which never allow for the building of coalitions or incremental changes, but instead embracing accelerationism, callout culture, and other dangerous ideas.
Nowhere on the Internet is it truly safe to plan radical actions, such as political demonstrations involving disruptive behavior, because of censorship and police surveillance.
Online leftism can never be effective because politics is always local, rooted in the real world. Online content focuses too much on global issues which may take decades to unravel, leaving people disempowered despite the fact that it is relatively easy to make change locally (e.g. in your town or place of work). Online video thus poses no threat to capital or empire, and we need to be spending our time differently.
I’ve always been struck by a particular line in Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”, which just so happens to outline the exact problem with leftist content. “Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” On TikTok, you get to be the star, the main character, the person who is Correct about everything. But right now, we don’t need main characters, we need people to take walk-on parts; somebody needs to be the person who makes fliers, who knocks on doors, who cooks food for the next meeting. Maybe we don’t all need to be “using our voice” all the time; maybe we just need to use our voice strategically, like speaking at the town hall meeting. I feel myself slowly arriving at the conclusion that “online leftist” is an oxymoron; the real world needs us more than any app does.
In solidarity,
-Anna
*P.S. Would you actually buy a book like this? If so, maybe I’ll write it one day…
P.P.S. Your weekly Koko.
