preface
This is a paper that I wrote in 2021 for my first year Integrative seminar class at Parsons. While in the midst of the George Floyd protests, as well as Covid, and a looming election, I felt quite unsatisfied with the state of activism on the internet - This paper reflects that, and details the blatant obfuscation and ineffective means of organizing that I saw in the culture neural network of social media and the internet at the time. Much of this critique is stuck in its time, and isn’t really as eloquent as I would like (i was literally 19 like, what do u expect), but I still think it serves as a useful document to reflect on that specific inflection point in social media activism and organizing, despite being quite short-sighted, and not entrenched enough in theory to make a genuine Anti-Capitalist argument.
I think now, we are at a better place when it comes to organizing, more stuff happens in real life as opposed to online, and I think theres a better understanding now that true justice can only come from the intentional dismantling of this oppresive capitalist system that has scorged the earth and plundered its resources for centuries.
Instagram Activism, and the Deterioration of Social Movements
Gia Lombardo
2021
In 2010, the Arab Spring revolution, a protest movement fighting for free elections, and against Islamic Fundamentalism was organized almost entirely on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The Arab Spring is part of what made people realize that Social Media is a valuable tool in terms of organizing large groups of people around protest movements, and is what caused sites like Twitter to start being taken seriously as a means to consume news about global affairs and events. This method of organizing rapidly and efficiently also inspired activists in the United States who later in 2011 started the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was arguably the first truly mainstream American Anti-Capitalist protest movement in the 21st century. The first demonstration took place in New York City’s Financial District, in Zuccotti Park, in September 2011, and gave rise to the larger Occupy Movement across the nation, a direct response to the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis. An important part of the Occupy Movement was the use of Social Media such as Twitter as a means to organize and spread information. Social Media in 2011 was still in its infancy, and the use of Social Media by Occupy organizers laid the groundwork for future Social Media based protest movements. Though Occupy at large failed to create real systemic change, the proliferation of Occupy-related content on Twitter created a significant amount of buzz around topics of wealth inequality, and fundamentally laid the groundwork for the language and methods used by present day resistance movements on Social Media. However, due to the mass acceptance of Social Media, and the state of Social Media presently as a fundamental pillar of our society, using Social Media as a tool to spread awareness has become oversaturated in the current cultural zeitgeist. The rise of “Woke” culture, and the consumerization of dissent has diluted the goals and pathways to change of many Social Justice movements and causes.
Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation laid out the relationships between society, media, and symbols, in particular the significations and symbolism of culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence. The shared existence that exists on social media relies 100% on symbols, and symbols that resemble reality in one way or another, this dissonance between true reality, and representative reality on social media, is where the trouble lies when trying to organize resistance. Instagram is a popular platform in the current mainstream social justice sphere, however, when you factor in how Instagram as a platform works, you can start to see how it’s feed sorting algorithm makes it a fundamentally un-democratic platform for sharing information regarding Social Issues, this has given way to the current form of Mainstream social media activism, which is often drained of any actionable messages or useful information, as to please the Instagram Algorithm, and drive post performance, however, these posts on Instagram are just a microcosm of the larger commodification of large protest movements, take the story of Ziad Ahmed for example, who was admitted to Stanford after writing “#BlackLivesMatter” 100 times on his admissions essay and publicizing the stunt on several news and media channels. This is a perfect example of the recent neoliberalization, and commodification of political activism because Ziad, a non-black person, who runs a $34 billion a year “Gen Z Consulting Firm”, and whose father is a former CitiBank and Morgan Stanley officer, is using a movement centered on the struggle of working class Black people in America to his own advantage. This has a ripple effect throughout the whole Internet. People see these banal social media posts, and empty gestures of solidarity from people in the mainstream media, share them over and over again, boosting stories like the one previously mentioned to the front page of news feeds, and because doing your own research, or finding reputable sources and further reading are not necessarily encouraged, people who have not engaged with any kind of political action on a mass scale are led to believe that this is all it takes to start a political revolution.
The fundamental dissonance between Social Media platforms, and Social Justice movements come from the fact that platforms such as Twitter or Instagram are private businesses, that operate to please shareholders and advertisers, and therefore do not have to treat all content on its site democratically, and because the interest of tech companies and protest movements do not align, we start to see the dilution and decay of these movements through their need to adapt to appeal en mass in order to be successful. Think of it more in a marketing sense - because these movements exist solely on the Internet in terms of recruitment and organizing, and because everything on social media is sorted through one algorithm or another, there’s a need to make activism marketable, which goes against the very nature of activism itself. This dilution has become a perfect pathway towards the commodification of political protest movements - t-shirts with pro-BLM phrases have become commonplace among the upper echelon of “Activism Influencers” on social media, and despite the commodification of activism not necessarily being a new thing, the commodification of a movement like Black Lives Matter is different because of the internet, and the desire to identify oneself as much as possible in peoples online and offline identity, which is unique to the internet age. Because of the Internet, things like Black Lives Matter can move exponentially quicker around the public consciousness than for example the Anti-War movement in the 60s, which was mostly concentrated in places like San Francisco and New York, and didn’t really move beyond there, simply due to the fact that people in more isolated, and small parts of the country did not have access to fringe grassroots movements due to a lack of direct connection. We can also look back in history to the 70’s and the proliferation of the punk aesthetic into the mainstream as an example of how history often repeats itself. During the Occupy movement, which was often seen as a fringe movement by the mainstream media due to their outright anti-Capitalist messaging, whereas now, looking at the Black Lives Matter movement, phrases such as “Eat the Rich” or “Defund the Police” are considered normal and acceptable. The Punk ethos in the 70s was outright anti-Authoritarian, and anti-Capitalist as well, and was also considered fringe by the mainstream, until in the 80s when designers like Vivienne Westwood and Malcom McLaren started incorporating punk aesthetics into their collections, and in turn, gave prominence and legitimacy to the Punk Movement.
The contrast between the straight-forward and focused political movements of the early social media era and the hazy, unsharpened political movements of today is caused by repetition, and stagnation in terms of political willpower among people in neoliberal, hyper-woke spaces. Because the people that run these social justice campaigns seemingly have run out of ideas to forward their messaging and make strides in the mainstream political landscape, due to a lack of serious leadership. Take Black Lives Matter for example, while BLM has succeeded in changing the narrative around race, and racial inequality in America, the path to real systemic change is still far off, this comes from the fact that BLM’s desires for change have outgrown its structure, due to lack of understanding of how class interest trumps identity when it comes to oppression at large, and because BLM for example, purposefully does not have any leadership, and lives in the public consciousness as an idea, it can easily become skewed by people who have more influence, and different class interest than the majority, and also opens the backdoor to people who might have an alternate agenda, or who are trying to use the movement, and the desire of the people to help others, like we saw with the incident in February of 2019, when activist Shaun King raised money for a reboot of Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist newspaper The North Star, never delivered it, and then proceeded to pocket all of the money. The people who have the most influence, are usually high profile centrist journalists, politicians, pundits, and Social Media Influencers who, due to PR constraints, are usually apprehensive towards claiming “radical” political ideologies, and who do not have a stake in the working class gaining consciousness, and organizing in a truly meaningful way, and if we are talking about having a real revolution, organizing around race as opposed to class will get you nowhere. A Black CEO does not help the Black community, it helps one Black person, the same way that Poor White People do not have the same goals and interest as rich White People.
We can begin to understand this decay when we look at Jean Baudrillard’s 4 Stages;
1 . It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
“Basic reality” in this case refers to the general goals of something like the Four Waves of Feminist Movements in American history, or Black Lives Matter - The goal begins as a reflection of the true issues at hand, and through constant stagnated repetition, the meaning starts to chip away, and become more and more banal and devoid of meaning. So, what does this all mean for protest movements moving forward? Simply put, it means that if the current idea of Activism carries on like it has for the last 5 years, the causes that people are currently fighting for will be in a constant state of limbo between getting nowhere and getting somewhere. Until people start to realize that it’s going to take legitimate, straight forward ideas and messaging to get their point across and make it to the finish line. You cannot just post a black square and expect the world to change, and picking the lesser of two evils is not going to let the establishment know that what they’re doing is insufficient for the needs of the people.
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