As I submit this piece it is October 10th. In about a week from when you are reading it, on October 18th, the second installment of No Kings will unfold. Over 2,400 component anti-Trump, anti-Fascist, anti-war, anti-racist, anti-misogyny, anti ecological collapse demonstrations will sum to what hopes to be one incredibly massive demonstration. How many activists will have made all that happen? How many times that number will participate in the actions? How many more will see, feel, and be moved by the cumulative effects? And then, we have the most central, most consequential questions. How many participants will on October 19th start to prepare for the next No Kings? How many more will first start to newly work against Trump and what is now undeniably fascism on parade? And finally, how many, even as they seek ever more No Kings participation, will also work on civil disobedient responses to Trump and on positive, assertive themes along with rejectionist ones?

And so we come to social media, or to what I guess people now call “socials” when they refer to their “socials” or to posting on “socials” or to keeping up with “socials.” It seems that fiddling online while society implodes has become “our socials.” Amazing. Words morph into their opposites. But I do get that social media is ubiquitous. I do get that to not use social media to promote what we favor can be self limiting—rather like to not use click bait can be self limiting. But here is a critical angle on it. 

I bet nearly everyone who will read this uses a bank. For that matter, and more analogously, I bet nearly everyone who will read this reads the New York Times or some other mainstream news source. To not use banks can be self-limiting. To not read the NYT or some comparable mainstream outlet can be self-limiting. But while we use banks and we consult mainstream media, we don’t celebrate those choices. We do not play their games. Do not invest in their stocks. We do not restrict ourselves to them. The fact that we use them does not blunt our critique of them. But with our “socials,” a good many of us scroll and then scroll some more and then perhaps post something but rarely if at all post our full views. We play the “socials” anti-social game. We know that to praise banks or mainstream media, and to enter uncritically into the roles they require of us and to let those roles crowd out attention to what matters more and even most is a slippery slope to no longer hating hateful banks and to no longer critiquing manipulative media. To immerse ourselves in such patterns can slip slide us into no longer doing or even discerning all that matters.

By analogy, it is one thing to hate social media but hold our nose while we cautiously use it for positive ends and still relentlessly critique it in the large. It is another thing to get into habits that waste endless time, suck us into worthless gossip, acclimate us into laughing at exploitative snippets, or seduce us into feeling that to repost a link or a photo or whatever else while offering nothing substantive that we ourselves think about the link or the photo or whatever else that we post is somehow to seriously socially interact, or is even somehow to undertake a serious progressive act. 

Current social media isn’t even social much less a serious vehicle by which to exchange investigative much less critical much less strategic much less visionary views. We too often scroll robotically and then perhaps post links or pictures but not our full carefully conceived thoughts. Not even questions we have. We too rarely respectfully engage with others to change their or our thoughts. Too many of us develop a commercialized, surveillance-informed, emotionally stunted and even morally warped conception of “being social,” of having friends, of communicating. Our attention spans dwindle. We start to favor a paragraph over an article and then a sentence over a paragraph. Brevity, and very often hostile brevity, becomes our Moses and the Prophets. Substance gets atomized down to snippets until we consider snippets normal. We don’t even know we are limiting ourselves. We deny we are curbed. We start to find those who maintain scope and balance much less aggressive hostility to social media annoying and even abhorrent.

Moving on, so what? What’s the big deal? Consider the difference between posting a paragraph or posting a one line call to promote a demonstration or a candidate, or perhaps posting even a meme, and alternatively posting one’s actual thoughts much less knocking on doors to listen and talk with people about a demonstration or candidate, or even to talk with parents or children, siblings or neighbors, classmates, workmates, or friends about what’s happening, about what really matters. 

Super succinctly posting a time and place to get together seeks to mobilize allies and to mobilize allies can be very important work. For many people to arrive at the named place at the named time matters greatly. But to hear and convey reasons why we should arrive there, to explore strategic motivations for our arriving there, to carefully evaluate having arrived there, and especially to offer serious proposals for how to improve our future arrivals—that’s part of organizing. And beyond mobilizing, organizing is always needed.

My point? Socials have quite predictably wreaked havoc on youth and on adults too, even on, dare we face it, ourselves. Shortened attention spans, aggressive defensiveness, idiot wind that relentlessly blows away insight, and in many instances derivative loneliness and anti social habits that become preponderant. And next up, AI enters our world rom stage right and I hear the same things I heard back when I was railing at Facebook and Twitter when they first launched. We can use it for our purposes, friends told me. We can make it another tool, another resource. We can use it judiciously, critically, like we use the bank that we put our pay in. And now, next up, AI is like socials, it is just a tool, friends tell me. And yes, to sometimes use these tools might even yield great benefits for ourselves and others (at least until we and they become addicted). But to do so also yields steadily growing calamity for society.

You exaggerate, I was told, with anger and outrage. How dare you suggest we would succumb to or would in any sense do other than make productive, progressive use of “socials,” I heard hurled at me with real anger. What others do with it, that’s on them, not us. We will get more good from it than others will do bad with it. And back then I hoped those who thought such things about “socials” were right, but they weren’t. And now I hope those who say such things about AI are right. I hope I am out of touch to think AI’s advocates, AI’s defenders, AI’s “yeah it is dangerous but let’s enjoy what we can” users are about as wrong as wrong can be. Rather like people who sincerely said and even still say, “Trump is obnoxious and hostile, sure, but no real danger.” Sadly, I think from “socials” yesterday and today to AI today and tomorrow, history is repeating, not as a mere farce but as still bigger tragedy. Indeed, AI looks to me like tragedy on steroids. So, to my eyes, AI is another thing for movements to critique and confront, to control and transform, and perhaps even to transcend and replace, like banks, mainstream media, and socials and certainly not to overly enjoy and then defensively celebrate.

But does any of this bear on the big horrors of our time? Poverty proliferates. Greed metastasizes. Wars rage. Racism resurges. Misogyny mangles. Fascism entrenches. Ecology collapses. Do “socials” and AI have anything to do with these crippling crises that we have to deal with before they abort our ability to deal with anything worthy at all, much less with winning a new world before the old one takes us all to hell? 

Honestly, all this isn’t entirely new but it is incredibly ramped up. Evidence of evil is everywhere. Genocide is on parade. Cruelty trumps empathy. For power to preserve such evil, it is necessary that elites get we the people to energetically hide from evil, actively avoid registering evil, vociferously deny evil’s impact, or even perversely welcome evil. It is necessary that they get us to put our eyes in our pockets and our noses on the ground. So you tell me, please. Are “socials” and AI possibly part of a solution to our crises, or are they intrinsically part of the ugliness that is now ramping up? 

Either way, October 18th’s “No Kings” is coming. And after that will come opportunities to work for the next coordinated outpouring and to work as well for other more contextual forms ways to say no and to keep saying no. To work on ways to reverse repression and curb oppression. On ways to forge a path toward real sociality, media, and intelligence. No Kings 2 on October 18. No Kings 3 in mid November? Even early November? 

Something is happening here. What it is, is exactly clear. Even what to do about it is pretty clear. The remaining question is, will we each and all do what’s needed? Will we resist with words, with actions, with everything workable that we can muster? And will we do it again? And again? Will we organize and mobilize, organize and mobilize, until we get rid of Trump and Co. and will we then to go beyond that as well?Email