The Pragmatics of Posting

This is almost certainly going to be the sort of post which my lefty friends (i.e. almost all of them) will consider wishy-washy but I feel like I'm going a little nuts.

Everyone needs to shut up.

I don't mean this in a chastising way about how someone should feel about Charlie Kirk's death, who he really was or what his words meant. I don't really care, feel pretty strongly about those things, and I'm the last person to get weepy about being virtuous. I am not a member of the Obama family.

Thesis the first: Whatever world we lived in yesterday is not the world we woke up to today. I don't mean that in the sense that the right are now meaner than they were or that they don't really need an excuse to do what they wanted to do all along. I mean that the levers of state power and surveillance often do need that excuse and it's arrived.

Thesis the second: I don't trust social media. I don't trust Signal and I actually trust Signal quite a lot. Deleting isn't deleting, whatever assurances you have. If the full weight of surveillance comes down on the American people, they will get what they want. I promise. Official speeches are clearly indicating that celebrating Kirk's death is going to be looked at. Whether it actually is right now is, in my opinion, less relevant than the indication that it will be sometime in the future.

They're already doing it in the UK and the people in power there don't seem particularly bothered that they've irrevocably broken the internet. If you think the more powerful, far crazier people in power here in the US will be bothered, you are wrong.

Thesis the third: Everyone needs to do risk assessment. I do not mean be a coward. I mean you should be asking what do I stand to gain and what do I stand to lose. Posting a lol meme about Kirk gets you exactly nothing versus the admittedly very small chance that you get thrown in the slammer. I wouldn't take that risk.

The risk tolerance should go up the more efficacious a political act is. If you stand a much greater chance of being arrested or disappeared in an act which moves the needle, your willingness to do it should probably likewise rise.

A friend was popping off in our Signal chat yesterday (not Husky Boys EBM Chat) and I gently said hey, what's this getting you and let's say the vanishingly possible comes true, is it worth not seeing your kid? He said yes. I think that's bananas.

Vent. Get that catharsis. Find a way to do it in person.

Thesis the fourth: Posting is not politics. It isn't even discourse.

I saw someone say on Bluesky that posting on that third tier site (which I quite like) is changing discourse. It is not. No one important is reading except maybe (maybe) those who can do you real material harm.

Bluesky spent the morning banning people and deleting posts. Ask yourself: if you/we/I can't even get Bluesky's rump mod team, desperately in need of keeping users, in line via "discourse" why in the world do you think posting moves the larger discourse?

Thesis the fifth: The broad left to center-left, with all its myriad contradictions and interests, converges in thinking this is still 2015. It is not. The idea that using language in just the right way, posting the right memes, making the right jokes moves the needle derives from a dead world where it did have that power.

The right isn't wrong that the broad left to center-left held all the levers of cultural power. Yes, I recognize that the further left would protest this observation, but you could at least talk about gender in a class about YA lit and gender once. Universities, film, media, music. Mostly because, in my opinion, that cultural output tended to be correct in some gradient more often than not.

The idea that posting will move the needle is a phantom limb of that power. It's gone. And that calls for a reassessment of exactly what power rhetoric has for people who have lost all power.

A few days ago, some fairly big sci-fi author excoriated the modern novel for being focused on horny old professors banging grad students. Then a bunch of people said no, those haven't been made in a good 20 years, don't you read? It went back and forth for awhile.

My take: who the hell cares, nobody reads and AI is writing novels. It was a 2015 debate about a dead art form that people got in on because they still feel the phantom limb. And while I'm big on rearguard actions for lost causes, standing athwart history and all the rest, it felt so small. A little window into a little passage of time that we're still peeking into.

Thesis the sixth: The debate about novels was big on my corner of Bluesky. I've no idea if it was big anywhere else. I could probably find out, but I didn't. And because I didn't, it felt big. And because it felt big, it was big.

Context collapse is here. All that matters is that something feels big. It's bog standard, old style dopamine and libidinal attention economy theory running the show. I do it, too. It feels good or I wouldn't do it. The broader public doesn't need to know my thoughts, but I toss them out there.

Feels good.

Thesis the seventh: You won't remember this. No one will. They'll remember it in a vague sense: remember when this event happened? Oh yes, oh god, that was four years ago, I'm 43, where does the time go.

Two weeks. That's Trump's magic. For a later post but important: his pull is that he is fully a creature of our media environment and he knows that nothing really lasts more than two weeks. He's all of us, not just the conservatives. All of us.

More than forgetting the event, you forgot what you posted about the event. It felt really good, but you've already forgotten that, too. You forgot it 20 seconds after the hit wore off.

Better post again.

Thesis the eighth: Because everything happens, nothing happens. Ask anyone. It's a meme. Nothing ever happens. Everything feels good, especially something happening, but nothing ever happens because everything happens.

Nothing ever happens.

But the things that never happen are happening. High profile political assassinations, unprecedented tariffs, people being disappeared, military in the streets.

This is a distraction from the thing that will happen happening, keep an eye on the thing happening but nothing ever happens.

Nothing ever happens. Anhedonia. What would it be like to feel as if something were happening? Subjunctive.

Better post again.

I'm going to reiterate because I know that nobody can or will read charitably and most won't read anything at all: I'm not saying do nothing. I'm saying the opposite of that.

Do I know what that is? No. Do I know what it isn't? Yes. Posting about this. Nothing to gain, a very small chance there's something to lose. But more than that, it'll feel like something so you'll do the nothing again.

Be smart. You are smart.

Black mass held upon the radio.