Kate Wagner post: "One of the imminent questions of our moment is: what would it take to relearn how to do political work offline, to recognize that there will perhaps be a time---in the very near future---where online work will be rendered impossible for those of us not in favor of the administration?" (expand for link & excerpts)
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There are some useful thoughts in this Kate Wagner piece, subtitled "We need to destroy the phone":
https://www.late-review.com/p/the-eternal-present"Still, many are asking: where are the ordinary people? Where are the normies who showed up in the streets the first time around when the threat of Trump was — in retrospect rightfully — recognized for what it was? In the first Trump administration, when “the Resistance” blew up, it did so on social media. Millions of people were exposed for the first time to protest movements, Left organizations, the labor movement, and other forms of direct and organized action. We were not yet aware at that time that this was a short-lived window in which the master’s tools could be wielded by us to achieve these moments of mass, collective outrage."
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"While in phoneworld, it suddenly occurred to me that I was only seeing images of protests and other forms of public outrage after they had happened. It didn’t matter which social media site I used — BlueSky, X, or Instagram (the platform where I mostly follow people I know in meatspace.) Calls to action beyond, like, dialing up one’s senator always reached me too late, even when the protests and gatherings in question took place a few miles away in my own city. Hence, there is, I think, a broader feeling that no one is doing anything not only because of a very real defeat and the resulting protest fatigue that lasted up until the last year of the Biden era, but because when something is done, when calls to action are made, we are not seeing it."
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"The smartphone has deskilled seemingly everything, even something as fundamental to human life as reading. But it’s especially deskilled political organizing. Perhaps a subconscious reason why the Left puts so much hope in the labor movement is because organizing one’s workplace is a largely offline endeavor. It takes place face to face in a spatially and temporally anchored place where everyone, despite all that may divide them, is subjected to the same material conditions, the same injustices."
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"One of the imminent questions of our moment is: what would it take to relearn how to do political work offline, to recognize that there will perhaps be a time — in the very near future — where online work will be rendered impossible for those of us not in favor of the administration? The old ways are already crumbling now in this moment of highly siloed algorithms, where no two people’s internet is the same. Hence, we must quickly abandon the 2010s idea that our content, concepts, and actions will, through the internet, find the masses."
