Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us *wish* we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis
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Yes, changing social media will offer some obstacles, but massive and successful protests happened before the Internet and social media existed. Seems incredible now. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice surpassed 200,000 and was organized by telephone and in person conversations by Bayard Rustin and team. When certain social media outlets are captured or compromised as organizing tools, the organizing will move to other tools, including texts and (shudder) phone calls.
I spent a decade riding a bicycle around the streets of Toronto with a stack of fliers and a bucket of wheatpaste, winter and summer, trying to get people out for mass demonstrations.
It worked, sometimes.
But if you think that we can do that labor intensive work without losing time and capacity to do more meaningful organizing, I have a bucket of wheat-paste I can lend you.
Dr. King did it without social media and with the media of the time fully against him. So we need to go back and re-learn the lessons from the civil rights movement.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I spent a decade riding a bicycle around the streets of Toronto with a stack of fliers and a bucket of wheatpaste, winter and summer, trying to get people out for mass demonstrations. It worked, sometimes. But if you think that we can do that labor intensive work without losing time and capacity to do more meaningful organizing, I have a bucket of wheat-paste I can lend you.
Cory Doctorow
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