I recently found myself taken aback upon discovering a number of TikToks from progressive U.S leftist influencers claiming they would abstain from voting in the upcoming election in order to show their disdain for the nomination of Joe Biden. I found myself reminded of 1968, in which the political situation in America bore a stark resemblance to that of today. The democratic party were gearing up to nominate Hubert Humphrey as presidential candidate to run against Richard Nixon. Humphrey was a defender of the war in Vietnam and progressives of the time, including big names such as Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden, agreed that this wasn’t the direction a proclaimed left-leaning party should be heading. They took to the streets in Chicago (where Humphries was due to be nominated) in an effort to stop the nomination and would be beaten, harassed by the national guard and the leaders of said protest would later be put on what can only be described as the biggest political show trial in U.S history. The parallels to the situation in America today are compelling. Biden is also supportive of what is evidently an incredibly unpopular war and has increasingly been levied with criticisms (often aimed widely at the democratic party) of not representing the left wing of America legitimately. However, the idea of thousands of leftists gathering outside the D.N.C this year and protesting for tangible change is somewhat unfathomable. In 1968 the protests were in many ways a pivotal moment of American progressive politics, and today there is no sign of collective action, no general consensus on stopping this, just a waste of one’s independent voice; a piss in the wind masqueraded as activism. Despite being haunted with visions of a potentially impending second Donald Trump presidency, I found myself asking one question – “What ever happened to our collective voice”.
I would quickly find the answer to my question upon a reread of Malcolm Gladwells 2010 article “Small Change,” or more commonly referred to as “Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.” Gladwell makes a number of predictions and insights into social media and how it will shape activism in the coming years. This was written at a time when social media was blossoming and largely hadn’t the grip on civil society it does today. It is an incredibly engaging read especially in retrospect; Gladwell has his finger on the pulse of not just how social media works, but on how politically minded individuals would interact with online media platforms. His diagnosis was simple – social media enforces weak-tie relationships. What Gladwell means by this is that social media encourages digital relationships that are substantially weaker than real life ones. For social activism, an area where most participants are encouraged to join by peers, this means the stakes for online activism tend to be inherently lower. Gladwell refers to the civil rights bus boycotts where familial ties and parishes encouraged more people to engage and so the movement spread, with weak-tie social media relationships this kind of commitment is harder to convince people to take, signing a petition or forcing recognition is likely as far as social media can achieve for Gladwell. This article (for its time) was incredibly left field as journalists and scholars alike had seemed to come to the unanimous conclusion that social media was an inherent good. Glawell referenced this culture himself “The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism”. I don’t blame early onlookers of the digital revolution for believing this, by all means social media looked like a truly inclusive deliberative platform. The political apparatus was, and still is, a behemoth of elitism that to regular people cannot be beaten, platforms allowing people across the globe to communicate and organise had to be revolutionary, Gladwell was simply a hater. However, with the glorious gift of hindsight, I found myself siding with Gladwell.
Hindsight was one piece of the puzzle, the article only concentrates on social activism after all, but in the almost 15 years since its publication I felt like there was more to be said here. It is undeniable that in the past decade both sides of the political aisle have taken to social media like a duck to water. Right wingers have done this in a very scary way, using conspiracy and fear-mongering to achieve genuinely terrifying results. The emergence of fringe conspiracies like Qanon are rampant, prominent grifters are able to stoke fear by the minute and January 6th showed us that more than anything the right were able to use social media to organise themselves in a chaotic and dangerous fashion. Meanwhile, on the left social media has led to a situation that is a different kind of messy. For the left, the result of using social media as a platform for politics has been a resurgence in individualism over any kind of collective consensus. This is hardly a surprising consequence of social media, which is an inherently individualised platform. What I mean by this is that social media does two things really well: it delivers content catered to your preferences, and it rewards you based on how palatable and likeable your image is to everyone else on said platform. This is all wrapped up under a high speed environment where repeated content and slower forms of engagement are penalised. What this implies is that we are being fed content we agree with, repeating it to our own audiences and then moving on to the next issue very quickly. This leaves little to no room for reflection, meaningful discussion or any sort of stringent general consensus. There is seldom any space on social media for leftists to come together and form any sort of stronger political agreement. What we instead see repeated daily is both moral grandstanding and subsequent infighting.
The incessant need for online leftists to have better morals than everyone else ,is something subconsciously, most fellow leftists are not just aware of but ultimately tired of. It looks different and varies in severity depending on which platform you are using. On X (formerly known as Twitter) and TikTok it is fairly similar. You will often see replies to deranged conservative content or a general dogging on bad politicians and bad government policy. I by no means want to argue if there is no genuine criticisms and good-natured commentary happening on the sites. However, this is also accompanied by a “holier than thou” spirit that often occurs between leftist accounts on the platforms. When one engages on a platform where the most palatable image possible is rewarded, and accounts are being heavily criticised (sometimes rightfully), it becomes vital to maintain that clean image. In return if someone can prove this image can be toppled in any way they can be rewarded with high levels of interaction. This leads to a tirade of who can have the “best” politics and an incessant need to be “correct” on every conceivable issue. This kind of behaviour could be beneficial if it led to thinking critically about issues and deepening your world view but it doesn’t. This behaviour leads to comments such as “well I was never a fan” when someone is “cancelled” or here why “Subject A” (typically an incredibly common behaviour) is actually problematic. There is an overwhelming tendency for left wing social media users to make increasingly niche comments and arguments in order to not only separate from the herd but also to pivot themselves to a position of moral superiority . We have seen a clear rise in tangents online, typically tirading over the most menial of online behaviours. The goal becomes less focused towards building a general worldview or even keeping people of the world in check and more about proving yourself “right” in any conceivable circumstance. This behaviour is mimicked on YouTube and Twitch but rather than moral grandstanding I would prescribe the term “intellectual superiority”. Leftist content creators often engage in debate and “online drama” with one another. Rather than using this as any means to bettering our understanding of leftists politics it boils down to who is objectively smarter. You will see this through clips of one creator “owning” the other and using outdated debating tactics and unnecessarily convoluted language to win. This looks different to the moral grandstanding ,and often takes far too many an influence from old school right wing tactics (primarily the culture of “owning the libs”), but the result is the same, petty arguments over a whole bunch of trivial issues and generally just a bunch of time wasting. What we are seeing in mass online is the emergence of an individual approach to discussing politics that is void of any deeper process towards enacting change or broadening understanding of leftism as a whole.
What this behaviour encourages is perhaps the crux of the issue; infighting. At some point it became a given that politics online was a battleground, using ratios and quantity of clicks to one up others and hopefully one day emerge victorious in this war of ideology. One would be remiss for believing the left would fight the right in this holy war but in contemporary online life this is seldom the case. The right is far too busy rotting their brains with dangerous conspiracy theories and spreading hate against anyone who dare use a pride flag. Meanwhile the left is occupied, eating itself from within with tired fights over any trivial issue it sees fit. There is a tendency for the left to create enemies, enemies that can typically be dealt with quickly so there is some semblance of success and forward moving action. You may not be able to enact a redistributive economic system in an evening but you can definitely get your followers to agree someone is racist, this leaves you feeling like you have done something for the greater good, as if politics is in your control. Infighting is explainable in many ways and is a deeply convoluted issue, to use an extreme example the current boycott of Israeli goods, an incredibly effective boycott in solidarity for Palestinians, has sometimes led to such behaviour. If one was to publicly slip and break the boycott (even if previously unaware what they were purchasing was part of the boycott) they may be subject to any kind of scrutiny online. This is typically vicious and extreme in nature and leads to one being ostracised from the greater movement, or deemed an enemy of it as a whole. This is an extreme example but situations in this vein are daily on sites like X and TikTok, people being piled on for making the slightest of mistakes or simply for using the wrong language when discussing an issue. This infighting makes the left smaller as a whole, either by forcing people into different factions of leftist politics and in some cases can push certain individuals to the right. The latter may seem redundant, surely people who end up on the right belong there to begin with. However, this online culture does ostracise people, they feel as though they may have no place on the left and as the right has various methods of making itself more appealing and as a self-declared enemy of “wokeism”, that can take down the left, many turn towards them as “safe place for online discourse.” So the left becomes smaller and splits into smaller and smaller factions, still prioritising the individual image above all else; what are we left with?
We have lost our voice. In an era where we could be louder than ever, we are consistently oversaturating the online sphere and subsequently drowning out voices with tangible, important points to make. There is no longer a coherent collective voice on the left and when we lose our collective voice we are left as individualist leftists. Now this isn’t to say there is nothing the left can’t agree upon in the digital era. It is clear to me that rallying against Israel and a clear solidarity towards the oppressed people of Palestine has been successful, the recent sit-ins at Columbia is a fantastic return to fashion for old school, effective social action . We have risen above the infighting to a certain degree and despite clear moral grandstanding surrounding the issue, we on the left have created a clear consensus standing against the acts of Israel and have stood strong in solidarity with Palestine. I do find myself wondering, in these brief moments of triumph; how long will it be until we go back to business as usual? This individual leftism hasn’t been addressed, just momentarily paused, the leftist space now dominated not by cohesion but by a group of people with vaguely similar outlooks obsessed with perfecting their own views for the digital stage. This individualism and lack of a general consensus leaves us feckless, unable to adequately tackle the serious issues facing us. Joe Biden isn’t a serious leftist contender and I do believe the Democrats can do better but throwing your vote won’t prove anything, collective action and protests will. I don’t know if we need to be tear gassed and shot at as they were in Chicago in ‘68, but there has to be something in between. Abstaining from voting is an individualist answer to a problem we all face and it is not going to help. More so, this online behaviour pushes away any other potential leftists. When the culture consists of a rigorous cycle of vicious arguments and a peacocking of our moral values, why would you feel enticed to join. When the right wing online presence is as good at attracting young people as it has proven itself, we need to do better before we pay the price.
I don’t want to come across like a deranged anti-social media champion, akin to Ted Kaczynski. I actually don’t think social media is an inherent force for evil, but we are using it wrong. There is room to not only engage meaningfully online, but to mobilise on issues. This is the most evident takeaway from protests of solidarity towards Palestine. Yet we don’t see this, we instead are caught in a loop that continues day in, day out. So how do we get out of this, part and parcel of this issue is the intrinsic design of these platforms; echo chambers are the most profitable ways for these sites to run, and social media firms do need to be kept in check, but we can do better as users. I don’t feel like my argument has been nuanced in any way, it is intuitive and I think anyone on the left who exists in any way on the online sphere recognises these issues. The best way forward may be to simply stop engaging in it, to let some of the smaller gripes go rather than pull people into a dogfight; to try engage in more meaningful discussion over the more significant issues than simply whirl-up, online pile-ons. There is a plethora of online creators from many communities creating political content that we can learn from. There is plenty of room in the online space to engage with people who before the advent of social media were severely lacking a voice. These are all simple ways we can use the online sphere to organise ourselves in a way that binds us rather than pits us against each other. I don’t think we ever meant to get here, I don’t think anyone engaging in this behaviour has malicious intentions, we just simply got caught up in the whirlwind of it all and haven’t had adequate time to reflect. That’s okay, people get distracted but now more than ever, it may be time to put down our keyboards and get back on track.
