#HashtagActivism is a robust and thorough defense of its namesake practice. It argues that Twitter disintermediated public discourse, analyzing networks of user interactions in that context, but its analysis overlooks that Twitter is actually a heavy-handed intermediary. It imposes strict requirements on content, like a character limit, and controls who sees what and in what context. Reintroducing Twitter as the medium and reinterpreting the analysis exposes serious flaws. Similarly, their defense of hashtag activism relies almost exclusively on Twitter engagement data, but offers no theory of change stemming from that engagement. By reexamining their evidence, I argue that hashtag activism is not just ineffective, but its institutional dynamics are structurally conservative and inherently anti-democratic.
Jesus yeah that’s a great point re:Musk/Twitter. I’m not sure that it’s true as you wrote it quite yet, but I would definitely agree that it’s, at the very least, an excellent prediction. It might very well be functionally true already as a matter of political economy, but it hasn’t been tested yet by a sufficiently big movement or financial crisis or whatever.
+1 to everything that you said about organizing. It seems that we’re coming to the same realization that many 19th century socialists already had. There are no shortcuts to building power, and that includes going viral on Twitter.
I’ve told this story on the fediverse before, but I have this memory from occupy of when a large news network interviewed my friend, an economist, but only used a few seconds of that interview, but did air the entirety of an interview with a guy who was obviously unwell and probably homeless. Like you, it took me a while after occupy to really unpack in my head what had happened in general, and I often think on that moment as an important microcosm. Not only was it grossly exploitative, but it is actually good that the occupy camps welcomed and fed people like him. That is how our society ought to work. To have it used as a cudgel to delegitimize the entire camp was cynical beyond my comprehension at the time. To this day, I think about that moment to sorta tune the cynicism of the reaction, even to such a frankly ineffectual and disorganized threat as occupy. A meaningful challenge to power had better be ready for one hell of a reaction.