Re: Weaponising Silence
Howdy! I've been away from blogging for a little bit. Most of my pieces as of late have been me, trying to flesh out bigger ideas I've had -- as to how successful I've been, that's up to other folk to judge. I think I'll just try something lighter, a little less effort, do a couple responses to other posts. Definitely with less of a harsh tone than my last reply.
Today, I'm responding to this piece from Digitally Nick. It's all about the idea of "silence is privilege". It pushes back on the idea, pointing out that some people don't have the luxury to post their views online and still feel safe. Some people don't post about it, but still help out in private. Some people just don't want to deal with the conflict and negativity that comes along with that sort of thing.
I think it's odd that we expect literally everybody who cares to be an activist. Most people lead small, decent lives, just trying to make it to the next day. Most people do not have what you'd call "platforms" in any meaningful way, so it's odd that we judge them like they do. I have 12 followers on Twitter, and I like it that way. The number of people who have ever read this blog could fit in a phone booth, albeit horizontally like they used to do in the 60's. I'm not an especially important person, in the grand scheme of things, neither mover nor shaker. Why am I being judged with the same metric as celebrities and journalists?
I think a few things are causing this. First, online culture has changed. We all listen to more "influencers", i.e. people who are used to being listened to. We talk like them, we adopt their ideas, we reflexively reflect their mindset. We think about what we can do with our own platforms, without realizing that that shit is entirely imaginary. Not only that, we feel judged by posts about people not using their platforms, and we jump to our own defense, without realizing the whole post was never meant for us in the first place, it was meant to complain about some jackass with orders of magnitude more people who listen to them. The whole thing is a brainworm.
Influencer feels like a very new and strange creature. It's a whole continuum between the poster of the older net and the celebrity of the pre-social-media-media. It creates thousands of different levels of mini-famous that you can be. I used to listen to this one guy on YouTube with maybe 500 or so subscribers, just rambling about topics that interested him to maybe 100 people a video. Then, you got guys with tens or hundreds of millions of subscribers, who feel like bonafide celebrities, and they're judged on the same metrics as the 500 sub guy, and you look at what they're both doing, and there's not that much different.
Good Lord, we are all having the content squeezed out of us by gigantic machines. Screaming ain't gonna stop it, so the best you can do it live your life, and don't worry what some jackass on instagram thinks you should do.