What We Talk About When We Talk About Organizing

Besides the numerous forces arrayed against us (capital, entrenched white supremacy and patriarchy, etc), one of the big impediments facing the organized left in the US is our inability to talk to each other across tendencies. In lieu of real strategic debates that act as ways to draw out and further develop our own ideas, we have arguments that are merely things to be won.

I was in DSA for three years, left and helped form MATCH, which organized in Hudson County for two years, and now I'm back in DSA, so I'll limit the scope of this to DSA. Despite this two year gap in membership, the topics of discussion don't seem to have changed much from when I left DSA. People shit on mutual aid or electoralism while completely flattening the scope of the tactic that they advocate against. Within the organization, most mentions I've seen of the org-wide forums have been negative, and a quick look at some of the threads there shows a pretty low level of political discussion. Political and ideological discussions may get shunted to chapter-level or caucus Slacks, ensuring that they stay stuck in loops in one echo chamber or another, but for the most part they end up on Twitter.

People talk all the time about how Twitter is bad for political discussion, but it's useful to break down why that is and why those faults are inherent to the platform. I usually see complaints about the site related to the length of tweets or pseudonymity, and there's truth in that. You can't get into too in-depth of a debate with short posts, and if you reply to someone at length it'll come off as going on a rant. The use of a pseudonym makes it easier to discount the validity of other people's experiences and to get nastier. But I don't think either of those are the primary issue.

In the old days of the internet around the mid-2000s, it was easy to find niche discussions on forums and blogs. For myself, I was active in forums for the TV show Arrested Development and the band Primus. While I wouldn't say I'm proud of that particular set of interests, having the scope of discussion and the size of the posting base both be smaller allowed for some sense of community to develop. Even behind a pseudonym, people could reveal a little more of themselves because it was only a semi public-facing medium and there was much less need to "perform". Moderators existed and could ban members, but they rarely needed to step in because people knowing each other better would make them regulate their own behavior. The mods also were posters themselves, and could use context while exercising judgment.

Twitter, like all major tech companies, can't replicate that because of Twitter, Inc.'s business model. The company seeks to take all users and all discussion that might have once been scattered across thousands of different blogs and forums, and bring them all into the same forum. Twitter, Inc. is also a publicly-traded company, so it needs growth to satisfy stockholders and it must bring everyone on the site at a faster and faster pace. Moderation at the level of old-school forums is impossible. Twitter, Inc. would need to hire thousands of moderators, which is in direct contradiction to the Silicon Valley model of "scale": build a company with very few employees and an enormous amount of end-users. Instead, the majority of moderation is replaced with algorithms.

Despite Twitter, Inc.'s assurances to their stockholders that they're working to make interactions on the site kinder, if you put communists, fascists, and dipshit media personalities on the same "forum" and put them in each other's feeds with retweets and suggested tweets, the end result is always going to be people trying to dunk on each other. An interstitial message asking "Are you sure you meant to post this?" when I write "fuck you" to Glenn Greenwald will only slow me down for as long as it takes to tap the confirmation button.

This general culture of Twitter gets reproduced into inter-organizational discussions in DSA. Differences between tendencies get magnified, each side gets to dunk on each other with quote tweets, likes from your own followers (i.e., people who already agree with you) roll in, and you get a faint sense memory of what serotonin feels like. Political argument gets reduced to point scoring, and if you're following the same thread of logic as all your other antagonistic interactions on the site it makes sense to bully people from different tendencies out of the org. It's very easy to fire off a tweet that has the effect of alienating people we should be working with with little to no thought, and the platform rewards dumb bullshit. I love dumb bullshit and nearly exclusively post dumb bullshit on Twitter, but dumb bullshit isn't useful for building an organizational strategy that synthesizes many perspectives, it just rewards you for thinking the way you already do.

I am a very much a "thinking out loud" kind of guy and in group chats I often get into "on the one hand; on the other hand" conversations with myself that probably annoy my comrades. I feel strongly about certain strategic questions, but when trying to put those feelings into coherent arguments that address how power is built, I usually end up reevaluating my priors. Building thoughts into paragraphs, re-reading, and revising can sharpen our arguments and makes us think more critically about what to learn from our organizing experiences. Blogging may seem passé, but it's a way to kick the tires on our arguments and see if they can run.