Save Yourself, and Maybe Someone Else
Don’t post. Don’t do it.
Don’t read posts. Don’t make posts. Don’t login. Don’t jack in. Don’t like or follow or share or retweet or reblog.
No dunks. No owns. No bofas. No burns. No riffs. No yiffs. None of it.
Don’t be a content creator. Don’t be a reply guy. Don’t be a big account. Don’t be a rando.
Just stop. For the love of god, stop.
But you can’t, can you? You love this shit. You’re addicted to the masochistic rush you get from constantly bombarding your already decaying brain with even more horror every waking moment. You learned nothing the last time around, and now we have to go through it all over again.
Apparently the presidential primaries are back, and they’re most certainly not, nor were they ever, good again. Yet, you won’t be able to help yourselves. You’re going to disseminate the pairov thesis. You’re going to make earnest attempts to promote policy. You’re going to have 300 post threads arguing with Lady Gaga’s personal stylist about whether Kamala Harris enjoyed destroying people’s lives as a prosecutor or not. And it almost certainly won’t matter.
Don’t get me wrong, you matter. Your politics matter. Your fervor and dedication working for a better world matters. The friendships and networks amongst comrades matters. Telling centrists and maga chuds to eat shit, however large the dopamine hit, does not. I am not opposed to shitposting, but it’s a well documented fact that electoral politics melts your brain. It warps you into increasingly complicated positions that, much like tantric sex, are uncomfortable and ineffective. If you’re being honest with yourself, they aren’t even the type of degrading that you enjoy.
As if debasing yourself to boost and campaign for a politician that at best only shares some of your values, you may just as easily find yourself caping for someone you’d just as soon throw into an active volcano, simply because they’re not quite as horrific as the alternative. At very least, the thought that your best posting years may be squandered on such ungrateful sacks of shit should chill you to your core.
If my principled exhortations to sit (at least mostly) out this election posting cycle don’t convince you, consider this; somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 billion dollars were spent on digital media during the 2016 election cycle. How much of that went to social media we will likely never know, but we do know that Correct the Record spent at least a million dollars to argue with you online, and still lost. You can dunk on how pathetic your online opposition was. You can calculate the cost per a pigpoopballs sent to one of their innumerable accounts, but that doesn’t change the facts. Posting did not decide the election. Posting likely hardly affected the election. It’s almost inconceivable that the demographic least likely to believe that Russian Meddling decided the election via a few hundred thousand dollars worth of facebook and twitter trolls could possibly believe that sufficient amounts of deez nutz in people’s stupid faces will move the needle at all.
I’m as disappointed as you are.
For all the faux catharsis that comes with a well timed own, we need to be honest. Catharsis isn’t meaningful if you’re mainlining poison faster than you process it, and catharsis isn’t effective politics. I’m not interested in relitigating the interminable electoral politics debate, but if you’re going to engage in political action you need to understand that online is it’s lowest form. The left constantly criticizes empty rhetoric and manipulative communications strategies, and we should be no less ruthless in the criticism of our own efforts. Simply posting isn’t enough. Rhetoric isn’t enough.
If we have to continue enduring this farce every four years rather than burning Washington DC to the ground and salting the earth, the least we can do is log the fuck off and get out into our communities.
Even an argument with your shithead cousin over a beer will do more. Drunkenly singing old union standards with your rowdy friends in a bar will do more. Practically any real world interaction will do more to advance your politics than yet another dril post side by side with a screenshot, however apt. Whether you’re interested in providing mutual aid, organizing labor, fighting landlords, or taking on one of a million other projects to build power and solidarity within your community you have real power. Not the illusory influence that goes with making other internet rotted brains mash the RT button, but actual power. Use it.
Knowing, as I do, that nobody reading this could ever be convinced to abandon the poster’s life, I’ve crafted a creed. I pay you let it guide you during this cylce:
The Poster’s Creed
A Poster’s duty is never done
To own a chud, perhaps a lib
I cannot choose only one
But owns alone do not feed
Many struggle, their pain no fib
My posts can’t meet the masses need
For every tweet that shames the sheeple
Each post each dunk, no matter how glib
In real life, I’ll serve the people
Jean Krill is is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His writing navigates the many disparate visions of a radically better future.