I've also seen this described also as "political hobbyism" by Eitan Hersh, which I only learned about from Pod Save America this last Sunday in a video titled "Are College Educated Democrats Going to Cost Joe Biden The 2024 Election?" It's worth a watch and his 2020 Atlantic article "College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics" is worth a read.
Full time worker on political campaigns and so many people I know scoff at my work and pretend they're doing better when they're engaging on level 3 or 4 at maximum.
I think an important thing you didn't write on quite enough is that activism is hard and takes up time. Engaging at the level of offering cynical commentary or clamoring about a "revolution:" with the date and details TBD is easy and you can claim that you're unable to work with the system we have so the actual work of an activist is avoided. If you convince yourself that the whole structure (elections, Democratic campaigns, etc) is a vehicle that will never lead to change (despite repeated evidence to the contrary) then you can convince yourself that posting on a formerly bird themed social media site run by a Bond villain is the only way to get any wins.
<I think an important thing you didn't write on quite enough is that activism is hard and takes up time.>
Absolutely. In the subset of folks I am friends with on social media that I also know in real life, the ones that are the most vocal online with the strongest opinions are also the ones who would absolutely not have the grit to do even the most basic of volunteer work on, say, a congressional primary campaign. It is annoying, people get mad at you, and it often feels pointless. The slow boring of hard boards, and all that. It's a lot easier to advocate for tipping over the apple cart.
There are a sneaky lot of folks out here living level one lives and showing level four faces to the public, especially online. By virtue of running for office in the first place, most politicians are probably level ones, but boy oh boy, many of them present as level fours in the worst possible ways.
I think the trick is making levels 3 & 4 productive. If you can figure out how to get even the posers to contribute, even if marginally, to making political change then you've cracked the code
That's why i say modern leftism is just a replacement for religion, they have the purity culture, the rules, the self righteousness, the superiority complex, the pointing fingers, "if you don't believe exactly what I believe you are going to hell" thing, they desperately crave religion and cannot expand their minds to actually think about nuance and action in the real world
- I read your "technology has always been profane" post just as I received two of those "let iPhone create a picture montage to music" things from my Mother in-law. I can say with utmost certainty that she had no part in creating these montages, but they were nice, and reminded me of good family times that we've all had together. So technology, as it does, helped her do something that was really hard to do in an earlier time. So hard, that she wouldn't even have imagined doing it.
I think social media has done the same for activism: It was *much* harder to do before the Internet, and then these particular iterations of networked users, allowed people who wanted to enact change to put their thoughts out there, find like-minded people, and engage in wars of rhetoric.
(This "keyboard activism" was derided even 20 years ago (your bingo card would definitely have "Cheetos", "basement", "neckbeard", "keyboard kommando"), so in one sense, nothing new under the sun. But it's true that the scale has dramatically increased, again thanks to technological advancements.)
Frequently the same activists who use social media complain about its power to "spread misinformation", as if this wasn't the very tool activists use to forward their goals! You think an activist is going to give it to you straight? That's not their motivation. At. All. Twitter was a *godsend* for activists, at least from a messaging standpoint. On the other hand, and this is where this post comes in, messaging has become so easy that any institutional memory of pushing realistic concrete goals has almost faded away entirely. There have been attempts: The Movement For Black Lives released some concrete goals in their manifesto c. 2015, but I don't recall any that were realistic short of completely reorganizing society "like, yesterday".
I'm not so sanguine that most activism is "just about clout", actually. Think of all the ways language has been changed out of fear these last 10 years. We sort of sit back and wait for the Normie cavalry to arrive, and chortle when elections go our way, but without any sustained pushback these modes of thought and language will become -- well, norms, thanks to these "Level 3" activists.
- I had thought the "simulcra" argument Baudrillard was making had to do with a "discussion of the thing" not being the same as "the thing" itself. Your post about "everything is violence" made me think about the Hobbesian argument about the State having a monopoly on violence. But I've never read Leviathan! I'm saying "Hobbesian" to mean a particular thing, but I don't actually know if that's an accurate portrayal of what Hobbes actually said! This is inevitable: You simply cannot read everything, and must rely on others to summarize the main points or, further down the line, accept a floating idiom that once was attached to an actual text. So in one sense this behavior from activists is normal, just scaled up to a level we've never seen before.
But yes, without an actual agenda, and boots on the ground, the online arguing won't have much real world effect (although...elite spaces...). I think that will eventually happen, though, and I'm not sure I'm going to like it. Give me Biden Democrats all day, every day.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree with much of it, but did want to share one interesting tidbit. BLM is in some ways the only successful protest movement of the last 10-15 years - they did actually change public opinion substantially and there were a ton of police reform efforts passed at city/state levels across the US. It wasn't the BLM organizations directly causing it, but indirectly they clearly made a difference.
I’m not sure wanting to ‘change the world for the better’ is a level 1 phenomenon. We can’t really perceive that directly, it’s too abstract. But I do think you can enjoy winning for its own sake. But then, when it comes to politics it’s not really you winning, is it? It’s your team.
maybe there are levels both in our actions and in our perceptions. Some things we perceive directly, some are mediated by abstractions, some are mediated by our team, and some we just think we are perceiving something but we don’t really understand what that thing feels like.
So in that sense, the kind of winning you are talking about seems like a level 3 perception.
I've also seen this described also as "political hobbyism" by Eitan Hersh, which I only learned about from Pod Save America this last Sunday in a video titled "Are College Educated Democrats Going to Cost Joe Biden The 2024 Election?" It's worth a watch and his 2020 Atlantic article "College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics" is worth a read.
Full time worker on political campaigns and so many people I know scoff at my work and pretend they're doing better when they're engaging on level 3 or 4 at maximum.
I think an important thing you didn't write on quite enough is that activism is hard and takes up time. Engaging at the level of offering cynical commentary or clamoring about a "revolution:" with the date and details TBD is easy and you can claim that you're unable to work with the system we have so the actual work of an activist is avoided. If you convince yourself that the whole structure (elections, Democratic campaigns, etc) is a vehicle that will never lead to change (despite repeated evidence to the contrary) then you can convince yourself that posting on a formerly bird themed social media site run by a Bond villain is the only way to get any wins.
I think this is true and maybe worth a future update!
<I think an important thing you didn't write on quite enough is that activism is hard and takes up time.>
Absolutely. In the subset of folks I am friends with on social media that I also know in real life, the ones that are the most vocal online with the strongest opinions are also the ones who would absolutely not have the grit to do even the most basic of volunteer work on, say, a congressional primary campaign. It is annoying, people get mad at you, and it often feels pointless. The slow boring of hard boards, and all that. It's a lot easier to advocate for tipping over the apple cart.
There are a sneaky lot of folks out here living level one lives and showing level four faces to the public, especially online. By virtue of running for office in the first place, most politicians are probably level ones, but boy oh boy, many of them present as level fours in the worst possible ways.
I think the trick is making levels 3 & 4 productive. If you can figure out how to get even the posers to contribute, even if marginally, to making political change then you've cracked the code
That's why i say modern leftism is just a replacement for religion, they have the purity culture, the rules, the self righteousness, the superiority complex, the pointing fingers, "if you don't believe exactly what I believe you are going to hell" thing, they desperately crave religion and cannot expand their minds to actually think about nuance and action in the real world
Two thoughts:
- I read your "technology has always been profane" post just as I received two of those "let iPhone create a picture montage to music" things from my Mother in-law. I can say with utmost certainty that she had no part in creating these montages, but they were nice, and reminded me of good family times that we've all had together. So technology, as it does, helped her do something that was really hard to do in an earlier time. So hard, that she wouldn't even have imagined doing it.
I think social media has done the same for activism: It was *much* harder to do before the Internet, and then these particular iterations of networked users, allowed people who wanted to enact change to put their thoughts out there, find like-minded people, and engage in wars of rhetoric.
(This "keyboard activism" was derided even 20 years ago (your bingo card would definitely have "Cheetos", "basement", "neckbeard", "keyboard kommando"), so in one sense, nothing new under the sun. But it's true that the scale has dramatically increased, again thanks to technological advancements.)
Frequently the same activists who use social media complain about its power to "spread misinformation", as if this wasn't the very tool activists use to forward their goals! You think an activist is going to give it to you straight? That's not their motivation. At. All. Twitter was a *godsend* for activists, at least from a messaging standpoint. On the other hand, and this is where this post comes in, messaging has become so easy that any institutional memory of pushing realistic concrete goals has almost faded away entirely. There have been attempts: The Movement For Black Lives released some concrete goals in their manifesto c. 2015, but I don't recall any that were realistic short of completely reorganizing society "like, yesterday".
I'm not so sanguine that most activism is "just about clout", actually. Think of all the ways language has been changed out of fear these last 10 years. We sort of sit back and wait for the Normie cavalry to arrive, and chortle when elections go our way, but without any sustained pushback these modes of thought and language will become -- well, norms, thanks to these "Level 3" activists.
- I had thought the "simulcra" argument Baudrillard was making had to do with a "discussion of the thing" not being the same as "the thing" itself. Your post about "everything is violence" made me think about the Hobbesian argument about the State having a monopoly on violence. But I've never read Leviathan! I'm saying "Hobbesian" to mean a particular thing, but I don't actually know if that's an accurate portrayal of what Hobbes actually said! This is inevitable: You simply cannot read everything, and must rely on others to summarize the main points or, further down the line, accept a floating idiom that once was attached to an actual text. So in one sense this behavior from activists is normal, just scaled up to a level we've never seen before.
But yes, without an actual agenda, and boots on the ground, the online arguing won't have much real world effect (although...elite spaces...). I think that will eventually happen, though, and I'm not sure I'm going to like it. Give me Biden Democrats all day, every day.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree with much of it, but did want to share one interesting tidbit. BLM is in some ways the only successful protest movement of the last 10-15 years - they did actually change public opinion substantially and there were a ton of police reform efforts passed at city/state levels across the US. It wasn't the BLM organizations directly causing it, but indirectly they clearly made a difference.
I’m not sure wanting to ‘change the world for the better’ is a level 1 phenomenon. We can’t really perceive that directly, it’s too abstract. But I do think you can enjoy winning for its own sake. But then, when it comes to politics it’s not really you winning, is it? It’s your team.
maybe there are levels both in our actions and in our perceptions. Some things we perceive directly, some are mediated by abstractions, some are mediated by our team, and some we just think we are perceiving something but we don’t really understand what that thing feels like.
So in that sense, the kind of winning you are talking about seems like a level 3 perception.