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Title: Who you gonna follow? Author: Anna Mercury Date: July 11, 2019 Language: en Topics: social media, the Internet, media Source: Retrieved on November 30, 2021 from https://medium.com/swlh/who-you-gonna-follow-c459e086753e
I remember the first time people started calling me cool. It was in
2016, I was living on a narrowboat in London, partying too much, and
suddenly all these people I was meeting through a new school program
kept telling me how cool they thought I was. It was flattering, but also
weird. I’ve never been a particularly cool person, nor a particularly
popular one. Not in school, not at work, not in life, and definitely not
on social media. My philosophy towards popularity is: fuck cool; be
warm.
Still, it felt validating. When people called my van (pictured above)
cool, it felt validating. The Instagram likes felt validating.
I like likes, because I like feeling validated. I think I’m pretty
caring, interesting and authentic. I genuinely work really hard to keep
becoming a better person by every standard I have for what that means. I
think my tattoos look pretty fly. But my guess is, the cool factor came
more from the weird living situations and the tattoos than it did from
being compassionate or thoughtful. The way I’ve been called cool has
never actually validated what I value most about myself.
The thing is, we all seek attention. We all need validation. When we
criticize those qualities in others, especially when it comes to others’
use of social media, we are mostly talking about ourselves and shaming
ourselves for having desires for attention. Everything is a mirror.
But we all need attention. As members of a tragically self-aware and
interdependent species, we cannot survive if our needs are not attended
to and met by others. So, let go of your bootstraps, bucko; your rugged
individualism is a fantasy.
I think social media has given us a convenient approximation of actual
attention and validation, and we’ve come to rely on it to a point of
detriment to our ability to find actual attention and validation. The
classic example of checking Facebook while having dinner with someone
comes to mind.
But I think there is more to it than just this inverse relationship.
There was something we were craving, when the first social media
platforms took off, that made them so wildly popular. Perhaps none of us
were receiving the validation and attention we needed from other humans,
due to emotionally incompetent parents or emotionally corrosive
institutions across government and culture or a society rooted in an
understanding of what’s valuable that regularly invalidates us for
liking to do anything that doesn’t easily turn a profit (usually, a
profit for someone else).
We’re craving authentic connection and community. Authenticity withers
in the face of coercion and force. Connection feels contrived and
obligatory. We’re craving authentic validation and attention, for who
and what we are, as full people with unique interests and needs and
lives. This requires us to be allowed to express ourselves fully and
freely.
No wonder we’ve chosen options that give us more of what we crave. Even
though harmful and oppressive ideals are perpetuated through social
media, we at least have some power to represent ourselves, and choose
for ourselves from a diversity of options whom to follow, when, and to
what extent to listen to them.
Typically, when we talk about a follower, the opposite term is a leader.
I think it’s interesting that on social media, we talk about influencers
instead.
What standard would we hold our influencers to if we thought of them as
leaders? Having influence is having power. What accountability would we
expect? What code of ethics, and who would decide upon it? Public Lands
Hate You would say influencers need to be more accountable and take more
responsibility for their power. Its detractors would not.
What standard would we hold our leaders to if we thought of them as
influencers? Would we ever accept their rule as absolute or their
hierarchical power as moral? Would we accept not really having other
options to switch to if our consent to their rule wanes?
It’s funny how we like candidates for emotional reasons more than
rational ones. It’s almost like our emotions matter more to us than our
thoughts. Just look at the entire phenomenon of people actually liking
Beto O’Rourke because they think he’s cool and he stands on tables a
lot.
I don’t like Selena Kardashian Grande Frappuccino or whatever either,
but at least people choose to listen to what they have to say and to
consume awareness of their lives, rather than having no other viable
option. I don’t follow them. I follow some influencers who I deem make
my life better for whatever reason, and if I don’t like what Beige
Cardigan or Contrapoints is up to, I can always unfollow them.
I suppose this is social media, too. You can always unfollow me.
We don’t vote for one social media influencer once every four years from
a narrowly-derived list of rich and powerful people that rich and
powerful people deemed appropriate candidates for us.
The Internet is, in some ways, an approximation of Anarchism: the
political philosophy of non-hierarchy, horizontalism, free association,
mutual aid and self-determination. It is not indicative of an anarchist
society. First, Internet-based companies and ISPs are still monopolistic
in society and undemocratic in structure. Second, governments keep
making repeated efforts to police and control bodies and minds on the
Internet the way they try to in physical reality.[1] Third, we cannot
take ideas of “anarchy on the Internet” as a basis for what anarchism
would look like in human community. The whole point is community —how
the human relationships we have with one another shape our
decision-making. Dispersed power within physically-close communities
looks very different than dispersed power across an infinite
non-physical space.[2]
What social media does retain of an anarchist society is free
association: we can choose whom to follow and when and why, and we can
unfollow and ignore and block. We cannot do this with our governments.
Though paid advertisement and public voice beyond social media limit
this, social media popularity, and therefore power, is also democratic
and largely consensual.
The most important feature of an anarchist society that social media
upholds is self-determination, and self-representation. We have the
ability to choose what of ourselves to put forwards, and determine for
ourselves if, when and how to do so. We have the ability to choose whom
to follow and for what reasons. We have a diversity of options, and the
ability to choose for ourselves which ones to take.
If all social media platforms had democratically-elected moderators and
consensual community agreements made with the input of all involved in
the community, and multiple options for which platform to use to get
your needs met, they might look more like an anarchist society.
I think the fact that platforms like Twitter, Youtube and Instagram
became so wildly popular shows that what we’re craving is far more than
just validation and attention. We’re craving sovereignty,
self-determination, and free association too.
What happens when self-determination meets community? Authentic mutual
aid.
As more and more people turn away from social media and back to their
in-person lives for connection, validation and attention, we’re also
seeing a rise in people fed up with any system that doesn’t allow them
to represent themselves and disassociate from leaders whose rule they
find abhorrent. I do not think these trends are coincidental.
We’re craving a democratization of access to power. We need to have our
needs met and the power to meet them. This includes the power to be
validated as ourselves, and more agency over how that happens. Real,
direct democracy is all about seeing everyone’s needs and perspectives
as valid, and giving everyone the chance to figure out how to meet them
in community.
What interests me so much about the “accountability of influencers”
conversations are that they’re exactly the kinds of conversations we
need to be having about our political structures, about if and how those
structures meet our needs, and how directly accountable they should be
to us.
Understanding the intersections and differences between the two kinds of
being a “follower” can help us to understand our needs and how to meet
them together more broadly. At the end of the day, both kinds of
following are about power: what we have, what others have, and who gets
to decide.
[1] I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the U.S. government policing
whistleblowing and activism on the Internet, and if any nerds want to
chat hacktivism and the CFAA, hit me up. I haven’t delved into it much
in the past few years and would be interested in hearing what’s new in
that conversation.
[2] For more about dispersing power by keeping it held at the grassroots
within communities of people who can actually talk to one another, I
recommend that you google Murray Bookchin.