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Title: #RedditRevolt as Sympathy Strike Author: William Gillis Date: July 4th, 2015 Language: en Topics: Social Media Source: https://c4ss.org/content/38668
Yesterday arguably one of the biggest general/sympathy strikes in modern
history kicked off. I refer, of course, to reddit and the shuttering of
hundreds of subreddits in protest of a woman’s firing and, more broadly,
the lack of democratic accountability on reddit.
Millions of people right now are excitedly joining a general strike with
billions of dollars at stake. Now the leftist subreddits have expectedly
sneered at the strike because they despise the broader culture in reddit
and see themselves as adversaries to anything popular in the site’s
notoriously problematic userbase. But it’s an interesting situation
because, you know, I was raised to never cross a picket line. And one
would be hardpressed if one stepped back and looked from a conventional
union perspective to characterize going to reddit or keeping subreddits
online as anything other than scabbing/crossing pickets.
I am, of course, a left market anarchist, who thinks the traditional
models of unionism are laughably antiquated and map poorly onto anything
of relevance in the modern world and that the Marxist expansion of
“labor” to include literally every human activity including discourse is
an insane colonization of all human experience into a dated historical
lens.
Further as an anarchist I am adamantly in favor Reddit being
destroyed/decentralized, not just to apply some much needed evolutionary
pressures on the troglodytes that have found refuge in reddit’s
reactionary aspects, but primarily so the internet can be the internet
again. The anarchist orientation is ultimately not one of uncritical
support for campaigns to make admins (and moderators) “more accountable”
— replicating the same rotten forms of representational democratic
society again and again as though a child whose imagination has been
beaten away. Rather our goal is the dissolution of places of power,
whether that be capricious and disconnected bosses or the enclosure of
the web into walled gardens.
But this is an astounding moment in both the shattering of long ossified
norms and the hands-on practice in resistance this such a rapid sympathy
strike is giving the internet’s denizens. While a subcurrent of
racist/misogynistic reactionaries is present in this struggle and
seeking to push reactionary perspectives/memes such people are usually
present in moments of great social contestation.
And it’s illustrative of just how deeply internet discourse has turned
into defensive policing of clusters of identity/community that everyone
is basically incapable of seeing this strike unprecedented in scale in
the history of the internet for what it is.