thank you: Kathryn Wallenstein, Heidi Yamate-Morgan, Tia Shamba, flightlessblrbs, mums, and many others for tuning into my first (slightly embarrassing) live video!
i went on substack live, not because I enjoy being on screen, but because i engaged with this post by Don Knight, and I have a modest proposal about how to fight back. go ahead and expand his post so you can read the whole thing.
anyhow, i think we should spook the techno-fascists and get off our screens… engage in a little austerity measures ourselves.
let the idea percolate. would it be inconvenient? yes. but when we’re talking forced famines and forced pandemics (the whole point of cutting SNAP and the ACA credit is to cull the population) and ethnic cleansing, we really need to move out of a place of singular self-interest and into a space of shared commitment and shared sacrifice to reclaim our collective liberation.
yes, being without the internet and abstaining or severely limiting our use of phones, is difficult. so is fascism. so are death camps. so is forced famine. so is a forced pandemic. there are no “convenient” ways moving forward, neighbor. this is a “choose your hard kind of moment,” where we need to ask ourselves if we want to engage in shared sacrifice to save our democracy or whether we want to sit back on the train to hell and watch techno-fascists and christian nationalists lock arms to sacrifice our neighbors (one by one, and then all at once) on the altar of mammon.
these people’s entire-ass plan is contingent on all of us feeling like we can’t survive without the internet or our cellphones.
i got news for you: we can.
not only can we survive, but getting offline and abstaining from our cellphones might be the very thing that kicks ‘em in the change purse and helps us reclaim our lives. because that’s where we are right now: we’re fighting for our lives.
to me? you’re worth giving up screens. you’re worth a temporary loss of income. money is fiction. you are real, irreplaceable, and precious to me. you are worth my solidarity.
i have done the moral math: you’re worth it every time.
also many things you’re looking for online, particularly by way of genuine connection, is in abundance when we walk away from the very tech currently being designed to bankrupt, surveil, abduct, and literally unalive us.
maybe it’s time we break up with our techno-fascist abusers, flip the script, go dark online, and organize in our communities offline— building parallel systems of support— as if our collective lives depend on it. it’s not enough to protest. we need to stop engaging with these heifers entirely and start building parallel systems so that we simply don’t need any thing they’re selling and the wheels fall off their janky soapbox derby car.
i wanna be clear: yeah this is scary, but there are also WAY more of us than there are of them, they’re already crashing out, and if we pull together and do a brave, sustained thing, i believe we will win.
do not let our collective addiction to screens be the thing that ends democracy.
it’s not like we have to stay offline and without cell phones forever: it’s about reclaiming our human dignity, standing up for our neighbors, and refusing to endanger young people by kicking the can down the road.
we need to be the safe adults in the room.
if not now, when?
