Read on Twitter
#NoComradesUnder1k is good. Almost all of it I've seen has appeared genuinely wholesome, well intentioned even when critical, inclusive, and predicated on an impulse towards openness and support.
But let's complicate things.
But let's complicate things.
Starting from the obvious good; it shows a developed, intuitive understanding of how Twitter works (tweets from accts. with more followers get spread more; therefore if leftists generally have more followers, left tweets spread more)
And, it shows a knack for and participation in a simple form of collective action (if we all make mutual following a habit, we can build a bigger machinery for viral tweets to emerge). Moreover, most of what I've seen of it has been explicitly inclusive of non-white, LGBTQ+ accts
But, because Twitter is a fundamentally liberal and capitalist platform, and because of the inherent openness of spontaneous trends, there are vulnerabilities and incentives we all gotta look out for.
The most obvious is infiltration; it took like 2 minutes for posts about #NoComradesUnder1k to show up on /pol and similar. Expect plenty of both open and incognito chud accounts to try and pass themselves off as left in order to get a boost and spread shit.
Obviously this is nothing new - #NoComradesUnder1k itself comes about a week after a rw troll campaign to spread memes linking LGBTQ+ activism to pedophilia on facebook, which gave them a nice little side-victory when facebook cracked down on their "anti-pedophile" hashtag.
Another potential issue is dilution - timelines are only so big, and people only have so much time, and Twitter is not real life. Having thousands of followers, especially based on a broadly similar ideology and program, means your timeline gets more and more repetitive.
Whenever a trend goes through the community that all of your followers are pulled from, that trend dominates your timeline as the algorithm assumes those are all the tweets you're interested in. This leads to disengagement as you start tuning out the repetition.
It also leads to isolation from "the mainstream" - what becomes most relevant is whatever dominates the community all your follows are in (and your timeline).
Twitter already isn't real life; the tendency towards increasingly specific intraleft navel-gazing is worth resisting.
Twitter already isn't real life; the tendency towards increasingly specific intraleft navel-gazing is worth resisting.
And, because Twitter isn't real life, it's important to remember the limitations of whatever happens on here and not get too plugged in - Twitter brain worms pop up everywhere on the ideological spectrum.
At the same time, if you want to use this thing as a tool to spread class consciousness, something like #NoComradesUnder1k is great - if double-edged. In addition to boosting your follow count, IMO, be profligate with the follows.
Learn to distinguish between substance and style; limit hard lines to the most important issues of substantive, real-world rights instead of aesthetic, consumer, or cultural choices. Be compassionate with individuals, but ruthless with systems.
And, at the same time, make good lists - because following lots of people will make TLs a mess, start relying on lists for broader perspectives. Have lists you disagree with, lists that are just news outlets, lists of your favorite thinkers.
Remember that this platform's design *wants* to push you into an irrelevant little bubble, disconnected from the real world and any kind of broad movement, and even good trends like #NoComradesUnder1k are vulnerable to this.
This platform *wants* you to spend useful time chasing clout, and it *wants* you to waste time thinking of hotter and hotter takes for engagement, and it *wants* you to get angry, and it actively discourages you from engaging with compassion, nuance, and solidarity.
As #NoComradesUnder1k falls down the trending list, the next incentive will be for the leftist cloud-bubble that it generated to start competing for clout - by applying ever-stricter purity tests, by weaponizing identity, by substituting petty internet spats for real differences.
That's the way this site works - social interaction is framed as a currency that you have to compete for, and when you move into a network of broadly connected accounts, your neighbors become your competition.
Everyone who wants something different to happen out of #NoComradesUnder1k needs to start thinking, now, about how to be compassionate in disagreement, how to be nuanced in their language and read nuance in others' tweets, and how to hold righteous anger without being goaded.
(incidentally I think Gen Z has an innate advantage here, as y'all grew up using images, linked context, emojis, memeified language etc. in a way that conveys an incredible amount of depth with relatively little text)
I think that's my key point here. The spontaneity and solidarity that this lil trend popped out of is awesome and needs fostering - not for Twitter's sake, fuck Twitter - but because it's practice for overcoming how competitive, individualist liberal ideology divides us.
(also, credits; much of the way I'm thinking here owes debt to folks like @tmbsfm, @petercoffin, @ThoughtSlime, @caitoz, @jacobinmag, @Zahn_Zee, @KAR_YZ, @EmericanJohnson, @LunaOi_VN, @SpeaksAngie, and many others)
And, hey, idunno what this rant's reach will look like but if you want a boost, holler and I'll RT it.
