I’m giving a couple talks over the next few weeks on digital activism and the current environment and I wanted to share a few thoughts, none of which are particularly original, but which capture my perspective on the matter

In 2017, while Charlottesville was dealing with the Summer of Hate, one thing I said a lot is that we have to understand the boundaries of doing activism and fighting a war, and to make clear which we wanted to be doing and which we were doing.

A lot of people want to see the current political landscape as one of extremes, as one of media destruction, or as one of disinformation. That doesn’t tell the whole story. Our current situation is that we are in the middle of an irregular war.

All of those other lenses are the result of the ammunition spent on the current battlefield: information. We’re all constantly trafficking in information.

I said once that I created First Vigil to be a weapon in a culture war in which one side was doing all the killing. And that’s pretty accurate—giving people information is like giving people arms and ammunition

The right is doing their part. all this manufactured consent, all these huckster outlets, even QAnon, it all is just the same thing as airdropping crates of rocket launchers to a rebel force.

If we’re going to get serious about engaging with this we have to view it through the lens of conflict not through the lens of politics

In his book American Antifa, @professor_stas describes antifa as a sort of de facto non-state policing force, enforcing community standards through multiple means up to and including violence.

But I think that that view has to evolve now, since the scope of the threat is more that just community scale. It was once enough to purge your city of Nazis, but now those same Nazis have direct pipelines into real political power

So the domain of antifascism has to scale to that level, too. We’re not just fighting punks in bars or facing off against them in the street, but kicking them off of platforms, engaging in media campaigns against them, and going after financing sources

The ethics of these actions have to be viewed in that light, too. Why is it ok to dox a nazi?

Look at how many of them have been teachers, politicians, city employees.

Doing so removes them from the levers of power.

The question is if these means are enough. The left must be a politics of science and fact and rigor.

The right can manufacture 1000 lies before one truth can be told.

We have to address this with scale

This is why the left has to be a big tent. Because information—the ammo of this war—has to be produced at scale. And the only way for that to be both correct and sufficient to counter the right is to have a lot of people doing it

Every one of my activist circles is struggling now with how to address the ease and rapidity absolutely awful information is generated. Joe Rogan can do in five throwaway minutes what will take 500 hours to undo.

I don’t know what else to say about this other than we can get up to and past something like January 6 and we still don’t have a mainstream concept of the scale or the nature of the activities

Anyhow, activism is what you do when you want to politically influence an organization to change. War is what you fight when you have an enemy hell-bent on destroying your entire way of life

Anyhow, recognize which one you’re doing. https://twitter.com/jennaellisesq/status/1353508571485495301