I'm Not Bothering with Electoral Politics Online Anymore

The upcoming United States election to see who'll end up becoming the 47th president of the United States has been mentally draining. Conventionally, everything is going par the script. A lot of folks who aren't normally engaged in any sort of political activity are now becoming vanguards for folks who they'll never meet in person. These folks will most likely disappear come February 2025, during Black History Month. I've spent too much time online and offline in situations that I didn't realize that were debates until I felt myself getting hot and I'm personally choosing to resign from the topic. This is for a few reasons.

White people are America's most loyal defenders American white people are the largest conservative block in the United States by population count. The European settlers brought Christianity to Turtle Island some 200 years ago, predominately Protestantism, and it still remains the dominant religion of the country; despite the narrative of it being a religiously-inclusive nation. To this day, they make up 57.8% of the nation's population. The ethics of Protestantism has been transformed into how we as a society, especially in America, perceive our self-worth (bootstrap logics, individualistic survival ideology, work being a virtue) and dictates how we even see who's worthy of respect or dignity. Tying this with the information in a December 2019 study that noted that "white women are the only [female] voting group who support Republican Party candidates ... in all but 2 of the last 18 elections"; y'all need to work shit out amongst yourselves. Figure out if you actually want the Handmaid's Tale to come to life.

If the actualization of the largest voting block being largely responsible for pushing the policy that we see today turns an uncomfortable sentiment in your stomach, I strongly suggest engaging them (if you're in the realm of privilege to do so). My focus on white women here is to exemplify how, even in an opportunity to side with an marginalized identity, people choose oppressive power over solidarity. This is the same for Black men who dive into misogyny as it affords them social capital that they can leverage and transform into other outlets.

Capitalism is the blood of America As someone who's staunchly anti-capitalist, I routinely do not see any part in any of the last elections I've been once forcibly directed to participate in working to reduce this impact. From Obama to Trump, the idea that individual voting that's routinely manipulated isn't one to shy away from. In fact, we also routinely ignore the fact that the proxy voting committee, has a tremendous influence over how this goes down. One great example was the 2001 election that eventually led to the mass murder of millions of Iraqi people in the name of oil extraction, bolstering support for the destabilization of Iraq and in fear of an Iraqi-Iranian alliance. These elections are pushed by privately-funded entities like AIPAC, Freedom House, The Heritage Foundation and dozens of corporately-backed organizations by groups like Microsoft, Boeing and the ilk. If people want to see change, we need to see private bribery (or lobbying) to be abolished completely and make space for a publicly sponsored means of uplifting electoral candidates such that private money can't interfere.

Prejudice and discrimination defines policy in America I can list things like misogynoir, classism and a dozen other fields of oppression in which these elections thrive on to keep people engaged and to sustain themselves but at this point, it's borderline repetition. bell hooks has a book that talks about how much of the United States itself relies on racism and misogynoir. And in understanding that, attempts to reify (or deify) the virtues of this country reminds me that for the people mentioned in the first block, anything that brings them closer to the power that was most prominent in this country will be what satisfies them. Not liberation, not actual reform, not change - but the cementing of authority and guidance that their might makes right and what's good for them is good enough for everyone else.

I spend more time in political engagement offline. This means doing in-person surveys for radical organizing groups, doing volunteer labor as a webmaster, translating material to my ancestral tongue to reach folks who are routinely and systematically isolated from any sort of political engagement and constantly engaging myself in political education with cadres. The extent at which one can do this online is severely tempered by the control that social media platforms permit and I think this has contributed to my angst. YouTube, Reddit, Facebook/Meta/Instagram/Threads and the nascent Fediverse and ATmosphere are all wrestling for attention and can only deliver enough that'll trigger one's sense of comfortable engagement. This is never enough to be sustainable and make the notion of online engagement very cheap.

In #Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, the authors end the book noting the importance of having open access to information on social networks to help gauge the health of discussions on the topic. With the aforementioned, I find it extremely difficult to see these organizations work to open up in a way that'd give either an accurate or recent perspective. Either because of data access, trade secrets or a competitive advantage; being online and attempting to use it as a vehicle for political activism is a losing battle the more left you try to push things. It's not something that'll change without the combination of regulation and true mobilization from industry. And as long as the tech industry commits to keeping America great, that won't happen on its own. So I'm bowing out and focusing on what's truly important: keeping communities safe, educating the masses against state propaganda and expanding our perspectives such that we can truly fight for a better future.