= DEMOCRACY =

Thing is though, by centering the individual public figure as the basis of their politics, it ultimately makes these supporters completely unable to discern for themselves what they think about a particular topic. They just parrot the talking points that these public figures spew out, where the thinking is already done for them, and the only thing that they have to do is absorb and regurgitate without doing any of thinking for themselves.

And the really strange thing is how these people have constructed not just their politics, but also their entire identity as a person based on being “a supporter/follower of [x public figure].” This is why they take it so fucking personally when people criticize these public figures. They’ve literally created a cult of personality around them, to the point where criticizing or disagreeing with those public figures is very personal. To say that any one of those public figures is “wrong” isn’t just attacking their ideas, it’s considered to be an attack on the very identity of the people who support them. 

This has been bothering me all day, so I’m going to take a moment to go into personal stuff with minimal details.

For those unfamiliar, opsec is short for operational security - or how to organize in a way that keeps those involved around.

This discussion was about organizing antifascist actions on Facebook, and in particular keeping public guest lists. My argument: Even if all you’ve done is organize a peaceful solidarity rally, keeping a public guest list is a terrible idea.

What bothers me in particular is the rebuttal that making the guest list private is paternalistic. I would like to soundly shut that argument down.

Private guest lists will not protect you against police surveillance. If they’ve got a warrant, they can get the guest list. If they don’t have a warrant, they can sometimes get the guest list. If you expect retaliation from cops, don’t organize on Facebook. Period. This is especially true of Facebook’s event system. All you’re doing by using Facebook’s event infrastructure is providing a searchable database of surveillance targets, the means to sabotage your network. Any escalation above strict nonviolence that poses no threat to capital is probably best kept off Facebook. No, there is no good alternative, and that sucks, but if we expect to mobilize and win, we can’t organize on communications infrastructure designed to expose organizers.

This, however, is not what I’m talking about. I am talking about the more limited threat of what’s academically called lateral surveillance, and less academically called nazis knowing where you live.

The argument about paternalism went like this: If we want to effectively oppose fascists, we must be seen to oppose fascists, we must be loud and proud, and assuming that people want protection rather than to be loud and proud is paternalism. People understand the risks of signing up for a public event and will take precautions when they need to.

Conceptually, I agree with some of this. Yes, it makes no sense to fail to condemn fascism in our private lives. Antifascists should certainly make it clear that fascism is unacceptable within their communities. Fascists should know that their neighbours and coworkers won’t tolerate them stepping out of line, that the silent majority is not with them, because the majority is not silent and it’s not having any of their shit. So long as there aren’t fascist secret police, we shouldn’t be acting like there are.

But this misunderstands what Facebook is, and the nature of social media in general. What we have on our hands is not a home to speech, as we would in something like Skype or Discord or even Facebook’s own Messenger but a publishing platform. Speech is ephemeral, even chatlogs are very limited in their reach and don’t lend themselves so easily to searching. Certainly they cannot be looked through by anyone to whom they are not specifically given.

But publication is a little bit different. It’s meant to be seen very generally, and it’s meant to be on the record. Once it’s out there, so it goes, it’s out there. And that’s the issue with public guest lists on Facebook. Facebook is pretty problematic to begin with, it’s a platform for publishing your personal life, all of it. You’re supposed to help friends find you by listing your full name, a recognizable picture, where you live, your place of work, your contact details, and so on. Many people don’t even protect their posts because of “it’ll never happen to me” syndrome.

So let’s say you’re an antifascist organizer, and you create an event page, where everyone’s going to show solidarity and it’s all very nice and peaceful, and then the cops or some fash decide it’s time to FSU even though nobody in the crowd is doing anything particularly confrontational at the moment. A fair chunk of the people going put it on their Facebook calendar. On the guest list of that page are the names and faces of all those people who went to the event. They might list their school, their workplace, their hometown, hell you might be able to get their phone number.

So a fashy looks up “<this city> antifascist rally” on Facebook after it’s all over and they find that the organizers (whose lives have been too disrupted to take down the page) left it up and left the guest list public. Dutifully they pick a couple faces they recognize and share those details around on stormfront or /bahamut/ or /pol/, wherever they feel like. The cops receive a frightened call, someone’s being attacked in their home! Through the crocodile tears of a white nationalist troll, the cops come to think they’ve got a tip, and send the swat team.

Or maybe someone armed and scary show’s up at that person’s door to intimidate them. Or maybe their workplace finds out they’re violent antifa terrorists who have to go. Et cetera. It’s been made positively easy for fascists to find you and fuck with you.

Keeping a public guest list is like recording the names and photos and personal details of everyone who attends a rally, and printing it in the local newspaper saying “look at us, we are the antifascists!” Really it’s more akin to a national newspaper. 

By setting a public guest list, you lower the barrier to doing all the nasty things people can do with all your contact details. You know how we’ve been sharing around the names and photos and workplaces of fash in Charlottesville? We’re not the only ones who can use that tactic, in fact it’s kind of a hallmark of their side of things, and they’re better at it than we are. The least we can do is not make it easy.

I’m overcautious about organizing. Partly because I’m a fatalist, and I always assume things will go much worse than they actually go. Partly it’s because I work with tech and I understand exactly how easy it is for a smart person or a well-organized police intervention to destroy activist networks, given the motive (easy in principle, in practice there aren’t a lot of smart private citizens, and police are mostly incompetent).

But partly it’s because I am genuinely optimistic about the socialist cause. I think we can win and I think the record shows that once it starts happening, it happens fast, faster than anyone expects (at least in terms of how the political situation changes). When it does, the response is swift and brutal. We must seriously grapple with the fact that we can actually succeed, even partly, and success is often met with violence. When the violence comes, we must be in a position to resist destruction, or we could very well be destroyed.

eisenhower sent the national guard to prevent a race riot. the same goes for the other two. tension was boiling over in 50s and 60s america and they had to put a bandaid over the issue.

even with this, the majority of white america (about 63%) hated this bandaid. a similar number thought dr. king was “damaging the civil rights movement” by having sit-ins and marches.

nixon later ripped this bandaid off by initiating the “war on drugs”, which reagan strengthened- his policies disproportionately targeted black and latino people, throwing them in federal prison for victimless crimes such as having some weed. so while black people aren’t at square one, we have been pushed back routinely by a white america that wants to see us shut up and suffer silently.