This text discusses social media in general, its effect on the communication of anarchists and other radicals, and Makamik’s own social media practices.
The spread of social media has revolutionized the way people communicate with each other in the last fifteen years. The same applies to the information activities of anarchists and others working for a freer world; wheatpasting posters, press releases, takku.net and e-mail lists have changed to a bunch of projects’ and individuals’ own accounts on commercial social media platforms.
Many of our activists hate commercial social media with all their hearts, its like addictions, superficiality, short-sightedness and, above all, the unprecedented surveillance and control it enables. The authorities no longer necessarily need to infiltrate, bug homes or listen in on phone calls to find out who knows who if we start to be unruly. And often the police don’t even need to intervene in the organization of subversives before the social platforms censor, ban, silence and isolate those who have become too radical.
Despite this, we (also) at Makamik have decided to communicate on commercial social media as well. So much of all communication has gone there that by staying out, you miss out on a lot. It seems that in this state of the world, the only thing worse than being on social media is being left out.
We have a long-standing policy of not sharing things published by others on social media unless we have something important to add. Many comrades accounts publish insanely good and important content that we would in principle like to share, but already several accounts (with largely the same followers) often share all possible comrade content, so we believe that us joining the same flood of information would be more harmful than useful for anyone. We are longing for the good old takku.net times before sometization, when you could easily and anonymously find practically all public communication of anarchists on one site 💔