lookatthesky

phantasmagoria of animegirl view

@lookatthesky

look at the sky.

taste me, as the food and drink Alice found almost said. she was cast unto a stormshorn sunderedsea. you too will fall beneath my waves in time.

profile pic by moiwool (nonbinary color edit by me)

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lookatthesky
@lookatthesky
NireBryce
@NireBryce
NireBryce
@NireBryce

Overton's Ladder

there's a double rachet in activism that a lot of people really seem to miss, and slam one of the sides of it. But it's a force multiplier.

you have impolite and overton-window-pushing side
who's job is pushing the "left wing of the possible" by fighting hard for what is realistically impossible for the conditions and groups at hand but morally important.

and then there's the polite and more 'professional' (demeanor-wise) side
that capitalizes on it by now being able to present an even-more-left-for-their-role argument that now looks reasonable from the other type of person pushing the window.

(That does not mean the sort of people who weaponize "NGO politeness"/"white polite" speech to police others, but instead the people playing the other side of that political game.)

things do not work nearly as well without both.

but there's a whole lot of infighting around politeness.

If you use both in concert, you have one side moving the "tailing/'right wing' side of the left" leftward because now they seem unreasonable, and one side pushing the far side of the left further, for any given domain's far and tailing side of 'left'.

Catfish-Man
@Catfish-Man

As a long term maintenance/performance/security engineer, my entire brain is designed for incremental improvement. But when I say that in activist communities they assume I mean stonewalling them, and I really don't. I need y'all to push the boundaries of the possible, and I'll be there behind you picking up the pieces and applying spackle to the holes.

NireBryce
@NireBryce

and exploiting the gaps that are left in the scramble to counter them

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

When you're in a position of leadership, or have a big audience, you have a lot of inertia, unless someone else makes the first move, and then you get seen as 'running to catch up' instead of pushing left. It's extremely important. It lets the people with influence in spheres you need, act with it, without risking losing their position for seeming 'too political' in a way that makes them lose that lever of power they're using for your goals.

not even from a 'diversity of tactics' standpoint. The symbiosis is necessary for leftward movement when the right wing has all the funding, and footsoldiers who will follow orders wherever they're placed.

The left has lots of skills, but is more diffuse, and refuses to be led by leaders who aren't facilitators, of which we have very few at the moment. So instead you have to treat all politics like an insurgency: open many fronts (protest, embarassment campaigns, muckraking/investigative journalism/"hacking" but in the journalistic sense, demanding media attention with stunts and crowds and marches that would be embarrassing for the media to ignore, etc)

But if you do, you increase stress on the system of your opponents, while the people who cannot make the big moves can now shift all of their audience, all of their social circles, etc, further left. Because the unreasonable has now become reasonable, now that someone is creating a new "unreasonable".

No one knows what they're doing, they just know what they can do, and they act on opportunities as they arise. It's our strength. An endless september and constant eyeroll-worthy politics from newcomers just means that our onboarding capacity has been outstripped by our wild success. So until we have that capacity back, the key is to act more decentralized but at the same time: write about and share skills and techniques.

Occupy worked because they understood that most people would not have the skills. So you distribute the tools that allow that information dissemination (human microphone, blogposts and zines, etc), assume at least the invested people have seen those, and then can start teaching the people around them.

This is, I suppose, in that same vein.

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boredzo
@boredzo

The nature of a decentralized big-tent movement is something that a lot of people (particularly those brought up with many hierarchical influences on their lives) struggle with.

The left, as it exists in the United States in 2023, is a decentralized, big-tent movement. We are many orgs with many philosophies, many theories of change, many goals, and many schools of tactics.

People keep expecting the DNC or DSA or the President or some other group or person to be In Charge, and that is not the way it works. The left is not a hierarchy; it is a decentralized movement in which everyone (hopefully) does their part. The DSA does their part and the President does his. (The DNC, well…)

This is why I advise people to find their people, and find their piece of the work and do that. Don't worry too much about what other people are or aren't doing—the former because nobody has time to get into those kind of fights when we have common enemies to worry about, and the latter because that way leads to overwork and burnout.

There are going to be people pursuing the same goals as you in different ways, or more radical goals, or more moderate goals that are in the same direction but not as much. Let them. Don't try to stop them or change their goals or tactics. Maybe don't even talk to them at all: Sometimes being hands-off helps each faction have more legitimacy (with the audience they care about) than trying to work together.

Not to say that coordination has no value, but it's best for groups whose values are aligned and whose tactics are similar—coalitions of political (as in politician-pestering) orgs, for example.

Where goals or tactics differ wildly, it can be better to let each group go their own way—one more radical, the other more moderate—and hopefully effect the dual-ratchet dynamic you described.

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

this, but also: as much as possible, do what you can in the open. Not to brag, or to propagandize, but to 1. share the skills, techniques, and perspectives and 2. prevent labor duplication.

But yeah -- ime things move too fast for anything but, and i really hate to say this, more Agile kinds of groupings. Not the consultant-manager-corrupted kind, but the original one; small teams, closely intertwined with the problem, that can act fast and largely on their own with the rest of the group picking up from that and figuring out what to do to help it.

Of course, to non-computer-people I'd describe that as a type of anarchist (and communist, but I'd get stabbed by both sides if I said that) form of organizing, but the shorthand is way more understood intuitively with software imo, because it become So Obvious when it's done wrong.

The Team is a superorganism, but only to a certain point. Once you have too much infrastructure to coordinate just because of growth, you gain exponential inertia for every "management layer" that needs to sign off on something, or that can corrupt things up/down the chain.

DSA has it's problems but works pretty well as a My-First-Volunteer-Org for learning how Politics work outside of politics (and much more, but I think it's biggest use is as... an onboarding structure. But don't get me wrong, it holds it's own and punches above it's weight even during times of chaos, MOSTLY IN SPITE of the topheavy nature of things there, because the local chapters end up self-organizing small teams if they aren't actively prevented from it)

this is a tangent but: https://mmabeuf.medium.com/maos-study-groups-and-mass-media-b875553735e8 is worth the read, even if I don't care for a lot of the framing, simply for

One technique the Chinese Communists used was to put politically un-advanced people in a study group with people who were only a little bit ahead of them, so the un-advanced could still identify with them, and see a path forward. New information was introduced gradually. People weren’t bombarded with all of the critiques and correct ideas at the outset. The process of changing somebody’s mind is understood as a path along a gradient, no as the flipping of a binary switch.

which is a great articulation of why I feel that way about DSA

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catball
@catball

I appreciate this post!

  1. Do you know if there's any lit out there about this topic I could review and cite, or is this mostly original work?
  2. Are there good tactics for working someone who is the more incremental ratchet? I've had a few experiences where folks have written off basically everything left of their brand of incrementalism as completely counterproductive and wall off their spaces from more-left-leftists
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NireBryce
@NireBryce

with the first point, lemmie know, I'd love some too. If you're just looking for something vaguely credible looking to cite, I can wordpress it or stick it on medium to launder it.

This is like, me putting my readings and experiences of:

  1. Occupy
  2. a point Jane McAlevey wasn't trying to make her main point but really was the main point of No Shortcuts
  3. reading a lot of left lit over the years
  4. observing community dynamics with my own eyes (because what are communities but politics in microcosm)
  5. which were then confirmed by my participation in much more hardscrabble politics and protests 2017-2022.

and then putting them in a blender.

For your second point: Those people aren't the tailing-edge ratchet in this case, they're the tail. The people who are the tailing-edge ratchet there are the more active parts of their community, who through moving left as the opening presents itself, then make it look embarrassing further down the line and pull them further forward. It often has fractal waves, for any given 'left' down the line.

for people who do act as those ratchets (You'll notice them as community leaders who can't act, but will follow, I don't want to name names in case it's a thing they don't want having been pointed to, but you see them all the time in tech as people well positioned to move, but only if it means not losing their reputation. because they need to keep that reputation to be able to otherwise help funnel that power to you.

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

if you want some more advanced and thoughtprovoking reading on the flipside of this:

https://mmabeuf.medium.com/maos-study-groups-and-mass-media-b875553735e8

and remember that 'mind control' in that context of the cold war is closer to 'rewriting their idea of reality through intense teaching' and not 'hypnosis/telepathy'.

The most relevant bit is

One technique the Chinese Communists used was to put politically un-advanced people in a study group with people who were only a little bit ahead of them, so the un-advanced could still identify with them, and see a path forward. New information was introduced gradually. People weren’t bombarded with all of the critiques and correct ideas at the outset. The process of changing somebody’s mind is understood as a path along a gradient, no as the flipping of a binary switch.

in conclusion, that's why Contrapoints is important, as sad as I am to say it.

(the main point of the article is that the chinese communists invented mechanical-turked social media in the 1950s, and that tech companies basically just did the dark-end version of it)

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gnar
@gnar

ive always sortve thought of this in the same way as haggling: you always go in with wildly too high or too low offer, because the first number you give determines the floor or ceiling. the first group is setting the boundaries and the second group is moving to the actual price

(and of course you can have multiple rounds of this floor/ceiling thing—similarly you have multiple groups along the ‘unrespectable’/‘respectable’ axis who all partially set the bounds of the overton window)

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