Thread by @justinpodur

No matter how radical your politics are, twitter has made you into a liberal. How?

Definitions: First, radicalism. Political radicalism arises in the 18th century when people around the French and Haiti revolutions take the declaration of rights seriously – which means abolition.

Radicals accepted the right of armed struggle by slaves and the colonized. Radicals are egalitarian. The radical idea is equality of outcomes. Losurdo writes about this very well.

versobooks.com/books/960-libe…

Radicals want equality of outcomes, meaning everybody gets the same thing. Not the same chance to get a great job that gets you health insurance, but the health insurance. Not the same chance to get a good education, but the good education.

The first struggles for free speech, freedom of press and assembly, that I found were by working class people in Britain in the early 19th century who were banned from forming unions or talking about their oppression by capitalists. Radicals. EP Thompson:

archive.org/stream/makingo…

Alright so what about liberalism? Liberals want equality of opportunity, which doesn’t even work unless you have quite a bit of equality of outcomes.

theconversation.com/without-equali…

Liberals talk a lot about freedom of speech, but historically (without exception) liberalism’s rights are restricted to a small group: slaves, Indigenous people, the colonized, the occupied – are always excluded. Only radicals apply them to everyone.

Twitter (and other social media) have made us all into liberals, in two ways.

Twitter has a moving window exclusion zone. The window moves around, grows and shrinks but overall cuts radical ideas out by rolling around suspending accounts. Facebook does the same, only worse; Google does so by burying radical ideas in search results.

But more importantly, twitter makes you think liberal. It's possible to imagine an Internet where any person could post something and it would be found and read as easily as the most exalted Ivy-League/Oxbridge educated US/UK-corporate media columnist.

But instead what we have is an internet where everyone has *in theory* the *opportunity* to go viral, to get as many followers as the exalted figures.

In reality, you have as much chance of getting Barack Obama’s 120 million followers as a peasant had of becoming the King of England. But it’s important that you feel like you have a chance, and like there’s something you can do (try harder!) to achieve it.

What is a follower count, really? To tweet is to put a few sentences on the open internet where anyone can read them. That is already all anyone can do, regardless of their follower count.

Your tweets are on the internet anyway. So a follower count is nothing but a psychological manipulation, a quantitative measure that creates a hierarchy against which you are meant to measure yourself and feel inadequate.

A follower count is your place, in the sense of “know your place”.

You might not have a big follower count, but you could. You might be a blue check, but you could. You might not be trending, but you could be. You might not go viral, but you could. So, why haven’t you?

These beliefs hijack our status conscious monkey brains and send us back to the platform every few minutes looking for validation.

alaindebotton.com/status/

So much so that we don’t ask what actually comes with a large follower count. I’ve had 200 followers and now I have 2000. When I think about it clearly, it seems to me that the higher number signifies absolutely nothing.

And I doubt that having 20,000 or 200,000 would be anxiety-reducing – it would probably tie me to the platform more by the sunk cost fallacy.

Radicals come to these platforms seeking to influence the public debate in radical directions.

But understand how twitter’s perfectly quantitative class system that tells you your place in the hierarchy in real time (with extra caste badges like blue checks) is constantly pushing your mind towards liberalism.

And also understand as we look for alternatives that having at any given time 1. a few of us on here, 2. a few of us kicked off, 3. a bunch of us campaigning to get the kicked off ones back, and 4. most of us anxious of our status – is perfect for them and miserable for us.