q: how do anarchists handle internet culture?
a: internet culture, as such, is really corporate culture.
think about it: when we talk about the problems of Internet culture, we tend to mean mainstream social media platforms. we vent about dogpiles and creepy DMs on twitter. about unhealthy beauty standards and constant anti-fat bias on instagram. about an inaccessible interface and way too many conspiracy theories on facebook. about homophobia and clickbait on tiktok. but when our group chats are crazy or even when our mastodon instance has problems, most of us don’t immediately blame the technology while letting its users off the hook. it feels smaller, more personal. so as a result, if someone’s causing problems, we hold them accountable as we would in any other space.
how does this work? well, the smaller and more connected forms of technology that most anarchists prefer enable accountability. when someone trolls us on twitter, there’s no way we can rebuild trust—there wasn’t trust to begin with. but on the fediverse, a twitter alternative popular with many organizers, there’s an innate sense of trust. for example, i use The Wandering Shop for my personal fedi account—i found out about it through Mirlo, my amazing podcast distro, and then chose to make an account. there are about fifty to a hundred active users, many of whom are on the discord server—and most of us know the moderators personally and would be comfortable coming to them with a problem. TWS federates with most other instances, so we can all connect with other queers/punks/anarchists—all of whom are in similarly small and tight-knit spaces.
on TWS and every other instance I’ve used (kolektiva.social is also a favorite of mine) there are hardly ever dogpiles or bullying situations because it’s a small space with a sense of community, and we know each other as people rather than simply as online commodities. so when and if there is a problem, we don’t chalk it up to a vast and formless Internet Of Things. we know what technologies we’re using, how they work, and who maintains them. we’re all in the anarchist community, so intrinsically trust one another to some extent—and when that trust is broken, we know that this is caused by humans who can change, rather than by mysterious and alienating technologies. “internet culture” is not a monolith when the internet is anarchic—it’s something we build together.
now this is all great, you might say, but mainstream social media isn’t like that. you’re right, it isn’t—and that’s why anarchists handle internet culture by creating more collectivist alternatives. we treat technology as something to create and operate together—fedi instances, websites, open-source software, and this blog are all online anarchist projects! and because it’s all DIY, we can hold one another accountable rather than using technology as a cop-out. there may always be internet culture, but queer culture is powerful too—especially when it’s built in community.