And the Participation Award Goes To...
notes on all of us
Friends, these are early thoughts I want to flesh out and develop further at some point. Think of this as a pre-draft. A reminder that paying subscribers can read and comment on all my posts, and will be able to chat to me in future Zoom Q&As/hangouts x
Over the past two weeks I’ve seen so many critiques of Qatar hosting the World Cup delivered by people who are still following the game and commenting on the matches. On the face of it that’s not unusual, except that the criticisms are based on egregious human rights abuses, and the tenor of them is one of (justified) moral outrage with an either implicit or explicit call for punishment as the outcome. Punishment in the form of sanctions, or refusal—to watch, to commentate, etc. In so many ways, this is the fundamental choice that faces all of us: to participate, or to refuse, and whenever the latter rears its head, hysteria often follows. I’ll come back to that idea later, but for now, it’s worth noting that these criticisms had some success: the BBC for example declined to show the opening ceremony, instead running a segment that took aim at Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers, thousands of whom died are said to have died during the building of the stadium, and so on. I can point out that the BBC had no issue showing Brazil’s opening ceremony, despite its litany of crimes and corruption, or that the United Kingdom is drenched in centuries of crimes against humanity that persist to the present day, but I’m not interested in this kind of shallow “all nation-states are evildoers” point-scoring.
I am interested, though, that they took this action at all, because there are few things that rile up corporates and politicians more than refusal to participate—to this day the successful cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa is treated as “controversial”, and the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) from apartheid Israel movement is not just taboo in the West, in many places it’s illegal to perform—so when refusal does occur, in such a public way, we should pay attention. Who are we allowed to withdraw from? Who is it okay to exclude? Arabs, always, of course, but North Korea, Cuba, and Iran are others, while Russia has returned to this position due to its invasion of Ukraine. The question could be modified to, who can the West afford to exclude? Not Saudi Arabia, for one. And not China, either. The issue is never human rights, never about justice, and more is the pity.
Relatedly, a lot of the critiques I’m talking about were aired on Twitter, which is seeing its own paroxysms of refusal in response to the open Nazification of the platform. Once again many of the same people pointing out the problems, that continued participation was gross, still weren’t deleting their accounts. To be clear, I am one of those people. My rationale is that I need to leave my profile up because in this age of anyone-can-be-verified-as-anyone-for-$8, my timeline is proof of my identity. But also, I have 26,000 followers, an audience built up over a decade of my life, and as a full-time freelance writer, it’s hard to reckon with losing that suddenly. The problem I am trying to articulate now is one that grips me also, which is that many of us are running the same calculation I posed above: can we afford this refusal? Is it really “resistance” to stay generating content and activity that ultimately benefits a billionaire sociopath who is actively promoting racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia? At this point, I want to make clear that I am talking principally to the terminally online, the media class, the political and pop culture obsessives.
While there is a material cost to leaving, there’s more than that at play. We have internalised this need to always be "part of the conversation" because of the myth that it is only through dialogue that we move forward; conversation, then, becomes the main action available to us, the means of participation in what is a discourse machine, a never-ending source of content for the media that provides the powerless with an illusory sense of means, and the powerful with the fuel to continually fan the flames of their so-called "culture wars". On that note, please for the love of all that’s holy, we have to stop using the terms deemed acceptable by the status quo. There is no such thing as a culture war. This term does two things: firstly, it implies the subject is abstract or academic, the province of artists etc. (read: unimportant), and secondly, that there are two equal sides engaged in the same battle. Yet what is swept into this term is nothing less than the civil rights movement, nothing less than equality and justice for all, which the so-called “Right”—that is the racists and bigots, the Nazis and proud heirs of genocide—has fought against since their conception in the rotten balls of empire.
This is not a culture war, not a discussion, this is a war, and the Nazis are not subtle about this point, which is why there has been a staggering 320% rise in violent “far-right” attacks over the past five years that have killed hundreds. One side advocates for the safety and equality of marginalised communities, the other is trying to legislate them out of existence while inciting their base to carry out acts of extreme violence, as we saw most recently in the Club Q mass murder. Elon Musk tweeted about the “culture war” a week after this attack that killed five people, a week in which many of the “Right” were openly dismissive of it or engaged in conspiracy theories about its veracity, a gaslighting which has become their favoured response. Both sides are talking, yes, but one is only doing so to drown out the sound of their friends murdering us, to deny they had anything to do with it, to obfuscate and denigrate ad nauseam, while advancing their own equally violent agenda in policy and the judiciary.
If to be “woke”, to be pro-equality, a “social justice warrior”, is to “push civilization towards suicide” then you admit the civilization in question is unequal and unjust, and you are in favour of that as the main beneficiary of its inequalities and injustices. This is the man who owns and runs a global communication platform with 400 million users; he routinely engages with fascists and racists, and has begun suspending anti-fascist accounts identified by them. And so we come back to the question of participation—what are we part of, and what is its cost? I want to suggest to you, friends, that refusal is a far more potent force than polite engagement in conversation. Take BDS for example: it is seen as an existential threat in a way that even the most hateful anti-Semitism isn’t, as far as Israel is concerned. Why? Because even a death threat is engagement, even vitriol continues the discourse, which suits its purpose: to continue to oppress Palestinians, to dispossess and destroy them, while their rights are debated.
I think as well the reason governments become alarmed when their citizens begin to try to exercise their own economic rules for engagement, the reason they crack down on boycotts and protests, is because the underlying logic spells trouble for the system we operate in. After all, if participation is no longer tenable, if the situation is too rotten that even the idea of gradual reform through participation is unbearable, then what’s to stop us divesting from a “democratic” system that is bought by corporations and rigged to maintain an unfair class system? It stinks of strikes, of unionisation, of genuine power to the people, and this is anathema to modern democracy, which operates on the principles of profit for the few, with division, distraction, and disenfranchisement for the rest.
I’m going to end this here on a somewhat related note—because there’s too much more to say and not enough room to say it—which is that I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “IRL”. In real life. And how, despite its everyday usage, we still have not grappled with two fundamental things: that the internet is a created space, and that this space is privately owned, not public, meaning its central gathering points can be taken away or drastically altered at the whim of the ultra wealthy, as we’ve seen with Elon, of course, but also Zuckerburg with Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp. This is a profound human rights issue that warrants far more urgency that it has provoked. Nor am I certain that the “Fediverse” is a much better alternative; the problem persists, that the system is opaque, and that the servers which power the digital world are operated by a few, who can shut them down on a whim.
You’re likely receiving this letter in a private email server you don’t own, and Substack of course is also a private company. I was talking to a web designer recently who urged me to invest in my own website and email list to avoid having my content and audience facilitated by an outside organisation. Doing that requires time and money I simply don’t have.
Access to the internet is a human right, and the fact that a large part of the “information highway” of the world is owned by a few billionaires—Murdoch’s vile empire spanning AUS, UK, and the US; Bezos with Amazon and the Washington Post; Musk with Twitter, Zuckerburg with Meta, to say nothing of this class’s continued interference with global politics, like Rinehart and Forest at home, Trump and Thiel and the Koch brothers in America, etc—should seriously concern all of us, and more than that, provoke us into action.