First of all, I would like to thank Paul Demarty for his incredibly thoughtful reply to The Platform is the Message. His point about party media primarily taking the form of newspapers, podcasts and so on is very well taken and it was absolutely a glaring omission on our part. While we did address questions of accountability for party members with public influence within contemporary social media platforms like Twitter, Paul is completely correct that issues of accountability for the editorial staff and writing staff of political publications is of vital importance. In the absence of meaningful protocols for accountability to an organized movement, it often takes the form of self-appointed arbiters of acceptability who’s only qualification is their own personal brand and following among activists, or who were wronged in some ethical sense, to hold publications to account. For instance, the debacle with Commune Magazine where the publication was ultimately dissolved because of the inability of its editorial board to reach some acceptable resolution with a survivor of abuse by a former member of their team. There’s also important questions about Jacobin’s relationship to DSA, as the semi-official mouthpiece of the core leadership clique, that we could have explored.
I also think that Paul is correct to point out the “real subsumption” of legacy media to social media. Beyond “fake news”, even local news seems increasingly Buzzfeedified in some sense, with even serious content taking the form of clickbait. And his example of Corbyn-aligned media in the UK is a great example of how this structures the way popular leftist media is impacted in a very practical way. The hard problem we have to face though, is how do we deal with this structural reality now that we’ve diagnosed the problem? For my part, I don’t have an answer here. I think that on some level we probably do have to lean in to creating media that requires little mental investment to create an impression like clickbait because otherwise we just won’t reach people. But at the same time, as socialists we do have an ethical and strategic duty to avoid misleading people while also helping them get real class consciousness (which includes being able to think for one’s self). It’s a very tough needle to thread.(edited)
Where I part ways with Paul is in my evaluation of mass social media platforms in themselves. It’s true that having a single platform where all people interact isn’t necessarily more ‘economical’ than distributed and siloed forums (except for ad profits), but there are real benefits to being able to find people and connections you wouldn’t have otherwise that platforms like Facebook do provide. There are increasingly fewer people in the younger generations who don’t have at least some associates who they would not have met except through shared interests identified on some kind of mass social media platform like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter etc. Whether or not those benefits are worth the losses of unique forum cultures is a valid question, but the principle problems with Facebook are other than its mass size. I don’t think there’s much of an objective answer other than that the genie is already out of the bottle, and without overt censorship and negative control over the internet, some kind of mass forum would be rebuilt in all likelihood even if we shut down all existing social media. So the question of a program for social media becomes how do we want to consciously structure the dynamics of a platform the revolutionary movement would throw its weight behind, unless we are content with leaving its development to the spontaneous work of technical specialists who in all likelihood do not share the movement’s values.
Comradely,
Amelia Davenport
