guillotine vogue  🐶 💣 💛

I've been thinking a lot lately about how for the past year or two I've noticed more and more really young people (say 16 to 20ish) trying to participate in discourse and for lack of better words fumbling through it in antagonistic more than constructive ways

In the past I've kinda rolled my eyes at it and been like "ah the woke 18 year olds are at it again" and I've had to revisit this and consider A) that's ageist trash and B) it's not entirely their fault and I want to explore this.

Normally I really hate using the term callout culture because very often it's used by bad faith actors to patronize advocacy as a whole but I do believe that because of how social media works, there is an unhelpful if not toxic culture that's grown around it.

I try (and fail all the time) to unlearn doing outrage posts "just because" and while I don't consciously do it because I want social currency from it, subconsciously I'm sure there is part of me that knows that reward is coming If My Take Is Hot Enough.

That said, where the Marx/Debord comes into this is when you are operating in the framework of capitalism, there is a tendency for almost everything (if not everything period) to be commodified and recuperated and translated into representations and images if they are marketable.

If we consider that in the age of social media we have social capital and that attention is currency, Callout Culture is where we see the answer to the question "is activism marketable?" and we see that the payment for marketing it is social capital.

Note: This is NOT to say that callouts are not vital to advocacy because transparency is critical to accountability and if toxic/harmful people/groups/companies/etc refuse to be transparent, they must be made transparent to be held accountable.

That said, back to Debord. When he discusses the assimilation of genuine experiences into spectacular images, commodified representations, he says there is a trend for things to degrade from Being, to Having, to Appearing To Have.

I think it's fair to say when we look at how social advocacy develops within this framework, the less genuine substance it has and the less aware we are of this, it slips from being advocacy to having advocacy, to maintaining the appearance of having advocacy.

And this brings me to where I was so bothered seeing really young people try to participate in discourse and I always wrote it off as them Chasing Woke Clout. I'm sure some do but we all know that's not a problem exclusive to young people.

In thinking about all this the realization I had (more obvious now but less so before giving words to this) is that the problem with how younger people navigate callout culture may be that they've probably only seen/learned from content that has the appearance of having advocacy.

VS, you know, just BEING advocacy. I wouldn't even say this is a problem exclusive to young people because again, I don't want to flavor this with ageism but I do think young people are more prone to it in part because >>

People that age are still figuring themselves out, worrying about what the hell they're gonna do with their life, being pressured to figure out a career and a college as if any of us have our shit together that young, when would they have time to worry about this kind of theory?

And frankly it goes on, we're so burdened with labor most of us don't have time to think about theory like this, I've sacrificed time I should've been trying to make money for bills to try to get it, I'm fuckin 28 lol. (hint: that's how capital/the ruling class want things to be)

It's by design that the working class are kept working so they don't have time to figure this out (and very obviously by design why it's not taught in schools before Being An Adult Really Fucks You Up).

Back to the point (again). Reflecting on this I find it's not entirely anyone's fault if they stumble through activism and advocacy chasing representations of it, confusing having and appearing to have for genuine participation. But WRT to genuine participation...

(topical community e.g.) Let's be clear, regardless of whether you think X artist is toxic, frivolously accusing someone who got art from them before toxic behavior from them was exposed or before they found out as an accomplice to said behavior is... not constructive advocacy.

So what do we do about this? Well to be honest I think at large, this is an inherent symptom of capitalism that WILL happen, radical ideas will be recuperated into more innocuous versions, genuine movements will be degraded into commodified representations. BUT!!!

In understanding that framework we can work to avoid, maybe not entirely, but to some degree falling into that degradation by helping to keep each other educated and making theory like this accessible and visible.

WRT young people, I don't expect ANYONE to get out of high school, get on twitter, understand french marxist theory and interact with callout culture perfectly, I still fail at that and I graduated 10 fuckin years ago.

If you're young and you see this all I can ask is that you think about the mode in which you participate in activism and advocacy. Because of how this all works it isn't always easy to tell where what you're seeing or even what you're saying sits between being and appearing.

I don't expect you to get it right because I still don't all the time and that goes for everyone else older than you, I do expect that we all reflect on this more though. We're gonna slip up because unlearning acting in this framework how it wants us to is HARD.

If you're older and reading this, reflect on yourself too, we're the ones setting the example people younger than us learn from, if our advocacy only ever reflects a representation rather than just BEING and we don't make this theory accessible, what more can we expect than that?

This thread is in part a callout on myself because I know well enough I've done what I'm criticizing, I've tried to think more about how I can elevate what I post out of appearing to be Woke™ into being something better even if it's just trying to present theory like this.