Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
I’ve been really, really enjoying these.
Last week, Twitter was overrun with Yes Men-style pronouncements by some of the worst corporations on the planet.
El*n M*sk, new czar of Twitter, rolled out an option for users to pay a small fee to have a blue check added next to their handle. The blue check used to mean that a profile had been verified, common among accounts with a large following, representing celebrities or politicians, so on. Until this fiasco, it was an indicator of connection to reality, and theoretically, factual accuracy of the content shared.
But when verification was accessible via a fee, rather than a screening process, some clever folks (and also scary folks) found a way to take advantage of this easily purchased vote of confidence.
Impersonators of the above and beyond tweeted tweets directly in opposition or revelation of their historical and present wrongdoing, from Nestlé to Energy Transfer Partners.
The Yes Men, who came into my awareness via their 2009 ‘special edition’ of the New York Times, are culture-jamming activists. They make, distribute, and perform spectacles that highlight the unhinged and unacceptable things most have come to accept about our society. Recently, they’ve brought a climate chaos carnival to events where Vanguard, funder of fossil fuels, is present. A few years ago, one of the Yes Men coached a cohort I was part of to deliver a plaque emblazoned with We Knew to a bunch of oil and gas executives.
Their strategy is this: make something striking in the face of something we usually glance over, like the prohibitive cost of lifesaving drugs or the commitment to destroying a biome perfect for human survival.
We are so accustomed to the scroll; the easeful continuation of skimming, of holding reality at an arm’s length. It is precisely the culture of Twitter, where these shenanigans took place, that helps to numb us. We must be startled into stopping.
Culture jamming and birddogging—putting a powerful entity in a position where they have no choice but to respond—are not new. But the barrier of the virtual between us and the real, which has and can be so impenetrable, is shifting. Now, virtual can flex its muscles to push change offscreen.
Arab Spring was one of the first political movement moments to leverage the power of social media. While it may have also provided cover for social media giants to act as though they are agents of democracy, it was the beginning of an era of movements living online, both a reflection and amplification of real-world change.
In the days following the blue check mishigas, Eli Lilly’s stock took a big hit. A nod to the GameStop drama a few months ago—in which a group of individual traders organized on social media to short GameStop stock and drive a quick, high return on investment—this real financial event happened because people put words on the internet. That was all they did!
If you scroll through any of the comments on these re-posted impersonator tweets, there is a common thread: people can’t believe that they’re fake, or they can’t believe that everyone doesn’t see they’re fake, or they can’t believe that something fake could seem so real.
This illustrates the disconnect of our time: people are experiencing what it’s like for internet interaction to yield real world consequences. They’re shocked. But in the background, and on a much longer timescale, the stock market has been doing the same thing. The stock market isn’t real; it’s an agreed-upon but false reality that we accept as fact. When prices go down and up in the stock market, the only thing that changes is the amount of capital that’s theoretically available to the corporations represented by shortened versions of their names. Value is created and destroyed easily by people because it is just that—something that can be made and unmade.
What is the lesson here? Well, I think one is that it’s really good to be able to recognize satire when it is slapping you across the face. Another is that when groups of humans agree on stuff, that stuff becomes real, even if that stuff came to exist in a way that doesn’t seem real.
Obviously, we cannot speak the ecosocialist liberated world into being just by agreeing that it exists; we are buried too deep under the boulder of extractive capitalism. But as science fiction writers remind us, new structures cannot exist if we do not imagine them up first.
All of those satirical posts cast their eyes towards a world we need—one where lifesaving medicine is freely available, native people have sovereignty over their ancestral lands, and we are devoted to protecting this planet, not squeezing it dry.
If we can breathe a network of fiber optic high speed trading cables that determine the economic outlook for the entire planet, or an invisible mesh of communication that rounds the globe, into being, why not another massive, transformative human project?