On Fleeing The Glowing Glass

I have every intention of continuing my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  However, as I have said in a recent post, I've been working like a dog.  This has deprived me of bandwidth needed to write research-heavy posts.  In a few weeks, hopefully, I won't be so busy.  

This week, I thought it would be good to re-visit a post I wrote a few months ago titled, "Farewell to YouTube."  I wrote that post to announce my decision to quit watching YouTube videos.  I made the decision to quit because YouTube had chosen to make itself the haunt of racist, far-Right thugs (and of extremists in general).  (See this also.)  The reason for YouTube's decision was that the executives who run this service were told by marketers and cognitive psychologists that the way to drive up viewership was to recommend and promote videos that provoke outrage and extremism.  The reason why these doofuses thought that this was a good idea was that increased viewership meant increased advertising revenue for YouTube (and hence for Google).  I just got nauseatingly tired of recommendations to videos by Sky News, Fox News, or any other media outlet owned by the family of Rupert Murdoch.  I got "projectile emesis" tired of seeing recommendations for any videos with Donald Chump as the main character - especially after the attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol by Trump-head white supremacists in January and after YouTube's foot-dragging in removing former President Chump's access to YouTube.  

So I quit YouTube this past January.  But a funny thing happened.  I discovered that I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms of a sort.  Not that I missed being constantly insulted and threatened.  But it was because of my original reasons for starting to watch YouTube in the first place - reasons which roughly paralleled my original fascination with the Internet in the first place.  For the Internet (and YouTube in particular) started out as a source of inspiration and information to guide me in my pursuit of the mastery of hard things.  Later, they became an unfortunate escape to an unfortunate extent, as I found myself stuck in the drudgery of everyday life while compensating for the drudgery by sneaking looks at people whose lives truly seemed to be a happy adventure. This was especially true of the fascination I developed for the Philippines, for Indonesia, for South Korea, and for Gambia last year.  For in watching YouTube videos of life (and music) in these places, I was struck by the difference between the happy, sane cultures and the polite, pleasant people I was seeing versus the derangement of life in the United States under Donald Thump.

In quitting YouTube, I found that I was missing the dopamine rush of vicarious living - that is, of living through the experience of watching other people's happiness.  So I fell off the wagon a bit in February.  I thought I could tame the YouTube beast by switching browsers and search engines.  And I discovered YouTube channels hosted by people who made videos of themselves studying.  This was during our rainy winter season, and I had not yet been vaccinated, so I was stuck working from home.  The study videos did indeed provide inspiration, but I noticed that some of them also seemed to be designed to sell furniture, music players, computer monitors, and other gear so that the viewer could replicate the perfect study setup he or she was watching on his or her glowing screen.  As I watched these videos while doing some difficult reading of my own, I was struck by the silly banality of thinking I needed to watch a video of someone else studying in order to help me do my own work.  

And I was again confronted by the fact that for too many people (myself included), YouTube had become a means of vicarious enjoyment of other people' successes rather that a help for us in doing our own difficult yet worthwhile tasks.  It is much easier to watch mentally healthy, non-radicalized, non-European people socializing in developing countries than it is to try to repair the poisoned culture of one's own country.  It is much easier to watch an accomplished fingerstyle guitarist play music than it is to pull one's own ax out of the closet and engage in an hour of deliberate practice.  It is much easier to watch someone study to the sound of background music in the perfectly decked out living room of a fifth or sixth floor condominium whose window looks out over a city skyline than it is to read technical journals in silence at a desk in a spare bedroom during a rainstorm.  (Although now the weather is quite warm and dry.  My backyard has become the perfect place for me to do some deep work, accompanied by the ASMR sound of the freeway several blocks away and the more intermittent sound of the wind in the trees. My backyard beats the condo dude's living room - even though he has thousands of YouTube "followers"!  Maybe I should make videos of myself reading in my backyard.  Or maybe not...)  

So I am back on the wagon.  And one thing that has helped me stay on this time is a podcast I heard in March or April, titled, "Close Enough: The Lure of Living Through Others."  Fascinating stuff.  What are we missing by living vicariously through social media rather than doing the hard work needed to accomplish worthwhile things ourselves?  What kind of miserable life do you have if you spend all your time on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube?  And even if YouTube should clean up its act and cease to be a tool of white radicalism, would it be worth it for me to go back?  Didn't I waste enough time as a kid watching hours of TV?  What if by boycotting a thing, you discover that you really don't need it anymore?

The Strongest Nonviolent Weapons

When an oppressed people faces an oppressing power, there are certain limits on what the oppressed can reasonably expect.  One thing the oppressed usually cannot expect (at least, not by itself) is to end their oppression simply by appealing to the better angels of their oppressors.  For the whole point of oppression is to create an economic and political system which grants all the benefits of a society to a small group of privileged people while externalizing all of the costs of that society onto the oppressed.  This was the goal and chief characteristic of the antebellum American South and of South Africa under apartheid.  Anyone who would want to create such a system therefore has no better angels to appeal to.  The soul of such a person is a piece of garbage.

The Republican Party in the United States has sought to revive such a system.  From the Tea Party to Trump, we all can see the poisonous fruits of their labors.  The Republicans know that they can never win elections in a nation that is composed of many peoples who have been designated by the Republican party as meat to be chewed in a cannibal feast.  Therefore one of their strategies has been to try as hard as possible to restrict the right to vote in the United States by disenfranchising as many of their intended victims as possible.

So we come to Georgia in 2021, where the Republican-controlled state government has recently passed the most restrictive voting law in the United States.  But here we have a beautiful response by some of the people most affected by that law.  For over 1,000 pastors of African-American churches have joined together to urge a boycott of corporations such as Home Depot (also known as Home Cheapo) that refuse to oppose the Georgia law.  The boycott as a tactic is straight out of Gene Sharp's 198 methods.  Note also that these pastors have not called for street protests, thus showing a level of tactical and strategic maturity far beyond that shown by the Black Lives Matter organizers last year.

To be sure, there are some who say that calls for boycotts are "controversial."  Among these is Stacey Abrams, who asserts that a boycott is the wrong move because it would hurt poor Georgians.  She conveniently forgets that the same criticism was made against Black South African liberation leaders in the 1980's when they called for boycotts and international economic sanctions against South African businesses.  She also forgets that most Black South Africans living under apartheid supported the boycotts and calls for economic sanctions.  For they knew that when dealing with corrupt, proud, evil pieces of garbage, the only language that would carry weight was the language of power - the power to impose real costs.  Finally, Ms. Abrams seems to forget that it was the sanctions and boycotts - not merely trying to work through institutional means - that forced the de Klerk regime to renounce apartheid.  In her opposition to an economic boycott of Georgia, Stacey Abrams sounds suspiciously like the leaders of many modern-day "business unions" who dissuade their members from striking.  (Perhaps Stacey Abrams might better be named "Aunt Tammy"?)

To those "bleeding-heart conservatives" who oppose the organizing of economic non-cooperation against oppressors, I have some words.  Over fifty years ago, Thomas Schelling wrote the following:

“[The] tyrant and his subjects are in somewhat symmetrical positions. They can deny him most of what he wants — they can, that is, if they have the disciplined organization to refuse collaboration….They can deny him the satisfaction of ruling a disciplined country, he can deny them the satisfaction of ruling themselves….It is a bargaining situation in which either side, if adequately disciplined and organized, can deny most of what the other wants, and it remains to see who wins.”

In denying the oppressor what he wants, the oppressed must of necessity bear some costs themselves. However, the oppressed can win only by bearing those costs in a disciplined manner, from a position of mutually helping one another so as not to provide any support to the economic structures of the oppressor.  Each member of an oppressed population must ask whether he or she is willing for the "disciplined organization to refuse collaboration" with the oppressor.  Those who are not willing become Uncle Toms (UT's) and Aunt Tammys (AT's).  Given enough of these UT's and AT's, a nonviolent liberation struggle collapses.  Bleeding-heart conservatives such as former President Reagan and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher cry great crocodile tears at the sufferings which oppressed people take on themselves in their struggle to liberate themselves.  Yet those tears will turn to laughter if the oppressed are persuaded to sabotage themselves.  We who are of the oppressed must remember that some things are non-negotiable.  It was for the purpose of learning to organize exactly the kind of strong, coercive nonviolent action described by Schelling that I spent over two thousand dollars of my own money a couple of years ago to take a series of community organizing classes.  I mean business.

As for me, I have a four-pronged hoe that I've been using for several years.  A few weeks ago, the wooden handle broke.  The next hoe I buy will not be from Home Cheapo.  Let's boycott!