I stopped liking Greenday after Dookie, I deleted my twitter account, and I recognize Elon to be a fascist. However no one is tacitly supporting the Elon agenda by continuing to use X. There is no such thing as conscientious consumerism, every purchase is compromised.
If we were to deny the working class the use of every social media app with “problematic owners” taken to the logical conclusion we would have to deny them all. A consumer boycott of X could help, but it could only ever play a limited role. A better way to hit him is by raising the class consciousness of his employees, to convince them to strike, that would really hurt him.
I think it is better to subvert extremists of capital by using these networks and technologies against them, by educating each other and using them to organize. The difficulty of this endeavor is no counter argument against its necessity.
Marx explained the irony of capitalism providing the means of its defeat, and I think that insight is as valuable today as when he made it.
It's only a drop in the ocean but, as I'm sure someone's said somewhere, every ocean is made up of drops. Pretty sure he won't be hosting his own Mastodon instance though 😀
He who is without sin, you know the deal. I have been on Twitter since 2009. The first time I deleted my profile was back in 2017 or 2018. It was a tumultuous time, and I got attacked by a lot of Bosnian right-wing anonymous shitposters.
I came back around 2022, when Musk acquired Twitter, and realized it's not what it used to be (it wasn't that for a long time). My reason for quitting Twitter wasn't the owner, wasn't the majority of users, and the loudest voices; it was the fact that, as a small-time creator, I couldn't fucking propel my links to people who follow me without someone throttling them.
I quit Twitter by deleting all my tweets and squatting the name.
Green Day may be punk, but they're also a company, and companies can't simply quit.
Agreed. Though some companies are quitting (e.g. Best Buy, Target, 3M, Balenciaga), and it's a shame many bands (punk or otherwise) have ceded the moral high ground to brands.
I firmly believe that sometimes it's not their choice, which is sad in itself; when you have a label that forces you to choke on a big one forcefully, there's not much you can do.
I don't say this is the Cure case, but sometimes people can move themselves with personal profiles to signal their opinion (Robert's case).
Good piece! I think the difference between acts like Green Day, AFI, Offspring, etc. and some of the other acts you mentioned is that they're still making most of their money playing shows, so they can't afford to piss off any portion of their audience (the majority of which likely skews older and a bit more conservative than the average punk fan.) Reznor makes his money via soundtrack work these days, nobody's checking for new Neil Young releases, and they've already made fortunes on catalogs that still make up the majority of the stuff that gets listened to. Quitting and turning your back on a portion of your audience is a luxury.
Plus, this outrage seems selective considering what we know about Zuckerberg and all the insidious experiments Meta has run on its users and the effects Instagram has had on kids. No major social media platform is ethical.
Thanks, and - you're right - there's certainly various layers to the issue, many of which are bound up in good old fashioned commerce. (I set up and ran a Twitter account for London punk rock shop All Ages Records to help them out. When I stopped that, I regretted not being able to give them whatever limited commercial support that provided.) At the same time, while most social media is ethically compromised, some is more compromised than others.
I stopped liking Greenday after Dookie, I deleted my twitter account, and I recognize Elon to be a fascist. However no one is tacitly supporting the Elon agenda by continuing to use X. There is no such thing as conscientious consumerism, every purchase is compromised.
If we were to deny the working class the use of every social media app with “problematic owners” taken to the logical conclusion we would have to deny them all. A consumer boycott of X could help, but it could only ever play a limited role. A better way to hit him is by raising the class consciousness of his employees, to convince them to strike, that would really hurt him.
I think it is better to subvert extremists of capital by using these networks and technologies against them, by educating each other and using them to organize. The difficulty of this endeavor is no counter argument against its necessity.
Marx explained the irony of capitalism providing the means of its defeat, and I think that insight is as valuable today as when he made it.
I applaud Brian Baker's move, but did he change anything by switching to Meta's product?
And should we expect Baker to be interested in hosting his own Mastodon instance to post? To prove to us what, his punkness?
It's only a drop in the ocean but, as I'm sure someone's said somewhere, every ocean is made up of drops. Pretty sure he won't be hosting his own Mastodon instance though 😀
Threads is there for famous people and celebrities to feel good about quitting Twitter.
He who is without sin, you know the deal. I have been on Twitter since 2009. The first time I deleted my profile was back in 2017 or 2018. It was a tumultuous time, and I got attacked by a lot of Bosnian right-wing anonymous shitposters.
I came back around 2022, when Musk acquired Twitter, and realized it's not what it used to be (it wasn't that for a long time). My reason for quitting Twitter wasn't the owner, wasn't the majority of users, and the loudest voices; it was the fact that, as a small-time creator, I couldn't fucking propel my links to people who follow me without someone throttling them.
I quit Twitter by deleting all my tweets and squatting the name.
Green Day may be punk, but they're also a company, and companies can't simply quit.
Agreed. Though some companies are quitting (e.g. Best Buy, Target, 3M, Balenciaga), and it's a shame many bands (punk or otherwise) have ceded the moral high ground to brands.
I firmly believe that sometimes it's not their choice, which is sad in itself; when you have a label that forces you to choke on a big one forcefully, there's not much you can do.
I don't say this is the Cure case, but sometimes people can move themselves with personal profiles to signal their opinion (Robert's case).
Good piece! I think the difference between acts like Green Day, AFI, Offspring, etc. and some of the other acts you mentioned is that they're still making most of their money playing shows, so they can't afford to piss off any portion of their audience (the majority of which likely skews older and a bit more conservative than the average punk fan.) Reznor makes his money via soundtrack work these days, nobody's checking for new Neil Young releases, and they've already made fortunes on catalogs that still make up the majority of the stuff that gets listened to. Quitting and turning your back on a portion of your audience is a luxury.
Plus, this outrage seems selective considering what we know about Zuckerberg and all the insidious experiments Meta has run on its users and the effects Instagram has had on kids. No major social media platform is ethical.
Thanks, and - you're right - there's certainly various layers to the issue, many of which are bound up in good old fashioned commerce. (I set up and ran a Twitter account for London punk rock shop All Ages Records to help them out. When I stopped that, I regretted not being able to give them whatever limited commercial support that provided.) At the same time, while most social media is ethically compromised, some is more compromised than others.