Post #1640441

2026-04-17 23:21 UTC

Out this afternoon for Market groceries, I ran into someone I haven&#39;t seen in eight (8) years, so we promptly went to grab a coffee and catch up. And the conversation turned to -- the optics created by Big-A Activists™️, that *idea* of having a podcast and symbolic thought leadership and, well, change as social performance, and how people outside it can see that as both arbitrary and brittle. I found myself digging into the gaps between that and my experience of how #organizing actually gets done: very collective and rooted-in-place and deeply practical when it&#39;s working well. On the way home, passed a protest, complete with usual Marxist recruitment table. (They do this at everyone&#39;s events.) And I guess it put me in the mood to ask them: Why do I always see you proselytizing at other people&#39;s events but I never see you guys pitching in? Do you do hands-on work? Can you not find the pragmatic spaces? What&#39;s with that? Kid had no answer to it, not one that was real. But it really bookended the afternoon.

Replies (1)

@leahbobet@mstdn.ca 2026-04-17 23:48

I am not just dunking on the slightly parasitical Marxist kids (I know I'm unfair to them, but it's really uncool to piggyback other people's work while always refusing to do any of your own, and it's a longstanding situation; I'm not by far the only skeptic there). Batting this around with said acquaintance -- who does do things, is involved with unions etc. -- has me thinking about, I don't know. Context starvation? Where the line is in terms of how much context about the world you have where the performance of something is suddenly credible as yes, this is how this works, not the complex, messy, iterative reality of the matter? Like, where is the *threshold* for that: the event horizon where performance gains credibility? It makes sense for those kids because they're always early-20s, so *inexperienced*, and you never see the same ones twice. One suspects very high turnover. But there's clearly a threshold for distinguishing realities from cosplay and this? This seems valuable. #organizing

Open ##1694698