Comment on Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis
nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 1 week agoIt took me a few iterations to parse, but finally I groked the cut of your jib and noticed the reference to Musk’s X/Twitter
First – Dude, how many European or Canadian governmental entities still post on an official X account? Quite a few. We’re all working against Metcalfe’s Law here.
Second – FWIW this niche issue is one I do push on IRL. Locally there are often bills that would require our government to do things like use open source software, use open document standards, ensure all government internet services can be accessed via standards-compliant web pages (not apps that require iOS or Android), yadda. I do what I can to support those. It’s a long uphill process, but also kind of a hobby.
hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
The difference is that Europe and Canada don’t have ICE shooting people in the streets. Obviously they should get away from Twitter too, and some of them have. The US, however, is in the middle of a struggle to maintain some semblance of democracy in the face of a government in which all three branches are at the moment dominated by an administration that cares about nothing at all but ego and power. Official policy is at this point open malice with no meaningful pretense of civility or justification. We have gestapo on the street harassing and disappearing American citizens on the basis of their skin color and accents, and people are being killed by these same people for non-violent resistance.
This is not a situation in which our official mouthpieces for those parts of the government that haven’t yet been dominated to post official communications to a Nazi bar that’s directly connected to that same administration. Even a shift to something as simple as posting this kind of stuff on official government websites would be an improvement, and would be an actual form of meaningful praxis in breaking away from the big platforms that led us down this road in the first place.
Even if they cross-posted their announcements to social media, it would reclaim some small degree of autonomy for legitimate representation. It isn’t the most dire requirement for the times we’re in, but it shows that these institutions and the people leading them are more than happy to sit on their hands and accept the status quo until they’re physically forced to stop doing so. It’s just one more bit of practice maintaining the extremely dangerous habit of helpless complacency even in the approach to matters that are at the end of the day not difficult to enact.
It’s a dead canary with a note pinned to it about how some day we might have to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning.