Now is your chance, before capitalism finds new ways to shut you up!
I am absolutely not arguing that online protest is without value. It helps us organize ourselves and to test and synthesize our messages. And it is a medium that is new and open to us, not yet controlled by our corporate overlords. In the anti-war movement there was FM radio, which at the time consisted of underused frequencies we could colonize and turn over to our music and our voices. We had an alternative press and vehicles like the McGovern campaign of 1972 to demonstrate our influence and ability, in certain conditions, to capture institutions. We could get protest songs from our rock star leaders to, well, everyone.
But just as men in the pantheon of Republican heroes like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, John Lindsay, Jacob Javits, Edward Brook, Robert Mathias are too centrist to be part of the Republican party today, the FM airwaves (which is to say all of them) no longer carry protest music. The mass media has been “consolidated,” a euphemism if there ever was one. In 1983 fifty companies controlled 90% of American media. By 2011 acquisitions had resulted in just six conglomerates — Comcast, News Corporation, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS. — with 90% control of films, radio and television broadcasting, recordings, books and all other avenues of cultural expression. Soon they will claim ownership of the English language and demand you pay them royalties for using it.
Except they do not control the Internet, at least for now, although not for lack of trying. Trump’s FCC will not just obstruct but actually facilitate a different kind of consolidation, but one that is every bit as deadly to free speech. At the origins of the commercial Internet top tier Internet providers decided the fastest path for the Internet to reach everyone was for them to exchange traffic at gateways in which they treated one another as peers. This interconnection was considered a cost of doing business, the business relationship that would allow for cheap Internet service providers who sold access to individual customers. If they have their way the Huge Media Conglomerates would break this and use their market power and audience power to favor their own subscribers and put up obstacles to traffic that originates elsewhere, not on their network.
So for now at least the opposition to Trump has at its disposal a few crucial yet marginal media. The media of our rebellion is not FM radio but memes, Facebook posts, Substacks, YouTube, Web sites, hashtags and the other ways we find each other. We have not yet discovered how powerful this can be although we do have some clues. Andrew Cuomo ran a very traditional campaign for mayor of New York City, with massive money raised by “SuperPACs” (gotta love their nomenclature) and then spent saturating traditional linear media. His opponent Zohran Mamdani bet heavily on social media, more suitable to his personality and his message. He was helped by Cuomo’s inability to present himself as a man of the people, but it was the word-of-mouth media that created and fueled Mamdani’s buzz. The election of Momdani transformed how we understand New York City elections but that is a small thing. The big thing that it very much changed how politicians will seek and capture public office.
Sure, create and put out there all the self-created memes, Substack posts, Facebook and Instagram posts, Web sites and hashtags and everything else. Let a thousand flowers bloom, said some Chinese guy. But please, our greatest impact is with our bodies and our real, human voices raised in chants and cheers. There is no alternative way to bring down Trump, not even violence. The genuine challenge to the legitimacy of the Trump regime is to take our opposition into the streets. Take every chance you get to protest in person. Put down the mouse and get out of the house.
