this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Know what else causes a loss of effective action and leads to a reversion to performative activism?
Making good points badly, to such a degree that your (presumably personally and deeply held beliefs) come across as the inverse of your intention.
Because neither the erosion of effective action nor the rise of performative activism, occurs in a vacuum.
In fact, both play into the hands of those who benefit from said erosions, and who have guided the communual discourse in such a way that even the very act of discussion in regards to the topics most important to the themes at hand, is apt to fracture into a mixture of ineffective action, which itself can only come across as "performative activism" to those approaching the very same problems, from a different angle.
Like, are you even aware of how poignant your gun violence example is, how your approach can easily be misconstrued as the same performative activism (an angry, contrarian, lone wolf call to sanity online is practically a trope at this point)?
They're winning, because nuance cannot be shouted, it must be demonstrated.
You make a good point. But all of what we're doing here is performative. I'm not pushing back on these issues as an act of activism. That would be crazy, I'm immediately drowned out in every topic by hordes of self-congratulating back patters, giving a lovely comfortable feeling of puritanical martyrdom to anyone toeing the line. I can't compete with that.
You're right. I am the angry, contrarian, lone wolf trope. And I'm as much the product of the process you've highlighted as I am perpetrator of it.
This is venting. Activism takes place in the real world.
Where I don't agree is that this in any way leads to performative activism. That I lay squarely at the door of social media algorithms creating polarisation. I don't think anything we do here can be but a drop in the ocean compared to that.