The Art of the Real

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"The net effect of Trumpian/chan troll culture is to make democracy impossible. If no one can agree on the truth, and if there’s social pressure to appear too cool to care, good work can’t be done. Reform demands a certain earnestness, after all—if only to sustain the belief that things can change. Troll culture, regardless of whether it’s branded right- or left-leaning, ultimately dissolves into a bewildering array of postures and ironic affects; good for incisive mockery, but not for improving our condition. It’s useful for crowdsourcing the kind of animosity that’s sparked countless hate crimes across the United States since Trump’s election; its shape-shifting meanings, written into executive orders, are good for inciting immigration officers to unleash their implicit biases at border crossings. But because liberationist politics is based on an ethic of care, the outrage that trolling provokes is of only marginal use.
The larger logic of counter-trolling runs counter to the demands of movement-building. Our politics demands that we build something as well as diminish the opposition’s social-media brands. That requires unironic action, not just posturing and memes."
I want y'all to read all the words of this article.