#democratic socialism

tattooedsocialist:

I don’t think that cis men truly understand why women, trans, and nonbinary folx are hesitant to share their political beliefs.

It’s because your fellow cis men continuously threaten to destroy our entire lives for having opinions about issues that affect us.

Those of us who are able to put ourselves out there face an onslaught of violent threats, including rape and murder. When cis men are unable to compete with us intellectually, they attack our appearance or attempt to hack our online accounts. Our private information is often shared publicly for doxxing purposes. And our families, including small children, are not immune from these threats.

It’s not that we’re not into politics—it’s that we are forced to wade through the sludge of constant threats of violence from cis men for expressing our beliefs and we are so, so tired.

tattooedsocialist:

I am in awe of those who stare into the face of greed and power and corruption and humanity’s incredible capacity for violence and dream of a world where the most vulnerable of us are treated with dignity.

The resisters we have come to know as heroes — the abolitionists, the suffragists, the leaders of the Civil Rights movement — were always dehumanized and abused by the dominant culture of their time.

Our past is violent oppression and our present is blind complacency.

Fight for the future.

tattooedsocialist:

We need to remember that we have the culture. The people in political power may not be listening to us, but society is.

When a transgender child was left to fend for herself during an active shooter drill at her school, numerous people flooded the school with calls, emails, articles, and social media posts.

We just received an apology and a promise that it will never happen again, along with steps to actively address the situation in the future. I (and probably many others) was personally emailed by the school principal, which is amazing!

WE HAVE POWER.

We have a voice.

We must always speak up.

I know that it feels hopeless at times, but this anguish is not for nothing. We are still changing society.

This is important.

sumballein:

“Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.”

~ Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

librarycard:

mutuals do this

“The most basic problem is that the terms on which we meet our [online dating] partners, serious or otherwise, are increasingly being dictated arbitrarily and opaquely by corporate actors whose motivation is very different from that of users. We want love, they want money.

Don’t we want to understand how this crucial aspect of our experience is being shaped? And shouldn’t we have some say in how it’s shaped? If you think so, then we should work toward socializing the dating apps: bringing them under collective, democratic ownership.

What might that look like?

It doesn’t necessarily mean establishing a government-run National Dating Service or taking Tinder under state control. Digital platform scholar James Muldoon has argued that many digital platforms ought to be democratized and liberated from the profit motive, but what exactly this ‘platform socialism’ looks like will differ from platform to platform.

We could democratize dating through the creation of online dating co-ops, in which users and workers would collectively own and control their platforms. This approach would allow users to take control back from unaccountable investors and CEOs, while preserving the diversity of the dating-app ecosystem and avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.

An app’s users and developers could become the app’s co-owners as well, with the size of one’s ownership share being adjusted, for example, to the length of time one has been a user or developer. These shares would entitle users to votes of a certain weight in making decisions about the app’s function and management. That would include important choices about what sort of information users provide in their profiles, for instance, and how the algorithm deals with ethically fraught preferences. Users could collectively deliberate about the possible impacts of different choices, from the perspectives of social justice as well as users’ individual well-being.

Each user-owner could pay a subscription fee to fund the app and pay its employees; users and developers could democratically decide how high to set the subscription fee, with the goal being not to maximize profits but to raise enough revenue to invest in creating the best possible dating experience.

Freed from the imperative to deliver value for shareholders, cooperatively run apps could do away with premium subscriptions, add-on purchases (like paying to 'boost’ your profile’s visibility or paying for extra 'likes’), and annoying in-app advertisements. The co-ops could also institute collectively agreed-upon policies around privacy and data sharing; they would no longer need to exploit user data to sell to third-party companies.

But without the lure of lucrative profits drawing large investments, these dating cooperatives may find it hard to raise adequate funds from subscriptions alone. Here’s where the state would have an important role to play: in providing public funding for the development of cooperatively owned dating apps.

This idea isn’t as outlandish as it might seem: after all, even in the United States, governments already fund many cultural institutions for the benefit of their citizens’ quality of life: museums, the arts, research in the humanities, public parks, even nightlife. Dating apps are an increasingly important avenue for a central experience of being human. It makes sense for the government to devote public resources to them.

In fact, some countriesarealready paying to set up their own dating services. The Singaporean government’s Ministry of Social and Family Development has a webpage devoted to helping the uncoupled find partners; it advertises a government-run online dating portal, officially accredited dating agencies, and a 'Partnership Fund’ which 'supports ideas and initiatives that you are passionate about to create opportunities to bring singles together.’

These government initiatives admittedly do have an ulterior motive — they’re trying to reverse sharply declining birth rates. Still, these programs show that there is nothing particularly strange or novel about publicly funded dating.

Corey Robin once wrotethat'the point of socialism is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.’ That goes for socializing online dating, too. It wouldn’t do away with the frustration or disappointment that many people experience on the apps or in dating more generally. But it could be an important step toward making a dating experience that’s about people instead of profit. Then we could swipe, not to create wealth for the capitalist class, but for the simple and essential purpose of finding a date.”

- Nick French, from “Tinder Wants Money. We Want Love. The Solution: Socialize Dating Apps.”Jacobin, 10 June 2022.