Ferguson: Activism beats Slacktivism

It's appropriate that last week while Wired was publishing glamor shots of Eddie Snowden, the people of Ferguson were reminding America what real resistance looks like. Outraged at the local police and their cavalier attitude towards killing yet another young and unarmed black man, this community went quickly from somber candlelight vigils to raging insurrection in less than a week, scaring the local police into exposing themselves as the heavily armed and terrified crackers they are.

"Meine Ehre heißt Treue?"

And there's still nary a libertarian to be seen. Which if you know what animates them deep down, you expected - Jacobin has an excellent summation of the economic factors driving this rebellion, how the capitalist system extracts wealth from minorities whether through ticketing and bail money or through the very same businesses the protesters burned down. That's what really scares the privileged in this country, not the murder of an unarmed man by government employees but people rejecting the hierarchy of wealth that places minorities in the free fire zone of people too dumb or racist to make it into the infantry.

Since that night, the Ferguson PD has doubled down on the sort of police state malarkey you usually see in tin pot dictatorships: tear gas, mass arrests, and one desperate smear campaign against Michael Brown after another. It's gotten so bad the governor called in the state cops and even President Oreo is finally suggesting a federal investigation into the shooting, rather than just echoing the tone trolling of the rest of the ruling class. Because  these protesters, even when looting a local McDonald's recuperating from indiscriminate police tear gas, remained a disciplined and organized force to be reckoned with. They scare the ruling class.

Coastal liberals and internet libertarians do not scare the ruling class. The latter buy into the capitalist system, sanctioning any affront to liberty as long as it's committed by your boss rather than the state, and the former are too busy with their fucking puppets. The massive and massively ineffective protests of the Bush years should have driven this point home, that the ruling class knows the economically comfortable have no stomach for the long fight. That people bitching about civil liberties online are just letting off steam and, no matter how many likes or upvotes, remain utterly inconsequential.

The slacktivism of the internet age doesn't threaten the ruling class. At all. Because it reveals the disgruntled citizens as too atomized to properly organize. Libertarians, perfect marks that they are, support this sort of solo activism because they've not only internalized the supposed individuality of capitalism but also the power fantasies of a million bad sci-fi and fantasy stories. They imagine themselves the stars of Ender's Game while confronting a Jack Vance world. So they fixate on the conveniences of their own lives as the full extent of human liberty, seeing freedom from government bureaucrats reading their boring emails as the ultimate freedom, and thus spending more time dithering over police state products like Tor and other means to sneakily say "Fight the power!" to equally isolated inconsequential milquetoasts.

You don't fight the ruling class with encryption, you fight it with a megaphone and hundreds of your friends and neighbors at your side. Like the people of Ferguson are doing. And they're winning.