Platform use by anticolonial movements can inadvertently reinforce the corporate systems they resist.

Evidence

Consider next another starting point, the Idle No More movement, a campaign by indigenous peoples in Canada to protect their ancestral resources. Like many activist movements, Idle No More has become a smart user of social media to promote its cause and enlist supporters. The telegraph pole used to link the Bororo into networks of colonial power has given way to a tool on which even the victims of colonization would now seem to depend. Nonetheless, the implications of such tools are, at best, ambiguous. Reflecting on the use of social media during the campaign’s protests, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a scholar, writer, and artist of the Nishnaabeg people, wrote that “every tweet, Facebook post, blog post, Instagram photo, YouTube video, and email we sent during Idle No More made the largest corporations in the world … more money to reinforce the system of settler colonialism… . I wonder in hindsight if maybe we didn’t build a movement, but rather we built a social media presence that privileged individuals over community, virtual validation over empathy, leadership without accountability and responsibility.” — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 22

Categorization

• XREF: Amplifying critique of platform politics and ‘slacktivism’; useful counterpoint to celebratory digital organizing literature. — connects to: Mobilizing through commercial platforms simultaneously strengthens the order being opposed — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 587; Anti-corporate movements instantiated their political principles in their own network structures — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 102; Even anti-colonial activism via social media reinforces the corporate systems of settler colonialism — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 22 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: how does Idle No More’s experience fit with Zeynep Tufekci’s analysis of movement infrastructure and platform dependence?

Broader Connections

• Mobilizing through commercial platforms simultaneously strengthens the order being opposed #corroborates (0.95) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 587
• Even anti-colonial activism via social media reinforces the corporate systems of settler colonialism #exemplifies (0.92) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 22
• Anti-corporate movements instantiated their political principles in their own network structures #complicates (0.80) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 102
• Resistance to data colonialism must confront global capitalism, not just platforms #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 650
• Countercultural threats get defanged by commercial absorption #expands (0.72) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 501
• Rights-based anti-neoliberal struggle can inadvertently entrench the market #expands (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 66