The internet makes it easy to form activist communities, to rally people together to fight for a cause. The problem with this is that not all causes are righteous. Some are dumb.
That’s how you end up with stuff like #WeAreNotOurStereotypes. This hashtag was started by fraternity and sorority members to let the world know they’re nothing like we might think – they have been to other countries, wear Carhartts, go to church and have some income that doesn’t come from their parents. Students in Greek organizations aren’t actually oppressed, or even inconvenienced, by the apparent perception that they only wear Ralph Lauren, or by misconceptions about what fraternity dues are for. They are merely slightly bummed out.
There is indeed a perception on college campuses that fraternities and sororities are hotbeds of drinking, destructiveness, sexual assault and racism – mostly because, statistically, they are. But participation in the Greek system is a choice; indeed, far from being an oppressed group, frats and sororities are considered prestigious societies that students want desperately to join. And even among those who think (unfairly, no doubt) that every frat boy is a woman-hating alcoholic, there’s no system in place to disenfranchise Greek society members based on that assumption. On the contrary, there’s an extensive network in place to help give members a leg up in life. (Forty percent of senators, a quarter of the House, half of Fortune 500 CEOs, and half of US presidents are alumni of Greek societies.)
But that doesn’t stop students from being mildly annoyed by the assumptions. And in the easy-activism world of the internet, nothing’s preventing them from thinking their annoyance constitutes a political emergency. Unlike systemic discrimination, hurt feelings wouldn’t inspire anyone to lift more than a finger to change things – but on the internet, lifting a finger or two is all you need.
Online activism may not be slacking, but it ain’t hard. There are hazards and consequences – people get threatened, people get doxxed – but they’re not immediate or universal, and the barriers to starting a hashtag or a Facebook awareness campaign are low. In order to take on the work and risk necessary to spearhead a march or an occupation, you need a real motivation, a stake, a reason to believe that things must change and that only you can do it. For a hashtag, all you need is a petty grievance.
I’m a big fan of online activism; it’s been pejoratively deemed “slacktivism” by people who think effective political action must involve physical risk, but not every cure is appropriate for every ill. If it’s the laws that are unjust, or the actions of authority figures or police, it makes sense to address them with civil disobedience – declining to abide within an unfair system. But sometimes, what’s broken isn’t the laws, but the way we think and talk about each other. Civil disobedience, in that case, means declining to abide within that system of thought. People who point out ingrained racism or misogyny or transphobia with a hashtag (#YesAllWomen, for instance) aren’t slacking. They’re addressing wrongs where the wrongs are being done: in the words and the reasoning we use.
Internet activism is an efficient, targeted method of addressing ingrained cultural injustices. It might actually be the most effective form of activism for that kind of issue; it hits us right in the brain, where the problems are. But it’s also an easy way to make your privileged personal grumpiness into a public spectacle – and look like an idiot in the process.
The problem isn’t that online activism is lazy, because it’s not. The problem is that it’s easy for laziness to look like activism. The trappings are simple and low-effort – a hashtag, a person holding a whiteboard like they’re going to announce they’re the 99%. But not every group of people walking in the same direction constitutes a march. If you’re taking no risks, and you’re standing up against something that was never really hurting you, you’re not engaging in activism. You’re just holding down shift and 3.
