Who? Me. When? Now.

Never give up, know when to change tactics.

Wasn’t social media great (until it wasn’t)? Those heady early days of Twitter, learning the meme-worthy phrasing that was possible in just 140 characters until we started speaking that way (that’s right, Gen Z, your speech pathologies originated with us). E-meeting that person who would become your BFF IRL (I’m looking at you

Zoe’s Substack

) and organising tweetups with groups of policy wonks in shitty Canberra bars in the noughties, before the trolls got out of hand and it all just got a lot less fun. The rise and fall of Facebook and Instagram before they were merged into the single pair of shitty libertarian hands (let’s face it, he was always a twerp, but in the beginning he didn’t have the algorithms that would one day destroy the joyful sandpits we played in).

Through all of this, I have been an activist. First, in the city, advocating for the rights of postgraduates and higher education with a higher purpose than the managerial class have pledged. Then, here on the farm, hands in soil or gripping a knife, grounded with lofty aims for an uncommonly delicious revolution where everyone gets to grow, cook, share, eat, vote, deliberate and decide as equals on a habitable planet in perpetuity.

Back in the day, social media was pretty great for social anarchists and our causes. It connected us to people and ideas that challenged us and affirmed us, until the walls narrowed and we woke up one day to discover what an echo chamber most of us had curated. We debated this phenomenon furiously. We debated many things fiercely, little noticing the changes around us, the temperature slowly rising until we boiled in situ, frog-like. A place where we had chortled at the delight of an ad-free life kept eroding until sponsored content, and now AI content, took over our feeds like poison with no antidote in sight.

So I’m calling it a day, farewelling a (mostly) interesting and often generative epoch that is drawing to a close. Zuck helped me out last June when he ousted me from the ‘book as I sat cross legged with Marxist farmers in an agroecological paradise amongst the rice paddies of Sri Lanka, listening to stories of real revolution, hard won by peasants in armed struggle against their oppressors, a struggle that continues in many forms today. These are the places where the struggle will continue - on the ground, in the fields, at the table, in the town halls and in the corridors of power and shrinking democracy.

As we wrote in Farming Democracy in 2019, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Instagrammed’:

When Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were new, they served as fast, efficient and (relatively) un-mediated grounds for connecting people locally and globally as never seen before. Recently, that has been changing dramatically. Those same platforms (controlled by a narrowing group of corporations) are remediating the way we communicate with each other. As they re-work business models and seek greater profits, their algorithms increasingly privilege paid ads and downgrade posts that seek to collectivise or just share stories. The means of communication are once again heavily mediated. […] Just as we must control the means of production, we need democratic solutions to unmediated means of communication with each other.

I’ll continue lurking on the ‘gram for a bit until one day I’ll just slip away, and you’ll find me here. I’m not big on uninformed speculation, so who knows where this will go, but I’m told substack is a nice place to nestle in and find the people ready and willing to make the changes we wish to be and see in the world, so Imma check it out. Let’s hang out.