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An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about those connections. You can support the author directly at patreon.com/christophersloce. 

I was scrolling instagram when I saw something that annoyed me. Outside of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, a group of protesters held an aerobics class, sweating it out clad in spandex. When one of the black vehicles drove by, they would stop and boo. The aerobics class would continue once the gates closed. 

The context in which I saw them were left instagram accounts, taking multiple screenshots of multiple Left twitter users commentating on the aerobics protest in typical fashion. They were painfully sincere arguments which in Leftbook/Leftsky/Left-Twitter fashion means writing like you’re Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong in the year 2025, about the limits of liberal protest. 

Let me say that I agree with them, and my annoyance was less criticism existed of novelty protests. If there’s a point at which a protest isn’t limiting someone’s ability to do something it’s not really doing anything. We know what’s going on with ICE. The civic protests and omnipresent resistance in major cities against ICE agents, hogs who’d make slave-catchers proud, fit the demand right now. Dressing like you’re in The Substance isn’t going to cut it. 

And yet! The context I saw these posts made me feel infinitely more powerless than watching a bunch of people do a cringe protest. It was a criticism that nobody who was shaking their ass in front of the Portland ICE facility was going to see, just an audience of Twitter people, who could argue about it. And even more depressing than seeing these protests was my realization that a completely legible type of “leftist” was a meme page admin whose job is to give people stuff off of Twitter or Bluesky. Political Tosh.0, basically. Maybe all of these admins of pages with names like SocialismIsDemocracy or Hollercommie are organizers in their communities or rank-and-file labor organizers, but frankly, based on people I’ve witnessed get very into the Dank Left Meme culture as some sort of Gramscian or Connolly derived will of the people, I highly doubt it, and will be proceeding as such. Because without doing a Jacobinian pitch to some editor out there, the best way to describe all of the above is: “This shit sucks, man.” Sorry to do the Rick Sanchez you-both-suck-and-I-can-prove-it-mathematically meme, but that’s pretty much my opinion. Some people see “joy as an act of resistance” and think dancing in the shadow of the concentration camp is meaningful; some people read “I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be,” think that the very act of criticism is political instead of worshipping the market place of ideas but communist. 

We are not a nation of organization. There’s a whole book about bowling alone. Everyone, in some ways, is a sclerotic political actor, whether they’re doing exercises to Gloria Gaynor in front of an immigration prison or shooting up a school or writing their own version of Worker’s Vanguard. What has replaced that is something of a notion that “social” interaction can meaningfully take place on social media, that our interactions are now commodified entertainment. News isn’t really news, it’s a way for your friends on the tv to bitch with you about the world without dealing with other humans who might tell you you’re wrong. 

Recently on Bluesky PatrickCosmos posted an idea called “Everyone is twelve now” theory, which is pretty much what it sounds like. Everyone sounds like they’re twelve now, which is to say: not everyone, but people in power who push the notions of our age are, increasingly, sounding like twelve year olds. I don’t think this is contradictory what I’m about to say, which is this: if everyone has willingly trapped themselves in front of a machine that shows them what they want, and it goes to show what they want is to get angry, then how different is anyone from a Fox News viewer (and this is key) in how they function in relation to the information economy? What happens when the grandpas, screaming at the news, are really just screaming at the other grandpas, because the information economy has fallen to an entirely algorithmic view of itself, and thus, there is nothing but how mad grandpas react to other mad grandpas? And probably the most important question of all: when the people who should know better about how capital acts, what exactly is being “produced” by social media, and how that’s like insufflating the broken, petty notions we call common sense, why is it so important to the mission? Why is every “organizer” spending, perhaps not a majority, but enough of their time, getting mad online? 

Upsetting social media posts are the most effective flypaper in existence. If you retweet or give any commentary whatsoever, you’ve created a new node to be interacted with, which repeats the process for someone to get mad at you. And then, annoyed, you continue looking for something better, something to release the honeyed grip of the flypaper on your feet. Meanwhile, you find yourself more and more stuck, relating more and more to your new home, making it a part of your day. 

That the same people who are supposed to speak of the importance of industrial action and pure refusal are hopelessly addicted to a slot machine of feelings doesn’t speak poorly of them, necessarily. It’s not a crime to make a post and have other people enjoy it or to use social media too much, anymore than cigarettes being addictive doesn’t make you bad for smoking. And, preface, but this is a real jerkoff thing to say: once you’ve gone viral or had an excessive follower influx on your social media app of chance, you recognize it’s pretty much uncontrollable after a point. All you were trying to do is make a trenchant observation about banjos and strangers show up in your living room, forcing you to declare their favorite band banjo player isn’t doing insufferable cosplay. Content aggregation is something else: a decentered sluice pond. It’s not curation to repeat what the algorithm thought you and your audience would like anymore than sludge becomes pudding because the consistency is similar. (In theory, this means that left-slop exists, something I’ve been wanting to write about forever but want to strike the right tone, because it’s easy to smear criticizing form and feature as criticizing notion, and I’m absolutely not having any bonafides questioned because I think laborwave was cornball shit). Somehow, ruthless criticism for all that exists hasn’t really extended to how the left uses the internet, which is, effectively, no different from any other subculture. The problem is we need so much more than a subculture right now, and so many people are content with the subculture, because pointing out the world is failing is much easier than dealing with the ramifications of your own failure to change it. It’s easier to post a criticism of the ICE Yoga class than to talk to your coworkers. 

Most people have an idealistic view of the Internet, because it is a miracle of communication technology. This view extends to even their criticisms. We speak of people being too online, of needing to touch grass, all of which eventually seems to implicitly feed back to life on the computer, those blades of grass a tactile save point to allow to regain enough hit points to log back into the miracle. When you look at the world outside, it’s hard to blame them for running back to the computer chair. But the very people who want you in the chair want to tear up everything outside so they can use you, endlessly, as a revenue generating machine, a reservoir of views, as a battery for their toys. The question is how much are we going to pretend it isn’t the case.