The Gaza Conflict Highlights How Supremely Weird the Internet Is

I have been struggling to find something new to say about this whole topicm because so many opinions have been made, and so many of those opinions are roughly the same — this side good, this side bad, if you don’t speak up you’re bad, if you don’t speak up, we respect your decision because you must be on our side but just don’t have the energy to engage in this post-capitalist hellscape and so we’re gonna fight extra hard for you because we got your back. And so on and so forth, variations of the same fuckin thing over and over again, all done with the conviction and energy of a person in the midst of an intense and contentious conversation.

Except the glaring fact that….

There is no conversation.

I literally did not ask your opinion. You are not even posting with me in mind. You are in an argument with the world at large and just roping me in because I unfortunately follow you and when I unfollow one internet activist it turns out I am connected to so many more! It really is a manifestation of cutting the head off the snake only for another to grow back. Bro, I’m on Instagram for cat memes, stand up, and recipes, and your posts are fucking up my algorithm.

Ok, I am in fact quite political and have my strong convictions about many things, and I have decided, after years where I was trolled and received unsolicited advice from people with bad intentions, to keep many of my opinions largely to myself online. It’s also a matter of recognizing, in my 39 years of life and 21 years of adulthood, that expressing my opinions don’t amount to much of anything, so I don’t bother posting much about politics. I also generally feel like if I want others to respect my nonsense on my social media account, I should offer them the same courtesy.

So before I get into my full diatribe, let me just say, you have every right to post whatever you want on your account, and if this makes you happy (which I have doubts about) then more power to you. You’re not hurting anyone, even if you’re not helping anyone.

Instead, I want to broach the subject of how we communicate online and how that manifests in the real world. Below is a typical meme that has shown up on my feed. I’m using it as being indicative of the tone, approach, and unself-reflexive nature of it.

Imagine being on a street in real life, and a random person comes up to you and says this, or more likely, they are on the corner with a sign and either yelling or speaking through a megaphone with this message. I have seen this in real life, but only with religious zealots trying to get me to repent and follow Jesus on my way to a club or a bar, and one such night somebody decided to spray this zealot with a shook up beer can, and we all cheered and applauded.

Because in real life, if you can imagine, people ranting in public to get your attention are annoying at best, threatening and unnerving at worst. Blurting out a statement like this unprovoked, in say, an office environment, would not be met with cheers, it would be met with people side eye-ing each other wondering if Bob just fell off the wagon again. This is especially true if Bob just shouted this to no one in particular, just like this post, which is not directed at any one person. It is the digital equivalent to shouting on a street corner. In real life, you’d wonder what preceded this outburst? What is going on in this person’s life that they feel the need to guilt trip random strangers? Are they having a nervous breakdown? Is something wrong in their personal life? Is it as simple as nobody has fucked this person in years and they finally just snapped?

And yet, online, people say shit like this all the time and its treated as totally normal. Not only that, I saw this meme because it was shared by someone I know, so it’s as if the ranting crazy person had gotten a disciple and they decided to share this madness to more people, who, like I said earlier, never asked for this, and if it were real life, we’d be like — hey buddy, are you seriously having a mental breakdown along with this person? What is wrong with you?

I think about the people who post these things, at least on my feed, they are uniformly privileged — educated, living in a comfortable house with a comfortable job or a partner who supports them financially. I don’t see poor people or people struggling to get by post these things. Most online activists, if you dig a little bit, are middle class or higher, and college educated. Yet in real life, when you see someone ranting on a corner they are typically poor, or homeless with severe mental health problems.

So I gotta ask these online activists…why do you really need to post these things? What is the Gaza conflict to you? I mean, if its civilian casualties, Russia has been massacring Ukrainian civilians for almost two years and I never once saw you post about it. Sudan and Ethiopia have been in long term conflicts, same in Myanmar with the Rohingya. Yet I never saw protests in support of those people. I never saw this level of engagement with all the other conflicts of the world, so why Palestine? Why do you care about this? Or maybe the right question to ask is, what are you trying to get out of this?

Is your personal life ok?

Everything good at your job?

How’re the kids hanging in there?

Or, if I may be so bold to ask, are you jumping on a bandwagon to draw attention to yourself in order to give your life a sense of meaning, a cause, that perhaps you feel is missing? I sympathize with that. We all need a purpose in life. But you’re not being honest. I say this especially to my fellow Puerto Ricans trying to link the Gaza conflict with Puerto Rico. They are not the same thing, and it’s pretty gross to try to piggy-back your personal cause onto another country.

It is actually rather disingenuous to manipulate the affairs of an outside conflict to draw attention to your own. But also, prior to this, I didn’t see you doing much to advocate for Puerto Rico, not even in your own life. I have seen Puerto Rican activists even advocating for what Hamas did on Oct 7 as being the cost of resisting oppression, which is funny, because that means you are ok with murdering civilians, so when are you going to do the same in the US? I mean, it sounds really tough and revolutionary to be cheering on fighting oppression through violence except when you aren’t willing to do that for your own causes. If you really believed in what Hamas did, why do I not see any of you cutting off ties to white people in your life, whether they are friends or lovers or bosses? Why are you still aligning yourselves with white institutions and enjoying the luxuries of a life you built on cozying up to white people. If you were sincere, you’d sacrifice all you have and take the next flight to the island. Why aren’t you fighting back in Puerto Rico the way Hamas did in Israel? Aren’t you all about revolution? Aren’t you militant?

Imagine a world where you’re just full of shit. I remember in 2019, when white people briefly cared about Puerto Rico, all of the cheering on social media for the protestors looking to overthrow Governor Rosselló. Online, it was such a revelatory moment for Latino activists who had one eye on white people to make sure they had their support in rooting for the protestors (funny how anti-colonial activists only latch on to causes when white people care about them). Much like the Gaza conflict, white people cared, and so we brown people could care, unlike in the Sudan or Congo or Ethiopia or Southeast Asia, where advocating to end those conflicts just doesn’t get white approval in the same way. So many Latinos cheering on the car burnings and resisting the police and calling out the brutalities inflicting on the protestors.

And then it ended. Rosselló was overthrown and replaced with someone worse than him. And then his party won the next election, and according to polling from last week (November 2023), his party is going to win the next election. And I don’t see any of you activists talking about this. That your glorious revolution didn’t amount to anything. You’re too busy talking about Gaza to care about your own people and our struggles and most of all, our failed revolution. But maybe that’s the point.

It’s really easy to go online and rant and rave and act like you’re part of a movement when in reality, you can just put down your phone and it vanishes from your life. That’s also true of the religious zealots on street corners, or the protestors who go to a chain restaurant after protesting capitalism. You did your post, you did your duty, so that as you navigate your real life as another drone of the system, you can feel a little better about yourself.

But for the people trying to survive these catastrophes, they will continue long after you stop caring about it. This conflict is not affecting your life, but it is affecting someone’s life, many people’s in fact. Being the equivalent of the guy who has a nervous breakdown at work, doesn’t feed a Gazan, or protect them, or help anyone but yourselves. The internet is a tool of narcissism. That is where the real-life activist and the online one differ.

That religious zealot trying to save my soul outside a club may be unhinged, may be annoying, but they are a true believer. Enough to be ridiculed in person, which they often are. Even if I think that guy is crazy, I respect the conviction. Where is yours?