notes on communications tools and tactics

This re­sponse to Alexan­dria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘con­cen­tra­tion camps’ re­marks this week is very sim­i­lar to the re­spons­es you see when po­lice prac­tices are questioned. 

It seeks to hu­man­ize the peo­ple in uni­form while mak­ing zero ef­fort to do the same for the peo­ple those uni­formed folks are vic­tim­iz­ing. By forc­ing you into a sym­pa­thet­ic po­si­tion for of­fi­cers, you are just a lit­tle less em­pa­thet­ic to­wards the kids cur­rent­ly locked up in cages be­cause it ab­solves those of­fi­cers of any responsibility. 

Af­ter all … they are just good, hard­work­ing peo­ple do­ing their jobs. It’s not their fault if they are un­der-re­sourced right? 

The prob­lem here is that it sloughs off blame to a neb­u­lous en­ti­ty like “the gov­ern­ment” and ef­fec­tive­ly pre­cludes any dis­cus­sion that is so­lu­tion-fo­cused or that pre­serves the hu­man­i­ty of the vic­tims while un­der­gird­ing the sense of “us vs. them” that makes it im­pos­si­ble to work (or vote) col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly as coalitions. 

This is on purpose.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, me­dia out­lets copy­ing and past­ing Chief Provost’s quote into the share box­es on so­cial are not func­tion­ing as in­de­pen­dent jour­nal­ists, but rather as a mag­ni­fi­ca­tion en­gine for this work. In­ten­tion­al or not, it makes me­dia out­lets com­plic­it in the so­cial con­trol ef­forts be­ing made. 

We need new a Jour­nal­ism Ethics Code for the dig­i­tal age.
 

—dar­cy totten

Flom­mist Dar­cy Tot­ten is de­vot­ed to il­lu­mi­nat­ing of­ten-over­looked voic­es and telling sto­ries from new an­gles. Dar­cy has worked with MTV, Spike TV, NBC/Hearst, ABC, Cor­bis, the State of Texas, Panthea­con, RGBB, LLC, KIA mo­tors, The Promised Band, ACSA, the NBA, sev­er­al Black Lives Mat­ter chap­ters and is the co-founder of Ac­tivism Ar­tic­u­lat­ed. Copy­right © 2019 Dar­cy Totten.

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