350.org on Facebook: Now You See It…Now You Don’t
Posted by keith on April 8th, 2011
Naomi Klein decided to join the board of 350.org. They are delighted, as you would be if one of the world’s most influential anti-capitalism writers joined your campaign.
Obviously this puts Naomi Klein’s writings in a whole new focus – she’s happy to be part of an organisation that received its seed money from a foundation that bears the name of the kinds of business empires she railed against in the Shock Doctrine. She’s happy to be part of an organisation that has recently forsaken its grass-roots members in favour of business partners in order to add a bit of money to its empty coffers.
They are happy, so they put something on their Facebook Page to say so. Not surprisingly the fans were also delighted and started posting gleefully, as they do on everything to do with 350.org.
Then someone posted a link to my previously mentioned article – it didn’t quite gel with the self-congratulatory sense of the rest of the comments, but criticism is criticism and 350.org are surely big enough to cope with a bit of that:
Apparently not. Within a few minutes the link was removed. Someone alerted me to this and I posted a comment asking why the link had been removed, and whether their recent merger with 1Sky was not just a way of saving money.
That post disappeared as well, as did the post of the person who originally alerted me to the link.
Then 350.org commented back, which you can see in the image below, along with the absence of the two posts being referred to:
That response in full:
“Hey Rachael and Keith. I’m a 350.org FB admin — and didn’t delete any comments, except the sudden notes you left accusing 350.org of deleting comments (could you have re-posted your criticism?) We do moderate comments, and will un-publish ones that are divisive, or seek to draw people into movement in-fighting. We don’t have time for that anymore. Critical discussion is a whole other ball-game — we welcome that, of course, and need it to keep evolving. Thanks.”
I highlighted a key phrase here – “Critical discussion is a whole other ball-game — we welcome that, of course” – in view of the next move by the 350.org administrators. They blocked both me and my contact from commenting further on the Facebook page. Not content with censoring anything that looked like dissent they decided to lock out any dissenters entirely, in case their rose-tinted views might be damaged in any way.
The following email has been sent to 350.org. I await their response:
Hi Guys
Well done for the brave move in banning people from your Facebook group. Glad to see that the merger with 1Sky is making you even more keen to avoid any kind of criticism rather than engage with the criticisms of symbolic action and working too closely to businesses.
Don’t worry, though, because the original screen captures of posts you deleted and people you banned are still available and will be appearing on a few websites soon.
I think it’s safe to say you ran out of money even with your appeals to business, which is why you have been forced to recombine with 1Sky. Call it a tactical retreat if you will, but I think there are a growing number of people who recognise that writing letters to senators and forming pretty pictures out of tee-lights isn’t really the way to undermine the planet killing system that’s loving every “action” that leaves them unscathed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb9JdH6sU1Y – the industrial system must be really crapping itself with this kind of hardline stuff.
Cheers
Keith Farnish
www.unsuitablog.org
www.timesupbook.com
April 8th, 2011 at 6:15 pm
Just tweeted yours and the United Progressives story out. Not that it matters ;)
April 8th, 2011 at 6:43 pm
Nice article… should get someone with “clearance” to post it on their wall- and then set a stopwatch…
April 8th, 2011 at 7:01 pm
Also, this is pretty amusing…
http://www.facebook.com/iMatterMarch?sk=app_190322544333196#!/iMatterMarch?sk=app_190322544333196
April 9th, 2011 at 3:42 am
I made an appropriate comment ;-)
April 9th, 2011 at 5:51 am
limited hangouters!!!!
April 10th, 2011 at 11:50 am
Oh, this is just great … I tweeted this post and the “crapping itself” line/link and was rewarded by Joe Solomon (Social Media Coordinator for 350.org) following my twitter persona. Creepy.
April 20th, 2011 at 5:38 am
I had to laugh when I saw the title that Patty mentioned:
“Social Media Coordinator for 350.org”
Any “grass roots” organisation that needs fancy titles like this (and to coordinate it’s “social media”) has truly lost it’s way and has probably been bought out by the economy that it is (was?) trying to change …
LS
April 21st, 2011 at 9:30 am
[…] http://thesietch.org/mysietch/keith/2011/04/08/350-org-on-facebook-now-you-see-it-now-you-dont/ […]
April 30th, 2011 at 1:50 pm
So true, LS.
Oh, and that guy is still “following” me. I guess some just collect numbers on the twitter.
June 6th, 2011 at 5:20 am
this kind of politically correct censorship and greenwashing is rampant among fake-Left sites, organizations and (cult of)personalities (not to mention the fake-Left in general: progressives, liberals and democrats; understanding there is no substantive difference among these terms, institutions and beliefs).
the fake-Left is as batshit crazy, delusional, destructive, dangerous, anthropocentric and counterproductive as the real-Right and non-existent-Middle.
but this is what happens in collapsing empires and disappearing ways of life.
denial reigns supreme.
i consistently return to Imperial Entropy, by Kirkpatrick Sale (2005):
“Jared Diamond’s recent book detailing the ways societies collapse suggests that American society, or industrial civilization as a whole, once it is aware of the dangers of its current course, can learn from the failures of the past and avoid their fates. But it will never happen, and for a reason Diamond himself understands.
“As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that collapsed in the early 15th century: ‘The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.’ If this is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then we can isolate the values of American society that have been responsible for its greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to them no matter what. They are, in one rough mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism, technophilia, and humanism (as the dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance whatever, no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a society that we will abandon those.
“Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.”
– http://www.energybulletin.net/node/4474
—
on a related note, i proffer Adam Curtis’s latest:
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
“A series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers”
– http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011lvb9
video:
Episode 1 – Love and Power
“The story of two perfect worlds. One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s who saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires. The other is the global utopia that digital entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley set out to create in the 1990s.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz2j3BhL47c&feature=related
Episode 2 – The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
“The story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq0xVuRG4ng&feature=related
Episode 3: The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey
“This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed – so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure.”
(not yet released)
—
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Richard Brautigan
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammels and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
—
i know there are XHTML tags to use, but having no preview option, i prefer safe than sorry.