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Notes -
I think that the Twitter poster's use of military jargon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in his argument. Here is his key claim about what the anti-ICE forces are doing:
Let's break it down:
I don't know how Signal works, so I'll leave this one without comment.
I mean yeah, this is just specialization of labor, well-understood by humans for many thousands of years. Pretty much anyone who has been on a sports team or has had a job understands the idea of having different members of the organization focus on what they're good at.
This can just mean "some people are sitting around watching the feds and telling each other online where the feds are and how many of them there are, and there are enough such people that at least some of them are active at any time of day or night".
I don't know what a chat rotation is, but regularly deleting your data is the kind of thing that plenty of tech-savvy people would think to do, and would also recommend to others. And there is usually no shortage of tech-savvy people in large political movements in the US.
I mean, I should hope so. You don't have to be a military professional to figure out that this is a good idea.
Well yeah, of course sympathetic locals are going to help. That kind of goes without saying.
"People meet at each other's houses to discuss what is happening and plan further steps". I mean, yeah? Of course they do.
Yeah, most of them have cars. It's pretty easy for them to get around.
I've often thought that plenty of people seem to 'play' reddit the way I used to play massively-multiplayer games, and they just somehow missed the more appropriate outlet for their energy which would have served them (and the rest of us) better. And this kind of thing we're hearing about with these activist signal chats seems to be similar, just spilling out into real life.
In the 90s/00s, I missed out on actual early MMOs, but played a text-based browser game called Archmage, with maybe tens of thousands of players around the world at its height of popularity. You would gain like 1 turn per 15 minutes, such that you couldn't really 'play' more than once or twice a day. So the game really ended up being more socially-interactive metagaming, where people formed guilds, mixed it up on public & private forums, hung out in IRC, etc. There was scheming, strategizing, wars, alliances, propaganda campaigns, spying & fake identities, all kinds of fun emergent creativity. Some people were the superstars who were actually good at the game, others were reliable at monitoring opponents' activity at different timezones, some people had the social skills for being good leaders & diplomats.
I think there's an inclination to suggest that people waste their time and energy on games like this, and should instead put it toward something real-world productive. But I guess I'm practically the opposite now, and think people who managed to miss finding a 'gaming' outlet for expending & refining this kind of social energy are actually shitting up the commons by 'playing' less appropriate venues. Team sports, fraternities, and large mixed-up workplaces are at least pretty good alternatives. Being in discord/signal rooms for subreddits or local activism, not so much.
I agree with you that being an IRL Reddit anti-ICE protestor constitutes “shitting up the commons thinking life is a video game”, but I am simultaneously self-aware enough to realise that I only think this because it’s an objective I disagree with. If these were right-wing Reddit LARPers going out to help ICE round up foreigners then I’d consider it a heartening efflorescence of organic civic virtue.
As Dilos said of the Arcadians: brave amateurs, they do their part
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I think the Twitter poster's point is that these anti-ICE protests are being widely represented in the popular media as spontaneous grassroots affairs, when in fact they are much more organised and coordinated than that. Do spontaneous grassroots protests organically converge on "specialisation of labour", vetting the people attending the protest, purging chat history so there's no digital paper trail? Not in my experience. If his assessment of how these protests are being organised and coordinated is accurate (and you aren't disputing that it is, merely that the fact that they are is worthy of comment), they sound materially different from a great many leftist protest movements, many of which inevitably degenerate into directionless rioting and/or People's Front of Judea/Judean People's Front squabbling.
The Twitter poster's point, whether he is flesh and blood in realspace or bundle of bits in cyperspace, is that the right wing has absolutely nothing comparable. Leftoids organize and fight, rightoids are trusting the plan, polishing their guns and waiting for big boog.
When the right wing attempts to organize, the FBI infiltrates and breaks it up.
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Sounds like you're not actually disputing any of his observations, as much as trying to dismiss their relevance to the conclusion because they individually make sense as tools.
Which is how most professional military, and paramilitary, things turn out to work when broke down into individual components. There are no magical secret ninja techniques to running a military, or an insurgency. At its heart, it's all a combination of individually simple, logical concepts that make sense with just a bid of explanation. It does not require a college degree, not least because they are often constructed to be executed by people without such credentials.
And yet, there remains a wide gulf between professional/competent organizations and those that fumble about. A large part of that comes from not only having the drive to actually make sure everything that needs to be done gets done, but also knowing the scope of things that needs to get done for a specific ends, and how to organize the allocation of tasks of develop those particular means, as opposed to getting drawn into irrelevant rabbit holes. That is where the indication of exceptional understanding, and deliberate intent, comes in.
So when you say things like this-
In response to this-
That the [specialization of labor] is developing a shared database, which entails a host of specialized efforts, and developing specialized reconnaissance efforts for the deliberate purpose of the database, which entails a host of allocation decisions, is far more important than the presence of [specialization of labor]. [Specialization of labor] is a means, not a reason, to develop such a database.
'Just specialization of labor' could be found anywhere, in any protest movement. Not any given protest movement has a reason to develop the means to build vehicle databases of law enforcement agencies. Even fewer have a need to develop such a database for the purpose of establishing real-time tracking networks of law enforcement agencies in the process of their work. Even fewer yet have a legal basis to use said real-time tracking networks for the purpose of targeting law enforcement agencies in the middle of their activities with the intent of disrupting those activities.
And because these reasons, needs, and basis are so rare, all the steps and sub-steps required to do them are not obvious common knowledge. They are not obvious common knowledge for people even when they intend to disrupt ongoing law enforcement agencies. The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan underwent darwinian evolution to such collections of both deliberate targetting and operational security precisely because all the required elements were not inherently obvious to the people who got taken out.
In turn, we know that Americans don't know all these techniques either. You yourself admit to not recognizing the implications of signal chat caps or the call rotations. We have various Americans openly publishing their participation and crowdfunding off of it, which both the funders and fundees would recognize as a terrible idea if they actually cared about the OPSEC. Protestors are consistently inconsistent about whether they need face masks to protect their identity or not. They are not subject to darwinian organizational evolution.
These are not the people who know the various insurgency mechanics to start building into the organizing infrastructure. They do not know the 'sensible' things, or the importance of enforcing it with regularity, or the longer why's behind various guidance. They merely fall into the architecture that was set up for the purpose.
That architecture, in turn, required both specialized knowledge, and intent. No one 'accidentally' develops a government license plate tracking network. That the people who have are coincidentally cribbing from insurgency network practices is, as the tweet says, concerning.
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