I can hear it now. “Uggggh, one of those content creators passing the buck of responsibility.” That’s one viewpoint. The other view is that we live in a racist, sexist society. We live in the patriarchy, and the patriarchy wants to protect the patriarchy. So, the platforms we use, owned mainly by rich, white men (can we scream patriarchy any louder?), use algorithms. And, then, you’re surprised that those same algorithms don’t show your spicy, political content to the masses.

Capitalism, a byproduct of the patriarchy, works well when we are so busy with life things that we want to numb ourselves. So it feeds numbing by content – cat videos, endless binging, and more. We are numb to what is going on in the broader world: the endless violence, climate destruction, abject poverty, and more.

Real change doesn’t come through ranting on social media. Real change comes from having authentic relationships and building power together with those genuine relationships.

Power. What is power? The ability to influence. One definition of power is organized people and organized money (and organized ideas). Organized money can clearly influence and buy up those ad spaces, buy influence, and more. Organized PEOPLE get hard to ignore when there is more and more and more.

And we don’t get organized people by shaming them that they aren’t doing enough. We don’t get organized people by telling them we’ll mute them or not buy their products if they don’t toe the line. We don’t get organized people by pissing them off.

We get organized people by showing up with empathy. Learn their story, their why, and their self-interest. We get organized people by aligning with power-building organizations, so 1, 2, and 3 organized people suddenly become 100, become 2,000, and become over 50,000. And, together, with our aligned values in aligned organization, we make change.

We have so many terrible, awful, no good things happening in our world. Ranting on social media will not get us there.

It will get us part of the way there. But it won’t get us nearly as far as we want if we’re not building genuine relationships behind the scenes.

Ranting on social media without alignment with organizing people is nothing more than performative and will never yield the change you want.