Social media and statues of Stalin

A clip flashed by me on the old TikTok, where a woman was talking about statues of Stalin in soviet Russia. Every town square, every school, every park had a statue of Stalin, to the point where they stopped being monumental. People stopped noticing them. What's the point of venerating your leader so ubiquitously, that instead of being a constant reminder of your winning political ideology, he becomes part of the landscape?

Bear with me: I don't know how to dig up this exact clip, credit the author, or name the political science theory. I'm a scroller, not a researcher. But this woman was saying the very point was to become the landscape. To take up space that would otherwise be left empty. An empty town square begs to be filled. If you look at a blank spot on the wall long enough, you might think to put a picture there.

It stops being about statues of Stalin at all. It starts to be about preventing the imagining of anything else.

I'm thinking about statues of Stalin as I delete my Facebook and Instagram accounts. For so long they've been my main port of access to community and connection, especially as I live a massive physical distance from most of my friends and family. As each platform pivots one-by-one to the far right, I've collected my friends' phone numbers and emails, unwinding myself from the ubiquitous social media ecosystems that have become our new public square.

What could we imagine, if there was an empty space?

I've signed up for this platform because I've been reading a lot of history books for the first time. I'm not a writer, I'm a house cleaner, but when you read, you gotta get the ideas back outta your body in some way shape or form. If you want to hear in real time what I've been reading and imagining about cleaning, gender, work, social reproduction, hierarchy, class, community and resistance - check back here.