Like millions of other TikTok users, I was convinced the ominous ban had finally taken effect in mid-January. My heart sank as I thought of the dozens of creators I would no longer see in the same way — the therapists, indie musicians, bioethicists, and Black leftists who had helped shape my worldview. I’d spent hours downloading hundreds of videos the day before the blackout, archiving clips from the pages I manage. I compiled snippets of in-person actions, interviews with organizers, and entertaining skits I’d written to spread class consciousness. Imagine my surprise when I was able to log back into TikTok after a 14-hour darkness.

But then I saw the note. The home screen featured a now-notorious message thanking President Donald J. Trump for the platform’s rebirth — never mind the fact that Trump had proposed the ban in the first place. Fascists love telling fairy tales, whether they pretend you can make America great again or turn sleazy reality TV stars into knights in shining armour. Trump and his cronies have a firm grasp of human psychology. They know many Americans don’t understand the world based solely on facts. Instead humans tend to retain information based on stories and emotions. The right has perfected using this phenomenon to deceive people. The liberal fantasy that we can fact-check our way out of the current political mess is fading. Fascists want us in perpetual reaction mode, burning ourselves out as we counter their attacks. What we should do instead is channel our energy toward world-making, toward reaching masses of people, whether online or IRL. Sure, some are determined to misunderstand. But far more Americans desire captivating visions of a future that uplifts the many instead of the few.

In her op-ed “Men Are Lost. Here’s a Map Out of the Wilderness,” the writer Christine Emba argues: “People need codes for how to be human. And when those aren’t easily found, they’ll take whatever’s offered, no matter what else is attached.” The right exploits people’s real economic fears and offers control and corporal punishment as answers. As an artist and abolitionist, I grow weary when progressives forget that social media doesn’t reinvent the wheel and dismiss a communication tool. Meta, X, and TikTok sell their users’ attention to data brokers, much like television and radio sell viewers and listeners to advertisers. In the United States, our media system has long regarded audiences as commodities, treating news and culture as products to be milked for profit. Yet we can’t cede this terrain, however problematic it may be.

Our task on the left is to make the revolution irresistible, to forge bonds and not to silo ourselves. We can’t just obsess over the perfect take or lecture people about socialism until their eyes glaze over. Instead we need to share knowledge through creative inquiry, celebrate the experiences of people impacted by the issues we want to organize around, and speak in language they understand and relate to. The left sometimes mistakes making bold ideas accessible for dumbing down, when accessibility actually means you are communicating respectfully and well. Communicating to multicultural audiences is serious, strenuous work, especially since Americans increasingly live in contrasting cultural dimensions and are divided by algorithms beyond our control. Disability activist Imani Barbarin says, “Plain language is community building,” and it’s an important antidote to loneliness and apathy. Instead of being condescending, leftists should notice when ideas aren’t resonating and consider the possibility that it represents a shortcoming on the part of the teacher, not the student.

Political education is critical. To do it well, we need to engage in the online and offline culture war — but in ways that honor and expand our humanity rather than diminish it. We must embrace culture as more than an afterthought or a dash of entertainment to make edification go down easier. George Orwell claimed that “all art is propaganda,” and the Black Panther Party’s Minister of Culture Emory Douglas said, “Art is a powerful tool, a language that can be used to enlighten, inform and guide to action.” We love to complicate things on the left, but perhaps now is the time to simplify complex things creatively — to provide more people better codes to live by.

I’m not just a TikToker. I’m an artist who uses short-form video as a tool in my creative arsenal. I like to tell people my mediums are words, sounds, and ceremonies, which irritates those conditioned to believe that art is a product and artists who don’t fit into market categories aren’t artists at all. Staying true to my craft has been an adventure. I’ve performed hip-hop sets in Buenos Aires and written musical scores for dancers suspended from the sides of buildings. Back in 2021, I was curious about why so many young people gravitated to the platform — I wasn’t convinced it was purely because of corporate power — and I started making TikToks. Disregarding the next generation is a fast way to become obsolete. Did the app start messing with my brain? Probably. But I loved it. I found myself hooked, eyes fixed on the blue glow of my iPhone as I searched recipes or nodded my head to viral beats. I had spent eight years as a poet in residence at a juvenile detention center in San Francisco, using creative writing to help hundreds of young people strengthen their literacy skills and expand their emotional intelligence. Then the program lost funding. Making TikToks allowed me to channel the pedagogical skills I had developed. The process was akin to writing a witty rap bar or creating a punchline for a comedy set. I soon began speaking directly to the camera, as if I were on a FaceTime call with a friend, and my followers grew exponentially.

Perhaps the short-form video’s popularity reflects an increasingly isolated populace. It may also meet an accessibility need. As many as 130 million people in the U.S. fall below a sixth-grade reading level. An expertly crafted two-minute explanation with captions can widen the scope of who can engage with a piece of information. TikTok’s competitors Meta introduced Reels and YouTube unfurled Shorts to mimic the short-form video format. My first videos were creative-writing prompts with the hashtag #RandomThingsToWriteAbout, inspiring people to write poems. At one point, the hashtag hit one million views. I found it invigorating to grow my organic audience, especially as a working-class creative who has never had a marketing budget.

In 2022, I learned about an organization fighting to abolish debt. Saddled with six figures in student loans after pursuing an MFA in poetry, I reached out to the Debt Collective and offered to help expand its TikTok presence. Joining the collective expanded my class consciousness; experienced organizers taught me and helped with direct actions, while I distilled big ideas into short videos. I was able to increase the Debt Collective’s TikTok followers to nearly 100,000. A video I made asking viewers, “What’s a scam that’s become so normalized we don’t even realize it’s a scam anymore?” (#WhatsAScam?) went viral, garnering billions of likes and views. People responded by highlighting everything from the limitations of abstinence-only education to the pitfalls of criminal background checks. The short clip was featured in the 2024 documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon and, more recently, on the CBS show After Midnight with Taylor Tomlinson.

The social media approach I developed amplified and augmented the Debt Collective’s other organizing strategies in the long fight to abolish student loans and win free college. And even though Joe Biden failed to cancel all $1.7 trillion of student debt during his presidency, he did discharge $187 billion, wiping out loans for over five million people. Perhaps even more important, thousands, if not millions, of people were introduced to important radical ideas, including that (1) politicians have the legal ability to change our material conditions, and the working class should build the power necessary to demand they do so; and (2) we are not morally obligated to banks, governments, or other predatory creditors; we’re morally obligated to people and the planet.

Even if awareness is insufficient to produce change on its own, waking up is the first step to getting free. Art and media for abolition is never solely about the final “product,” whether it’s a striking visual work, a dance that electrifies a space, or a tweet that goes viral. Art is fundamentally about the process, and so is organizing. While securing victories is essential, developing people’s political consciousness endures whether or not a labor union wins higher wages or a debtor union’s demands for relief are met. But with the rise of technofascism, the left faces ever more pressing obstacles to online and in-person organizing. Enshittification ensures that our favorite social media platforms become less about being social and more about stuffing billionaire tech oligarchs’ pockets. And we need to get serious about staying safe during in-person actions as the government abandons comrades who may be more vulnerable to illness. We should support young people in their efforts, incorporating both the in-person strategy of Free Palestine encampments on college campuses and a massive movement to spread political education online, especially via TikTok. When the powerful try to stifle our freedom dreams, we must diversify our tactics and make connections through every means possible.

These are lessons I learned during my challenging stint teaching poetry to incarcerated youth in California. Guards routinely told the kids, “Talk is dead” as they shuffled down the hallway to the school inside the jail. They were barred from keeping a pencil in their cells. Most of my students had had negative experiences in traditional classroom settings, and their writing skills either bordered illiteracy or were advanced, rarely in between.

One day, I asked my students to write about a made-up journey to a made-up destination. First, we started brainstorming. We listed modes of transportation and destinations. “The weirder, the better,” I said. “How about piggybacking across the border?” one young man suggested. The class laughed about joyriding to the moon’s surface or showing up to a drive-through window on horseback. It wasn’t until that young man, probably no more than 16, finished his poem about his heart racing as he carried his brother over barbed wire that I realized he was sharing a real experience with me. How had I missed this? My morning travels suddenly flashed before my eyes: I had woken up before dawn, taken a bus to BART, ridden another bus up a hill, then gone through three security doors, and now here I was, standing before a boy who’d journeyed across nation-states. I felt humbled by his bravery, his willingness to share his journey. It reinforced the fact that solidarity is not sameness — it is about cultivating connective tissue. Even the most sensitive among us knows empathy is a muscle that must be stretched and strengthened. Poetry, like other art forms, is about translation and about transformation. We’re falsely taught that art is reserved for the “gifted,” an elite class. The art I make and teach is dangerous. It is stepping-razor-sharp and can cut people open. It demands that they feel. If attention is a form of prayer, poetry is, in essence, a practice of paying close attention.

The capitalist attention economy wants us to surrender to the barbed-wire fences, raids, and psychological warfare that obstruct our path. Many young adults have been severely harmed by TikTok. It remains unwise to trust our devices not to spy on or exploit us. The broligarchy had a front-row seat at Trump’s second inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg’s thirst for market monopoly already has him cosigning for the right, sharing a false promise of “free expression” in his own short-form video. Elon Musk has turned X into his personal manosphere, urging the public to join his moral bankruptcy and firing off lie-filled missives 24 hours a day: “In most cases, the word homeless is a lie. It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness,” the billionaire bigot assures us.

We need to fight back against this worldview not just with facts (including that homelessness rose by 18 percent in 2024) but also by creating stronger, more beautiful, more urgent codes to live by. We want people to look at a sky burning crimson with wildfire and Californians with mouths agape, staring at the carcasses of their former homes, and then direct righteous rage toward the ruling class. We want seething frustration to catalyze them into organized action against greedy landlords. This is the time to imagine, change minds, build bonds, and discuss strategy. The portrait pop-up I helped organize in Los Angeles’s Leimert Park gave the community a way to ease their anxieties when the Debt Collective showed up and asked them to engage with bold ideas for economic disobedience. Organizers like the LA Tenants Union don’t just fight rent hikes; they also break bread together. Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (known as MST) doesn’t just occupy land; it also engages in the practice of mística. These cultural and creative tactics are part of an ecosystem that prepares us for opportunities to win.

The stereotype that leftists are overly critical and pessimistic is a cop-out. I think leftists are optimists, albeit occasionally antisocial ones. We see what the world could look like and refuse to abandon that vision. We lose sleep holding on to ideas that can liberate millions, and we’re well versed in empathy. No matter how rough the terrain, we should be ruthless toward oppressive systems and compassionate toward actual people. The left has an unparalleled opportunity to capture the attention of millions of Americans who have grown weary of the status quo. We must use art and media not merely as fluff and distraction but as key points of political education, narrative formation, and radical optimism. We must help people channel difficult emotions — isolation, grief, and agony — toward revolutionary action. We need a movement’s worth of accessible creative media to help Americans make sense of the turmoil that will only intensify under the current regime. Our task is to catalyze the creative stamina necessary to confront upcoming challenges and actualize new worlds and to do so over the long haul.