The Digital Dunkirk: Why We Have to Bet on Bluesky

Dave Karpf offers a realistic estimate of Bluesky’s importance to digital America. He’s compared it to a record store: a niche cultural spot for dedicated enthusiasts rather than a mass-market medium.

In my conversation with the hilariously insightful political scientist who has chronicled the evolution of social media and digital media in American politics, we noted that Bluesky, as niche as it is, helped launch a pair of remarkable uprisings. First, Ben Collins used a half-joke on the site to spark the plan to buy The Onion from private equity and revive it as a satirical powerhouse against boring fascism. Then, in the bitter cold of 2025, as elites lined up to bow to Donald Trump and Elon Musk raged through our government and private data, it helped launch the #TeslaTakedown. This movement made non-cooperation and regularly scheduled protests the foundations of the anti-Trump swell.

I’d forgotten a third remarkable act of resistance that originated on the platform: the historic mutual aid effort launched in response to the regime’s invasion of Minnesota.

When Ashley Fairbanks dropped a crowdsourced Google Doc link with her network in early 2026, StandWithMinnesota blossomed. Bypassing traditional fundraising avenues, it funneled tens of millions in direct rent relief and mutual aid to affected immigrant families, proving what digital solidarity can do in an emergency. And Fairbanks continues to raise money and collect frequent flyer miles on the app to help people released from detention get back home.

“I would credit Bluesky [users] with most of the success of StandWithMinnesota, mostly because our Minneapolis community is very over-represented (thanks to Ian Coldwater, really) so it was a very effective tool at spreading the website to folks in the Twin Cities, who shared it across channels,” she told me.

She isn’t very active on social media platforms, but from Bluesky alone “the website started to receive tens of thousands of visits,” and it jumped to other platforms like Instagram.

What I’m saying is that for a small record store, Bluesky has played a remarkable role on America’s left, providing key footholds in the opposition to Donald Trump’s second regime. If it functions mostly as a place to get your fingers dirty sifting the crates, its users have shown they can turn it into an emergency broadcast network. And I’d argue it’s no coincidence that these supernovas of left inspiration happened on the one large social media platform not currently operated by a billionaire or a billionaire’s conglomerate.

I spent a lot of 2024 begging people to move to Bluesky from Twitter, comparing it to a barren but inhabitable planet we could escape to while our home orb was pillaged and turned into a machine for fascism that is scientifically proven to fry brains.

I thought that major Democratic candidates and celebrities, at very least, going to X Last and sending people to a platform where their brains were far less likely to be fried would be one clear way to signal that the 2024 election was not normal. Not normal because an insurrectionist was on the ballot, and because one man was buying said insurrectionist the election, as the FEC quietly removed the last guardrail that effectively allowed unlimited dark-money spending to merge with voter-contact operations.

And no one really listened. But after the election, many of the biggest left-leaning accounts fled directly to Bluesky (without ever really stopping posting on X), and millions more followed when Rachel Maddow spoke about it on TV.

That created the record store that helped make the #TeslaTakedown.

This year I’ve decided to get back on my bullshit. As what I knew was going to happen and Elon Musk decided to buy another election for ethnofascism and his own personal corruption, I launched the X OFF campaign, which is an offshoot of my larger effort to get the freaks like us, the 20-30% of America who actively and purposely follow the news, to get our news first from high-quality independent media and journalists before we go to social media to try to lessen the influence of the billionaires and the algorithms.

On Saturday, October 17—a date that will go down in history as the single largest day of early voter activation—I realized I was thinking way too small.

On that day, Meta suspended the No Kings coalition’s Instagram account for about 90 minutes while organizers ran nearly 3,000 early-voting events, then blamed an automated error. The day before, Folha de S.Paulo reported internal messages in which Meta staff acknowledged that restrictions had hurt Lula’s Instagram accounts ahead of Brazil’s runoff. Meta says technical faults caused it. Meta also gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and funds far-right influencers, so nobody needs a theory about Zuckerberg’s politics. A rate limiter set too tight on a campaign’s biggest day works like a ban, and 38 percent of American adults regularly get news on Facebook.

Anyone who cares about democracy and American freedom needs to make an escape plan from any billionaire-controlled platform.

And while this is difficult now, possibly even impossible, everyone who continues counterprogramming on these billionaire brothels should refrain from sending people to these platforms in 2026 at least until every vote is counted. I know this sounds absurd. But it’s the kind of absurdity that makes perfect sense only in retrospect. Think of the lesson Ukraine has learned in the last week. The nation that has boldly fought off Putin for a decade now knows, definitively, what it costs to wage war on one man’s satellites, especially if that man is Elon Musk.

Starlink terminals arrived within days of the February 2022 invasion, and Ukrainian forces built their communications around them. And the warnings came early. In September 2022, Ukraine asked Musk to switch on coverage for an attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea, and he refused, saying SpaceX would be “complicit in a major act of war”. On October 14, SpaceX capped its military-grade Starlink service at 100 miles per hour, and a presidential adviser said Ukrainian forces got no warning, disrupting combat missions. Musk says the Pentagon sets those limits. Either way, Kyiv’s drone war now runs on a switch it does not own, and Poland, which pays for Ukraine’s subscriptions, objected.

In 2022, Ukraine took the satellites on offer because it was fighting for its life. Our situation isn’t that dire (yet), but we can no longer ignore our reliance on and intertwining with billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Andreessen, who actively hate democracy, and billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who would and have chosen fascism over paying a tiny bit more in taxes.

We cannot uninstall Peter Thiel’s Palantir from the Pentagon, where it seems to have been used to help destroy a school full of girls in Iran. You can, however, uninstall X from your morning.

Reality will keep breaking through any feed. The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents broke through every filter in January. Gas has been above $4 a gallon for a record number of days this year, and no post needs to explain why that’s bad to most Americans. So our information emergency isn’t as bad as it was in 2024, or likely will be in 2028.

But the right has proven that the information landscape is pliable, and whoever fills the vacuum wins. So they filled it. And their drive is only becoming more compulsive, swallowing CBS, TikTok, and soon CNN.

Democrats need to decide to stop at least helping them by marching their own followers into these false narrative factories.

So Democrats should send people to Bluesky and recruit there before the election. That leaves the majority on the big platforms, and you’ll have to counterprogram there, but for now it’s the only plausible alternative. There’s no chapter in The Art of War about marching your troops into your opponent’s brainwashing torture chamber because you always have.

Some will call leaving X an act of surrender. So stay and fight, if you think it helps at all. Counterprogramming is one thing. Building your permanent house in the torture chamber is another. Keep tossing metaphorical Molotov cocktails over the wall and syndicating snippets into the enemy’s kill-zones. Just stop breaking news there. Stop feeding their engagement loops with your primary labor, and stop expecting a fair shake from landlords who are rooting for your political extinction.

We have to start making the case that you cannot trust the billionaire class and their media. How are we ever going to nationalize SpaceX or kick Palantir out of our lives if we can’t even stop our congresspeople from sending people to hang out with the largest GOP donor in human history?

Ukraine found out when the speed limit arrived. We have the warning. Until every vote is counted, get your news somewhere other than X, and tell the people who follow you why.