The right isn't just beginning to lose the 'information war' because of a few popular youtube channels. I believe that people are really just starting to grow up. Maybe I'm biased, because I went through a similar change in politics (as I'm sure many have) when I was a young teenager, but I really do believe that we're nearing a critical mass of people who have 'woken up' themselves, individually, from the current right wing bullshit we're seeing today. I think some people have a limit for the amount of right wing talking points they can be fed before they're just sick of it. I think right wing provocateurs can only milk gamergate for so long--its been years at this point. In internet political discourse the left has been on the defensive for quite a while, but I think now the tides are changing not only because of an uptick in mature, well-reasoned content creators but also in just the general public's capacity for having their discourse dominated by hate-filled right wing pseudo-intellectuals.
The far right has historically been initially successful but ultimately a failure in the long term because the type of talking points they use take much less time to convey then to disprove. There's something called the bullshit asymmetry principle which states that "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Taking advantage of this, the right has been able to manipulate quick victories before the facts needed to disprove those talking points (for example, the complete falseness of the ethnology used to justify Nazism or other race based ideology) becomes publicly accepted.
With the information age, it is true that the right has once again been able to use new methods of communication to quickly and viciously disseminate their empirically false (but to some, appealing) politics. However, the left's response time has been likewise diminished by the communication methods. The difference between the two is now so comparatively small that, if the ideological swing we're seeing holds true, the left's ability to bring reason to the discourse may have finally outpaced the right's ability to quickly seize control of governments and realize their long term political goals. Time will tell if figures such Bolsonaro, Orbán, and those who control Trump and the like are able to remain relevant long enough to complete their projects, or if this ideological swing persists.
I do fear that although the information age has potentially given the left an advantage in response time compared with the right, it has also presented the left with new forces which have the potential to subvert its message in more insidious ways. Whereas in the past capital and the state have controlled the discourse in much more overt ways, now the interests of villainous state actors like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Israel, as well as the United States for that matter have the potential to influence the public discourse covertly. Trolls, bots, and the like, (almost exclusively working for the right as those with the resources to wage this type of information warfare are always companies or states) have the potential to greatly diminish whatever gains the left may have made for itself with the advent of the internet. Hopefully our ability to recognize those types of 'infiltrators' improves or we will be faced with a truly dystopian situation.
shanc wrote
YouTubers of the world, unite!