Submitted by redjake in Anarchism

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.

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shanc wrote

YouTubers of the world, unite!

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rot wrote

neat.

welcome in

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kore wrote

I think you are severely underestimating the power of recommendation algorithms. They have no bias, and it is a strange quirk of human psychology that we are attracted to extreme content. It is very easy to be made a fascist by the rabbit hole of infotainment. It is very difficult to seek out and critically analyze information to give one a balanced view of the situation. Take the anti-vaccination or flat-earth movement. People were totally manipulated. Or that Jordan Peterson guy. This is the case with any sort of propaganda campaign, even pre-internet.

The solution to this in my opinion is twofold: the first is to move towards platforms that are decentralized and not for profit, where the motive to stay is more driven by community than by addictive content. I see raddle as sort of like this. I don't really enjoy the bombardment of information, but I do find value in talking with other users here.

The second solution is to encourage cognitive security, a term I learned from /u/plast's essay available here. It is not enough to "hope" that our "ability to recognize those types of 'infiltrators' improves." Our ability to do that is already abysmal, has been since language existed, and requires extremely hard work to improve.

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videl wrote

What well-reasoned content creators?

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ziq wrote (edited )

I can't think of any. The only "anarchists" I've seen on youtube are copfuckers who think "hierarchy is good, actually."

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shanc wrote (edited )

According to OP, it's something to do with 'reason' and 'objective truth'. So if you're not a lefty leftist you must be an unreasonable liar, ziq.

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shanc wrote

The far right party where I live has many anti-capitalist policies. Across the pond, the neo-Nazi 'Traditionalist Workers Party' was explicitly anti-capitalist before its hilarious demise. Also, does that put the various theocratic governments of the ME on the left? And can the left only be defined as being anti something, not for? I think your analysis needs more analysis, comrade.

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