The New Chaos Marxism

[Cramulus]

Our old friend Dolores LaPichio has a new post at her Chaos Marxism blog:

https://chaosmarxism.blogspot.com/2019/12/theses-on-new-chaos-marxism.html

I think there's a lot of interesting stuff here. Dolores is thinking about the future, and about how the left can reconfigure its strategy at the level of we shitbird individuals posting on social media.

I mean, a lot of us have scratched our heads at this one -- how the vanishing of the forums resulted in all the active RAW and Discordian discussion groups being hosted on facebook -- where they gradually overflow with right wing assholes who crowd out any of the good shit. This week, it's all memes of Greta Thunberg with hitler staches shopped on.

So that's the state of the union -- "boomer memes crowd out dank memes" -- now what?

Dolores suggests we need to think of the online community in different terms. The community affects the consciousness of those who participate in it. When this forum was hopping, it changed a lot of our lives. That's a good example of a praxis group - an online community which bridges the gap between theory and action.

And in order for a group to not get gradually transformed into a jerk circle of assholes, the group should ask something from the participants - that they make an attempt to smell their own bullshit. Easier said than done!


anyway, give the post a read, tell me how it strikes you

[Doktor Howl]

Thing is, you get the kind of group you allow.

And universal tolerance in this day and age means you're up to your ass in fascists while hand-wringing about the rights of those fascists.  And if you could get fascists to smell their own bullshit, they wouldn't BE fascists.  They'd be something else entirely.

If you want a space to talk about things, you have to kick the Nazis out on sight.  No argument, no appeals to fairness, whatever.  Their right to bloviate may exist, but nobody says you have to let it exist in your living room.

That being said, off to read the post.

[Doktor Howl]

Okay, that was top notch and you should ask her for permission for us to post it on the front page.

She is bang on the money.

[Cramulus]

Okay, that was top notch and you should ask her for permission for us to post it on the front page.

She is bang on the money.

[Doktor Howl]

Okay, that was top notch and you should ask her for permission for us to post it on the front page.

She is bang on the money.

Cain or Faust, can you make this happen?

[Doktor Howl]

Point 3B is particularly accurate.

[altered]

That really was a good fucking read. Damn.

[Faust]

Okay, that was top notch and you should ask her for permission for us to post it on the front page.

She is bang on the money.

Cain or Faust, can you make this happen?

No problem
I'll have a look when I get home

[The Johnny]

The huge problem is that people are literally lazy as fuck, don't read things longer than two paragraphs if it isn't a news-article format.

So to engage in "rational discussions" is almost impossible because people lack the attention span.

And if you try to express something compromising to the lazy fuck format, you're degrading your message to slogans and images, which just gets flooded out by all the vast quantities of garbage.

[Cramulus]

I keep thinking about searchlores.org -- it was this forum-community many years ago. Hosted a ton of essays around this broad network of topics. Much like PD, it was a very engaged, creative community in its time.

The website looks like it's from 1995. That's on purpose. It's meant to deter people who are going to judge it based on its aesthetics.

I kinda recall the Barbelith forums were like that too -- purposefully antiquated, favored long-form posts.

so there's hope...

I also think that the ultra short-attention span engagement is a function of UX -- it's baked into any site with a bottomless newsfeed. But maybe it won't be like this forever.

different structures lead to different communities...

LOL, can you imagine THE RETURN OF THE INTERNET FORUM?



I've had this daydream for a while now -- indulge me in this train of thought


imagine Discordian cabals meeting up in person to write holy texts

and then each cabal mails its holy texts via snail mail to other people in the network -- just like the Discordians of old did -- call it a POEE 2.0

And the only rule is that the texts are not allowed to be posted on the Internet, they have to only exist in meatspace. When you read them, it's a physical experience which is isolated from newsfeed psychology. And the ideal setting to read these materials is in the physical presence of your cabal. And by yourself is OK too, after all, it can be a 1-member cabal. But just don't ingest that stuff in the same way you ingest "normal content".


Think of this communication style - which was once practiced by Discordians of old - as its own medium

And part of that medium's message is to unite theory and practice. To move the body in Discordian circles.




and yeah, I know, this is a boomer idea. HOW ABOUT WE GO BACK TO WRITING LETTERS TO EACH OTHER BY HAND AND USING ROTARY PHONES AND WATCHING THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW, NOW THERE WAS A GOOD SHOWMAN.


look, it's not meant for everybody

who wants to talk to everybody? russian bots, that's who.

[Doktor Howl]

and then each cabal mails its holy texts via snail mail to other people in the network -- just like the Discordians of old did -- call it a POEE 2.0

And the only rule is that the texts are not allowed to be posted on the Internet, they have to only exist in meatspace.

See, I never would see it, aside from already knowing about it, since I now more or less JUST use an e-reader.

THAT BEING SAID, the reason Putin never gets hacked is that he has a room full of people using old Selectric typewriters.

[Frontside Back]

HOW ABOUT WE GO BACK TO WRITING LETTERS TO EACH OTHER BY HAND AND USING ROTARY PHONES AND WATCHING THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW, NOW THERE WAS A GOOD SHOWMAN.

Are you saying we can beat the fascists by going back to the Good Old Days?

I think slow communication is stupid and for smart people. Most of us didn't know how to read quite recently. Meanwhile everyone's getting stupider, because world around them is getting smarter. We are here to process tiny abstracted crumbs of information and pass them on. Real thoughts are happening waaay over somewhere else.

[The Johnny]

Adding to my point about everyone being lazy fucks, one could add the stuff about Roger's recent thread... this arrogance about assuming you're in the right from the start.

Everyone's too busy preaching, to the point that they took our jobs... i think memetic warfare is a lost front, now we have to be good listeners, and from a deep understanding of what is being said, throw one or two good and precise punches to the gut, that's the only window of opportunity you will ever get.

[Doktor Howl]

It's also worth mentioning that memes either make people laugh, or page down if they don't agree with them.

They're just a way of shouting, not of magically getting people to join your side.

[The Johnny]

It's also worth mentioning that memes either make people laugh, or page down if they don't agree with them.

They're just a way of shouting, not of magically getting people to join your side.

You would be disgusted by the ammount of memes I scroll thru every single day (it's deliberately the most brain-dead hobby i could come up with so all my actual mental energy goes to my intellectual work).

They're pure poison to the mind and the comments are even worse. Memes aren't even about what is considered funny anymore, those days are long gone in the past, theyre the primordial soup of ideology and as close as you'll get to experience the unconscious of regressive shitlords.

People upvote or downvote not what even truly elicits laughter, but a slight blow from their nostrils, they upvote cosplay girls that satisfy their infantile nostalgia and fixations, they upvote their regressive statements for some type of circle jerk confirmation bias, toilet humour, liberal bashing, sexism...

Memes have become rallying cries - everyone's become immune to the infiltration by the meme virus, memes don't provoke cognitive dissonance anymore, they're just amplifications of what already is entrenched.

(I gotta go to sleep, I gave it my best shot  )