This is just a vibe, so take it for what it’s worth.

But personally I feel like I’ve been experiencing, witnessing, or hearing less stories about people managing to “deprogram”/“convert”/“change” people in terms of their political ideology. Actually I’ve been hearing more of the opposite, accounts of people regressing: “A year ago I talked my racist uncle into being a Bernie bro but in the last 3 months he’s gone all the way back to QAnon.” That sort of thing.

It doesn’t seem to be just me, I’ve seen a lot of “Debate Bros” start to have increasingly strict rules about who they debate, or just abandon the whole protect of debating all together to just stream to their existing fans. Some (one in particular funny-clown-hammer ) openly say it’s because they fell like their opponents have consolidated their base and there’s nobody reachable anymore.

And that’s what it feels like, consolidation. Echo chambers have become more effective, it almost fells like people have scripted retorts to whatever talking point might get thrown at them. Fuck, “Israel” just straight up as academies on how to do this shit. It’s like the internet has just perfected rhetoric so much that once you pull someone in they’re just locked into it forever.

Idk, I just feel like everyone who is a Chud/turbo-lib/Succ/Tankie RN is probably gonna die one at this point. Every ideology is just a Skinner box now.

Edit: And another thought, it is a bit ironic, I recall us Commies were the first ones to be saying “one-on-one debate is a often worthless performance, and most people who get too deep into Far Right ideology are probably a lost cause and not worth wasting energy to reach,” and everyone giving us shit for it and acting all noble about how the market place of ideas could fix everything. Now post-Trump everyone seems to be realizing we were right and Libs and Chuds alike are abandoning the whole affair.

Edit 2: I wrote this while drinking box wine and listening to Post-Punk, sorry. What provoked this was learning that “Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky?” quote by Lenin we all love is probs fake. Made me think about what truth there may be in it even if it isn’t actually real.

Edit 3: just woke up and Jesus I made some big ass grammatical errors in this post. Fucking box wine!

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    10 days ago

    Same.

    I think there’s a distinction we can make between growing politically from our experiences and reading theory vs growing politically because of looking at posts and yelling about politics on the internet. If there ever was a time when the internet changed people’s politics that time has passed. We are now in an era where the internet can only reaffirm people’s politics.

    Now I listen to audiobooks at work. Just got through a few of Fanon’s works, gonna check out “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” next