The Dystopic Leftist Youth of Reddit and Facebook – Dark(ish) Web – Medium

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I don't know how is written and I just recently got into theory so don't judge me

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no
theyre almost polar opposites
this is bait

kek

Also Google blocked us so unless you got bing or yahoo as a default, you aren't going to find us

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Really?
Are they?
Is it?

seems legit

muh dank memes aren't that interesting anymore. They merely reflect the cynicism and meaninglessness of late capitalist culture. Just like callout culture, meme culture is based on detachment and a smug sense of superiority. Most internet leftists are hopelessly neurotic self hating people. The unrestrained anger of the right seems like a better fit for meme culture. If we are to win, we'll have to pull all the stops and make full use of the media available to us. We have to shock people out of the state of narcissism and self absorption that capitalism fosters among its subjects. That means we'll have to go beyond the mask of irony and beyond the walking-on-tiptoes politically correct neuroses of facebook page admins, abolishing the distinction between poetry and propaganda and art and everyday life.

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So…we'll have to be…sincere?
Please no don't make me leave my irony mind castle

Sincerity is literally impossible in the modern period. Even Baudelaire recognized that.

meme 'irony' lacks the bite of real irony, it's a pseudo self aware simulacrum of the ironic, nothing but a cowardly mechanism of evasion. When brands such as Wendy's succeed in imitating the language of basic bitch 'irony' you know it's time to go beyond that somehow. It isn't going to be easy, it's up to our generation to discover new forms of communication technology AKA poetry.

We have to become unironic. All that you have hitherto said ironically you must now proclaim unsmiling.

What exactly is callout culture?

We shouldn't adopt meme culture, first and foremost. Memes don't matter, getting people to actually read is what is important, and to do that we need simple, clear, and professional looking infographics with citations and further reading.

Someone says something like "Why do black people commit so much crime?" on facebook and you tell them how shitty and stupid and wrong they are and then share screencaps of you doing so for liberal asspats.

Memes are an important component. My friends that have kids and work multiple jobs don't have as much time as they'd like to read theory. They collapse exhausted into bed and browse their facebook or whatever feeds and laugh at commie memes.

But scattered among the memes are links to articles or essays or whatever that they share. Comment sections too can have people in them discussing the content of the memes or arguing about theory.

They've probably never even heard of Cornel West or Lucy Parsons or Daniel De Leon before, but they scroll past images like these and they like what they hear and so they share it or like it or whatever, but they start to know these names, these words, these ideas, and when they have the time or money or whatever, they go and try to learn more.

Memes aren't an end in themselves but it's foolish to discard them. If you want people to read, they've got to know not only what they should be reading, but what they want to read. Memes are the tasting tray of intellectual dissemination, which is more than essential for people that only have time and energy for a bite and nibble.

I think this speaks more to the decimation of the intellectual life of the working class, for the issue isn't about 'time'. If it was, those detail labourers working 12 hours a day in a factory or manufactory wouldn't have had the time to read as much as they did. There was a population of politically radical self-educated workers, of significant size, in the 19th and early 20th centuries that facilitated the great workers movements of those times, despite enduring far worse conditions than any Western worker today.

The difference is in the sheer amount of stimulation readily accessible; so that when you come home from work the first impulse is to wind down with some trash on TV or facebook instead of a book. The job of the modern left is to popularise this great literary tradition we've inherited; a tradition intended to be read by the masses.

That's remarkably well put, user.

You're wrong again. Do you think all those people got their education about communism just from reading books? In the 19th century, when the average person was lucky to finish grammar school? Point at any of your books, and behind it will be a tremendous amount of context and information that for most people will be completely alien. Put something by Noam Chomsky into the hands of someone that hasn't read anything more substantial than the sports page and it might as well be Greek.

Socialism wasn't spread by giving people homework. It was spread in beer halls and taverns and churches and universities, where people go to talk and relax and gripe about their problems. They didn't catch on because of people listing off obscure 19th century tomes for them to read, but because the ideas conveyed by these intellectuals were transmitted through and synthesized by people familiar with their problems and needs. You can't question The Manifesto on particulars relevant to coal miners in West Virginia. If by some stroke one of these people happened to be in a library and they pulled Grundrisse off the shelf, flipped to a random page, and started reading, their eyes would glaze over almost instantly. All these books only have a theoretical value if people know what's inside of them, and for that they're going to need someone that can show them the way to what they want to know, and contextualize what is almost certainly going to be alien information.

You might not like it, by internet forums are the beer halls of the 21st century, and memes are the cultural tokens that convey and synthesize this relevant information down for people unfamiliar. Yes, people should be reading these books, but first they have to want to read them, and for that to happen people have to know what they're about and why these ancient books are relevant enough to them that they should spend the single hour of quiet time that they have reading dense literature about grain prices and the need to abolish God.

Make people feel like they're in a classroom and you'll be wasting your time until the sun burns out. Make information sharing fun and cultivate their interest and they'll do the most arduous intellectual heavy lifting with a smile on their face and come back for seconds.

no they aren't lol

yes they are

whoever has the dankest spiciest meems wins

Well I guess I got a start with my ironic accelerationism since my home island is literally going to go bankrupt in about 10 years

except no they aren't

ok