I think it is a needed step towards people getting rid of brainworms and starting on a path of real organizing, theory and the material part. I can only speak about this anecdotally, but in my immediate circle in a society that is very hostile to communism I have witnessed several people go down the rabbit hole of deprogramming and it has started from these memes and articles every time. And eventually leads to real organizing. Not for everyone, but for some. In general it makes the attitude towards communist ideas less hostile again, or I think it can do at least that.
The Internet as a new tool of information sharing is powerful and I also think this explains the widespread moral panic about mis-/disinformation in Western media and states and also the capitalist drive to use of LLMs to fill the internet with actual bs to disarm this information in our current time. In a way capitalism has created the tool of its own demise by going down the road of globalism. This is why they want to shut it down and put us back in the national/Western bubbles.
Looking at my information space in the 80s, 90s and even 00s it was so wildly different that it's hard to put into words now. Finding the kind of content and agitprop I can easily find now would have been very hard unless I would be connected to someone who is already there. In a place like this, that would have been very unlikely to ever happen. Communism here has for decades been existing on the very edges of society with small paper magazines that have a circulation of 100 people. Without these memes I likely would not be here nor would I be looking to join a communist party in my country.
The road from starting to ask questions to being actually organizing in the world can take years, everyone goes over a kind of process of deprogramming that does not happen over night. It can start from a good meme when conditions are right and looking at the world it seems like people are pretty ready for a counterstory. This space can also be filled with reactionary and populist ideas and it already has, so we better fill it with ideas of communism instead. Saying none of this matters is like saying what the mainstream media says doesn't matter, yet we see how much it does control the masses every day of our lives.
I am personally assessing how far folks are on this spectrum on their current takes on things like China, the USSR and Ukraine for example. I for one think that if the curiosity and content is there, this will have material consequences in the world in the long run. It can also mainstream communism which to me matters.
I could not imagine a channel like Second Thought existing even five years ago with the kind of views it gets. And being that "ok" to talk about in so called mainstream spaces. This does make the right kind of people think about their position and what they "know" about history and the world. If nobody voices the counterstories, how can they manifest into anything? And it needs to be voiced to enough people, online spaces are great for that.
I think it is a needed step towards people getting rid of brainworms and starting on a path of real organizing, theory and the material part. I can only speak about this anecdotally, but in my immediate circle in a society that is very hostile to communism I have witnessed several people go down the rabbit hole of deprogramming and it has started from these memes and articles every time. And eventually leads to real organizing. Not for everyone, but for some. In general it makes the attitude towards communist ideas less hostile again, or I think it can do at least that.
The Internet as a new tool of information sharing is powerful and I also think this explains the widespread moral panic about mis-/disinformation in Western media and states and also the capitalist drive to use of LLMs to fill the internet with actual bs to disarm this information in our current time. In a way capitalism has created the tool of its own demise by going down the road of globalism. This is why they want to shut it down and put us back in the national/Western bubbles.
Looking at my information space in the 80s, 90s and even 00s it was so wildly different that it's hard to put into words now. Finding the kind of content and agitprop I can easily find now would have been very hard unless I would be connected to someone who is already there. In a place like this, that would have been very unlikely to ever happen. Communism here has for decades been existing on the very edges of society with small paper magazines that have a circulation of 100 people. Without these memes I likely would not be here nor would I be looking to join a communist party in my country.
The road from starting to ask questions to being actually organizing in the world can take years, everyone goes over a kind of process of deprogramming that does not happen over night. It can start from a good meme when conditions are right and looking at the world it seems like people are pretty ready for a counterstory. This space can also be filled with reactionary and populist ideas and it already has, so we better fill it with ideas of communism instead. Saying none of this matters is like saying what the mainstream media says doesn't matter, yet we see how much it does control the masses every day of our lives.
I am personally assessing how far folks are on this spectrum on their current takes on things like China, the USSR and Ukraine for example. I for one think that if the curiosity and content is there, this will have material consequences in the world in the long run. It can also mainstream communism which to me matters.
I could not imagine a channel like Second Thought existing even five years ago with the kind of views it gets. And being that "ok" to talk about in so called mainstream spaces. This does make the right kind of people think about their position and what they "know" about history and the world. If nobody voices the counterstories, how can they manifest into anything? And it needs to be voiced to enough people, online spaces are great for that.