Yesterday I was listening to a podcast when one of the hosts was like: "ask yourself: are you happy with your life? Is this the way you wanted your life to be? Are you satisfied?"

Immediately I thought: fuck no, and thought about the hours I had spent that day posting leftwing memes on social media. Almost no one engaged with anything I posted. I was basically screaming into a void. I have a little under 700 followers on twitter and about 600 facebook "friends."

Regardless, a total of about twenty people interact with things I post on my TL. All of those people are already socialists. If I attack a liberal on twitter, I am almost always ignored. If I attack a conservative, a bunch of chuds answer, and can actually argue literally for days until they block me in frustration.

In all the years I've been using social media as a socialist, how many people have I converted to the cause? Probably less than five, if even that many—at least that I know of. For a few weeks last summer during the uprising, people seemed more open to socialism than I've ever seen. Then that opening closed up again.

My own conversion from liberalism to socialism began when someone on reddit (probably r/politics) directed me to r/chapotraphouse. I thought you guys were hilarious and refreshing, and I took you seriously when you ordered me to read theory. But I actually don't remember who told me to go there and I never thanked that person. The ground on which those seeds fell was not exactly fallow, but who knows where I would be right now if I had never discovered the dirtbag left and through that, Marxism-Leninism?

Hexbear is much better because you guys actually interact with me, but everyone here is already a convert. We should definitely take advantage of social media to spread the message of socialism, since the powers that be definitely take social media extremely seriously, but what can we hope to do when so many people ignore or ban or block or mute us, when the algorithm may even be sabotaging us?

I know some of you are probably thinking that I should organize in the real world: I've spent years doing that, and although it's actually much more rewarding even if you don't get anywhere (I've barely made any impact at all), it's still incredibly frustrating. I live in an extremely rural area and it's hard for me to justify organizing in person during a pandemic, although I'm going to get vaxxed soon so I may give it another go (while I continue to wear a mask and social distance).

I guess this is just kind of a "sir, this is a Arby's" rant. Anyway, when I got home after listening to that podcast I deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps on my phone. Already I can feel them pulling me back, though. The reasonable thing is to say that I should limit my time there to half an hour a day or something, but it's like telling a gambling addict to spend only half an hour pumping coins into slot machines.