Anti-anarchists sometimes like to accuse "anarchists" of having terrible opinions, and then if you're like "I'm an anarchist and that's not true" they say "Oh, I mean internet anarchists."
I've seen some of you mirroring this rhetoric and complaining about "internet anarchists." This is playing into anti-anarchist rhetoric that discredits anarchism and divides the movement. You don't have to prove you're one of the good ones.
We used to call those people "baby anarchists." They weren't pretenders who we had to distance ourselves from, they were uneducated people who needed some pointers on things like cooption, anti-imperialism, lesser evilism and the non-profit industrial complex.
Don't distance yourself from internet anarchists, educate baby anarchists.
On a related but separate issue, I personally think it’s a bit naive to assume all those anti-imperialist takes are simply baby anarchists who need further educating, and not the work of dedicated astroturfers. The same goes for the bizarre “patriotic socialist” crap that’s seemingly being pushed on the ML side. I realize I might come off as paranoid, but I just think the level of psychological manipulation that happens online is probably worse than we realize and something we should at least pay attention to. After all, it’s not as if we haven’t seen this kind of manipulation before.
The CIA did a ton of shit with waay less impact, so no, you are not paranoic.
Poison the well with braindead takes is not only effective vut they must be having a LOT of fun. Imagine being the shitstain who gets paid six figures to post about how bed times for children are dystopian.
the "everything is CIA" meme makes me want to blow my brains out, and in that regard it's more fedpilled than any particular twitter rose emoji idiot's hot take on whether it's okay to shoplift. if there was a vital, thrumming popular left that was doing a good job of educating agitating and organizing the masses and something like class consciousness were more widespread, i would find it noteworthy and suspicious that an obviously idiotic, contradictory, and discursively destructive point were gaining traction. but i live in the united states some 30 years after the destruction and pillaging of the soviet union. i was radicalized by tumblr posts when i just as easily could have been radicalized by 4chan posts. most of my participation in politics is arguing on sites that profit off my use of those sites, no matter what i say or do, and i am a perfectly typical internet user. i know how fucking deranged this state of affairs makes people, and i know we can all be fucking idiots without having to be get a paycheck from the FBI.
I certainly don’t think “everything is CIA”, and I’ve had plenty of wrong/bad opinions myself, so I get that there are real people out who fit what OP is describing. I’m just saying that it is well known that powerful interests use various means to try to shape online discourse their direction, whether it’s the CIA, FBI, police departments/unions, corporations, political groups, etc. In particular, when there’s a clear narrative being pushed from multiple places and especially from “influencers”, it’s worth considering that there might be more behind it than just bad opinions, even if there are also many real bad opinions out there.