Posting is not praxis. Yet. I have a proposal on how to fix this which involves a bit of educational theory and I’d like some feedback.
Specifically, it involves Situated Learning Theory (Lave and Wegner, 1991). Here’s a short summary for anyone interested.
These are the basic mechanics as I understanding them. Keep in mind that I have no formal educational credentialing.
- Learning takes place in “communities of practice”, which means the information we internalize in a given social setting is based on how that information is used in that setting. We learn via social norms and practical application.
- We start learning at the periphery of a community and move our way inward as time goes on. You start out as a new-timer and end up as an old-timer as you learn. These terms are specifically meant to not imply that old-timers are the givers of knowledge and that new-timers are receivers of knowledge. If anyone’s read Freire, you know about the banking model. Situated learning is opposed to the banking model just as Freire is.
- Old-timers have more experience in navigating the community, but fresh perspective from new-timers is necessary to keep a learning community alive.
- Learning is done passively in these communities. It is a byproduct of other community projects and activities.
What are the barriers to posting-as-praxis?
- Lack of organization
- Opsec concerns
- No pipeline infrastructure
- Copying all but the most egregious bourgeois design decisions without a theoretical basis for doing so.
It’s always been obvious that independent leftist social media should not optimize for profit, but the question of what to optimize for has always loomed for me. Now I think I have an answer: maximize the sorts of socially-valuable connections that make up these learning communities. If this can be done while preserving a semblance of opsec, I believe all the other barriers will fall away over time. This is my proposal, optimize leftist platforms for learning and for community.
Hexbear and SLT
If we look at Hexbear through the lens of Situated Learning Theory, we see the sorts of activities it’s old-timers participate in, like:
- Browsing bourgeois social media for content to crosspost
- Discussing various leftist theory in comments
- Engaging in meme culture of multiple scopes (world-wide, left-adjacent, and Hexbear-specific)
- Sharing tidbits of personal info
- Asking for advice or support when facing challenges
- Enforcing social norms via gossip (often about celebrities and left wing figureheads)
- Participate in offshoot discords, cytube, megathread organization, or the book club
Some of these are obviously more accessible to new-timers than others. Hexbear-specific memes and engaging with people based on personal background in particular can be difficult. Same goes for a lot of the satellite communities from the last point. They aren’t exactly included in an orientation packet and could easily be missed.
Furthermore, it’s not obvious how someone who has radicalized enough on bourgeois social media to end up here should proceed. It seems that the end of the pipeline is just… more posting and being angry all the time. We can’t partner with physical orgs because they need the plausible deniability that comes with distance from a pile of users yelling about how billionaires need to be shot in Central Park. At least, they can’t direct people here. And anyone asking which group to join will get a bunch of infighting about which group is revolutionary enough when the real answer varies mostly based on location. This should all be more automated and streamlined by now.
There’s also a tension in telling people that doing physical praxis involves logging off and grillpilling. I think there’s a balance that could be struck where people can go out and do praxis in meatspace and come back to report with their peers to learn. Independent leftist social media needs to optimize for these sorts of interactions. A need arises and people who are in the community should be able to connect the people with the need and the people with the resources to meet that need. Someone needs help starting up an org and they ought to be able to be quickly connected with people who have the experience to help.
As of now, there’s no good mechanism to encourage sharing of useful information and creating guides for newcomers. The amount of legitimate activities for newcomers around here to do are minimal and they aren’t systematically pointed out to new users.
So this is partially a design problem and partially about understanding what our goal is in the first place. But I believe that the book club in particular is a good place to start. Book choices and proposed and chosen collectively and learning is largely participatory. Things like this are a good start, but I think we can go much further in this direction.
commie school. It's free and open to everyone. Also a YouTube channel and discord if you want to learn without actually having to interact with meatbags operating in meatspace
Still need to remake the post since all the old images got yeeted a few months back
Oh right. Couldn’t hurt to regularly promote it as well. Maybe a weekly or monthly post outlining some of the “extracurriculars” around here
It's quite literally weekly, Tuesdays or Thursdays at 4 eastern. Tonight's Lenin's monumental 1901 work "What is to be Done."
@marxisthayaca I’d love feedback from your or any book club members
Your summary of situated learning is on point and I agree with the premise of your post. I think the book club is a fundamental radicalization tool and having these discussions is what keeps us going. The challenge is recruitment, time management, and the motivation to finish the readings for every member of the club.
However, I would hesitate to advocate for more praxis posting, admitting, or organizing for communist activity in a public forum is against the idea of opsec.
I think if the book club is helpful in any way, is that the people that truly make changes do not sit in forums and argue the nitty gritty of leftist ideology or interpretations but they go out and do things. And that praxis => theory any day of the week. It is also giving people an understanding of what those theories say *straight from the tap" versus these reinterpretations or revisionist approaches that we hear on social media because a lot of leftist social media is just a bunch of people regurgitating memes and playing telephone with said memes — how memes evolve from "Social Democracy killed Rosa Luxemburg" to "Bernie killed Rosa".
Once someone is radicalized enough, their job is to a) radicalize others and b) organize en mass. This can be done through orgs and unions, advocacy groups, and talking to actual people. Radicalizing others is creating similar book clubs, conveying messages through artistic pursuits, or doing serious and thorough investigations of a problem and advocating for solutions (in short writing a book on theory) or giving speeches.
My question is are we still growing, and would we want to funnel people into activities that they might not be ready or motivated to engage with, such as reading dry books for the sake of knowledge alone.
However, I would hesitate to advocate for more praxis posting, admitting, or organizing for communist activity in a public forum is against the idea of opsec.
A technical solution to this could be to allow praxis-posts to be anonymous, ie. you check some checkmark and nobody will be able to see your username.
It would be possible to not store usernames directly, but to hash them and store the list of hashes for the purpose of banning users. Although if an instance is small enough that would be trivially easy to brute force
Oh yeah ideally everyone would be using a VPN and not reusing usernames but even that’s not a cure-all. The site would likely need to increase its security culture
Having private communities and instances would also be a big help. I believe upstream Lemmy is working on that
Once someone is radicalized enough, their job is to a) radicalize others and b) organize en mass. This can be done through orgs and unions, advocacy groups, and talking to actual people. Radicalizing others is creating similar book clubs, conveying messages through artistic pursuits, or doing serious and thorough investigations of a problem and advocating for solutions (in short writing a book on theory) or giving speeches.
My question is are we still growing, and would we want to funnel people into activities that they might not be ready or motivated to engage with, such as reading dry books for the sake of knowledge alone.
I think ideally we’d see more similarly productive activities and keep the membership of those activities permeable. There’s no enforcement of people finishing a book other than the pings and the features, which are themselves examples of features which are useful in the way I’m describing even if crudely. A larger variety would help
To tell you the truth, I would love if people were reading these books and making slogans or propaganda posters. The 1930s communist party list of demands still belongs in the American discourse in 2022. The fact that almost nobody knows what they were demanding, and how they went about demanding it is a clear sign of the effective communist repression and red scare that has been going on in this country since the 1940s.
More organized sharing of that propaganda would provide a great incentive as well. The idea that I could post OC and it would get posted all over Reddit and Twitter and Facebook could create some a neat culture. As of now this happens “organically”, but more calls to action on stuff and maybe a discussion group in !agitprop@hexbear.net would make for a good short-term solution
I’m done editing and reformatting for now. Thanks for the pin!
I also think you're dead on about the book club, that's always been my go-to on campus for expanding on initial radicalization and starting people down the pipeline to actually understanding things. Focused discussion is extremely key for moving people from being mad and posting hard to actually understanding why they're mad, what to actually be mad at, and understanding how to become an ambassador for other newcomers to leftism.
