On the one hand, perhaps due to my own selfishness, it feels good to be validated in my belief that most of the shit coming out of Ukraine that reaches western audiences has been either blown way out of proportion or is just entirely made up and that we have, by and large, resisted the propaganda wave; it would suck for us to have to do yet another "I guess we were wrong and we need to take another L here".

On the other, the ease at which Ukrainian narrative has propagated throughout social media and the western world generally is very concerning and, as I've said before, has killed any lingering hope within me that these online institutions can be used for good. China's firewall has been fully justified - you need to create an online sphere that is disconnected from western propaganda and is controlled by your own country and people, or the vast resources and psychological techniques that at the west's disposal can and will infect the minds of people into directly opposing their self-interest and genuinely does create that now cliche Orwellian world where you are told to forget what you know and ignore the evidence of your own senses. Except I'm not sure if we can really do that.

There's the beginnings of that project with, well, this website, and sites like MeansTV, and I genuinely appreciate the efforts of comrades to create these spaces where you can take a sanity break from the chaotic and awful world outside, but any attempt that tried to genuinely supplant reddit or twitter or youtube would be crushed without a second thought to "freedom of speech", so we're kinda inherently limited to only ever being a relatively small leftist offshoot even in the best case scenario. So the offline is the only arena where true progress can be made. Which we all instinctively knew from the beginning, but sometimes you think you're making progress with libs and making them anti-capitalist and then all the liberatory air gets sucked out of the room and they're back to baying for the blood of foreigners, and then you realize that even if you give a lib the initial jolt to make them realize that things suck and it doesn't necessarily have to be this way, they're going to be herded off towards the radlibs and the twitch streamers and any revolutionary energy will be channeled into "more realistic" aims that not only don't help people, but ultimately reinforce capitalism. Which I guess is what Fischer was talking about.