Radlibs managing to be Chomsky fans and hardly understanding any of his critique. Incredible.
Getting kinda tired of the "lol dumb anarchist" takes that are just radlibs calling themselves anarchists because they've been set adrift from western liberalism but have read zero theory or refuse to engage with perspectives outside their own.
Props for calling this out for what it really is.
I mean I know people here like to give Chomsky shit for some of his takes, but if these sorts of people are going to be his inheritors, holy hell will we miss him.
The danger here is that reddit communities are a consensus-finding machine. If/when one side in a disagreement starts to gain ground over another side it eventually becomes the defacto opinion of the entire collective as it forces people to either assimilate to the dominant opinion or get pushed out of participation entirely. This pattern occurs on basically every subreddit I have ever watched for over a decade.
This is generally a good thing for leftist communities, especially with a modteam well educated in marxism. This is a horrifically dangerous thing literally everywhere else on reddit and it makes reddit as a whole a monumental tool for consent manufacturing and propaganda.
This is generally a good thing for leftist communities, especially with a modteam well educated in marxism. This is a horrifically dangerous thing literally everywhere else on reddit
This describes the entirety of online discourse.
This pattern occurs on basically every subreddit I have ever watched for over a decade.
Today's debate is tomorrow's "You're banned for breaking subreddit rules!"
This is generally a good thing for leftist communities, especially with a modteam well educated in marxism.
It's good for hardened groups of activists with a committed mission and the intention of inducting only other rigidly aligned followers.
Its absolutely dogshit for an open forum spanning the ideological spectrum to hash things out verbally or engage with ideas members haven't experienced before. That goes for leftist groups as much as anywhere else. Simply shoving people out who disagree only makes the inner circle more obnoxiously self-righteous. The end of that road is just Vaushites.
I'm not talking about shoving people out via bans. I'm talking about the community shoving people out via finding its way to consensus. Reddit is intentionally designed to do this, the entire basis of downvotes is to allow communities to collectively marginalise ideas which makes them pointless to even bring up, because of this you are either force to assimilate to the collective beliefs held by the community you participate in or you are forced not to participate as it would be a waste of your time and emotional energy.
Reddit is intentionally designed to do this, the entire basis of downvotes is to allow communities to collectively marginalise ideas which makes them pointless to even bring up
The iteration prior to Reddit was order by entry. Order by vote was an innovation that (ostensibly) culled a lot of the pure crap (FIRST POST!, Ad spam, shameless troll posting).
And even then, people would periodically engage with downvoted or buried content, when it was in relative good faith.
The bar for conversation online was low, but Reddit was - at least at one point - a place with some of the best discourse around in no small part thanks to the karma weighting system.
What really wrecked the site was a combination of bots and native advertisers. Once karma was properly monetized, a system that was biased-but-functional collapsed back into walls of shitposting and ad spam.
Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent about how cool it was to make people want NATO expansion.
