YOU are speaking!
As many are aware, there has been a lot of site drama in the past week or so. This is NOT a post to discuss that, and I ask that you keep all serious discussion about it on the pinned posts it belongs in. What I am looking to do here is ask the community what they would like to see from c/agitprop going forward.
There have been ongoing discussions on Hexbear regarding making more serious posts, having a place for effortposting to get noticed (and thus incentivizing more to be made, nobody likes spending hours working on en effortpost for 5 upbears), and having a more focused place for less casual/more academic discussion. The nature of this comm, or at least what the intended purpose was supposed to be upon its inception, was to give Hexbear users a place to produce and find agitprop for use in everyday discussions. Given these two statements, last week I made an impromptu U.S. Election response/commentary resource Megathread here on c/agitprop. I figured that perhaps this was the place to open up to users for less casual/more serious analysis and discussion regarding the U.S. election, like… for actual traditional agitprop purposes.
The post was a huge success, and the community received tons of high-effort posting from individuals into the Megathread posting their own takes on the U.S. election, many references and direct links to highlight other Hexbear user’s great effortposts elsewhere on this site, and good resources from outside of Hexbear. In my opinion, this post/style of post could be a useful and engaging format for effortpost generation/congregation of larger news events in the future.
Now finally for the purpose of this post: What would you like to see from c/agitprop going forward? Feedback on the U.S. Election response/commentary resource Megathread is of course appreciated, and I’d love to hear any ideas regarding how it went/if you (dis)liked it/holding a similar thread in the future, but please do not limit your input based only on what you have seen so far from this comm. This community is, of course, only what we make it, so any and all feedback is greatly appreciated and goes a long way towards improving everybody’s user experience.
Below I will list a few ideas I have seen floated by the community for c/agitprop in the past. Additionally, I will try to keep this list updated with any ideas that are provided in the comments of this post as well in order to highlight them for discussion.
•Effortpost Megathread for larger news events (frequency/guidelines for “larger” TBD here)
•Agitprop Megathread running parallel to the Weekly News Megathread for more nuanced discussion/analysis to be used both on Hexbear and elsewhere
•Ongoing Agitprop workshop/resource thread to organize the Hexbear community’s many skills and have relevant, ready-to-go agitprop for current events ready for dissemination outside of this site
•Reference guide for left/left-adjacent spaces to crosspost agitprop material to
•Agitprop field report for returning to Hexbear (potentially contest style) and seeing where agitprop is reaching the widest audience and receiving the most engagement
•”Quick Draw” style + up to date archive of good agitprop in order to quickly debunk common talking points
•Keeping a calendar of known upcoming events to help prepare agitprop ahead of time
•Highlighting past major events or public figures to conduct a postmortem effortpost analysis
This is not a request but merely a suggestion to consider if there is capacity within the mod team:
A calendar of important upcoming political and agitational(?) events
The way I see it, we did well (special mention to comrade Cowbee for being the exemplar) upon the Harris defeat/Trump win but I think as radicals we could, and honestly should, do better - we knew the election was coming up. We knew it was going to be Trump or Harris. I can't think of anyone who wasn't aware that this was happening. But we waited to act until after the election results came out.
Why? Should we not be ahead of the game and preparing our efforts at agitating prior to these known events? We were all talking about the upcoming election here, myself included so don't think that this crit isn't extending inwards and I'm not kicking myself (especially for waiting until now to raise this issue), but nobody put their hand up to say "Maybe this very large and world-affecting political event where we know exactly when it will occur should be used as an opportunity to agitate and educate, and maybe we should prepare for it?". I didn't. I can and should do better.
But what we can do is learn and
groangrow from this, to organise better. (I'm frustrated with myself at the thought of me talking big about agitation/education/organising and not stopping to ask myself how to do those things in preparation for a moment that matters and usually only comes around once every four years.) And I think it would be great if the mod team would consider a calendar of upcoming known events at first so we can organise our efforts around them. Don't know the results of the presidential election? That's fine. How many outcomes did you anticipate from it? We can organise around one outcome, so it's not like we couldn't organise around an event where there are two known outcomes with just a little bit more effort.I think if this is a success and it doesn't put undue burden on the modteam, this idea could be expanded and we could consider adopting a newsmedia model. Those ghouls have pieces ready to hit the presses in a matter of minutes for when a prominent figure dies (or, in Chomsky's case, survives). Surely we can do the same while probably inspiring a lot of optimism because we will literally be plotting the inevitable demise of our most hated political enemies. If there's a lot of agitational contributions on a megathread for George W Bush's death for example, when that hellspawn finally kicks the bucket and relieves the world of his sinister presence it would be a simple matter to dredge up the old megathread and start putting all the turboposting to good use. What, is that sick scumbag going to achieve anything else notable in his detestable existence? Unlikely. He's done. We can put together his
eulogydiseulogy now and gleefully await his death.Doesn't that sound kinda fun? We would get to celebrate his death twice, if you look at it from the right perspective!
(Sorry for being so negative and critical. I know this is off-brand for me. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed and maybe it's because I'm so disappointed in myself that it's dimmed my typically gentle and encouraging tone. I still love all my comrades
)Edit: I realised I have more to say about this and it's really about driving the key message of my post home. I have worked to support comrade Cowbee's efforts through DMs. He generously offered to credit me in his post but I refused, so if you are asking why he's taking all the credit it's because I was supporting him for the sake of helping my comrade's efforts and I'm not interested in glory or self-aggrandizement. So don't come for him because he stole no work, I gave him my input explicitly denying credit, and come for me instead I guess?
So when Cowbee made his first draft post, I checked over it and realised that I had a lot of those works uploaded as audiobooks on TankieTube. I made a list and started filling it out to find that I had all bar ~3 in audiobook format, almost all of them professional ones, so I collected up a list and contacted him to invite him to add this to his post. Obviously audiobooks increase accessibility and that's a big thing for me with regards to disability justice/liberation but lots of people don't sit down and read these days while plenty can be enticed to listen to audiobooks.
I fleshed out the audiobook offerings as much as possible and that's where you see the addition of those to Cowbee's post. But I was scrambling to make it happen. I'm not complaining, I'll do the work where the work is required but if I wasn't ahead on this with all the audiobooks downloaded and upped to TT and categorised etc. then it would have been an immense scramble to achieve this. Luckily it wasn't this time but by rights it shouldn't ever be a scramble.
The upshot of linking people to TT is that there's a lot of audiobooks of theory and more agitation/education works and adjacent works available there which aren't available anywhere else on the clearnet as far as I'm aware (and I go trawling through the Russian side of the internet and I dip my toe in the Chinese side of the internet so believe me when I say I cast a wide net in this regard). By directing people to head to TT , there's a good chance that they will undergo some self-agitation and autodidactic efforts as they start branching out and bookmarking other interesting audiobooks and documentaries and the like that they will discover over there for themselves. The place is a huge resource and tbh even we are sleeping on it. I say this without intending to drag Cowbee, the user who has by far put in the most effort towards this recent push as anyone to my knowledge, but even he was surprised to learn that I had all of this stuff sitting on a metaphorical shelf collecting dust. I'm sure if he knew, he would have added in all the available audiobooks on his own initiative. But if one of our strongest posters isn't aware of the absolute trove that TT has become very rapidly over the past few months since launch then whomst among us does?
You can ask yourself why I haven't created a Comrade Cowbee's playlist in TT yet - anyone can do it ;)
But I do intend set about making that happen in the next couple of days as spoons avail themselves to me in sufficient quantity for me to lock in on the tasks I need to do to make a clean playlist that accurately represents Cowbee's current iteration of the masterpost.A lot of thought went into this idea and I appreciate it. I am not 100% sure how possible that would be/the amount of work it would take, but it is certainly a good idea to help be ready for upcoming events. I will try to look further into this to gauge!
As for timing of [Major Event] Effortpost Megathreads in the future like the one I posted for the election, if it is something that can be anticipated and has a set date, there is no reason to not have that posted preemptively and ready to go. I hadn’t even considered that, so if that thread is one of the directions we decide to go in the future, I will be making sure it is up ahead of time so long as it meets the (TBD) criteria of major event.
I think your diseulogy idea is funny but would have to be very focused on actual analysis and not just shitting on somebody. Maybe an idea for when we are in a period of time of decades that nothing has happened and can give users a good outlet for effortposting and analysis.
Yeah, sustainability and viability is fundamental to this kind of effort. Don't destroy your modteam by burning them out simply because I had a good idea that caused your crew to get overextended. I say this as someone who has done project work jobs in the past.
As for upcoming events that do not have a set date, it would still be possible to do the work prior to the event itself - it's not like we have to set our schedule of a mega based on the date that the event itself happens, right? If we can foresee things likely occurring, we can encourage a culture of preparation such as the very likely chance that Macron was going to stage a constitutional coup - that manoeuvre was being telegraphed increasingly loudly before it actually happened, so a mega would have been a good chance to prep for its likelihood. Ultimately this is what the radical newspapers of the prior era would do and it's partly how they would hone cadre's political awareness and analysis; if you can see an event likely coming, you can start to strategise for it in the present. The next step is to make more direct irl organising efforts around this likely event to exploit the absolute hell out of it. This is why so many of the most effective radical leaders came out of the newspaper printing milieu - it was absolutely no coincidence.
Anyway, start small and work on the biggest events. If there's a lull maybe test the viability of a diseulogy mega for one of the most reviled figures who is still around today, or one who appears to be on their last legs. See how that works. If it is successful then start growing it as the capacity of your team allows.
but would have to be very focused on actual analysis and not just shitting on somebody
My initial suggestion for this, especially to ease the demands on your modteam, would be to have a mod put a comment below the mega for any and all shitposting. A "Shit Here" comment, if you will. That way the mega will be largely self-cleaning and it will create structural disincentive for the shitposting because nobody wants to dig into the depths of a reply thread which is really long. They're most likely going to the top-level comments. You could even de-prioritise the cesspit comment by instructing people not to give it uppies, and whoever posts that comment can remove their automatic self-uppie.
Again, just spitballing and thinking about minimising the demands on your team while running containment etc. - if you like it, maybe try it one day. If it works, run with it.
Just FYI I added more to that top comment if you wanted to check it out - I think my edit and your reply came in at roughly the same time.
A lot of thought went into this idea
Well maybe that comment wasn't entirely off-brand for me in that case lol
Just saw this! Thanks for the glowing support and putting together the audiobooks and suggestions, truly. Again, my offer is open to credit you in the post itself as well.
You're right about TT, my exposure to it has largely been watching links posted directly on Hexbear, usually in the News Mega. I 100% agree that it's a great idea to link to audiobooks hosted there, but I will say, adding audiobooks in general would've probably slipped my mind had you not mentioned it! So thanks, comrade!
Also I absolutely support the idea of preparing ahead of time, haha. I think everything would've gone smoother that way.
I was reluctant to ping you haha. I didn't want to be like "Come look at the praise I'm giving you, now agree with me and support my take" because it felt awkward to me to do that.
If you were a topic of discussion rather than just applause I would have pinged you, if that makes sense - your recent efforts are a lens through which I analysed recent experiences and it shaped my perspective on our collective readiness to deal with big moments in politics but it was more about what your efforts catalysed in my thinking than it was about discussing you or your efforts directly.
I still don't need credit, honestly. I didn't do much. It's just that I thought it wouldn't be right to not address the credit thing upfront because the risk is injuring your reputation unintentionally all because you respected my wishes. If it weren't for that consideration I wouldn't have brought it up at all but I didn't want to stir up rumours or drama with people assuming you don't credit others. You respected my wishes and I owe you the same respect by ensuring that there's no fallout that will come from down on you from this. Kind of ironic that not wanting to draw attention to it has paradoxically put me in the position where I needed to draw attention to it, but my choices are what led me right to this place so I gotta own it lol.
Haha, no worries! Sometimes I search my name on Lemmy just to see if people are talking about something I posted, and that brings me to interesting places sometimes, haha.
And no worries on pinging or not! Though I will say I missed the webfishing ping, I think the @Hexbear part needs to go after my username or something because I missed it. I am out of town today anyways, but thought I'd point it out for next time if I can join
Oh thanks for letting me know, I'll jump on my computer and fix it up in a minute.
Honestly I'm very, very green at this whole thing; I'm just an effortposter who decided to overextend themselves lol. I've only just started using emojis after being here for over a year so I still feel like I'm learning how it all works.
I've been pinging everybody when we go live in a comment under the post so even though you can't make it this time, you should still get a ping if I've managed to do everything right.
Thanks. I figure I'd just do my best, hope that it's enough for people, and learn from the mistakes I make along the way so I can git gud asap.
Personnally I’d love to see a QuickDraw utility belt selection of memes or videos I could use to counter popular right wing ideas that don’t require a PH.D in history, sociology, or economics. Kinda like the gravel Institute. I would to see more “elementary”/“intro level” socialist and commie stuff. The more we can break down leftie stuff into super small building blocks the better. To get more regular people in the door at the very least.
You mean like an archive style collection dedicated to individual topics?
Yeah. Like one thing I like about the Gravel Institute (before they stopped posting) and things like Means TV are those little quickies that grab “normies” attention and breakdown why capitalism bad or why socialism good. Having videos or posts or whatever media you give people to just their foot on the path away from liberalism and capitalism and at least look at different (ideally look away from it) I think would be good. I’m not sure what that would look like exactly I’m not a organizer type but I think anything we can just get people to at least begin to question the system would be a big help for us and for them too (them being the person we want to reject this nightmare machine).
Whatever we can do to get people just a step closer to being based rather than cringe ideologically speaking. Move them a based we are so back rather than a cringe it’s joeover
Personally, I would like to see an effort made into actually making agitprop that can be disseminated. Like organizing the community's skills towards building a workflow of producing memes, infographs, outlines/talking points, and various other propaganda that can be easily shared or built upon. We have people who like doing the reading, we have artists, and we have posters. We should be putting these things together.
Also, this is one of the areas that leftists should be embracing AI to make up for our lack of numbers in the overwhelming face of the cultural hegemony. Building leftist LLMs and image networks, experimenting with and teaching each other how to use them to pump out revolutionary slop should be an important part of our toolkit. Technology is a force multiplier we are badly in need of. This should be a place we can talk about that without the "It'S NoT ReAl iNteLlIGeNcE!" rhetoric.
I really like the first half of this post and have thought a lot about it in the past. Because of our wealth of amazing users on this site we really do have all of the tools at our disposal to actually produce high quality agitprop for dissemination. My initial thoughts on this are that it’s something that could be run alongside the News Megathread in order to have ready-made agitprop for stories currently in the spotlight (both on Hexbear but also elsewhere)
Regarding AI, I’ll leave that up for community discussion and would like to see things remain civil. It can be a very divisive topic and I tend to find myself on the side of we have real people to produce real intelligence, while AI steals from others doing the same for the benefit of large companies who own the tech.
Regarding AI, I’ll leave that up for community discussion and would like to see things remain civil. It can be a very divisive topic and I tend to find myself on the side of we have real people to produce real intelligence, while AI steals from others doing the same for the benefit of large companies who own the tech.
Capitalists use AI to steal from the commons, my point is we should be using AI to take it back.
The problem I have with AI is that it feels like why should I care to spend my time reading or learning from something that you couldn’t bother to spend your time creating?
Yes capitalists use it. That just highlights how hollow everything about them actually is
I fail to see how that's relevant to my point that we are massively out-numbered, out-gunned, and out-financed.
Also, implying AI as hollow ignores the true nature of The Commons and our relationship with it. We do not create things, we discover them by providing context to an endless sea of information. Under capitalism AI is like an oil well stealing intellectual resources out from under our feet. Under socialism, it has the potential to be the people's custodian to the infinite.
I think part of agitated propaganda should include calls to action. I'm not saying we should be running and operating our own events, but we should have something to direct people to as well. We should maintain a working list of organizations (and not just the big ones) by location (country/state or provinces or territories/city). Something similar to this: https://hexbear.net/post/8930
Much of that list is Food Banks and Homeless Shelters, I think we can work on expanding it and directing people to things like Food Not Bombs (which is noted in the body of the post), women's shelters, and any other mutual aid programs we can find in these localities. The direction shouldn't be to simply donate money for food, but to encourage people to donate their labor.
Adjacent to that, we should curate a list of online social spaces where this content can be distributed. Reddit has a community for many localities (at least in the US and probably Canada), there are likely locality specific comms on the wider lemmyNet as well.
To encourage the creation of these types of AgitProp we should encourage agitprop "battles" not unlike "r/photoshopbattles" on reddit, an "AgitBattle" if you will. These posts should contain a topic with information that can be used to create the AgitProp, subjects should start with [AgitBattle]. Here is a good example of what I mean: Literacy Statistics 2024-2025 (Where we are now) by the National Literacy Institute. The information on this page can be easily transformed into agitprop, let's see what people come up with. It might be useful to also include a leaping off point, maybe a photo or image that needs to be incorporated into the AgitProp.
These kinds of posts should help with getting the creative energy flowing. Friendly "competition" that will likely encourage critique and improvement by the creators and consumers.
To complement posts like this, it might be beneficial to have a weekly brainstorming mega thread that encourages users to collect these AgitProp subjects and themes. If something interesting comes out of those threads, encourage folks to create a AgitBattle thread relating to that subject or theme.
This should help us cultivate a culture of both "theory" and "practice" which we can use to sharpen our skills. I would also say it's important to report back if any of the content being generated by this community appears to be effective. A kind of "field report" or "after action" report if you will. If content was posted on a publicly accessible site, link to the post, so that others can read the reactions and we can collectively assess its effectiveness.
All good ideas. I think we certainly have the ability to organize non-online action without risking being doxxed or something of the like. Standing good causes like food banks and Zapatista coffee, etc. are all good ideas. We could probably even boost the net amount of aid delivered by dropping a weekly aid request for very simple things like orderable refreshments for strikers on a picket line, which go a very long way and majorly boost morale, though I feel that this is something that belongs more in c/mutual_aid, especially with the part about trying to organize Hexbears to contribute actual labor.
An agitprop crossposting reference is definitely something we should consider. It would be easy to compile a list of left/left-adjacent communities to make sure Hexbear posts get delivered there in higher numbers.
A current events thread running parallel to the news Megathread should also be considered. Agitprop’s effectiveness really drops off if it isn’t being seen when these issues are being discussed in the first place and people are starting to form opinions.
I think your final two points can be combined to work more effectively. The “contest” can essentially be who has taking agitprop content from Hexbear and gotten the most engagement on it elsewhere, which also acts as a report back on its effectiveness and encourages spread of agitprop to wider reaching communities.
especially with the part about trying to organize Hexbears to contribute actual labor
To expand on my thoughts a little here: I imagined the target audience for the agitprop created here on this site would be people outside the site. I imagined we're agitated enough 😏 lol. My thoughts were more centered on creating Agitprop that can motivate the politically unmotivated / disillusioned. Like, creating tailored agitprop for the r/somethingiswrong2024 people, or for the r/antiwork or r/latestagecapitalism communities. Targeting places like r/florida with agitprop centered around the disaffected groups within Florida (women, queer people, etc.) and attempting to use that agitprop to direct them to these localized support networks, or even encouraging them to create support networks of their own. So not necessarily Hexbearians being mobilized to contribute their labor, but the frequently online liberal progressives who need that push into more leftist spaces. After reading a lot of content in r/somethingiswrong2024 I just have this sense that there is a group of people out there looking for anything to hold onto, and if we can direct them in some way to these local places, they'll fill that void and maybe work agacent to more leftists.
That is a very specific kind of agit prop campaign I would say, so obviously, we should also be creating more generalized agitprop as well that would work in places like r/antiwork and r/latestagepropaganda. Antiwork had a post recently that was linked here where there were a lot of "Maybe communism isn't as bad as I've been told" sentiments with many upvotes. So I think you're right about keeping things current. So, in line with those adjacent communities, it might be valuable to write up (given enough time) an effective guideline or guidebook for agitation in those spaces. What works, what doesn't, what themes resonate with the communities, how reactionary are they etc.
In the case of "local" agitation (r/state_name), the more targeted the agitprop is, the more effective the message is. If the message is "the 1% are going to kill us all" well, yeah, I think people would see that and agree, and that would be it. If the message was "Floridians! The 1% are trying to destroy your communities, build them up where they won't! Join {{local aid network}} today!"
This is basically a stream of consciousness at this point and not really well-organized thoughts haha. I think you get where I'm coming from, though.
I think that this then would fall under the points you made earlier about keeping a list of spaces we are actively working on spreading agitprop material, and then having reports back on how they went
It's a real shame Lemmy doesn't have a built-in Wiki like reddit, we could really benefit from a wiki, I think.
I also think wikis are a big missing feature compared to reddit.
However until such a feature is added there are various sources of free wikis such as code forges, miraheze.org, riseup.net etc. And if there's flexibility about the software (not a wiki but another format) many more.
But going to another website, having to create a separate account, then someone has to manage all that, is a lot more work than having it integrated.
Totally. I think some instances have integrated dokuwiki to allow authentication via Lemmy. However its still a work in progress I think.
looking at the repo issues, I see there is just activity 6-12 months ago... so either they got it functional enough for now, or gave up. I am guessing it works given https://wiki.slrpnk.net/
I would like to see an agitprop community that does a few things:
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Provides help/training/support to teach comrades how to design agitprop materials. How to design flyers, how to use Canva/Photoshop/GIMP/whatever, where to go for printing, editing images so they work best on Twitter or Facebook or wherever they are going, how to work with print shops, etc. We need graphic design skills!
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Figures out through research, testing, or other means what kinds of agitprop messaging works best. I want us to collectively apply not just theory, but also knowledge of Psychology, Marketing, and other relevant fields to create messages that will have the best chance of breaking through the noise.
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Comes up with messaging ideas that are unique for specific areas/campaigns/etc. There's not going to be a one-size-fits-all message. In the deep south U.S., for instance, I could see us creating agitprop that co-opts all of the Christian messaging all over the place. Jesus was a Socialist after all! Or go after Shen Yun which will be on tour again soon. Or produce messaging around how to actually get organized beyond attending a march for the inauguration.
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Has a clear call to action. We may not agree on which org people should join, but I'd like all of our messaging to point to either joining a local branch of a left org or link to where people can learn more. Give people a drop of theory and then give them a chance to read more and radicalize.
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•Effortpost Megathread for larger news events (frequency/guidelines for “larger” TBD here)
this is a great idea. election results, new wars breaking out, political "scandals" big enough to register with the population at large, etc. any time something in the news presents a real opportunity for radicalization, we should have a thread that centralizes all our approaches to undertaking that radicalization. obviously very few such opportunities in the future will be as big and obvious as trump winning a second term, but it'd still be worth doing
Agitprop Megathread running parallel to the Weekly News Megathread for more nuanced discussion/analysis to be used both on Hexbear and elsewhere
this is too similar to the news mega IMO, we get some pretty deep discussion in there sometimes and lots of links to non-hexbear sources and articles. too many places for this kind of talk could spread the conversation too thin and reduce engagement
Death to America
Yep, I think im in the same camp regarding a companion post specifically only for deeper discussion of the news Megathread. No need to take away from the good things happening over there.
As for large news events, I suppose it’s a matter of figuring out what that threshold should be. I think any major election anywhere in the world probably fits the bill. Beyond that I have trouble gauging where the line should be drawn for something to be considered major enough because I am so autistic and news-poisoned that everything feels worth discussion
I love all the ideas here and would love to help out with them. I definitely think that creating and distributing agitprop needs to be a bigger focus. The creation of agitprop in advance is also important.
spoiler
Also we should make a zine
don't have any suggestions, just wanted to say that I think these ideas are brilliant and I look forward to contributing however I can ❤️
How about making this a featured post again in another week? @CARCOSA@hexbear.net
sorry for posting this here as a mod but I recently made a free Substack where I'm posting anti-centrist-democrat effortposts. I got like 800 reads on my first post a few days ago about Bidenomics and I just posted another one a little while ago about democrat collaborators with the freakin cheeto in the freakin white house. If you get on the list you'll get some good agitprop in your inbox... people have apparently been sharing it with libs they know. https://serlava.substack.com/
