One of my bunch-of-related-thoughts posts…

  • Most countries are not in a revolutionary state now. There is insufficient class-consciousness, insufficient socialist ideology.

  • Countries move from a non-revolutionary state to a revolutionary state partly because the contradictions become intensified (the crisis of capitalism, e.g. in 2008-2011 things were more revolutionary), but also partly by propaganda.

  • Heightening the contradictions deliberately is… I know some comrades are for that (accelerationists) but it seems evil to me.

  • That leaves propaganda as the correct praxis for countries not ripe for revolution (most developed countries now)

  • Propaganda ain’t what it used to be because media technologies have changed. Handing out fliers on the street loses you credibility.

  • Fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is warfare that is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, cyberattacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. Fifth generation warfare has been described by Daniel Abbot as a war of “information and perception”. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_warfare (yeah that was just a fragmentary thought, I warned you at the top)

  • Propaganda has to a lot to do with repetition. It’s not just about crafting the perfect meme, it’s about people seeing that meme millions and millions of times

  • So it might sound like I’m driving towards “Socialists should have a lot of bots and automated social media campaigns!” but I’m not. I think capitalists have an unfair advantage there because A) they own twitter/facebook/youtube so they control the algorithms and the bans and the shadowbans B) they can probably outspend on developers and on compute

  • Not sure then what the answer is… maybe if social media companies were shut down by regulators/EU, and it creates a vacuum for digital communications on a more level footing?

  • I’m pretty sure of this much: leftists should be A) creating lots and lots of propaganda, different types (to suit different tastes) and B) distributing it a lot (which almost certainly means digitally)

  • Some might say a lot of different media are required, e.g. computer games, films, as well as the usual text and posters.