This is nothing to do with any current or recent struggle sessions, or any one struggle session/controversy in particular. This is a much broader issue and I am wondering what it holds in store for any strictly leftist social group online. I would also like to apologize to our non-American/Western users as this is going to be very centered on that.
There was a lot of anxiety about Trump’s 2nd term back in 2020. There were people afraid that Trump would be way worse than any Democrat. I didn’t personally see it that way, but I (now) empathize a little more with comrades even if their fears don’t seem deeply well founded. This made everyone a little more jumpy. Everything seemed a little more urgent.
After 2020, a light depression set in. Bernie lost and all the people who supported that were let down. All the people who knew it was going to be a let down lost their energy as well. There wasn’t much of a new thing for everyone to focus on and talk about. Basically the left, as much as it exists, wasn’t in the conversation anymore. We were even more relegated to the crank pit. The media project that had been built, that most of us here paid attention to, simply became about dwelling on history, naval gazing about what is to be done, and supporting media careers as praxis. Even the fascist infighting of Jan 6 didn’t result in anything and thus “nothing ever happens” mentality is born.
Tensions with Russia and Ukraine, and disastrous Democratic presidency gave us something to focus on and plenty of new enemies to fight. We once again could go after libs and point to how liberals are screwing up everything. We had the invention of new internet guys at which to get mad. Ultimately, the war didn’t lead to some new level of consciousness for everyone. It became normal and whatever fresh possibilities existed in Feb of 2022 didn’t exist anymore.
Once again we were looking down the barrel of another Trump term. This time the people who felt that Dems would give some respite from fascism had either been pushed past that by Biden’s term or they left the site. Jan 6 was a nothing burger, so the fear of competency was lessened. Biden had turned most into sickos who felt Trump was exactly what this country deserved, regardless of how bad he is.
The genocide in Gaza did not help attitudes. This also brought some life back to Hexbear in terms of analysis, news, and fighting genocide denial. I think it’s has also had a depressing effect as well. We all see the depravity of Zionists and Western governments every day. We see people being systematically exterminated and everyone waffles, everyone supports it, there is very little political will from anyone in charge to do something. At best it’s turned into a market issue where BDS will save us but then all the Zionists rig that game too.
As for the past few months, it’s been rough. Once again we face massive economic crisis in the US that liberal economic analysis either can’t see or refuses to see. It’s not that the jobs market is in a lull, it’s that it doesn’t exist. The largest sector of the US economy can hire cheap labor at will without having to even look at the domestic labor pool. They’re doing massive quarterly layoffs of domestic and foreign sourced labor. Food costs are still high and getting higher. Inflation can only rise at a faster rate (that won’t be reported).
It is completely safe for the worst right-wingers to espouse their views in public. They are rewarded for it with government jobs. If anyone harms them, the President sends troops to avenge them. The highest law enforcement body in the land will sue on their behalf. There are no brakes here. All those seemingly petty fears from 2020, the debates about Trump being a real fascist or not, are all valid. Jan 6 2029 could be way more serious than the other one. First as a farce, second as a tragedy, so to speak.
The increased popularity of AI has already changed the internet. AI, whether it’s just tulips or the next industrial revolution, is here to stay. The US economy has all but dedicated its entire economy to AI and AI companies.
As others have pointed out, doesn’t the internet feel a little off? The discovery of content has been completely dominated by increasingly fine tuned algorithms that make sure you stay on the correct rails. Podcast media is no longer subversive, if it ever was, it is a real tool of the state and is actively being used as such. Podcast popularity has flooded the market with an increasing amount of superfluous content that buries everything and makes it easier for propaganda outlets to hide. Youtube is nothing now. It’s almost a Skinner box that doesn’t even reward you and produces incomprehensible slop. You can watch short videos that range from roblox rp to nazi propaganda to cooking videos to some 13 year old making guns in his garage within 30 seconds. Everything else, including the best material, is just a gig for people who don’t want a “real” job.
Also thanks to AI, it’s going to be increasingly hard to understand what’s real. The distinction between advertisement and content won’t exist. Everything will be monetized and you will not get a cut.
Just as an anecdote, I have also noticed a slow down on the internet. Not in speed, but in the refresh rate of content. Hexbear seems to get fewer posts, existing posts stay in position longer, fewer comments. I have noticed this on reddit too. It simply feels like there are less people engaging in the internet and are instead just passively scrolling, or the algos have reached a point of tuning to where they are completely busted. But since Hexbear’s algo doesn’t get tuned like reddits, I don’t think it’s the issue.
To bring this back around, I am not sure we are going to make it to 2029. As things get worse materially and the right wing cracks down, everyone will be more on edge. This is going to lead to more and more infighting. People are going to draw harder lines in the sand and be less forgiving of one another crossing it. Now, none of this will be super obvious and to most people it will seem like everyone is being more principled and that’s why it will be accepted. In fact, it will feel good and make us feel like we’re cleaning up the community. This will lead to a series of major struggle sessions that will only break down the user base. Some people will get banned and just leave. Some might come back. Users will leave if no action is taken. Users will leave because they disagree with whatever action is taken. The result is less users.
The internet as a whole is not friendly toward sites like Hexbear. We will begin to run the risk of being targeted. All it will take is some fork of grok at Doge Corp to crawl us and flag us. Then some 14 year old chud prodigy will call his dad at the AG’s office and get us taken down. Or it’ll just be death by attrition from AI agents and reduced engagement. We will be cut off from fresh users from the outside. Federation with other instances will just result in net zero because they’re going to be in the same situation. The difference is they might be more friendly to liberals and live a little longer.
I’m not suggesting any action really I just wanted to share my fears. There is no coalition we can form, no concession we can make. It seems inevitable that our future is offline. We made it, what 5 or 6 years now? I don’t think we can do it for 5 more. If the site is still up, it’s going to be like 20 people at most.
I’m sure everyone will hate me, but we really need to align long enough to get maga out of the picture. I don’t want to be a monolith of morons but I really don’t want to be sent to a fucking camp.
It’s not about hating you, it’s a question of effectiveness. The police state didn’t show up yesterday. Biden helped build it, and no democrat will actually dismantle it. Democrats aren’t actually interested in keeping you out of the camp.
Always remember: the Democrats built the fucking cages
No the left needs to align by…… going more right presumably??? Somehow it’s never the center needs to align by being more left - hmmmm
Being trans wasn’t illegal under Dems. Dems aren’t trying to end same sex unions. What is the point of ceding progress for nothing?
The Dems have demonstrated for us that the only way to get domestic fascism “out of the picture” is a socialist takeover, because the Dems aren’t willing to actually crush fascism and will just as often either capitulate (thx Chuck), bankroll it (“pied piper”), or openly embrace it (Kamala told us a border wall is a good idea). You can’t survive by looking only as far as the tip of your nose, if you let the Democrats brow-beat you into opposing independent left organizing, the only thing that could ever get Dems to do something good and the only thing that will ever offer a more permanent solution, you will die in a camp 8 years later than if the Republicans won a few times more, but you’re still winding up in a camp. The only way to avoid it is socialism destroying the political power of capital and organized fascism.
A dem in office is far closer to socialism than a maga admin. Getting closer to what you want is better than getting further away from what you want. Now we have to spend years just getting back to the norm we had in 2020. Things like student loans forgiveness, lgbtq protections, reasonable immigration. Those are all gone now and Dems will have to focus on that instead of actual progress. What was gained by a maga victory?
You are literally using DNC talking points but attaching the word “socialist” while completely ignoring my argument. The Dems do not being leftists closer to what they want, and I don’t understand why I even need to say that when even so much of the mainstream discourse is forced to explain things in terms of “harm reduction,” i.e. harm is still being done (we are still going “further away” from what we want), it’s just less harm.
The Democrats keep moving right, over and over again, and they keep not rolling back terrible things Republicans do in the case of them not being completely trivial, while also promising to do more of the terrible things Republicans promised to do 8 years ago, like fund the fucking border wall because it’s a “good idea”.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, are only interested in cementing the power of neoliberalism and are not facilitating socialism in any manner. The only way to even get Dems who are pressured to do good things is to actually be able to credibly withhold votes, rather than vote for them regardless of how much contempt they have for everything you believe in like a fucking dog. Those withheld votes, meanwhile, can go to a third party to make the message of what you are interested in more clear.
Let me rain on your mic drop: Trump winning demonstrated that the Democrats couldn’t win on the terrible rightward lurch of the Kamala campaign, whose only articulated differences from Biden were being more rightwing and more conciliatory to the Republicans. If Kamala won, there is a very good chance that Zohran would have lost the primary, as an example, as she would use her credibility and authority to crush progressives because she is fundamentally also a rightist and her victory would have made the “viability” of Dem rightism look much more credible. As it is, her failure is part of a rupture in the party that has allowed progressives to become much more credible in the eyes of the public.
Leftists won’t vote for the DNC yet get shocked when it tries to get votes from the right. If leftists could be counted on to vote, people would try to appeal to them.
You have it completely reversed. The DNC doesn’t properly court votes from the left because a) it is extremely hostile to doing anything left-ish when their donors want rightism and b) as they demonstrate every cycle, they find vote-scolding and hostage-taking to be adequate to get “progressives” to vote for their ghouls. Their strategy is to use the abusive logic that you’re using here to pressure progressives into voting for them despite not doing anything for them, which is to say they do count on the left to vote for them, and historically they are mostly correct because “progressives” generally do vote for them. They take progressives for granted because there are many past elections where they were able to get by while openly running a “lesser evil” conservative, e.g. Bill Clinton.
You are contorting your logic at every turn to blame leftists instead of the party that is embracing reactionary politics, but observable reality does not agree with you. The only period where the Dems were substantively progressive was during the New Deal and shortly thereafter, and the reason they were this way is that they were forced to be by strong leftist organizing that was independent of them and pressured them to make substantial concessions to the people.
I’m curious, do you call yourself a socialist? If so, on what basis do you say that?
I believe it is the best way for a society to function. I am also keenly aware of modern history and current power dynamics. I’m guessing you call yourself a socialist, how did things work out for Trotsky and Lenin. The only thing that makes me cringe about socialism is that many of it’s modern adherents seem like whiny children who are too lazy to put in the work on research.
If you care about Lenin or Marx, you should know that they very explicitly opposed yielding to liberals in this manner or even trying to do entryism, because the development of advanced capitalism (something we already have in the US) is important for socialism, but subserviating yourself to liberals is not conducive to social revolution. They strongly supported operating as third parties to avoid getting their organizing hijacked by liberals.
Tell me where I have failed to research things within the scope of this conversation, because from my vantage point it seems that you do not know much about socialism, nor do you even know about the history of electoral politics in your own country (see my last comment). Your remark is, to the best of my perception, indistinguishable from what I might get from some ghoul on r/neoliberal talking about “data-driven policy” wonkery that obfuscates the fundamental ways in which the existing system is hostile to democracy or general human flourishing, such that normative behavior is broadly counter-productive.
I can’t say that I’m the greatest expert on just about anything, but for a conversation on very basic subjects like this, I’m just fine, and I don’t think you have any basis for claiming that I’m a “whiny child” who hasn’t done adequate research.
Marx was explicitly not anti capitalism. He thought it was a necessary step in the March towards communism. His most famous works are dedicated to explaining capitalism. Weird that you just made up stuff and felt confident about it.
hate you? no.
But if what you mean is that everyone from diehard communists to blue maga barely-liberals needs to come together and kick out fascism? That isn’t happening. There have been attempts to unite liberals, spicy liberals, and the actual left (see: bernie) but there’s two big problems that come to mind:
Link
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Are you a liberal saying this? You should just start being right about things, stop being a liberal, and then you don’t have to worry about uniting.
The last person people like you told me to vote for was explicitly pro-genocide and anti-immigration. If you’re talking about not getting sent to a camp, uh, yeah. Maybe don’t vote for the people who really love the camps.
I am not. I am aware of the actual power structure in modern society.
deleted by creator
What does this have to do with the pig poop balls website?