Notes on Political Influence

Last week I published a short piece in The Guardian, summarizing my thoughts on influence, content creation and its overflow into real world politics. I want to share some additional topics that were too disparate or nuanced for a mass audience.

• Post-Political Era

In the post-1989 era, we came up in a world without ideology. As young people now look to organize, they find themselves in unique historical circumstances with few political options. The ISO (International Socialist Organization) dissolved in 2019. The Worker's Vanguard stopped publishing in 2020. 100 years ago they might have found their way to the YPSL (Young People's Socialist League) but for now they are stuck on Reddit.

• Distinct Media Ecosystems

In my conversations with journalists (before and after publishing), few were familiar with most of the content creators mentioned. And none were familiar with all of them. Similarly, when the piece published to a mass audience, it took 8-12 hours to show up in the various Reddits, Discords and other platforms on which these influencer communities gather. This seems to confirm, as many have observed in the last few years, that social media is creating distinct spheres of information with few points of overlap. Journalists don't know about extremely-online communities. And extremely-onliners don't know whats happening in journalism. The end result is increasing polarization and a breakdown in consensus reality.

While the exact numbers are difficult to obtain, it seems likely that there were at least two days where Twitch streamer Destiny had more canvassers on the ground than the New Georgia Project. As online communities become more politically engaged, they could soon act at a scale that would be measurable/impactful but completely unseen by the media.

• From Content to Action

In an earlier draft I discussed Jimmy Dore and #forcethevote. But while the meme took up a ton of room in the discourse, it was ultimately unsuccessful.

The Gravel Institute is currently the best left-wing example of social media as a platform for political education. If they had been around in 2015 we might be in a very different online world today. This funnel seemingly leads most directly to the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and their video thumbnails have been included in at least one official DSA newsletter.

Brandon Wardell was part of a comedic short produced by DSA LA. As the online world increasingly spills over into real world politics, organizations might find themselves fulfilling a similar role to institutions, that of legitimizing influencer run pseudo-orgs.

@Incellectuals & YBC super pac crowdfunded an LED video van showing images of police violence in July of 2020.

• Moralism

One of the bigger hurdles that will increasingly become a point of conflict in the near future, is the need to push past the "activist church". In many of today's radical circles, politics is a ritual act (already assumed to lose) of which the end goal is the moral purification of the activist themselves. Organizer meetings generally meet on Sunday, they last for about an hour, reaffirm a set of moral principles but instead of the Lord's Prayer they say a land acknowledgement. Young people can tell that today's activist rituals are primarily inward facing. This is part of why IRL orgs are not growing as fast as URL communities. I don't want to hold hands. I just need to see the doctor.

• Web 3

As increases in moderation drive content producers into web 3 spaces (deplatforming from YouTube sends streamers to Dlive, Trovo, etc), the question inevitably arises; might political-influencer communities become DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations)? 

While distributed ownership has some cool potentials for new social formations, my sense is that the individual expertise, around which most influencer communities form, will cause them to focus on monetizing their fan base rather than creating new protocols for community governance. I find it unlikely that communities will want to vote on a spokesperson's policy positions because having expert opinions is what attracted the fan base to begin with. Influencer communities have some built in mechanisms for audience feedback: live chats, moderators, Discords, Reddits, etc. In most cases, curation will be preferable to democratic inputs. Perhaps in a few years, the neo-cancel culture will be liquidating your holdings to intentionally crash a micro-celebrities asset price.

• We're Only Getting Started

In October of 2020, Facebook banned QAnon. In January of 2021, a riotous mob, organized on Parler, stormed the U.S. Capitol. As we read on a recent Twitch stream, according to a study from Cornell University, deplatformed communities seem to recollect at a smaller scale but experience a relative increase in radicalization. Individual platforms are offloading the social and political costs onto the public.

The most reliable narrative of our era is that the "online" world will continue to push its way into "offline" spaces. In most cases, the nichification of media, and the ability to crowdfund counter-hegemonic narratives has proven to be key.

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Next week I'll have a new podcast episode: My Political Journey: Linkonia (part 2)

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NET POVERA, a cross over episode with New Models, is out on the public rss feed today.

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