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What caused internet/nerd culture to go full-on fascist?
(lemmygrad.ml)
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I'm gonna introspect here. Most of the other explanations in this thread I agree with, but I'm gonna focus inwards on the left.
The left abandoned geek culture spaces and allowed chuddery to take root unimpeded. We have a tendency to leave spaces to create our own instead of fighting over them. There are pros and cons to this, but one clear con imo is that we forfeit any culture wars before they're even fought. Sure, we also get banned and whatnot, but we don't (for example) use this place to coordinate raids on ! mainstream spaces the way 4chan and like do.
I also think there was a general distain for geek culture as a hyper capitalist expression of the lumpenproletariat. To what extent that is true is up for debate imo. There are still many anti-capitalist expressions from gamers and the like, but there are not enough leftist voices to frame them as such inside those communities. Recently we've had some discussions here about how abandoning and looking down on the rural working poor (so called "rednecks") and I think that's a really apt comparison.
The far right put in the work and ideological effort to fight over gamers and geeks, the left did not. As other comrades here have pointed out, any space without a leftist presence automatically drifts right.
A big reason for this is that left spaces need to be very tightly moderated in ways that right wing spaces don't need to be. Part of that is because left spaces are going to disproportionately represent bipoc folk, queer folk, disabled people, etc. And they're not going to stick around in spaces where they have to constantly defend their own existence. It's already enough of a hassle in daily life, so why go on a forum that's full of slurs or go to a nerd con that's full of smelly dudes who'll say you're the incorrect race to do cosplay? So people drift away, find their own communities where they feel safer.
Right wing spaces have the privilege of speaking to the dominant ideological authority already. Unless they're pulling out actual Nazi flags or doing salutes, they come across as fairly normal to everyday, uninitiated people who don't think about theory all day. Whereas leftist perspectives in the west aren't as common, and usually at best it's the very milquetoast progressive liberal sort of stuff. You say there's not enough leftist voices to frame the narrative within gamer communities, well there aren't much in the way of leftist voices in general. It's becoming more common to express anti-capitalist sentiment, and thankfully among younger people, but it's still fairly rare within the west and English speaking spaces.
Yeah, so the right already has the home field advantage here. Modern nerd culture can be traced back to things like Star Trek conventions in people's basements, or ham radio enthusiasts. It started off with moderately affluent white guys who had access to Usenet in the early 80s who were prime targets for the burgeoning commercialism of little plastic trinkets. It was only a matter of time before those beginnings would coalesce into functionally coherent fascist rhetoric because of the inherent overlap with the social base for white, settler fascism.
I think everything you say is accurate. It is good that we have established a space for leftists and all people seeking to be free from discrimination and oppression. In the model of Mao's protracted people's war, we have completed phase one: securing a revolutionary base area.
The next difficult step is to step out of the revolutionary base area, agitating, debating, fighting, until other areas become the new revolutionary bases. This is the hard part, and my overall point is that we can't get complacent and just vibe in the existing revolutionary bases.
I know lots of comrades are out there in the real world doing this, but internet culture is not exactly the real world and I think we can do a better job of getting out there.
How do you think we could do that? It's hard to do much of anything in capitalist controlled spaces.
I'd love to take back these spaces cause they can provide us with an opportunity to make some of the things in nerd culture better cause we can remove all the liberalism from it.
But they don't. Ultimately they're just words on a screen. Even 4chan allows people to hide posts/threads, filter by username, words and so on. People are bothered by those things because they grew up in "very tightly moderated" spaces both online and in real life, where others removed "bad words" so they never had to learn how to control their emotions or develop "thick skin" in response to them. I'm not defending the usage of slurs, but over-moderation creates another extreme where the mere sight of a word makes people emotionally distressed. People love to fantasize about revolution and "seizing power", but you think those who oppose us are going to use only nice words and be polite?
This is pinging 'false equivalence' for me. The revolution is going to be a harrowing meat-grinder of an event of which few of us will survive it and will be expected to give everything we have for it. Nerd spaces are not that deep; and do you really think I'm going to just be cool with a dozen crackers in a Halo lobby popping off every settler-crafted slur in the book? I don't get 'distressed' when some cracker piece of shit hard-r's me; I get furious. I don't play games, I don't watch movies, I don't do anything entertainment/leisure-coded with the intent for fury. So of course I'm going to cut myself off from the average cracker Gamer™ to try and forge a space of my own. "Ultimately just words on a screen" is so Very much not the take. A racist online is going to be a racist IRL, and a racist IRL is a threat IRL.
But that's what they are. Because the only power those words have is the power you allow them to have.
They're not an (immediate) threat to you, by virtue of being very far away and not knowing where you live. They could be a threat to someone else, someone they share a physical space with, sure, but removing them from an online space doesn't make that person disappear or make them less racist, if anything it'll make them hide their racism better. Isn't that more dangerous?
"Being racist" is not an immutable characteristic people have. The best (non-violent) way to get rid of racists is to expose them to the people/cultures/ethnicities they are racist against. Otherwise they will forge their own insular, racist communities where they will reinforce each others' racism and push each other to extremes.
That's a tactic. You can call them slurs too, "cumskin" is a good one. If you let them get to you, then they will know their tactic works. So next time they are losing or want to get their opponent angry (if we're talking about gaming) then they will just repeat what they did knowing it is successful. Showing them their words have no power might make them rethink their strategy.
I'm saying you shouldn't let them kick you out with words. If you're all gamers in a Halo lobby (to use your example) they have no way of actually removing you from a public lobby, other than getting you angry with their words. But fuck that, make them leave if they don't like it. After a while of screaming racial slurs they might be the ones who get angry enough to ragequit. Isn't it preferable that they be the ones who leave and not you?
Bigots are cowards at heart, and largely they will act on their feelings only to the extent that they believe they have social license to do so. Scared bigots are less dangerous than emboldened bigots.
You think online moderation makes bigots scared? Come on... They hide it cause they don't want to be banned from platforms. This also makes them able to "infiltrate" spaces if they so wish.
I think another aspect that has occurred recently is capital corporations have cloned the socially progressive talking points of the left.
These concessions to progressive politics to court younger consumers are no challenge to the power of capitalism. Throwing corporate sponsorship at BLM, LGBTQ or environmental organisations still keeps real power in corporate hands. Allowing an amount of dissent and protest in non disruptive forms poses no threat to them (Don't block a motorway and they'll let you protest as much as you like).
However it does allow the far right to radicalize the geeks. They can be convinced that the SJWs are their enemy rather than the bosses who adopted some SJW points in the name of progress so business can run as usual. Both "sides" are still just an internal contradiction within capitalism.
You hit the jackpot with the second paragraph.