No.941093[View All]
A thread focused on discussing the parasocial relationships cultivated by the
Almighty Algorithm to generate profit off of our atomization and society's commodification of petty internet drama.
Brace through the hyper-real lacanian void together with the Leftypol Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/leftypol_orgReminder That None of This Is Real!™
ɢʀᴀʙ ᴀ ᴘᴀɪʀ ᴏꜰ sᴘᴇᴄᴛᴀᴄʟᴇs
—————————————————–
CORE THEORY >The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord📖 •
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0blWjssVoUQ
<The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) by Walter Benjamin📖 •
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blq9sCIyXgA
>The Culture Industry from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer📓 •
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm📖 •
https://libcom.org/article/dialectic-enlightenment-philosophical-fragments-theodor-adorno-and-marx-horkheimer📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hSLdd8R8mY
<One-Dimensional Man (1964) by Herbert Marcuse📖 •
https://libcom.org/article/one-dimensional-man-studies-ideology-advanced-industrial-society-herbert-marcuse📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZCoLbEkAqs
>Discipline and Punish (1975) by Michel Foucault📖 •
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michel-foucault-discipline-and-punishment📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFbywfzu-jI
<Simulacra and Simulation (1981) by Jean Baudrillard 📖 •
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=DBF3E860993373223D72E98FADF0F2DC📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S96e6TdJlNE
>Manufacturing Consent (1988) by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky📖 •
https://libcom.org/article/manufacturing-consent-political-economy-mass-media-noam-chomsky-and-edward-s-herman📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M
<The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) by Slavoj Zizek📖 •
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=054E022C8BD24EE2C5595B575BCED7DC📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtIckkHsUQ4
>Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990) by Gilles Deleuze 📖 •
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu4Cq_-bLlY
<Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) by Fredric Jameson📖 •
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=5BD20E0E22FC8BC2CB4F8A7760D57027📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RtV0oO8Pmg
>Spectres of Marx (1993) by Jacques Derrida📖 •
https://libcom.org/library/specters-marx-jacques-derrida📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJr0NwXWb6Q
<Capitalist Realism (2009) by Mark Fisher📖 •
https://libcom.org/article/capitalist-realism-mark-fisher📺 •
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cb5XJH4NMI—————————————————–
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
>Precursor Material to Post-modernity and Critical Theory📖 •
Karl Marx - Book 1, Chapter 4 of
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm📺 •
Why Marx Was Right: Alienation - PlasticPills
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPRxxN4Kh30📖 •
Antonio Gramsci - Book 1, Chapter 1 of
Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1929)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/problems/intellectuals.htm📺 •
Hegemony: WTF? An introduction to Gramsci and cultural hegemony - Tom Nicholas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LI_2-qsovo📖 •
Louis Althusser -
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970)
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm📺 •
Althusser's Concept of Ideology: A Discussion with Anthony Gavin - Acid Horizon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtOqXxkKwvw
<On Neo-Liberalism and Post-Fordism[Work in progress]
>Documentaries•
The Society of the Spectacle (1974) by Guy Debord
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjF6I6SYjgA•
Manufacturing Consent (1992) by Mark Achbar & Peter Wintonick, with Noam Chomsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I•
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006) and
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012) by Sophie Fiennes, with Slavoj Zizek
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuI4SFw4g0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBcFLmu_tlc•
HyperNormalisation (2006) by Adam Curtis
https://youtu.be/thLgkQBFTPw
<Easy-Bake Breadtube (for absolute beginners)•
We're All Fake Now - Wisecrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTW1mPOJJ_Y•
Are Cell Phones Replacing Reality? - PBS Idea Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AXIAM7dTTg•
The Cultural Significance of Cyberpunk - Cuck Philosophy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvor7hhDKTs—————————————————–
RECOMMENDED OP-EDS•
I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person by Ginevra Davis
https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/11/04/i-do-not-want-to-be-an-internet-person/•
Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification by Cory Doctorow
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys•
Facebook's Threads is so depressing by Jason O. Gilbert
https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing No.1857540
>>1857530twitter, more than any other site, is the root of this. the people who grew up on the tumblr of this era, the people who grew up on the 4chan of this era, the people who grew up on athiest blogs circa 2008, they are all primarily on twitter. sites that are not on twitter orbit twitter discourse.
and naturally, twitter is about the most horrible medium devised by man, structurally designed to invite misinterpretations, arguments, and dumb 140 (280!!) character takes. the medium is the message and the medium is speaking loud and clear: we're fucked.
No.1857541
>>1857540oh, crucially i left out that politicians and your mom are also on twitter. the point is that while not everyone is on twitter,
everyone is on twitter. if your mom does not have a twitter account she'll still be watching a journalist on TV who spends half his day tweeting.
No.1857543
>>1857540Which is funny because when Tumblr banned porn most if not all their worst puritans moved on to Twitter and started rehashing Tumblr drama there which didn't go unnoticed by old Twitter+Tumblr users.
No.1857544
>>1854311I was expecting Nick to be smarter than this.
No.1857546
>>1857540>>1857541am i crazy if i think twitter is more influential, at least if we focus exclusively online and not irl, than their more popular alternatives like instagram and tiktok
kinda like how sa or 4chan werent the most used but still were the beginning of the online content river flow so to speak
No.1857549
>>1857541From The Culture Industry:
>The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same.The final part of this criticism does not even change when one talks about twitter: the political views one sees on twitter are simply seperated by their content, which is no real meaningful division, because they are all fundamentally derrived from the same system which produces them. Reading Adorno's criticism backward here, even when one is given the ability respond as a subject, it is in a form conditioned by central forces which preclude the ability to form a response different to any other; you are simply presented with statements on facts on which you agree or disagree. It is democratic.
No.1857553
>>1857538>while the ones with more or less cushy lives tended to be scolds, religious, puritansMaybe they should start wearing blue party uniforms and dream about murdering their spouse
No.1857554
>>1857523>>1857525> Here's an absolute gem from that era.But these are all shit
No.1857555
>>1856174>Implying that 'the right' aren't just cuckolds of capital that will betray their voters and ideals at the drop of a hat.>>1856165Regardless of the intentions the result will be significant demographic changes in countries mostly inhabited by Whites.
No.1857557
>>1857554>But these are all shitPrecisely.
>>1857523 may as well be a fucking fossil. There is no cynical skepticism, you are not being sold a narrative, it is simply an optimistic expression of the relation the individual has with themselves with these companies.
No.1857561
>>1857523fucking deviantart is in that pic. tumblr is definitely part of the old internet and cant be compared to any of the big platforms that dominate today
No.1857564
>>1857557>you are not being sold a narrativeThis isn't entirely true in reflection.
You are still being encouraged to consume a personal identity, but the picture does not make explicit epistemological claims to some sort of subjective social truth which most images today do.
No.1857568
>>1857561Part of that is the fanfiction network. Fanfiction would make its way onto tumblr where users would share their fandom and artists would create images for it.
I imagine they too have moved to twitter.
No.1857588
>>1857568>I imagine they too have moved to twitter.Yeah, because of the popular platforms it's the best, or least bad, for uploading art. Instagram has a lot more censorship and Tiktok is obviously an awful format for fanart and fanfiction.
No.1857618
>>1857511I'm not clicking a Twitter link. Screenshot and/or summary plz.
>>1857517It's hard to remember now, but Tumblr really was popular, or at the very least highly influential, back in its day. A lot of the culture you see in "fandom" spaces today can be traced back to that site.
>>1857561Individual social media platforms have grown as much as they have because of userbase consolidation. As an example, LiveJournal and Blogger were absorbed into Tumblr, which in turn was absorbed into Twitter.
The internet as a whole had more-or-less the same usage per-capita now as it did in the 2010s, at least in the West. Remember, by the summer of 2012, smartphones as we know them today had been around for four years (technically five but the ios app store didn't launch until 2008) and the internet as a whole had been widely available on home computers for well-over a decade.
No.1857638
>>1857511>EVERY>SINGLE>TIMEIt was the Joooooooos
No.1857644
>talk like an asshole to person who is wrong about something
>other person replies politely, sometimes even apologizes
>immediately get humbled and feel bad about it
why am i like this
No.1857649
>>1857637hand placmnt's too high 2 b datin, i'd reckon their cousins kek.
No.1857654
>>1857618Dude you're tripping. I'm a third-worlder but I have a hard time believing this is true even solely in the US. I had to look this stuff up because I didn't want to respond just with vibes but:
>Looking at broadband access, in 2000, just half of Americans had broadband access at home. Today, that number sits at more than 90%.>This broadband expansion was certainly not just an American phenomenon. Similar growth can be seen on a global scale; while less than 7% of the world was online in 2000, today over half the global population has access to the internet.>Similar trends can be seen in cellphone use. At the start of the 2000s, there were 740 million cell phone subscriptions worldwide. Two decades later, that number has surpassed 8 billion, meaning there are now more cellphones in the world than peoplehttps://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/heres-how-technology-has-changed-and-changed-us-over-the-past-20-years/Smartphones and data plans are cheaper than ever too. What was once restricted to almost exclusively the middle-class is accessible to almost everyone today. Like a good number of the most piss-poor workers are glued to their phone too nowadays.
No.1857658
>>1857654socialists should start a movement to get proletarians to switch to laptops rather than trying desperately to use cell phones to text even though they suck at hitting a high post-per-minute number
laptops are far better for smaller sized game files and for texting/typing than cell phones are but for some reason everybody wants to pretend cell phones are all they need. they're mainly useful for calls but if you arent calling anyone on your phone and only use it for mobile gaming then you should upgrade your gaming setup
No.1857660
>>1857654>Smartphones and data plans are cheaper than ever too.also free wifi spots everywhere + wifi at work
No.1857668
>>1857654>What was once restricted to almost exclusively the middle-class is accessible to almost everyone todayI was going to make this argument about tumblr. The political content it generated appealed primarily to the socialised tastes of the middle class (used in the loosest terms). Looking back, you would call this content what it is: Bourgeois.
No.1857679
>>1857668And again, once this link is made you can see the political content the site's users primarily fixated on, the representation of diverse sexual, gender, and racial identities for what they are: the highest expression of the ideal of the bourgeois individual.
The incipient pride movement was a coalescing of the legal and material reproduction of this ideal.
No.1857683
>>1857679>The incipient pride movement was a coalescing of the legal and material reproduction of this ideal.Within the context of this site's content. The history of the pride movement obviously did not begin with this site. But it was a major inflection point in the development of the spread of its appeal.
No.1857689
>>1857668>>1857679>>1857683The middle-class feeling guilty about themselves can only reach liberal conclusions informed by their own position, but that doesn't make issues like sexual expression strictly middle-class. They ARE interclassist issues and thus not solely concerned with the proletariat alone and hence don't advance its class interest.
No.1857704
>>1857686
>but that doesn't make issues like sexual expression strictly middle-class
I mean you are correct, but in the same way in which racism is still today an interclass issue. Ironically the liberal bourgeois retort to these two issues has occured under the same banner: the contemporary pride flag.
Rather than liquidating the categories altogether these identities are explicitly reproduced in the social and economic fabric. The absolute hilarity of this is best expressed by individuals claiming to be transracial; they are, in a way, correct. They are simply expressing the universality of these categories. The Bourgeoisie do not want to do away with them because when you move from the legal ideal of this freedom of expression, which is really the claim of the pride flag (to the ideal bourgeois individual) into the world of the market, these identities appear as marketing categories.
The entire issue of the question of sexual, racial, and gender identities becomes one in which political and economic power overlaps: it encourages those who identify under this system, becasue they have been sold their very existence back to them, to set out in its defence. But this overlap between the corporate enterprise and the political body is exactly what you think it is: Fascism. It is ᴉuᴉlossnW's ideal, because it does not engender Nazi sympathies for racial purity, but for one objective only: profit.
No.1857706
>>1857668>>1857679>>1857686i would be very, very skeptical of putting too much weight on "political content": much of the "Political" discourse of tumblr is not "properly political" at all. arguments about the race of the homestuck characters are not "political", they are not
about representation, they are and were mainly interpersonal disputes and clout-seeking using politics as cover. ("this person is racist" hits a lot better than "this person is annoying", does it not?) the emphasis on individual identity may well be bourgeois, but it is not inherent to Tumblr - it is inherent to the internet.
for the mirror image of this: take a twitter leftist who decries the emphasis on identity issues from "the left" - superficially, this too is "political content", but it is very common that what this person is doing is
constructing an identity for themselves, one that uses the red flag instead of the rainbow flag, but one that is also just about clout and interpersonal disputes - not changing the world, not "politics". the aesthetics change but the game stays the same.
No.1857709
>>1857637Women are bourgeois.
No.1857710
>>1857706I mean again I can see this, I've tried my best to express it
>>1857549The system of commodity production has penetrated through the integration of these identities some boundry which at least formally divided the social from the political fabric. What these individuals on twitter are consuming are essentially their own lives.
No.1857715
>>1857704its not like rejecting those categories by itself is necessarily "revolutionary" either. like yea there shouldnt be divisions nor prejudice among the proletariat for communism to be an effective movement but outside the context of organization then rejecting identity and doing nothing else with this action just becomes another identity. sorry for any bad phrasing
>>1857706what you said applies to the majority of protests and riots too tbh. everyone focuses too much on form and not on content
No.1857720
>>1857717"hmofa" covers a good chunk of this phenomenon and it is one of the most pathetic things i've seen develop. the most embarrassing parts are when it takes cuck-adjacent elements ("she looks like she fucks [x] men") and substitutes "human".
No.1857728
>>1857720It's just a meme, bro.
>cuck-adjacent elements ("she looks like she fucks [x] men")Anon…
No.1857732
>>1857728people never speak so seriously as when they speak in jest.
No.1857743
>>1857717this phenomenon also happened with bronies
No.1857747
>>1856760the internet became people's real life instead of an escape from (and rebellion towards) it.
No.1857749
>>1857747not to justify puritanism, just that people are puritannical by default because they suck
No.1857751
>>1857717Yeah, you're reading too much into it.
No.1857752
>>1856760>>1857747>>1857749I think it's simply just a narcissism of small differences mostly and failure to reckon with the context for a lot of ever-faster cultural shifts (gentrification of the mind type beat plus the complete deference of safeguarding in online spaces and creation of Four Websites).
No.1857790
>>1857789This one is satire, the other one was 100% genuine.
No.1857791
>>1857789this one's just funny lol
No.1857794
>>1857790>>1857790Come on the originals are clearly a shit post too
No.1857806
>>1857794Considering the original author deleted their blog after getting made fun of for it I'm not so sure.
Unique IPs: 14