Writing In The Ruins 2: The Internet Is a Place of Poison

 Maybe you've heard of discord, it's quite popular among the youth. They use it to communicate while playing their video games and whatnot. Essentially it's a real time chat app that is quite sophisticated. It has a number of servers (forums) catering to a variety of topics. Unfortunately...

It's also full of fascists and racists.

I don't understand what has happening to the younger generation (and I'm sure this will probably sound horrendous, I don't like to think of myself as old). There seems to be a whole generation, nurtured now by the panoply of social media and digital content, unprecedented in human history. My generation never had this when we were growing up. Not even close. While I'm not technophobe, I don't think it has been entirely positive. These kids have grown up drinking in a variety of political content, reading theory and philosophy, to the point they are intellectually rich but experientially poor. This lends to a certain naivete about the real impact of fascist and racist politics. 

They will argue vigorously how wonderful Trump is and how awful leftists/liberals/progressives (and so forth). They will scream down opposition voices. But they benefit not at all from those they support. They have no lived experience of the working class and the class struggle. Most of the are white men and they feel as if class politics represents an attempt to take from them. They complain with the voice of aggrieved privilege; taking what they have for granted without realising that their ideological interlocutors have less - BLM for instance. All because they haven't got that experience.

I think this is dangerous.

In the wake of the two rich old white capitalists butting heads, masquerading as a presidential debate, this is even more true. The absolute state of it. Trump's tactic was clear: gaslight his opponent. Force him to stutter and lose his train of thought while you constantly interrupt him. I'm not a 100% sure it worked but it doesn't really need to do much, a few clips of Joe being interrupted will be taken out of context and played to Trump's base to demonstrate that 'Sleepy Joe' is dysfunctional.

These are the final days of the American Empire (I hope). Presided over by two horrendous establishment characters. The only difference is that Biden is marginally less disgusting. This was demonstrated by Trump's refusal to distance himself from fascism. Instead he told them to "stand back and stand by". Even if you agreed to a charitable interpretation of that, it will be interpreted a certain way by those it was directed to, and Trump is already mobilising his base to watch the polls. In other words fascists will interfere in the election, or the aftermath. That is pretty scary.

And some people genuinely wonder why we need Antifa.