mind reader

Dear friends,

Yesterday the ALP passed into law legislation that bans all young people from social media [1]. This has been widely regarded as a bad move [2]. Without wanting to sound like a broken record, this is another step towards fascism from a supposedly union-supporting party – populism anyone? As mentioned a few days ago, social media bans for young people are not Lovejoyesque “won’t somebody please think of the children”, but rather a sinister configuration of common sense that seeks to shape and control the development of class consciousness in the digital age – amongst those most likely to see that there’s something really very wrong with our social order. This enacted ban, dressed up in the language of protection, is nothing but an attempt to forestall the development of digital literacy and thinking skills among young people. In 2024 the best tool the ALP and LNP can dream up together (yeah, those two supposedly opposed parties) is banning – this is simply because they can’t force US tech giants to capitulate to their will and enforce their particular brand of fascism.

So, to get to the bottom of this, we need to understand what social media actually represents under contemporary capitalism. These platforms aren’t spaces for connection. In fact, I doubt anyone is “connecting” on any tech-bro founded social media (and if you’re on social media, odds are you’re on social media not the fediverse). No, contemporary social media platforms, of which there are ever smaller numbers not subsumed by Meta (Zuckerberg), are a human-machine hybrid of mechanisms to enforce hegemony. They simultaneously atomise users while harvesting their data for profit. Does that make you feel good about your social media use? Nah, me either. Meta, Twitter, “Truth Social”, Bluesky and their ilk function as digital fiefdoms – we talked about this earlier today [3] – where interaction itself becomes a commodity. The “social” in social media is a cruel joke. What’s actually being cultivated is a form of managed isolation that serves capital’s interests. So, not a great place to exist if we can agree on the toxicity of these systems and their owners. So what, banning this is a good thing now?

The trouble here is young people are being systematically denied access to even this hollow form of connection, while simultaneously being prepared for lives of digital exploitation. And more importantly, because social media is such a “thing” their ability to navigate these spaces is forestalled, and appropriate forms of engagement aren’t suitably developed. At least, that’s what this bill would prefer. Remember the “digital native” narrative? I was supposed to be one of those, computers were just accessible enough during my youth that I pretty well had access to one from birth, and this made me a digital native – no questions asked. Except I’m the exception – most of my peers have no clue how a computer works, how to navigate digital spaces critically, or engage with thinking about the problematic nature of platform concentration. No, they were too busy seeing the opportunities presented by MySpace to cyberbully each other. I’m not helping here, am I?

But this is the fundamental trouble.

Young people either learn to be consumers of technology, and particularly today’s youth are directed almost exclusively towards consumerism. YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, it’s all “consume” with very little create – beside perhaps performative selfies. This doesn’t build technical literacy, actually it seems to do the opposite. Young people today can’t touch type on a keyboard (maybe on a phone screen), they don’t know what a CPU is, and they certainly don’t understand TCP/IP. Yeah, so the last one is maybe not so necessary – but my point here is about deliberate mystification of technology. This mystification only ever serves capitalist interests – it reinforces the exploitative status quo, and by denying young people access to digital literacy, it reinforces digital sheep – giving up all their personal information and attention, numbing the existential pain of knowing we are all dying from human-made climate death. Weeeee.

The intersectional impacts of this ban also demand our attention. For young people already marginalised by race, class, disability and other axes of oppression, being cut off from digital spaces means being denied access to community, support networks, and critical information about identity and resistance. The bourgeois fantasy that kids will just “go outside and play” ignores how digital spaces can provide vital refuge and resources for marginalised youth – particularly LGBTQI+ kids who are at incredible risk of “vengeance” from their right-wing moron parents. When the ALP talks about “protecting children”, they tacitly, and deliberately, mean only the straight white middle class children. Certainly not working class kids, Indigenous kids, or queer kids who rely on digital connections to find community and survival strategies. They also deny knowledge of how these systems operate, are governed, and whose interests they serve – the real educational piece needed today. We know creating communities is a threat to the ALP. Because anything that’s not one of “theirs” is a threat to their hegemony, and they are viciously and disgustingly protective of their “community” (cult). Probably something to do with the ban, ey.

Rather than dwelling in doom and gloom, let’s think about the interesting aspect, and perhaps hopeful corner offered by this ban. The very attempt to lock young people out of mainstream social platforms could create opportunities for new forms of digital resistance and community-building. And I don’t mean because Meta will basically refuse to enforce this (unless they see it as an opportunity to force you to tie your social media profile to a drivers license, etc. so they can extract more real-world data from you, the opportunities are endless, if you’re a sociopath). No, as a response to the “enshittification” of mainstream services we have already seen the emergence of federated platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy that operate on fundamentally different principles than the corporate social media giants. Different, but still susceptible to human problems. These spaces, governed by communities rather than algorithms, suggest possibilities for social interaction that isn’t primarily oriented toward data extraction and profit generation. As long as that’s what the communities focus on (and ignoring those problematic fascists purporting communism over in the .ml TLD).

Okay, back on the constructive bandwagon. Our questions become: how might we support young people in developing the technical literacy and the critical consciousness needed to build and maintain alternative spaces? Not “teaching kids to code” (though it probably wouldn’t hurt). What I’m pushing here is fostering forms of digital literacy that help them, and frankly everyone else, to understand and resist the mechanisms of control embedded in mainstream platforms. We need to craft tools and practices that support genuine community governance, intersectional equality, and meaningful dialogue rather than engagement metrics and algorithmic manipulation. The systems we have now either started as and became perfected under capitalist ontology, or are late-comers who go full throttle capital accumulation and propaganda out the gate. Where community run systems exist, we need safeguards that prevent hijacking on the basis of popularity, attention, and ad sales.

Let’s get into the construction zone – pouring some concrete here, we could:

1. Develop open-source moderation tools that centre harm reduction and community accountability rather than automated content filtering
2. Create educational resources that teach both technical skills and critical analysis of platform capitalism
3. Build infrastructure for local, community-controlled social spaces that can’t be easily co-opted by capital
4. Support young people in understanding and creating their own governance structures for digital spaces

But we should also be clear-eyed about the challenges. Capital is proven at co-opting and neutralising resistance movements. Any alternative platforms or practices we develop will face intense pressure to either conform to market logic or become irrelevant. Or worse, be legislated out of existence. The history of the internet is littered with promising experiments in digital democracy that ended up serving as research and development for corporate platforms. Remember when that soccer club setup a digital platform for making all their corporate decisions? Neither does capitalism, but the emergence of investor decision centres based on the same principle – just tailored for accumulation rather than public good – certainly go strong even today.

The likely immediate effect of the social media ban will be to push youth interaction into even less accountable spaces – private Discord servers, anonymous forums, and encrypted messaging apps. While this might temporarily evade state and corporate surveillance, it also fragments community and makes collective organising more difficult. The ALP knows this – again, the goal isn’t actually to “protect” young people but to prevent them from developing the digital literacy and class consciousness needed to resist exploitation. Added bonus points if adults forced into validating their age also have to hand over 100 points of ID to Zucc to expand his surveillance propaganda machine. And a big glaring reminder that Zuckerberg recently “bent the knee” to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, granting the dictator platform control [4].

We can’t ignore how this ban fits into broader patterns of surveillance and control – and a space of continued interest to the ALP who seek to regulate anything “private” into their domain. A friendly reminder that the Australian Labor Party is the very same current government who are expanding police powers, criminalising protest, and maintaining some of the most draconian digital surveillance laws in the supposedly “democratic” world. It’s never been about safety. It’s all about maintaining hegemonic control as capitalism enters an increasingly authoritarian phase. Of course, the very intensity of these control efforts suggests their underlying fragility. Capital wouldn’t work so hard (they rarely work at all) to prevent young people from developing digital literacy if it wasn’t afraid of what they might do with it. The challenge is always using moments of crisis to build genuine alternatives. Letting corporate social media platforms win is just a modern system of “digital enclosure”. Instead, we can, and are, finding better ways of community building.

This means thinking beyond individual platforms or technical solutions to consider how we might fundamentally reshape human interaction in digital space. Instead of engagement metrics and data extraction, what if we oriented digital tools toward mutual aid and collective liberation? Instead of algorithmic manipulation, what if we developed practices of genuine dialogue and democratic decision-making?

We already see, globally in forums, fediverse tools, and other digitally-mediated social spaces:

1. Networks of community-controlled servers and services
2. Educational programs that combine technical skills with political analysis
3. Tools that support consensus-building and collective decision-making, and
4. International solidarity networks that can resist state and corporate control.

Ultimately, though, the question of youth access to digital spaces can’t be separated from broader struggles against capitalism and fascism. The ALP’s social media ban is just one front in a larger war being waged against the possibility of collective resistance and alternative futures. Our response needs to be equally comprehensive – not just “building better platforms”, but developing new forms of governance, engagement, solidarity and struggle that can effectively challenge capital’s control of digital (and physical) space. The fascist creep doesn’t just happen in parliament or the streets – it happens in code, in algorithms, in the architecture of our digital lives (and we choose who the architect is). Resistance means developing not just alternative platforms but alternative ways of being together online, of making decisions, of building power.

They want to deny young people access to digital literacy and community? Fine. Let’s build something better – something they can’t control or co-opt. The future isn’t in the Metaverse or government-approved platforms. It’s in the spaces we create.

In solidarity,

Aidan

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/28/labor-passes-migration-and-social-media-ban-bills-after-marathon-senate-sitting

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/26/australia-social-media-ban-expert

[3] https://mndrdr.org/2024/on-immunity-and-the-ruling-class

[4] https://www.mediaite.com/tv/mark-zuckerberg-visits-mar-a-lago-after-trump-threatened-him-with-imprisonment/

Dear friends,

I woke to news that France was refusing to arrest Netanyahu despite the ICC’s ruling on his creation and maintenance of genocide. So yes, in one fell swoop, France declares a law of its own and renders the ICC as a theatre for political drama, not action – same as it ever was I suppose. This movement gives us yet another lens, in what has basically become a camera store or optometrist, through which to examine how the ruling class protects its own. This isn’t surprising, after all when was the last time you saw a billionaire or war criminal actually face consequences for their actions? But what makes this moment interesting is how this protection is being reinforced in mainstream society through broader political moves – once again creating opportunities to climb and hoist up the ladder. What we see, here, is concomitant and frankly thus far unprecedented control of digital information to manufacture consent.

As always, let’s delve into a little theory first. Gramsci (hello there) gave us a robust understanding of how the dominant group in society controls and maintains their power – hegemony – which helps us understand how ruling class power is maintained not just through direct state violence, but through cultural control and manufactured consent. In our digital age, this hegemonic control manifests equally through cultural institutions – now reconstituted to include social media companies – and through use of force when this manufactured consent fails. The ruling class isn’t just controlling traditional media anymore, in fact they are actively shaping the architecture of digital spaces to prevent class consciousness from emerging. The newspapers, radio stations, and cultural organisations of Gramsci’s time served to normalise fascist ideology and make it appear as “common sense”, today’s social media platforms serve the exact same function – personalised propaganda for fascist ends.

Consider how platforms like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube have “evolved”. What began as seemingly neutral spaces for connection and information sharing have become (badly tuned) instruments of ideological control. The concentration of power in the hands of a few tech oligarchs – looking at you Musk and Zuckerberg – is an extension the media barons of Gramsci’s era, hell of our era – looking at you Murdoch. These modern-day Hearsts (or “Johnny Newspaperseed” if you like) don’t just own the platforms, they shape what information users can see – right so history repeats itself, got it? The “freedom” – that brief flash of democratisation – to post whatever you want is, now more than ever, utterly meaningless when “the algorithm” ensures only certain viewpoints gain traction. This hasn’t “changed” because the technology itself changed – rather the technology is now more fit for purpose. Capital recognised the threat posed by truly “open” digital spaces and moved aggressively to capture and reshape them. That’s why there’s so much platform monopolisation and so many moves to lock down hosting, platform providers, and fundamentally “open” parts of the internet. The early internet’s potential for activist organising and counter-hegemonic discourse was precisely what made it dangerous to ruling class interests. And now it’s nice and Musky instead — and what’s left in the open web is not substantial enough to shake Meta’s exclusivity.

Modern digital hegemony is not a major departure from previous forms of platform control. Nothing truly innovative has ever emerged from capitalism, it is capable only of subsuming peripheral ideas that benefit control and manipulation tactics. But its propaganda machine is enviable and terrible – the modern Web 2.0 internet was a con to pull democratic voices and conglomerate them under tech giants. The aura of “open” remains in forums like Facebook, where people feel a sense of broad connection because their once upon a time physical network of actual friends migrated there (and then promptly stopped interacting in the real world). Mediation of friendship and human connection through technology could have been a wonderful thing, instead it’s an intensification echo chamber that amplifies the worst of humanity to serve capitalist ends. Users feel like they’re freely choosing what content to engage with, but the choices themselves are curated by algorithms designed to promote ruling class interests. This is Gramsci’s “spontaneous consent” operating at a deep level of sophistication.

Varoufakis offers a compelling framework, here, for understanding this transformation through his concept of technofeudalism. He argues that we’re seeing the emergence of a new form of economic domination where tech platforms function as digital fiefs, extracting rents from all social and economic activity that occurs within their domains. Much like feudal lords who could demand tribute from anyone living on their land, companies like Meta and Twitter can extract value from any interaction that takes place on their platforms. Look no further than Twitter’s claim that it owns Alex Jones’ profile and therefore criminal action cannot seek to sell it to reclaim damages. This isn’t traditional monopoly power - it’s a restructuring of social relations where tech oligarchs function as modern-day lords, determining what information can flow through their digital fiefdoms while demanding tribute (in the form of data and attention) from their users. The parallel to feudal power structures is apt when we consider how these platforms have become essential infrastructure for modern life. Just as medieval peasants couldn’t simply “opt out” of their local lord’s domain, today’s workers can’t realistically withdraw from these digital spaces without facing social and economic isolation – though, I’m happily Meta free for 6 months and counting and my mental health has significantly improved.

When we couple these background pieces with our key point – bad people can do what they want, as long as they work for capital, and legislature, public opinion, common sense and judiciary will be turned on anyone who doesn’t agree – we see hegemony in action with all its warts. What better capturing of coercive control than the Australian, particularly South Australian, Labor government’s utterly insane legislation to ban under-17s from phones in school and social media altogether. As always, this isn’t about “thinking of the children”. It is about preventing young people from developing critical digital literacy skills that might help them see through ruling class propaganda. Rather than teach young people how to critically engage with digital information, the response is to simply cut off access entirely. The message is clear: better to prevent access than risk class consciousness emerging through digital means. That’s what TikTok was fostering – communist awareness, even if it was the Chinese brand of capitalist communism (yes, that’s an oxymoron folks – and also another form of international state actors creating dissent).

All this legislature to dumb down the working class nests within a broader pattern of global control. The ruling class clearly recognised that Gen Z’s unprecedented access to information posed a threat to their hegemony. For a brief moment, young people had the ability to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and access unfiltered information about capitalism’s contradictions, imperial and intersectional violence, and class struggle. The response has been swift and brutal: the algorithmic promotion of fascist content, the strategic purchase of Twitter to control discourse, the flooding of the internet with AI-generated slop, and the deliberate degradation of search capabilities. There’s a reason Google only offers you mainstream news, social media posts, and “Reddit discussions” (read: AI bots screaming at each other; and sadly the other dominant search index is not much better).

The purported “neutrality” of algorithms provides perfect cover for the neo-Nazi ideological project (sorry, “Labor Party”) – the rise of fascism to cement capitalism under fire. When YouTube “randomly” promotes far-right content, or TikTok faces bans for allowing anti-hegemonic narratives to spread, we’re supposed to believe these are natural or necessary technical decisions rather than deliberate acts of class warfare. This is what manufactured consent looks like for the digital age. No longer just filtering information through corporate media ownership as Chomsky described, but actively manipulating the infrastructure of digital spaces to fragment class solidarity – and then enacting laws that ensure this is the only way to engage with politics, society, and critique. Meanwhile, the traditional protection racket continues unabated. France’s refusal to arrest Netanyahu follows the same logic as America’s refusal to prosecute war criminals from its own imperial adventures, or Australia’s protection of mining executives who destroy Aboriginal land. The ruling class doesn’t arrest its own – whether they’re genocidal leaders or billionaire exploiters. What’s changed is their ability to couple this direct protection with digital platform manipulation to preempt and prevent resistance from forming. This is what Marx would recognise as the intensification of class warfare through new technological means. The current axis of economic exploitation coupled with maintenance of “correct ideology” prevent workers from developing the consciousness needed to recognise our shared interests.

I think the worst part is that this all seems to be working. Despite having theoretical access to more information than any generation before, many young people are being systematically channelled into reactionary politics through carefully curated digital spaces. From PragerU propaganda to algorithm-boosted fascist content, the ruling class has turned digital spaces into machines for manufacturing consent. It’s a nazi’s world out there, or rather the new nazis, zionists, cryptofascists and other bullshit peddlers. The fact that they’re working to control digital information flows reveals their fear of what might happen if workers could freely share information and recognise their common interests. As always, all it takes is looking at how the 1% destroys the souls of the 99% and using these tools against them … not that that ever seems to happen.

Is there an opportunity here, now, to use the open technologies of the modern internet to undermine their propagandist, ecologically destructive, and toxic ideology? Of course there is, and there are a litany of open source projects that promote free platforms moderated by communities not tech oligarchs. There are many ways to learn digital literacy, to be critical of information that appears in front of you, and to reject racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic and hollow explanations for exploitation. The real problem is very simple – capital is destroying us as a species, and all those trapped in this jail with us. If we, the vast majority of people don’t take meaningful action to change course, we’re doomed – we are already doomed, even with traditional intellectuals sounding alarms of no return. If it’s so bad that the ruling class is divided on it, the urgency of working class action has never been clearer.

We can use our own digital infrastructure, we can find ways to connect with fellow humans, and we can reject the laws, propaganda, and bullshit the ruling class has cranked up to 11. From critiquing the colonial-capitalist project, to teaching our communities how to understand information that is presented to them, there are better ways. And if none of that sounds like you, the least you can do is get off Meta’s platforms – it’s actually as simple as just deleting the app. The ruling class is betting everything on their ability to control digital spaces and prevent class consciousness from emerging through these channels. Our job is to prove them wrong.

In solidarity,

Aidan

Dear friends,

The acceleration of populist movements globally presents an interesting contradiction for analysis. Populism, a peculiar (if increasingly popular) political “logic” positions people against one another for the benefit of a person, or small group of people, vying for political power. Building on manufactured “us vs them” narratives, populist leaders will typically suggest the people need to rally behind their cause to take on the elites. The elites, importantly in this context, are not capitalists – but rather minorities that have been or can be depicted as evil, menacing, and controlling society. There is an aura of sophistication to the way populists speak, engage, and share their messaging, but above all else it is regularly xenophobic, racist, and comes with a chaser of hatred. All this in the name of clawing over some political power while allowing the continued exploitation of workers, and so on. Over time, populism has come to serves as a sophisticated tool for capital by leveraging new technologies to fragment class consciousness while continuing to reinforce the power structures it claims to oppose. This deserves our attention, particularly as we suffer from the transformation of social relations through algorithmic mediation and the cultivation of what can only be described as digital fascism.

Populism, which, positions an imagined “pure people” against a supposedly corrupt elite offers a relatively straightforward power grabbing tool for political figures – and so its proliferation globally over the last hundred odd years has an almost self-evident feeling. Because populism doesn’t demand truth, nor offer anything genuinely transformative, it does not upset capitalist status quo. Indeed, it can simply serve extant capitalist agendas, while keeping the working class fighting amongst ourselves. Populist campaigns across history have shown this, from Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement in 1930s America to contemporary figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi, populist movements have emerged as responses to capitalist crisis. They swoop in, purporting to connect with working class issues, and offer seductive but false solutions to systemic contradictions. While these movements often appropriate left-wing critiques of inequality, they invariably redirect legitimate working class grievances toward reactionary ends, substituting scapegoating for structural analysis.

The historical record reveals some distinct variants: right-wing populism, which typically combines nationalist mythology with racial grievance (c.f., George Wallace); left-wing populism, which attempts to build multi-racial working class coalitions but often remains trapped within capitalist logic (c.f., Peron in Argentina); and what we might call techno-populism, exemplified by figures like Elon Musk who marry Silicon Valley utopianism with reactionary politics. Each variety, despite their surface differences, shares a fundamental characteristic: they offer individualist solutions to collective problems while reinforcing rather than challenging capital’s grip on social relations. Frequently, populist movements have relied on technologies to advance their messaging, initially a reliance on radio broadcasts and mass rallies, today demagogues harness algorithms and data analytics to micro-target their messaging – or just buy an entire social media platform and run it into the ground with fascist spam. This technological “evolution” requires theoretical framing to understanding how capital reproduces its hegemony through increasingly sophisticated means. Let me digress slightly to reactionary politics, first, though.

Marx offers a critique of reactionary politics, particularly his analysis of Louis Bonaparte’s rise to power, which provides a crucial substrate for insights into contemporary populism’s function within capitalism. Importantly, Marx observed how reactionary movements emerge during periods of class struggle, presenting themselves as defenders of “traditional” social relations while actually serving capital’s need to forestall revolutionary consciousness. His famous line about history repeating “first as tragedy, then as farce” continues to hold resonance as we witness capital’s recycling of reactionary tropes through digital means.

What Marx identified as “Bonapartism”, where a supposedly charismatic leader claims to transcend class conflict while actually intensifying capitalist exploitation, perfectly describes the function of contemporary populist figures. Nailed it. Analysis over… But not quite. The key difference lies not in the fundamental mechanism, but in its technological amplification. Where Bonaparte relied on army and bureaucracy to maintain power while appearing to stand above class interests, today’s populists leverage technological manipulations, algorithmic timelines, and digital surveillance to achieve the same end with unprecedented precision. Marx’s insight that reactionary politics serves to “represent” the masses while actually defending ruling class interests remains, devastatingly, relevant as the specific technologies of control metamorphose.

Historically, populist movements have emerged during periods of capitalist crisis, offering simplistic solutions to complex systemic problems while redirecting working class anger away from its true source. As we’ve touched on, the fundamental playbook hasn’t changed. Scapegoating marginalised groups, promoting nationalist mythology, and promising restoration of an imagined golden age. Rinse and repeat. But the mechanisms of delivery have evolved dramatically – and while this doesn’t change fundamentally the role of populism, it does alter the scale and damage. Where demagogues once relied on radio broadcasts and mass rallies, today’s fascist authoritarians deputise traditional intellectuals to leverage data analytics, manipulate social media feeds, and micro-target their messages of hate and division. As with all right-wing ideas, the goal is to continue capitalist accumulation, exploiting and fucking over the 99% – fracturing working class solidarity while maintaining capitalist hegemony.

From the printing press enabling nationalist propaganda, through radio and television creating the first “celebrity” politicians, to today’s social media platforms optimising for engagement through extremism, each new communication technology has been seized by capital to enhance its ideological control. The key here is that capital does not care who on the spectrum is chosen to “lead” – it cares only that growth continues. In this humanity-destroying way, capitalism is tantamount to cancer. The only difference offered by new technologies is the unprecedented precision of manipulation. Social media algorithms don’t just broadcast populist messaging. Rather, they actively cultivate ideological bubbles, pushing users toward increasingly extreme content while creating the illusion of mass movement. Your feed becomes a carefully curated echo chamber, with each interaction driving you further from genuine class consciousness and deeper into manufactured tribal identity. Regardless of the “specific messaging” you’re seeing, this is true for you if you use any of Meta’s platforms. The resulting right-wing scream-fest of hatred and misguided anger coupled with the extremely inequitable capitalist model we continue to allow creates such angst and suffering and, remains, largely unidentifiable by the 99% due to hegemonic enforcement and cultural institutions.

The cruel genius is that populism, through its “almost truth” about exploitation, extraction, harm and division, transforms legitimate working class grievances into individualised rage, redirecting systemic critique into personal vendettas. Better yet, for the capitalists, cottage industries of hatred and “content creation” intersect to fuel accumulation and production of whole categories of misanthropic, cynical, and despotic media, merchandise, and more. Rather than recognising shared class interests, atomised “users” are encouraged to view their fellow workers as enemies, with algorithms helpfully suggesting which out-group to blame for their precarity. This technologically enhanced division serves capital perfectly – keeping the 99% fighting each other while the 1% continues accumulating wealth at our collective expense. The new found dictators rising to prominence through these platforms aren’t threatening the capitalist order; they’re its perfect products/pundits, offering the illusion of rebellion while reinforcing its fundamental logic. Or better yet, they are capitalists, beneficiaries of the worst of the system, seeing how it operates and perpetuating crueller and intersectionally more disadvantageous systems to solidify their own wealth and power.

This brings us to the wicked problem of electoral strategy in an age of algorithmic radicalisation. While the liberal fantasy of individual consumer choice in the “marketplace of ideas” has proven catastrophically inadequate, we must also reject the false populist promise of strongman solutions. The path forward requires rebuilding class solidarity and collective political consciousness – what we (or specifically Piper) might term utilitarian voting for the many, not the few. This means understanding elections as tactical terrain in an ongoing struggle, not as ends in themselves. When we vote, we must do so with clear eyes about the systemic limitations of electoral politics while recognising the material differences that policy choices make in working class lives – particularly at the margins and intersections of gender, race, disability and class. The myths perpetuated to forestall this kind of collective consciousness are as numerous, from the bootstrap fallacy of the “self-made millionaire” to the fiction of meritocratic mobility, capital relies on an elaborate mythology to naturalise its violence. These just-so stories about deserved wealth and poverty serve to individualise systemic problems, making structural critique appear impossible or naive. The ultimate success of these myths lies in how they’ve infected our ontological understanding. They make the artificial constructs of capitalism appear as natural as gravity – and even economists will tell you it’s not. We must remember that every “self-made” fortune rests on generations of stolen labour, every “individual success” story obscures a network of social relations and structural advantages.

What makes our current moment particularly dangerous is how new technologies amplify and accelerate these mythologies while simultaneously fragmenting our capacity for collective response. Ughh, I’m tired, are you tired? The same platforms that connect us also isolate us, channelling legitimate rage into algorithmic dead ends killing the development of genuine class consciousness. Filter bubbles abound, and rage lies at the end of every rainbow. Every click, every share, every angry reaction feeds the machine learning models determining what content spreads – letalone the deeply manipulated content priorities on platforms such as Twitter and “Truth Social”. All this, naturally, supports capitalist accumulation – more clicks, more ads, more engagement, more MAUs, more investors, more money! And engagement metrics inevitably favour extremist content that drives division over nuanced systemic critique – because who wants to listen to a Marxist when you’ve got Andrew Tate on the scene (present company excluded).

The “self-made” mythology really deserves scrutiny as a masterwork of hegemonic control. This narrative performs a dual function in service of capital, offering a phantasmic promise of class mobility while legitimising the structures that make mobility impossible. Like a cruel parody of Tantalus, the “American Dream”, hello white picket fence, or “Australian Dream”, just “a house”, I guess – the colonial-capitalist branding matters not, dangles forever out of reach, close enough to maintain hope while far enough to ensure continued submission to wage labour exploitation. This mythology operates simply: a very small handful of privileged workers do manage to ascend to petit bourgeois status through some combination of “foundational capital”, chance, and brutal self-exploitation. Their stories are then weaponised by capital’s (occult) cultural apparatus, transformed into morality tales about “hard work” and “determination” – better yet “GRIT” my absolute favourite psychology bullshit-ism – carefully excising any mention of structural advantage or stolen labour value. That’s right, these “self ascending” dickheads stole from you to get where they are. These exceptional cases serve as both carrot and stick – promising rewards for compliance while implicitly blaming the vast majority of workers for their own exploitation. “If they made it, why haven’t you?” (words that I’ve heard way too many times). The unspoken accusation, transforming systemic critique into personal failing – a joy.

The ideological sleight-of-hand ever effective because it leverages real examples while completely mystifying the underlying relations of production. Yes, some workers do become small business owners or climb the corporate ladder. But their individual success stories obscure how this limited mobility actually reinforces rather than challenges capitalist hegemony. The petit bourgeois small business owner often becomes an even more passionate vanguard of capitalist relations than the capitalist class itself, having internalised the logic of exploitation through their own desperate struggle to avoid falling back into the proletariat. They become the perfect deputies of capital, enforcing its logic at the micro level while championing the very system that keeps them in constant precarity. Not to mention the narcissistic, psychotic, torturous class of professional “managers” that capital deputises to “bootstrap enforcement” jobs.

Naturally the ingenious, come utterly evil, system transforms the potential energy of class consciousness into the energy of individual striving (or cutthroatism). Rather than organising collectively to challenge exploitation, workers are encouraged to view their peers as competition in a grand meritocratic game. What. An. Absolute. Load. Those “above” are more interested in pulling the metaphorical ladder up behind them than doing any work, and constantly in the process of creating new platitudes, torture technologies, and endless bureaucratic bullshit to keep workers busy. This process of selective co-optation serves capital perfectly – fracturing class solidarity while creating a layer of ideological enforcement within the working class itself. The. Worst.

We need both tactical savvy and strategic clarity. We need to deeply understand these technologies without being used by them, to use alternatives like Mastodon, Lemmy, and other decentralised systems rather than gargling corporate fascist propaganda on Bluesky, Instagram or Reddit. We need to find ways to build genuine solidarity that can withstand algorithmic manipulation. This means developing new forms of digital literacy and collective resistance – my assertion is that digital literacy remains one of the most foundational pieces of knowledge required to date, and Australia’s political leaders have spent a majority of the last term in office ensuring that kids have absolutely 0 exposure to any kind of analytical thinking or technology capabilities. Only by understanding how these systems work while refusing to let them work on us can we see “through” the shit – the constant normalisation of harm. The alternative is continued fracturing of the working class, with populist demagogues serving as the perfect instruments of distraction while we literally COOK OURSELVES ALIVE. The jet stream is gone, folks, we’ve already passed the point of no return on climate. If anyone’s willing to learn a lesson here, its the 8 billion of us who will be left here suffering when Musk’s on his way to Mars.

Deep time is such an important concept for our futures – and its something we absolutely have not come to understand. Caring for the future – generation, ecology, collectivism – these are things we notionally cared about as a society – now it’s militant individualism and capitalist propaganda all the way down. What the hell.

In solidarity,

Aidan