/395/ A Coup From Within the Computer ft. Benjamin Studebaker
Added 2024-03-05 07:00:04 +0000 UTCOn media and the Millennial Left.
[Patreon Exclusive]
Continuing the retrospective on the millennial left's failures, we invite political theorist Benjamin Studebaker back on. We discuss:
- Was left-populism a media event?
- Was the Millennial Left just a moment in internet history?
- Having bought into the internet's possibilities, can we abandon it?
- Does it make sense to speak of a "millennial" left?
- Faced with so many dead ends, do we need to "go monastic"?
Links:
- The Millennial Left as a Moment in Internet History, Benjamin Studebaker
- Omelets with Eggshells: On the Failure of the Millennial Left, Alex Hochuli, American Affairs. Additional comments on Alex's Substack
Comments
Angela Nagle noted the failure of the internet left about 6 years ago. This does not seem to be a new analysis and has not developed Angela's understanding at all. In fact, it seems to go backward in claiming that "if only all the real world nonsense wouldn't happen, or even just not be ascribed to millenials, we might have created a gorgeous utopia online." This falls short of Benjamin's other work which I have often found insightful.
Cheryl Hudson
2024-03-10 17:13:56 +0000 UTCAlso, people writing messages to their friends in ICQ weren't better writers. Come the fuck on, that's absurd. That's the subjective experience of having a handful of nerdy friends, in a relatively tiny circle. (And yes, that also goes for having a million people pretend to read your long political blog posts before everything fragmented into IDpol niches.) This is confusing autobiography for politics. The vast majority of "computer people" were exactly how they are now. They pwned their friends in Call of Duty, typed incoherent horny messages to fake profiles in chatrooms, and got their copy-pasted opinions about George Lucas killing their childhood from proto-versions of the moronic culture warrior YouTubers of today. Yes, the internet was better for a while. Better spaces for discourse existed and it may have deluded people into thinking something could be built. But it also wasn't THAT much better. These delusions need to be dealt with much more harshly if we're going to learn anything from these debacles.
Jonas Kyratzes
2024-03-07 16:52:03 +0000 UTCThere's something uniquely disorienting about this American obsession with generational politics. Instead of a sober analysis of class and material conditions, we get this semi-disguised autobiography in which the author's personal resentments and aesthetic opinions (who's cool and who isn't) determine how political events played out. He recognizes the failures of the Left and the delusional importance placed on the internet, and that's good, but I've rarely heard a less rational explanation for how this process actually worked. Doubly so because he neglects all the related events happening in the rest of the world under very different cultural conditions. Ultimately his account is almost entirely apolitical - in fact, he is still entirely caught in the internet mindset!
Jonas Kyratzes
2024-03-07 16:25:57 +0000 UTC
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