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Friday, June 19, 2020

Online Group Discussion and AMA Bookchat Today


Image Source: 4chan. A play on this painting.

A reminder, there is an AMA Bookchat today on the blog's Discord group. This is a weekly text chat where I talk with readers about technology's legacy in the early 21st century, in the form of red-pilled history. My definition of red-pilling is here. The bookchat is part of my work while I write my book-in-progress, Inside the Potemkin Village.

Everyone is invited to join the discussion. Friday, 19 June 2020, 4-7 p.m. Eastern (8-11 p.m. UTC). Go to the room marked hashtag #bookchat. The blog's Discord was established as a free, mutually-supporting community.


In the chat:
  • Toppled statues and the destruction of history. This is history, pressed to serve the causes of current politics.
  • Are protesters larping for tolerance? A revolution? An election? Are their activities a distraction from a collapsing economy and Pandemic Two?
  • The alt-right underground dismisses BLM's and Antifa's summer protests as a left-wing psyop and "fake narrative" to benefit the Democrats in the US election. They have considered psyop-ing the psyop by demanding that Yale University be renamed under Twitter hashtag #renameyale. Rather than fight with the demonstrators (as football fans recently did in the UK BLM protests), the trolls are encouraging the left to escalate their tactics. Right-wing anons understand memes like no one else, and in that spirit, they are launching new, pro-left anti-historical campaigns. Anons believe they are competing with the far left for the average voter, who can be swayed toward conservatism not through right-wing outrage at erased history, but through inconvenience, irritation, and annoyance at constant disruptions and socialist extremism. The trolls believe that it's not the toppled statues that will make the average citizen vote conservative. It's the traffic jams and trash around anarcho-syndicalist autonomous collective encampments and the disappeared police from leafy suburbs in major cities. Suburbanites don't really want to live in a Purge reality.
  • These actions and debates 'quote' and rewrite modern history, when very similar events took place. In the past, removal of statues was a prelude to societal collapse and violence.
  • We go full Orwell, as historians advocate the erasure of history in the mainstream media. A reminder that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith's job was erasing history, which was the dystopian equivalent to being a historian.
  • Meanwhile, in the mainstream media: the CBC was horrified to discover that a large portion of alt-right actors online are Canadians. The CBC deemed extremism as any engagement with information that falls outside the mainstream media narrative, which they define and control.
  • It all shows that history is written by the power players and it shows how information is connected to power plays.

Video Source: 4chan. A tweeted criticism of this comparison.














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