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Socialists of the Fediverse, let's talk about efficient communication!

There is a well-known internet proverb, the bullshit assymetry principle:

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

Anyone who has been in a few software chatrooms, a political communities, or any hobby groups has probably seen the eternal fountain of people asking really obvious questions, all the time, forever. No amount of patience and free time would allow a community to give quality answers by hand to each and every one of them, and gradually the originally-helpful people answering get sick of dealing with this constantly, then newcomers will often get treated with annoyance and hostility for their ignorant laziness. That's one way how communities get a reputation for being 'toxic' or 'elitist'. I've occasionally seen this first hand even on Lemmy, and obviously telling people to go away until they've figured out the answer themselves isn't a useful way to build a mass movement.

This is a reason why efficient communication matters.

Efficient teaching isn't a new idea, so we have plenty of techniques to draw from. One of the most famous texts in the world is a pamphlet, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a way for the Communist League to share the idea of historical materialism to many thousands using a couple of dozen pages. Pamphlets and fliers are still used today at protests and rallies and for general promotion, and in the real world are often used as a resource when someone asks for a basic introduction to an ideology.

However, online, we have increased access to existing resources and linking people to information is easier than ever. I've seen some great examples of this on Lemmy with Dessalines often integrating pages of their FAQ/resources list into short to-the-point replies, and Cowbee linking their introductory reading list. So instead of burning out rewriting detailed replies to each and every beginner question from a propagandised liberal, or just banning/kicking people who don't even understand what they said wrong (propaganda is a hell of a drug), these users can pack a lot of information into their posts using effective links. Using existing resources counters the bullshit assymetry principle. There's a far lower risk of burnout and hostility when you can simply copy a bookmarked page, paste it, and write a short sentence to contextualize it. No 5 minute mini-essay in your reply to get the message across properly, finding sources each time, getting it nitpicked by trolls, and all that. Just link to an already-polished answer one click away!

There are many FAQ sites for different topics and ideological schools of thought (e.g. here's a well-designed anarchist FAQ I've been linked to years ago). There are also plenty of wikis, like ProleWiki and Leftypedia, which I think are seriously underused (I'm surprised Lemmygrad staff and users haven't built a culture of constantly linking common silly takes to their wiki's articles. What's the point of the wiki if it's not being used much by its host community?).

Notice that an FAQ is often able to link to specific common questions, and is very different from the classic "read this entire book" reply some of you may have seen before - unfortunately when a post says "how can value com from labor and not supply nd demand?", they're probably not in the mood to read Capital Vol. I-III to answer their question no matter how you ask them, but they might skim a wiki page on LTV and maybe then read further.

(Honestly, I think there's a missed opportunity for integrating information resources into ban messages and/or the global rules pages, because I guarantee more than half the people getting banned for sinophobia/xenophobia/orientalism sincerely don't think anything they said was racist or chauvanistic - it's often reiterating normal rhetoric and ""established facts"" in mass media; not a sign of reactionary attitude. The least we can do is give them a learning opportunity instead of simply pushing them further from the labour movement)

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  • Honestly, I think there’s a missed opportunity for integrating information resources into ban messages and/or the global rules pages, because I guarantee more than half the people getting banned for sinophobia/xenophobia/orientalism sincerely don’t think anything they said was racist or chauvanistic - it’s often reiterating normal rhetoric and ““established facts”” in mass media; not a sign of reactionary attitude. The least we can do is give them a learning opportunity instead of simply pushing them further from the labour movement

    very true and add something like this to moderation actions as well.

  • Good write-up, comrade, and thanks for the shout-out! I have seen some comrades make talking point flashcards for easy linking.

    • Thanks!

      I have seen some comrades make talking point flashcards for easy linking.

      If you find one, can you please give me a link?

  • Adjacent. Matrix uses a lot more resources & storage than XMPP, making XMPP a more efficient method of decentralized, self-hostable communication (both servers and clients). Having control of your own chat server will prove important with facism on the rise, so owning your own server node + E2EE will prove important—but if the system is too expensive that everyone cannot afford to run it, it isn’t radical tech.

  • I see a lot of reading lists with a link to a dead group chat that put the onus entirely on the reader to sort through the books. There need to be more reading guides that include some responses or recent articles about a book along with chapter questions so readers learn not to slog through a book without knowing whether they truly learned anything.

    A pamphlet, even offline, should be a doorway into the hypertext world of the history of socialist praxis. It should mention a book or a website for those interested in the message to continue learning about what they just read, but there needs to be something there to actually receive them. For instance entry level well-cited history books that deconstruct imperialist history or "international relations" or neoliberal "economics". Helps back up a message. But websites and e documents are still not used to their full educational potential by much of the left.

    I think ban messages should always cite and link to a rule, the banning interface should make that an easy task, letting you check off a few reasons, with an "Other: [text]” area. The ban message should contain the rule citations and a custom message. This would lead people to receive bans in a less arbitrary manner. Arbitrary bannings are likely to make people disregard rules entirely, in my experience.

    There are plenty of ostensibly Marxist organizations that function as alt-media outlets and generic activist NGOs for liberal causes. There are few online spaces actually educating socialists rather than browbeating them. Best not to learn by example from contemporary activist organizations and online spaces frankly. Look at what works everywhere, not what exists, failing in the first world.

    • Have you checked out my reading list (linked in the post body)? I believe I did a good job within the constraints of a Lemmy post, character limit and all, but am open to suggestions.

      • I like that Jones Manoel article from Black Agenda Report. I will send you some books related to that when I am on PC. I think the formatting is great. I was focusing on expansion of this format of reading list, next step is to make this stuff usable offline or if posted somewhere without discussion/group chat, like a textbook with dicussion prompt questions, but obviously that is a lot of work so I will take it on myself and see how it turns out.

        Basically I see no reason Marxists should have to turn to the few orgs that offer free online classes. Materials should permit people to form their own, not simply prepare them to be inducted into an online community.

  • Bookmarked to read tomorrow. Sidenote, anyone have a recommendation for a good copy of capital? I keep meaning to read it.

    • When you said "bookmarked," were you referring to everything in the post, or one specific part? I'm the author of the linked Introductory Reading List so I can answer any questions you have regarding it.

      Secondly, I'd recommend avoiding Capital until later in your theory career, but a good copy of Volume 1 can be found here.

  • Lol imagine thinking people read. You need a communist manifesto in language-agnostic manga version.

  • First off and above ALL this movements need leaders. Something we thought we were owning the neolibs by not having but Occupy/ArabSpring/BLM proved otherwise. We need leaders they can negotiate with (this is why Israel took out all the Hamas negotiators to preclude peace). Our FIRST order of business is selecting leaders. Organization inherently rots or builds or dies from the head. Grammscian organic intellectuals will fall in line below that, but we need A leader with real charisma and concrete but lofty vision.

    • Idk enough about Occupy & ArabSpring, but BLM seems like a terrible example of having leaders being a good thing

      Edit: I'm an anarchist though, so I understand I'm a bit out of place here and may have different goals/motivations/priorities that influence my perspective on this

      • BLM is a good example of what happens when you don't organize with any structure or leadership, actually.

        For background, BLM flared up as riots and then protests and people's occupations in response to racialized police violence, of course. It was a reaction and not organized initially. Organization grew from on-the-ground experience as individuals and orgs shared spaces and developed political programming and actions. But this all happened locally. There was no national group that could legitimately claim to represent BLM, as every city had their own set of orgs and organizers. There was overlap, of course, as many of tge participating orgs spanned multiple cities, but no org or coalition could legitimately say, "these are our demands" at the national level.

        Now you might be thinking, "hey, TheOubliette, what about the literal national organization called Black Lives Matter that published demands and spoke to the press?" Well, that group is exactly what you tend to get in the West with a left leadership vacuum: they just asserted they were in charge and started taking credit and raking in donations to their NGO. That national org was full of NGO veterans looking to advance their careers, not on-the-ground organizers. It was essentially a grift / cooption.

        I've been unfortunate enough to see this kind of thing happen a few times. For example, there was a space that pledged horizontalism but then whoever brought a bullhorn to the next action ended up being the real person in charge. They weren't selected to do that, few people even knew who they were. But the crowd did what they said and people got arrested due to their bad instructions. I've seen other situations where a group declares itself representative unilaterally and begins speaking to the media and making demands or negotiating, and they end up saying and doing things completely at odds with the wishes of the collective. I've also seen situations where people tried a bit harder to have some structure, but ended up creating disconnected teams for different domains (press, logistics, action planning, security, etc) but the whole project blew up because one subset of one team declared themselves the only voices that mattered, using self-tokenizing and very inconsistently applied (most people of that identity there disagreed with them) liberal identity politics to justify their power grab. The project ended because they used those shenanigans to throw away leverage and told everyone to go home - it was too difficult to reassemble because communication methods were not solid and most attendees were not in organizations

        This is a weakness that arises from having weak, inexperienced, and poorly-structured groups, especially when they create a leadership vacuum. Many things work very well autonomously. Mutual aid and black bloc, for example. But for a larger organizing effort, there are key functions that must be carried out on behalf of the larger group in order for it to actually succeed. There needs to be a deliberation process so that decisions can be made quickly enough without being illegitimate by being non-representative. There need to be people that organize the deliberation process itself. There need to be people that ensure the decision is carried out. There needs to be a way to have some kind of community discipline around some of the decisions - like what to so if a subset of people start doing their own thing at odds with the community decision and putting people at risk. Assuming the organizing effort has external components, like it is intended to change something or confront another party, you need to develop demands and messaging and then have people who deliver and share those things. If you don't have those things, the organizing effort is vulnerable to the disruptive factors already (and more). Decisions will get made and people won't understand them and will get very angry. Some people will try to enforce a decision and those who disagree will literally fight them. Without people designated for communication, you will be represented by whichever person gets in front of a TV camera first. Capitalist media is oppositional. With Occupy, they used the fact that the various people talking to them provided about 50 total demands to then suggest that Occupy had no realistic ides of what it wanted to accomplish. There is some truth to that, but mostly this is a consequence of having no media discipline.

        Anyways sorry this comment is so long. I wanted to add a lot of context and examples so that it's clear I'm not being blindly dogmatic, but speaking to the fatal weaknesses of these efforts.

      • @TheOubliette@lemmy.ml already gave a fantastic answer regarding Occupy, Arab Spring, and BLM, so I'll answer your edit instead. I know you're an Anarchist, but I really do recommend reading at least the basics of Marxist theory. If you're going to organize, you're going to run into Marxists eventually, and it will be useful to understand what we believe and why. I wrote an Introductory Marxist-Leninist Reading List (also referenced in the post itself), and am willing to answer any questions you have.

      • You have to have leaders and then do everything in your power to not let them succumb to vanguardism.

        I also lean more in to an anarchist style of leadership, but decing everything by quorum can paralyze movements or leave them without a clear message.

59 comments