On the echo chambers.

Observing the relative success of the Alt-Right in the universe, and comparing it with the very limited results of the radical leftists, I am coming to get an idea of ​​why this failure. There are two factors that make Alt-Right's methods successful on the internet.

I am not referring to the amount of funds (Zuckerberg has closed the cords lately, or almost) but to two factors that are relevant.

The first is the "echo chamber" effect. Many of these far-left movements have behaved like cults. They gather in places where only their voices are heard, one speaks and the others agree, and dissent can only exist if it is acceptable within a precise orthodoxy.

On the contrary, in the world of the Alt-Right, ultra-Catholic fascists and pagan Nazis coexist, a difference that in the world of the radical left would lead to an almost immediate split. Both fanatical supporters of Israel (like Trump) and the most ferocious anti-Semites coexist: even this deployment, in a movement of the far left, would immediately lead to a split, or to the ostracism of the unfortunate who dared to side with Israel.

The Alt-Right does not pose the problem, because it places the action before the thought. It is not for nothing that one of their favorite philosophical treatises is titled "Man made of action alone". It is the action that must be orthodox, not the thought. If you fight on the right side you are "our guy", otherwise you are not. Thought is irrelevant.

This difference avoided the Alt-Right effect of the echo chamber effect that happened instead in the radical left circles. In the radical left it has happened that the need for an orthodox ideology has locked the faithful to the line in many communities, each with its own orthodoxy, each orthodoxy has its own language, its own consecutive and its dialectics. And this means that in a discussion of that kind there is essentially discussion of how much reason X is compared to Y, who is right but perhaps less right. Because if he wasn't right he would be unorthodox. In short, Franciscans who discuss with Salesians. They'll be right all day but at best they'll argue

• of maximum systems
• of irrelevant details

The problem of the extreme left that faces the internet comes when, after years and years of circular pumping and to agree with each other in some closed circle, he tries to land on the internet and discuss in the same terms.

Fishing in the anecdote I could mention a couple of things. The first is the attempt to label a topic without discussing it. At some point one arrives and says "it's reactionary". Okay, you can attach anything to anything. But in the end, a logical proposition is true or false, "reactionary" (whatever it means today for those who cite a philosopher who died two centuries ago) is not a category of logic.

But the point is that before the internet, if he had shouted at me in one of their closed circles, I would have been silenced by whistles, maybe slapped and thrown out . On the internet this ostracism is not possible, and therefore the operation resembles that of someone who threatens you with an unloaded bazooka.

• Say your prayers, perfidious reactionary, I have a bazooka !!!!
• Nice your unloaded bazooka, does Linux run on it?

Since there is no possibility on the internet to ostracize someone (you can find the extreme left on Facebook and on Twitter for this reason: they organize themselves to bomb the moderators of protests, in order to suspend the account, exactly as they did in their circles ) this attitude is not rational. It's just a habit. The continuous judgment, the continuous appeal to an invisible, as shared, court of orthodoxy is a conditioned reflex that binds them to failure. It is as if Gui arrived in modern times, went on television and started shouting "Are you perhaps denying the Bible?" In his day this question would have silenced anyone, today he would only receive big laughs.

Still fishing from my personal anecdote, another told me "if you think so 'we are on two different sides of the barricade". This may seem like a paraphrase, and as a statement it would only make sense if there were any barricades . But there are no barricades on the internet. The Internet is more like submarine war than field war. There is no front. But the point is that there is no war either: the Internet is the most majestic artifact ever built, and one thing must be clear: capitalism built it. There are no other contributions. It is supported by capitalism, produced by capitalism, sold by capitalism, caused by capitalism, designed by capitalism, thought by capitalism and produced by capitalism. There cannot be a division between capitalists and anti-capitalists on the internet , for the simple reason that the internet is 100% capitalism. Yes, also open source. It is not for nothing that Redhat was sold to IBM for billions of dollars, and it is not for nothing that one of the major contributors to the Linux kernel is Microsoft, which profits 50% of Azure's revenues, which are tied by linux virtual machines. . Nowhere, no corner of anything the immense IT supply chain is not capitalist.

But one has to wonder what would have happened if such a sentence had been offered in a far left club. There would have been two cases: if a large percentage of people had agreed with me, it would have led to a split. If it had been only a minority, or if I had been alone, there would have been ostracism (unless I renounced).

But on the internet neither of them makes sense. And it is this lack of POWER of orthodoxy to produce ostracism that stops them. That limits them. And that's why in their evolution they have given themselves to the #metoo (despite being a male chauvinist environment) of feminists or to the indiscriminate support of GLBT minorities. The thing that attracts them is not so much feminism or the homosexual issue: in their search for a powerful orthodoxy capable of producing ostracism these movements will be attracted by any tool that allows them to practice the canceling of someone. Orthodoxy (feminist, Marxxist, GLBT, etc) for them is only an instrument of power, of threat. "Anyone dare to contradict the sacred books?".

But even on the internet, and especially on the universe, this doesn't work. You can definitely ban gab.com and you won't have any more problems, but this does not make it "go back to the sewers". It remains the most populated instance of the universe, and its success stands out against anything they have ever managed to do.

Finally, there is the problem of their political jargon. They have abandoned the commonly spoken language, the living language, to develop their jargon incomprehensible to most people. A phrase such as "in my opinion, toltx lx solitx", to them will seem to make sense on the level of gender equality, but for the rest of the population it is simply a serious form of dyslexia . When it's okay. And to this we can add that their average writing takes two hours to read, because they seem unable to talk about a toothbrush without a thorough analysis of its history, capitalist structure, Marxist point of view, then stuffed with everything that culture made to mitigate the sense of inferiority that the lower classes have always had towards the culture of the ruling class.

This reflection has always worked within their circles, where a person can also decide that it is necessary to read a 95-page treatise to understand how to brush one's teeth, and how to frame the act in a historical, feminist, GLBT and Marxist perspective. The rest of the world, however, continues to think that brushing your teeth is all in all something that even children learn, and only in the academic field is this deepening necessary.

In summary, there are three vices that make the demands of the antagonists on the internet indigestible .

Academism, ostracism, orthodoxy.

Each of these vices on the internet is a death sentence. Even for a simple reason: it is the way in which the poor and ignorant classes of the past endeavored to make communist parties alternative realities, simply by showing that "we also have all those things there". The Party had nothing to envy from the orthodoxy of a church, the academism of bourgeois intellectuals, the ostracism of obscurantist societies. They had their version.

And that was how the pigs on the orwell farm became equal to the human masters: "they too had all those things there."

The bad luck is that the Animal Farm speaks of a failed revolution.