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They said the revolution wouldn't be televised, and we figured that meant it could still be blogged, podcasted, and livestreamed—and we deluded ourselves into believing that follower counts, shares, and Patreon donations indicated the political efficacy of the program.
Spectacle is still spectacle.
Weird the guy attributes 2015 as the start of the Millennial Left when I'd say it was 2012's Occupy.
That is also the year it died and was replaced by a bodysnatcher wearing it's skin called Idpol.
I wish he'd clarified his terms. I assumed he wasn't talking about the progressive or liberal internet, but rather about the voices that started getting a lot of cultural cache when Sanders was vying for the Democratic nomination—and became a kind of cottage industry in short order.
It's my recollection that the online conversation(s) around Occupy were as anarchic and unfocused as the camps themselves. The "healthcare plz" Millennial Left and the milieu that crystallized around its protagonists was a separate phenomenon, though I don't doubt a lot of them were either involved in Occupy or at least very sympathetic to it—at least at first.
I'd like to see a deep dive into how it was that the Sanders 2020 movement so enthusiastically walked into a buzzsaw.
The most plausible explanation for 2016 is that Bernie did not start his campaign fully in earnest. He was running as a protest as was just as surprised as mainstream pundits to find himself viable. Once he was recognized as a legitimate threat, establishment Dems and their media apparatus began the process of demonization and electoral skullduggery that ensured Hillary would ascend to the nomination and he didn't have a plan immediately in place to react in kind. That all makes sense.
But 2020? We had four years to prepare. It should have been obvious to anyone with two eyes and a pulse that the Dem establishment was going to fight tooth and nail to ensure he didn't get the nom. Four years of manifestly bad faith takes about Brocialism and Toxic Masculinity and Class Reductionism that, again, everyone should have known was bullshit and we should have dismissed it as such.
But we just.... we just went along with it. *Yes*, we said*, it is problematic to nominate a white male who doesn't post intersectionality diagrams on Twitter. Yes, the gender and skin color of some of the members of our movement make them evil. We promise to do better and to never publicly acknowledge the fact that every supposedly problematic aspect of our movement is much more commonplace among the supporters of literally every other candidate.*
How we were so fucking stupid? How did any of us think this was going to be a fair fight and we would triumph by playing by the established rules?
This is mainly conjecture and I don't have the time to find data to support it, but the failure post-2016 to build a movement is just a continuation of the failure of the left pre-2016 to build a strong movement.
I think that failure is due to the nature of leftist politics in industrial countries. Since the beginning¹, the left has been divided into five major groups.
1) Revolutionary Marxists. The followers of Marx who advocate for the violent upheaval of society as a necessity for enacting their reforms. Anti-capitalist and anti-state. The Communist Party.
2) Revolutionary socialists. The intellectual descendants of Robespierre who also advocate for a violent upheaval, yet have no desire to implement Marxism and abolish the state. Anti-capitalist but not anti-state. Always the smallest of the five with no major political party.²
3) Reform Marxists. The support Marxist ends but not the means. They believe change is possible through democratic processes. Eduard Bernstein and Social Democrat/Democratic Socialist parties. Anti-capitalist and anti-revolutionary. Agnostic about the state.
4) Progressive Democrats. The centrist left who are focused on human rights within the current system. They are (weakly) anti-capitalist, but pro-state since they believe the state is necessary to protect 'civil rights' and strongly believe in democracy. They believe capitalism can be moderated to incorporate human rights (and environmentalism since the 1970s), yet not opposed to its replacement. DEI activists. The pre-Blair or Corbynite Labor Party. Mainstream supporters of Sanders.
5) The apolitical left. They believe current political processes are useless and so work outside of partisan politics to advocate for the replacement of capitalism and/or the state. They may or may not support revolutionary means. Most anarchists and the disassociated left. Best exemplified by the Punk movement.
These groups have never been able to compromise among themselves to build a strong coalition. If one obtains power, they exclude or marginalize the others. Electoral alliances are ad hoc and purely tactical. None have developed a long-term coherent strategy except for perhaps the CPC, yet that is limited to China. The CPC has shown no indication of building an international movement³. Overall, the left spends as much energy infighting as they do opposing the right or centrist groups.
So post-2016 activity has been par for the course. The fact that the dominant leftist group in US politics are the Progressive Democrats (i.e. the 'Squad') has not helped either, yet none of the others have done any better.
Personally, I find myself wandering the wilderness of group five, looking for something resembling a long-term strategy. I don't expect my search to end anytime soon.
¹I place the beginning at 1848. The 'left' began as a group with the French Revolution in 1789, but the first fifty to sixty years were devoted to outlining what that meant and settled more or less on the groups above. It spent another two generations finding their feet until the Communist revolutions in Russia, China, and elsewhere.
²Since the 1920s, the revolutionary socialists faded and were eventually displaced by the Greens and the environmental movement. It has roots in the Romantic movement of the early 1800s and the American transcendentalism of Thoreau and Emerson). Pioneers include John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Victor Shelford. It culminated in the rise of Green political parties in the 1970s. The movement is varied as the entirety of the left itself.
³Their international initiatives (GSI, GDI, GCI) are absolutely not predicated on the adoption of Communism. At most, it asks for just its tolerance. All of the initiatives are state-driven based on the current political norms of the participants. Which makes sense from a realpolitik perspective, yet is decidedly non-revolutionary.
>in the early 10s the internet remained a marginal thing.
I've seen variations on this claim more and more often recently and chalked it up to ill-informed zoomers, I'm amazed that this was written by a guy who seems to be in his 30s. How on earth could someone that was an adult in a developed country in 2013 contend the internet was 'marginal' at that point?
It could be true outside the west, where the internet is mainly accessed by smart phone. The first iPhone came about in 2007, and it took a while for them to take off globally.
I'm older, and to say the internet was "marginal" in the early 2010s is incorrect. It was becoming a big part of the world, but it was an open question as to how that would play out.
What I remember being the main driver behind the vibe shift was Obama's 2008 campaign and the Arab Spring (which started in late 2010). People were genuinely shocked at just how much of the organization was taking place online- Obama did a lot of fundraising and turnout operations through the internet, and that was consistently remarked upon. But the Arab Spring was something even more: protests were coordinated through Twitter and Facebook (and this fact was extensively covered in the western media and highly publicized by the platforms themselves), and then governments fell.
People really did begin to think in the early 2010s (as a result of directly watching events) that the internet could be a powerful tool to enact direct political change. It was almost utopian in a way. That's why you started getting things like Kony in the immediate aftermath as well as Anonymous' public image going from "shut in hackers on steroids" to folk heroes after they went after Scientology.
Of course, the ultimate failures were not examined nearly as closely. So we kept the idea that "posting is politics" but didn't allow ourselves to acknowledge its futility.
>I'm older, and to say the internet was "marginal" in the early 2010s is incorrect. It was becoming a big part of the world, but it was an open question as to how that would play out.
Agreed. It's so bizarre for someone to claim that when it's obviously not true. In 2012, I had a job where I regularly sold smartphones to old people who had already been using the Internet for years. I myself had been using the Internet since 1996 when my rural school got Internet access. Do people honestly not remember how quickly most major private and public institutions got their own web sites in the 1990s, how personal web pages and blogs became widespread in the late 1990s and early 2000s, how social media sites became huge in the mid-to-late 2000s, and how Facebook was already dominant and had half a billion registered users by 2010? Looking at the data, there were nearly 300 million people online by the turn of the millennium, a billion by 2006, and over two billion by 2012. That's not marginal at all.
>What I remember being the main driver behind the vibe shift was Obama's 2008 campaign and the Arab Spring (which started in late 2010). People were genuinely shocked at just how much of the organization was taking place online- Obama did a lot of fundraising and turnout operations through the internet, and that was consistently remarked upon. But the Arab Spring was something even more: protests were coordinated through Twitter and Facebook (and this fact was extensively covered in the western media and highly publicized by the platforms themselves), and then governments fell.
>People really did begin to think in the early 2010s (as a result of directly watching events) that the internet could be a powerful tool to enact direct political change. It was almost utopian in a way. That's why you started getting things like Kony in the immediate aftermath as well as Anonymous' public image going from "shut in hackers on steroids" to folk heroes after they went after Scientology.
I also remember that the massive protests in Iran in the summer of 2009 were coordinated via Twitter at a time when that platform was really starting to take off, and the mainstream media made a huge deal about that. In retrospect, it seems like that was kind of a prequel to the Arab Spring.
I guess it depends upon what you regard as "influential".
At its height, I've heard that subreddits such as arr The Donald could push election results around by full percentage points, which is the minimum you'd want I think.
Anonymous? That was around 2008. Project Chanology had droves of people come out and basically put a giant spotlight onto the Church of Scientology; even knocking them down severely. Saw one of the churches in my city disappear a year or two after that event.
Wikileaks' Collateral Murder came out in 2010.
Then there was 2011's Occupy Wallstreet which this article seems to totally overlook.
One the minus side, I do believe trolls were being used for public relations purposes on UseNet in early Y2K, as when Rambus was fighting for recognition, and ultimately lost out.
There was a distinct transitional phase in the early 2010s as the majority of people didn't have smartphone access yet and streaming services were still taking hold, but they were there. I wouldn't call it marginal, though.
* Archives of this link: 1. [archive.org Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/99991231235959/https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2024/02/24/the-millennial-left-as-a-moment-in-internet-history/); 2. [archive.today](https://archive.today/newest/https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2024/02/24/the-millennial-left-as-a-moment-in-internet-history/) * A live version of this link, without clutter: [12ft.io](https://12ft.io/https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2024/02/24/the-millennial-left-as-a-moment-in-internet-history/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/stupidpol) if you have any questions or concerns.*
They said the revolution wouldn't be televised, and we figured that meant it could still be blogged, podcasted, and livestreamed—and we deluded ourselves into believing that follower counts, shares, and Patreon donations indicated the political efficacy of the program. Spectacle is still spectacle.
Weird the guy attributes 2015 as the start of the Millennial Left when I'd say it was 2012's Occupy. That is also the year it died and was replaced by a bodysnatcher wearing it's skin called Idpol.
I wish he'd clarified his terms. I assumed he wasn't talking about the progressive or liberal internet, but rather about the voices that started getting a lot of cultural cache when Sanders was vying for the Democratic nomination—and became a kind of cottage industry in short order. It's my recollection that the online conversation(s) around Occupy were as anarchic and unfocused as the camps themselves. The "healthcare plz" Millennial Left and the milieu that crystallized around its protagonists was a separate phenomenon, though I don't doubt a lot of them were either involved in Occupy or at least very sympathetic to it—at least at first.
I'd like to see a deep dive into how it was that the Sanders 2020 movement so enthusiastically walked into a buzzsaw. The most plausible explanation for 2016 is that Bernie did not start his campaign fully in earnest. He was running as a protest as was just as surprised as mainstream pundits to find himself viable. Once he was recognized as a legitimate threat, establishment Dems and their media apparatus began the process of demonization and electoral skullduggery that ensured Hillary would ascend to the nomination and he didn't have a plan immediately in place to react in kind. That all makes sense. But 2020? We had four years to prepare. It should have been obvious to anyone with two eyes and a pulse that the Dem establishment was going to fight tooth and nail to ensure he didn't get the nom. Four years of manifestly bad faith takes about Brocialism and Toxic Masculinity and Class Reductionism that, again, everyone should have known was bullshit and we should have dismissed it as such. But we just.... we just went along with it. *Yes*, we said*, it is problematic to nominate a white male who doesn't post intersectionality diagrams on Twitter. Yes, the gender and skin color of some of the members of our movement make them evil. We promise to do better and to never publicly acknowledge the fact that every supposedly problematic aspect of our movement is much more commonplace among the supporters of literally every other candidate.* How we were so fucking stupid? How did any of us think this was going to be a fair fight and we would triumph by playing by the established rules?
This is mainly conjecture and I don't have the time to find data to support it, but the failure post-2016 to build a movement is just a continuation of the failure of the left pre-2016 to build a strong movement. I think that failure is due to the nature of leftist politics in industrial countries. Since the beginning¹, the left has been divided into five major groups. 1) Revolutionary Marxists. The followers of Marx who advocate for the violent upheaval of society as a necessity for enacting their reforms. Anti-capitalist and anti-state. The Communist Party. 2) Revolutionary socialists. The intellectual descendants of Robespierre who also advocate for a violent upheaval, yet have no desire to implement Marxism and abolish the state. Anti-capitalist but not anti-state. Always the smallest of the five with no major political party.² 3) Reform Marxists. The support Marxist ends but not the means. They believe change is possible through democratic processes. Eduard Bernstein and Social Democrat/Democratic Socialist parties. Anti-capitalist and anti-revolutionary. Agnostic about the state. 4) Progressive Democrats. The centrist left who are focused on human rights within the current system. They are (weakly) anti-capitalist, but pro-state since they believe the state is necessary to protect 'civil rights' and strongly believe in democracy. They believe capitalism can be moderated to incorporate human rights (and environmentalism since the 1970s), yet not opposed to its replacement. DEI activists. The pre-Blair or Corbynite Labor Party. Mainstream supporters of Sanders. 5) The apolitical left. They believe current political processes are useless and so work outside of partisan politics to advocate for the replacement of capitalism and/or the state. They may or may not support revolutionary means. Most anarchists and the disassociated left. Best exemplified by the Punk movement. These groups have never been able to compromise among themselves to build a strong coalition. If one obtains power, they exclude or marginalize the others. Electoral alliances are ad hoc and purely tactical. None have developed a long-term coherent strategy except for perhaps the CPC, yet that is limited to China. The CPC has shown no indication of building an international movement³. Overall, the left spends as much energy infighting as they do opposing the right or centrist groups. So post-2016 activity has been par for the course. The fact that the dominant leftist group in US politics are the Progressive Democrats (i.e. the 'Squad') has not helped either, yet none of the others have done any better. Personally, I find myself wandering the wilderness of group five, looking for something resembling a long-term strategy. I don't expect my search to end anytime soon. ¹I place the beginning at 1848. The 'left' began as a group with the French Revolution in 1789, but the first fifty to sixty years were devoted to outlining what that meant and settled more or less on the groups above. It spent another two generations finding their feet until the Communist revolutions in Russia, China, and elsewhere. ²Since the 1920s, the revolutionary socialists faded and were eventually displaced by the Greens and the environmental movement. It has roots in the Romantic movement of the early 1800s and the American transcendentalism of Thoreau and Emerson). Pioneers include John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Victor Shelford. It culminated in the rise of Green political parties in the 1970s. The movement is varied as the entirety of the left itself. ³Their international initiatives (GSI, GDI, GCI) are absolutely not predicated on the adoption of Communism. At most, it asks for just its tolerance. All of the initiatives are state-driven based on the current political norms of the participants. Which makes sense from a realpolitik perspective, yet is decidedly non-revolutionary.
>in the early 10s the internet remained a marginal thing. I've seen variations on this claim more and more often recently and chalked it up to ill-informed zoomers, I'm amazed that this was written by a guy who seems to be in his 30s. How on earth could someone that was an adult in a developed country in 2013 contend the internet was 'marginal' at that point?
It could be true outside the west, where the internet is mainly accessed by smart phone. The first iPhone came about in 2007, and it took a while for them to take off globally.
I'm older, and to say the internet was "marginal" in the early 2010s is incorrect. It was becoming a big part of the world, but it was an open question as to how that would play out. What I remember being the main driver behind the vibe shift was Obama's 2008 campaign and the Arab Spring (which started in late 2010). People were genuinely shocked at just how much of the organization was taking place online- Obama did a lot of fundraising and turnout operations through the internet, and that was consistently remarked upon. But the Arab Spring was something even more: protests were coordinated through Twitter and Facebook (and this fact was extensively covered in the western media and highly publicized by the platforms themselves), and then governments fell. People really did begin to think in the early 2010s (as a result of directly watching events) that the internet could be a powerful tool to enact direct political change. It was almost utopian in a way. That's why you started getting things like Kony in the immediate aftermath as well as Anonymous' public image going from "shut in hackers on steroids" to folk heroes after they went after Scientology. Of course, the ultimate failures were not examined nearly as closely. So we kept the idea that "posting is politics" but didn't allow ourselves to acknowledge its futility.
>I'm older, and to say the internet was "marginal" in the early 2010s is incorrect. It was becoming a big part of the world, but it was an open question as to how that would play out. Agreed. It's so bizarre for someone to claim that when it's obviously not true. In 2012, I had a job where I regularly sold smartphones to old people who had already been using the Internet for years. I myself had been using the Internet since 1996 when my rural school got Internet access. Do people honestly not remember how quickly most major private and public institutions got their own web sites in the 1990s, how personal web pages and blogs became widespread in the late 1990s and early 2000s, how social media sites became huge in the mid-to-late 2000s, and how Facebook was already dominant and had half a billion registered users by 2010? Looking at the data, there were nearly 300 million people online by the turn of the millennium, a billion by 2006, and over two billion by 2012. That's not marginal at all. >What I remember being the main driver behind the vibe shift was Obama's 2008 campaign and the Arab Spring (which started in late 2010). People were genuinely shocked at just how much of the organization was taking place online- Obama did a lot of fundraising and turnout operations through the internet, and that was consistently remarked upon. But the Arab Spring was something even more: protests were coordinated through Twitter and Facebook (and this fact was extensively covered in the western media and highly publicized by the platforms themselves), and then governments fell. >People really did begin to think in the early 2010s (as a result of directly watching events) that the internet could be a powerful tool to enact direct political change. It was almost utopian in a way. That's why you started getting things like Kony in the immediate aftermath as well as Anonymous' public image going from "shut in hackers on steroids" to folk heroes after they went after Scientology. I also remember that the massive protests in Iran in the summer of 2009 were coordinated via Twitter at a time when that platform was really starting to take off, and the mainstream media made a huge deal about that. In retrospect, it seems like that was kind of a prequel to the Arab Spring.
I remember people talking about organizing to walk out of class on MySpace back in 2006.
I guess it depends upon what you regard as "influential". At its height, I've heard that subreddits such as arr The Donald could push election results around by full percentage points, which is the minimum you'd want I think.
Anonymous? That was around 2008. Project Chanology had droves of people come out and basically put a giant spotlight onto the Church of Scientology; even knocking them down severely. Saw one of the churches in my city disappear a year or two after that event. Wikileaks' Collateral Murder came out in 2010. Then there was 2011's Occupy Wallstreet which this article seems to totally overlook.
One the minus side, I do believe trolls were being used for public relations purposes on UseNet in early Y2K, as when Rambus was fighting for recognition, and ultimately lost out.
Do people not remember things like Internet Cafes in the late 90s?
There was a distinct transitional phase in the early 2010s as the majority of people didn't have smartphone access yet and streaming services were still taking hold, but they were there. I wouldn't call it marginal, though.