the post is a little over the top, but the middle-third of it is key.
Think about it. The user experience of distributed social media technology existed 70 years ago, in rural China. The Communists built it, without using capital. They built it to destroy capital, and it worked. All the other stuff — the LCD screens, wireless transmission of data, packet networks, big data aggregation of behaviors — that’s just capital that’s been added to the system to constrain and direct the user experience to further the production of capital.
[many paragraphs later]
One technique the Chinese Communists used was to put politically un-advanced people in a study group with people who were only a little bit ahead of them, so the un-advanced could still identify with them, and see a path forward. New information was introduced gradually. People weren’t bombarded with all of the critiques and correct ideas at the outset. The process of changing somebody’s mind is understood as a path along a gradient, no as the flipping of a binary switch. The “Lone Conspiracy Theorist On the Hunt for The Truth” is one narrative and the “Vanguard Party” is another. But there isn’t really in interstitial narrative to show the transition from one to the other. But there are plenty of fake narratives of contrarian enlightenment there.
Mao’s study groups were about changing people’s relations to each other so that the could engage in productive economic activity — changing the relation to the means of production by either further building the party, fighting the guerrilla war, or building an industrial project. Concrete things with goals that could be assessed, so the group would have immediate feedback to understand its own understanding, and apply its own theories. Less fighting over social capital and correctness because correctness could be concretely demonstrated. Relating knowledge back to your local circumstances, and bringing up the people who were just a little bit behind you was what generated that gradient of interstitial narratives of transformation that could be used to bring somebody to the truth.
But in the Western implementation you get the cult. Even in the therapy group, it’s just people intensifying their intimacy with strangers, turned inwards, no concrete affirmation of whose ideas are correct. It recapitulates the toxicity of the bourgeois family unit. And the arbitrarily-delineated social media social unit (“these people are important to be me because we all post in the same group chat”) just transfers the cult dynamic onto all mediated social interactions.