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.
Mao’s intent wasn’t to “mind-control” people — the “indoctrination” process that’s described in “Coercive Persuasion” was meant to unify everyone’s practice so that they could autonomously build socialism locally, within the same framework.This was necessary because there was so little mechanical infrastructure for issuing directives and getting feedback. The feedback had to happen as close to the work as possible. The directives had to come from the workers, with the Party only separating noise from signal.
What’s remarkable to me about “Coercive Persuasion” is that it was written at a point when the imperialists were scared to death of what the Communists had achieved in China. They had to look at the situation practically and honestly in order to not be defeated again. Schein etc can’t engage in ideological combat. They cant create a strawman Communism to mock or substitute a critique of postmodernism or something that wasn’t Chinese Communism. They had to understand the Chinese Communist Party and describe accurately how it worked so that they could reverse-engineer and weaponize the tactics that were used to defeat them.
“A narration of an endless number of stories drawn from the participants own experiences…one of the most significant factors is the mere knowledge that one’s experiences in these groups are being shared by virtually everyone else in China.”
Isn’t that all of us, in our group chats and our news feeds and our discords? Social media is just the electronic version of the discussion platform that Mao built in the 1950s, retooled to guide people to internalize capitalist theory values and put those values into action. The power of this technology was in creating a narrative that would incorporate the whole society and providing the tools for each person to find a place to act effectively to further the vision (here called an “image”) of that narrative.