"We need a Liberal Joe Rogan"

In the last week there has been an abundance of posts, articles and think pieces about right-wing alternative media figures and their impact on the American electorate. In particular, a great deal of attention is now being focused on alt-media’s ability to shape the political opinions of young men, a demographic that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Legacy media and political institutions are now being forced to seriously consider the influence of content creators like Lex Fridman, The Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Logan Paul and many others. I’ve had a lot of media requests on these topics, some of which are out now.

I spoke with Taylor Lorenz on the Power User podcast from Vox Media:

I went further in depth with Richard Hames from Novara Media on the topics of online politicization and its potent effects on young viewers. A video version of this podcast will come out later this week:

If you follow this newsletter, you already know that this is the singular, core proposal that I have put forward for the past six years: we need political messaging from the left, targeted at young people that are en route towards right wing ideologies. These viewers are receptive to new narratives and their grievances can only be meaningfully addressed by the left. Its that simple.

I was saying it back in 2018, when I first published Politigram & the Post-left:

Politigram & the Post-left

At the time, my interest in exploring this space is to find an online Left that can compete with the social media impact of the Alt-right. It seemed obvious that after the ubiquity of social media any progressive political movement would require some degree of a populist base. This base would need its own department of outreach; the memers, the influencers and the online personalities that work to prime new followers for radicalization.

I said it again in 2019, in an essay that was originally published on NEW MODELS:

Irony Politics & Gen Z (part 2)

Rather than prematurely deplatforming these users or amplifying their message through outrage, as the media did frequently in 2016, we should understand this content as the first inklings of political dissent and target these users for counter narratives. Ultimately they should be recruited into leftist political projects. Before entering this skeptic space, many teens do not know of progressive options outside the mainstream Democratic Party. Without further frame of reference, leftist critiques of the center often register just as strongly as the Right with these soon-to-be politicized teens.

In 2020, I wrote about it for The Guardian in a piece playfully titled, “Marxist memes for TikTok teens: can the internet radicalize teenagers for the left”?

There has been a great amount of research and resources dedicated to mapping social media “pipelines” into far-right and reactionary politics. Less thought, however, has been dedicated to a left-wing alternative. This is a huge gap in how the left, broadly, thinks about online politics.

In 2021, I expanded on this idea and highlighted several prominent examples in another piece published by The Guardian, “Are we ready for social media influencers shaping politics?”

Young people’s politics are being shaped by popular YouTubers, livestreamers, podcasters and other influencer personalities, who debate political positions and educate viewers on what political engagement looks like. As audiences grow and watch times increase, the question inevitably arises: will the influencers of the burgeoning alt-media sphere become a new type of political organizer?

In 2022, I wrote about my own experiments into memetic influence in a piece published by Do Not Research, “How to Plant a Meme”:

The goal of this project was to plant a progressive and politically rehabilitative idea within these at-risk communities. My hope was that they would embrace this new way of thinking and ultimately amplify that message on their own. It worked.

At this point, I feel like a broken record. I’ve basically said this every week for as long as I’ve been publishing on these topics. While its a positive development to see these important issues get more attention, it is unfortunately far too late. The world will have to deal with yet another disastrous Trump administration. The political reality right now is so bad that it doesn’t even feel good to say I told you so —but, goddamn, I told you so.

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Can there be a Joe Rogan for the left?

In this clip, Hasan Piker and Felix Biederman, of Chapo Trap House, respond to these topics and explore some possibilities for left-wing media. Piker is correct that there are no big donors who would financially support such a network. Giant media empires like the Daily Wire are backed by oil barons who understand the need for propaganda if they wish to maintain legitimacy. This structural asymmetry between right and left is also tackled in a recent Substack piece by Taylor Lorenz, “Why Democrats won't build their own Joe Rogan”. She writes:

…the Democratic Party is rapidly losing credibility among younger, predominantly male audiences who have become ardent supporters of influencers that promote a distinctly conservative worldview.

This imbalance when it comes to online influence is no accident. It is the result of massive structural disadvantages in funding, promotion, and institutional support.

However, Biederman’s response is focused less on the resource problem and primarily addresses the political activity of young voters and workers, approximately 18-25 years old, which overlooks an important part of this process. Through the many written and audio interviews I’ve conducted, we know well that exposure to this political material is often happening as young as age 13. A loose network of aligned content creators is necessary to acculturate audiences to left-wing ideas over time. If we are trying to reach them as late as age 18, they have already been indoctrinated by years of Ben Shapiro memes. I’m a great admirer of both Piker and Biederman’s work. While I agree that the task of building a left wing media network is very difficult, it is also necessary. We must find a way to be leaner, less resourced but similarly impactful as conservative alt-media.

The first 5 minutes of this Doomscroll podcast with Amber A’Lee Frost, published a week before the election, explains everything you need to know about the Democrats failure to message to young men.

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Platform Socialism

In other news, I recently spoke with Destiny and Kyla on the Bridges podcast. You can watch the 3 hour episode here:

My goal for this conversation was to be precise and targeted in my choice of topics. I would try to avoid any issues on which I knew we would irreconcilably disagree. Instead, I would use this opportunity to speak to a liberal audience on the important but rarely discussed theme of economic planning under 21st century capitalism.

I chose this approach for a few reasons. First, no matter how much I criticized America’s endless proxy wars, I knew that I would not be able to convince either the hosts or the audience of these positions. Second, I felt confident that I could make the argument for 21st century planning under a set of premises with which liberals would already necessarily agree; under the profit motive, large corporations now engage in forms of economic planning as a cost saving measure. This convergent evolution of markets and planning, flips the Cold War dichotomy of capitalism vs socialism on its head in a way that many viewers have not encountered before.

Today, transnational corporations, such as Walmart, Google and Amazon, engage in forms of internal planning, have profits greater than the GDP of many nation states and span geographical territories larger than the Soviet Union. Most importantly, their unprecedented aggregation of data now fundamentally transforms the calculation debate of the 20th century. These actually existing examples, invert the popular notion that many of us grew up with, namely “socialism sounds good on paper but cannot work in practice”. In reality, platforms now have more perfect knowledge, extending far beyond price, in a way that Friedrich Hayek could never have imagined.

We go in depth on these topics and much more in the episode: Can We Trust the Market to Keep Us Safe? | ‪@doomscrollpodcast‬ | Bridges #28. The comments seem to indicate that this strategic approach was a success.

Liberalism as a political philosophy

The real black pill is that Joe Rogan *is* the Liberal Joe Rogan. American labels like conservatism and progressivism describe two cultural wings of a capitalist political spectrum. Today we have a bad habit of calling everything “fascism” in a way that obscures how brutal liberal democracy actually is in practice. Progressives generally use the F word to mean “all the parts of liberal democracy that I don’t like!”

The only solution to the crises of the 21st century will come from an unabashedly socialist left that is willing to propose fundamentally new ways of organizing society. As Dustin Guastella said on a recent episode of the Bungacast with Alex Hochuli — across the advanced world, the logic of neoliberal austerity has been led by conservatives and chased by third-way progressives since the early 90s. So long as our political debates are framed within these foundational assumptions, there is simply nothing to offer workers other than budget cuts.

Perhaps these conversations around platforms and economic planning might offer an indication of where to go next? There is a new episode of Doomscroll coming up this week that addresses some of these topics further.