Am I reading something different than everyone else here? Because I completely understand what she’s trying to get at.
Leftists are dismissing the song because its early interest was astroturfed. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because it has actual interest among people now, because of the astroturfing. How do we combat this problem? Just because we dismiss the song as astroturfed right-wing propaganda doesn’t mean the listeners are. The right is changing minds with content like this, and it’s problematic for us.
“It can’t be viral because it was astroturfed” isn’t a helpful assessment, because the song absolutely is viral now. It even came up in my feed on a music community. I clicked it because it looked like it would be up my alley based on the title and thumbnail (I enjoy folk music that shits on capitalists) and I only realized it was that song once I got to the line about people “milking welfare.” The astroturfing may have raised the song up the hill, but at a certain point it had enough views and such to carry it based on momentum.
What I think the author is trying to say is that the right is succeeding here, and largely leftist media fails to make the same impact. Probably because we don’t have the same connections that allow astroturfing that the people who pushed this song do. But that does leave a meaningful question: how do we reverse this trend and get people interested in leftist topics through arts and culture? How do we promote the material we have already created?
I’m with you. Sometimes it seems like we’re content to sit back and be proven right by the failures of capitalism, but if we want to actually build anything that lasts then we need to engage instead of sticking to our insular pockets. I do think federation has been a step in the right direction for that reason.
Am I reading something different than everyone else here? Because I completely understand what she’s trying to get at.
Leftists are dismissing the song because its early interest was astroturfed. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because it has actual interest among people now, because of the astroturfing. How do we combat this problem? Just because we dismiss the song as astroturfed right-wing propaganda doesn’t mean the listeners are. The right is changing minds with content like this, and it’s problematic for us.
“It can’t be viral because it was astroturfed” isn’t a helpful assessment, because the song absolutely is viral now. It even came up in my feed on a music community. I clicked it because it looked like it would be up my alley based on the title and thumbnail (I enjoy folk music that shits on capitalists) and I only realized it was that song once I got to the line about people “milking welfare.” The astroturfing may have raised the song up the hill, but at a certain point it had enough views and such to carry it based on momentum.
What I think the author is trying to say is that the right is succeeding here, and largely leftist media fails to make the same impact. Probably because we don’t have the same connections that allow astroturfing that the people who pushed this song do. But that does leave a meaningful question: how do we reverse this trend and get people interested in leftist topics through arts and culture? How do we promote the material we have already created?
Edit: Oh no, I just heard it on the radio.
You’d think, as a bunch of paid CCP sock puppets and shills, we’d have some better astroturfing of our own.
I’m with you. Sometimes it seems like we’re content to sit back and be proven right by the failures of capitalism, but if we want to actually build anything that lasts then we need to engage instead of sticking to our insular pockets. I do think federation has been a step in the right direction for that reason.