I won't entirely blame it all on the internet, as there are plenty of reasons why the socialist movement is in the sorry state that it is, but I think we really need to come to terms with how detrimental social media has been to solidarity and just real world organizing. During the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, there was this optimism that the internet and social media was going to help us. In some ways it did help establish new ways of communicating, but overall, I think it has been very detrimental.

Politics is mostly now just a way of signalling personal identity and reinforcing people's narcissism to the point where it corrodes solidarity and makes political movements extremely ephemeral and fleeting at best, and just practically impossible or counterproductive at worst. Everyone has a pet ideology and if you don't agree with every aspect of my incredibly idiosyncratic worldview of intersectional Eco-Marxist-Leninist-Posaidism with Third World Characteristics, I'm going to split.

I'm not really sure where that leaves us, but at the very least I think people need to stop investing so much importance into these online debates and their pet ideologies. Please, posting isn't praxis. And it's not that political differences don't matter, it's that they don't even have any stakes because we haven't even achieved step one of anything. These debates aren't being hashed out in powerful working class institutions, revolutionary organizations with mass support deciding what to do, it's just a bunch of LARPing about bullshit.