Honestly this comment is kind of shitty as I am very tired, so yeah. Some of what I say may seem a bit reactionary but I ask that you read the entire comment in good faith and try to educate me if you disagree.

I really enjoyed the first half of the video, but the second half kinda dropped the ball. Maybe NonCompete’s position as a professional content creator somewhat clouds his vision and gives him a more optimistic perspective on social media.

He kind of brushes aside “cancel culture” criticism by arguing it’s just powerful people being scared that they are finely being held accountable, which isn’t entirely wrong but it’s also not very materialist. There are working class people being fired and persecuted for making shitty jokes on social media. Obviously these people need to be educated and need to change their behaviour, but publicly humiliating someone and then possibly making them face the effects of extreme poverty is very likely only further radicalizing them and their sympathizers. It’s mostly performative politics that targets individuals instead of looking to change the system which produces this types of behaviours. This is very clearly observed when people go fishing for half a decade old posts that non-black celebrities made when they were teens, where they post a non-racist meme with the n-word in it. It’s obvious that this isn’t aiming to be anything other than a purity test and virtue signalling about being “in” the liberal progressive club.
Just as he mentioned privatized information and the lack of formal censorship as legitimizing a propaganda network, “cancel culture” also ends up playing the same role when it comes to the silencing of non-mainstream voices. It’s now as if an organization is giving in to popular demand, instead of an organization giving in to corporate or state interests. As an example of this we have the blacklisting of Colin Kaepernick, which was sometimes paddled as the NFL giving in to their conservative demographic, instead of being about the franchise owners’ personal opinions and interests.

And now I get to my main point: it doesn’t make that much of a difference if individuals have their voices amplified if they just reproduce a different brand of the establishment’s ideology. The dominant ideology in mainstream social media sites is nothing other than neoliberal identitarianism, which, while better than conservatism or outright fascism, still upholds the status quo.
He mentions that the internet has made it so marginalized voices can never be entirely removed and, yeah, he’s right on this one. It’d be suicide for a company to try to pull it off. But do notice how he only mentions identities. Identities don’t challenge the ruling class, they just exist. Political movements do challenge the status quo and are being censored, which I don’t even need to elaborate on because most of us came here after being purged from Reddit. This will only get worse as the new Cold War deepens and communism/marxism-leninism is further conflated with hate speech because of alleged PRC human rights violations.

Of course social media is a major breakthrough for organizing and political discussion, especially with an ever increasing number of non-profit and decentralized platforms popping up, but it is irrelevant if people are still indoctrinated by the hegemonic ideology and aren’t politically educated. This is where we come in. There’s a lot of work to be done and being content and incentivising liberal performative politics will only lead us further off-track.

This is excellent, very clearly presented. I love the point that the internet is creating an unprecedented platform for the repressed, this is a very inspiring development.