So many mods and admins are petite bourgeois, and it changes the culture of the internet to reflect their interests (no not Hexbear and Lemmygrad)
So many mods and admins are petite bourgeois, and it changes the culture of the internet to reflect their interests (no not Hexbear and Lemmygrad)
I know a couple reddit mods IRL, and they're both business owners who can take time away and volunteer for hours a day on their phones. I've also seen enough Facebook mods, where you can see the uni and school they went to and its posh as fuck.
I'm definitely very supportive of modding. I think it's super that people volunteer their time to make communities safer. I just see that often those with the free time time have more income. One obvious example is Wikipedia, like the administrators are often there for much of the day. I know that there's a lot of Amerikan funding of Wikipedia editors, and this just makes it worse. I can't give up hours of every day to correct an obvious error, because there's some chud that's online 16 hours a day, who will revert any edit, and flood any noticeboard with tediousness.
I guess it applies to a lot of democracy "leadership" positions. Ideally workers would be filling those roles, but often we're too worn out to do much other than just show up.
This is why militant work in socialist orgs is so important. The bourgeois have "free" time from our exploited labor value to spend on crafting narratives. To counteract this, we have to take our smaller amounts of time to do the same but split among a much larger number of people.
Also while the examples you gave are very modern (social network admins and mods), this has been a feature of capitalism and pre-capitalist class dynamics. The ruling class writes history, both directly and indirectly, and part of that is their ability to dedicate resources (time, paid propagandists) to their causes. Business owners were/are often the most active or influential leaders at church, temple, etc. They're the most able to run for political office because they can still run their business and do legislator things simultaneously. Many legislative bodies failed (or still fail) to provide a high enough wage to make it a job that a working class persin can sustain themselves with so naturally they're full of people who are bourgeois. This was by design, for and of the ruling class, in how they maintain a pretense of "civil service" as a sacrificial act of the upper class.
Something something... professional group of revolutionaries... something something...
I feel this hard. All the leaders I see in progressive orgs are all well to do. And when leftists try to challenge things, it's always "I put in the work".
Just get passive income bro
I guess it applies to a lot of democracy "leadership" positions.
This is the paradox of representation. The people who show up to the assembly/council/meeting/election are the ones with the most leeway to just do that all day, which is a selector for certain demographics. This leaves you with a few options.
- Ignore the problem
- Make everybody read a few books and then pretend to have solved the issue through education
- Actively probe for and try to correct inequities in representation, while openly acknowledging biases of representatives
These options are not specific to any political position; any of these 3 can be done by Marxists, anarchists, socdems, or liberals.
r/legaladvice is just cops