Memes

Also, regarding "a material analysis that pig poop balls advances the cause somehow" — basically ever since I first started seeing this sort of stuff coming from Hexbear in the brief time when they federated with Blåhaj Lemmy, I thought of stuff like pig poop balls in kind of the same way as, like, the climate/vegan activists who throw soup cans at paintings or pour milk jugs in stores or trespass F1 races or break fuel pumps or so forth. A lot of people express a lot of anger and frustration and annoyance at these sorts of things and say "How can these activists be so stupid‽ Don't they know that this hurts support for their cause‽", but... ehhhh, being goddamn annoying as all Hell is honestly a more effective form of political action than a lot of people consciously believe it to be. The video essayist Ponderful once said about this,

People criticize actions like milk pours and soup…chucks? Because it “gives the right something to criticize”…but it seems like that's the point! And at the same time, it makes other climate activists look extremely reasonable and "good, actually" in comparison! If pouring some milk on the ground will mean that Daily Mail readers might hear some messages about how messed-up the dairy industry is, and then also maybe even consider old enemies like our Greta as good in comparison, then…yay! Yay, I say! And if it makes the public look kinder upon activists who actually target oil infrastructure, in comparison to what they see as random and annoying publicity stunts, then f*ck!gn ay!

Whether all of this applies in the case of Hexbear is something that people can argue about — it feels like kind of a silly comparison given that Lemmy is just an obscure social media platform, which doesn't exactly seem like the type of place where meaningful praxis can happen... But it's at least a thought that we can keep in mind. Hexbear has certainly succeeded in getting people on Lemmy talking and thinking about them and their beliefs, pushing the Overton window leftwards — especially if other, less annoying leftists look "good in comparison". I'm kind of reminded of my own path towards leftism, honestly: I'd certainly been annoyed by communist interlocutors plenty of times over the years, but I think that without that annoyance, I probably wouldn't agree with those selfsame interlocutors on so much today. That was just one of the many tactics that collectively led me down that path.

I don't think that this is necessarily Hexbear's intentional strategy in the same way as those aforementioned climate/vegan activists, but nevertheless, this is at least my spitball of a material analysis of why Pig Poop Balls actually does advance the cause. This is just a little advocacy for the devil, as it were.