I got about halfway through this video and then skipped ahead, before kinda just realizing that he was saying a bunch of totally unsourced surface level stuff, and none of what he was advocating for was actually anti-voting. I mean, he says that at the beginning of the video, yeah, sure, right. So like, I don’t find any of it super disagreeable in principle. Oh yeah, we should all do more in our local community and join local political activism groups instead of engaging in electoralism, and especially only engaging in it every four years! Sounds great. One question, where do I start?

Also, another question, right, underneath all this talk of voting and not voting, obviously this shit is referring to like, state and federal level politics, right, and not local politics under which people might actually be able to have a difference? It would kind of be patently absurd to deny that people can have (usually) a larger individual impact on their local political bodies and processes. I don’t really see the problem there in engaging with electoralism at a local level. There’s also like, not a clear alternative or picture in the video of what non-electoralist political advocacy looks like at all. Am I supposed to just kind of assume that I should go out and blow up a pipeline? I feel like you press any of these guys on this, and they don’t ever give you fucking, anything at all that you should actually, tangibly do, anything that you personally could do. They’re just like, oh yeah go to your city council meeting, eventually something will come up. Like no shit dude of course we should all do that if we can, but that hasn’t actually pointed me in a direction.

I also disagree with this idea of blowing up your sails with “not voting”, or, being “anti voting”. I disagree that this is a successful kind of clickbait strategy, for the goals that he seems to support (citation needed). If you gain anyone to your side with this incredibly basic and entry level video, they’re probably not going to be extremely committed to any of the ideas or organizations that you actually support, you’re just getting support in name only. It’d be better off to point people towards whatever local or online organizations they can actually participate in, which are usually what’s extremely lacking in participation.

Sidenote, I repetitively have this problem with breadtube, it just pushes people towards the abstract spectacle over and over because that’s obviously the self-serving thing for all these creators to do, and they’re going to be predisposed to existing in a kind of echo chamber where all their friends are only doing that as well even if their intentions are correct. There’s never even any attempt to utilize the spectacle towards political ends like what you see right wingers do all the time, it’s just like a huge autofellatio vortex. There’s like, this idea in left-tube that the first step is watching a video like this, and the ending steps are, you getting more and more involved in theory. There is no like, conception of the entry level as being like, “oh here’s a local group you can participate in that already exists”. Or, maybe better yet, “here’s how you might form a local group”.

Back to the main points, I think that these sorts of videos and this sort of rhetoric, this misguided attempt to direct people away from voting and towards other forms of political action, I think this is likely to galvanize people against you, as we’ve seen in this comments section full of idiots that won’t even give the video a chance. It also supposes that political action and energy towards political ends is kind of like, a limited resource, rather than a naturally recycling one that gains momentum over time.

So as a piece of propaganda, which is kind of, obviously is, right, I find it to be really bad and unconvincing, and maybe actively harmful.