I want to start off by saying that I am going to shamelessly steal memes for this channel, and there are a couple of reasons supporting my decision.

1. This is already the status quo in the Telegram meme community. The whole thing is an incestuous web of forwarded or resaved memes in the first place, most of which are lifted off of other sites like Reddit and Instagram.

2. It is often impossible to determine who the original creator of a meme is. By the time that it is posted to content aggregators, it could have already had names added or removed, or any number of edits made. I have seen some try to track down the origins of memes using google or twitter to establish a timeline, but these methods are unreliable given that many memes are originally shared on transient image boards like 4chan or in private group chats. So essentially, unless you are personally aware of who created a meme, it is basically anyone's guess where it came from. And even if someone does claim to have that knowledge, they could easily be fabricating their story. The exception to this rule is that of comics made by well known artists, but those live on the boundary of what might prototypically be considered a meme (a good topic for another time).

3. Anonymity isn't all missed opportunities at fame for meme creators. It also provides the freedom to crap out low quality work with poorly articulated opinions while still getting your ideas out into a public forum. This is the ultimate enabler of political discourse for the masses, and that this is such an integral part of online culture is something that I see as a huge positive.

To be clear, I still intend to credit original artists when possible, but this was an opportunity to rant about the nature of modern memes that I couldn't turn down. Does it sound pretentious? Probably, but I don't care if I sound cringe because I'm comfortable that my opinions aren't actual dogshit.

With that said,

I think this is actually hilarious on an even deeper level than what was probably originally intended, because your IP address is like, the least revealing thing someone could leak about you. Unless you specifically set a static address, it changes every time your router reboots, and it doesn't even tell someone where you live with any more accuracy than like which half of a state you're in. And that's assuming that you're not using a proxy or a VPN either. At best maybe they could determine if you had recently been active on some other site, but that would also require having access to their records, which are likely to be more secure than your information

So basically it's a display of just enough technical literacy to understand what an IP address is, but not enough to know that it's basically useless for doxxing. Or maybe the author was aware of that and choose to do this ironically. Or maybe it's just so fucking funny because a corporate account spitefully posting a string of numbers in response to a childish insult is so surreally online that it comes way out of left field. Whatever the case, this joke is definitely no longer funny, and I am glad to be the one to kill it

thanks for coming to my ted talk

So as many of you are probably aware, /r/antiwork has absolutely blown up this year to over a million users and counting. While that may not seem at first like a major milestone for American leftism, and indeed it may never be remembered as such, I think that it signals the beginning of a transition into a new period of leftist organization online. First, let's talk numbers. The fact that antiwork boasts a million subscribers is not something to scoff at. /r/socialism has a meager ~400,000 in comparison, and /r/conservative about 900,000. That makes antiwork one of the largest political subs other than /r/politics, which is possibly one of the shallowest places on the site. Now, you may take issue with the implication that Reddit is even remotely useful for gauging the internet zeitgeist, but on the contrary, it more or less has monopolized the topic forum space, and regardless of whether you think it's cringe a lot of people use it.

Anyway, back to my point. It is obvious to anyone in the leftist community that pro-labor sentiments have been on the rise, and the rise of antiwork is plain evidence of that. But what we have seen tragically little of is widespread, and especially publicized praxis. This week antiwork did that by denying Kellog the ability to hire scabs online, which I don't have to tell you is majorly based. But more importantly, it has done tangible damage to a major corporation. This is work that will transcend your local community. This is the power of organization. The whole fiasco has even become big enough now that even Biden put out a statement in support of the striking workers. Whatever you attribute it to, this is a major win for labor.

As exciting as that is, that's not really why I decided to make this post. What I'm concerned about is how corporations (and potentially state actors) are beginning to respond. In years past, leftism had been irrelevant enough that it just wasn't worth it to try to undermine the integrity of online communities. But now that we have the will and ability to actually fuck over big business, there's finally a profit incentive to make our movements as disorganized and ineffective as possible. And coming back around to antiwork, we're starting to see just how powerful their disinformation campaigns can be.

The word astroturfing has been around for years now, but up until this point it was mostly associated with hamfisted attempts by companies to advertise as if they were actual users. But now they've entered the plainly political realm by attempting to infiltrate /r/antiwork. And frankly, those attempts were about as successful as you could expect. But what came after is what really concerns me, friends. Because now seemingly every other post on the front page of the sub is about said astroturfing, or accusing other users of astroturfing, or disagreements about how the movement should be organized or what the proper narratives are about leftism's relationship with liberalism and right wing politics. It's leftists eating other leftists, and it's a story as old as socialism itself. It took surprisingly little effort on the part of the capitalists to set us off, too. Regardless of whether antiwork survives this trial by fire, it is clear that we as a community will need to come to terms with this flaw.