Both questions would deserve a book each to really answer, but I will try.

How are you defining mass parties? Relatively large participatory base, strategy decided democratically, presence on the local territory and ties with communities. Here though I was more framing them as “parties designed for a mass society”, where their strategy relies on the possibility to reduce the individual to mass, as in the case of workers parties. A one-size-fits-all organization, where one strategy, one identity and one theory of change is shared by millions of people.

When did they stop working, and why?

There are at least two big elements: the first is the end of mass society. Once we became all individuals, the mechanism of identification in a collective entity became harder. It got even harder over time, when most young people have no examples or memory of anybody around them ever acting collectively.

The second element is informational: mass parties are incredibly slow. The analysis-synthesis-action-assessment most ML parties are based on is predicated on the assumption that the social and political phenomena you’re working with don’t change too fast and between the analysis phase and the action phase, the underlying phenomenon is relatively stable. If the analysis is too slow or the phenomenon (i.e. specific industries, specific political landscapes, etc etc) change too fast, your analysis is always late. Correct, but useless. This renders anybody involved in such ecosystems (not just mass parties), very aware of the motivations of their own failure, but completely incapable of escaping them.

What does that mean? The PCF is pretty much a dying party with basically no relevance.

Have you ever spoken with an urban young mainlander? They are the most individualistic people on Earth. Beats any gun-bearing Texan everyday.

History does matter. In the same way mass parties wouldn’t have worked in 15th century Europe, they won’t work now. Learning history is useful to understand how entire system of thought and action survived way past their relevance, doomed and incapable of understanding their own demise.

Mass society in the West doesn’t exist anymore. You’re unfit to achieve anything you want to achieve and you lack the tools to elaborate to yourself why you keep losing. The world moved on and so should your politics.

It’s obviously an open topic of debate in philosophy, but genes have agency for some definition of agency.

In a cybernetic sense, they have agency in the sense that the information within them transforms the world way more than the world affects their information. They are more players than chessboard.

For people like Dennet, which I’m not necessarily a fan of, you can think of agency (and therefore freedom) as the ability of any unit of matter to prevent its dissolution in the face of threats. Life can be framed as a strategy of DNA to reproduce itself in the face of entropy. That is agency.

Agency is not will though. For sure genes have no will and neither does sand

While genetic agency is often appropriated by reactionary politics, it’s a quite established scientific perspective.

ITT: very little pseudoscience. It’s pseudoscience only when you try to pass something non-scientific as science (understood in the modernist sense). There are plenty of systems of knowledge that are outside of science and don’t really care about passing as science when making statements about the world: metaphysics, theology, cybernetics, open systems theory, and so forth. Those are not pseudosciences.

Science cannot even prove itself as a method. Science is just spicy epistemology.

Memetics is not really pseudoscience. It was science, there there were compelling evidence and arguemtns that ideas have no agency on their own, contrary to genes, and the whole field died for good.

but then it’s a social force, and social force can be turned into a physical force. I would say any cybernetician would agree with this. Social signals are part of the same system of physical signals. Then we can argue cybernetics is not science but rather its own paradigm, but that’s a different conversation.

No, it’s global. There are two timeslots to better accommodate the broadest possible crowd. TWC is mostly active in the USA and Europe atm, because the Indian chapter basically merged with the local IT union and stopped operating as TWC.

The event is organized by the TWC Global chapter, which is the “digital” chapter that supports the local chapters throughout the world.

yeah, it was a hypothetical, that didn’t happen for very specific reasons.

Look, I’m Italian, I live in Germany and the resurgence of nazi-fascism in these two countries is not due exclusively to the fact they didn’t purge nazi and fascist supporters back then, but it’s still a very big factor. They never went away, they just went into hide, learn to disguise themselves and came back as soon as the conditions were good. People who were raised fascist in their families and inherited their money, values and goals. There’s a line connecting them and it’s clear now we would all be better off if after the liberation, the Americans or the Soviets went on to purge entirely those structures of power, instead of trying to integrate them in a democratic society.

I don’t think the State of Judea can be ever reintegrated into Israel, let alone in a democracy. They are past any chance for rehabilitation, being in a self-destructive genocidal frenzy that even Netanyahu probably won’t be able to stop.

because a media outlet goes where there are viewers. They write to be read, so there’s little benefit in going on platforms where there’s nobody.

You cannot escape social norms. The act of rejecting them doesn’t free you from them. You will be judged for rejecting them and others will adapt to it, either by rejecting them too and creating a new social norm, or shunning you and attaching a certain rejection to a specific social signal. There’s nothing artificial on it. The logic you describe is very oblivious to how social norms and social actors work.

Also here we are talking about webcams not really as technological artifacts, but as social tools. Obviously it’s not a technical requirement to be presentable, but a social requirement, that’s implicit in the discussion.

“Virtual backgrounds as the norm” is an interesting practice, pretty much like school uniforms erasing difference in class by dressing everybody the same.

virtual and blurred backgrounds still signal a lot. Not only they let the viewer know that your environment is not nice, but they also become aware you’re somewhat ashamed of it, enough to be willing to hide it.

If the protocol doesn’t give incentives for an even distribution of users, it’s not going to be solved by blaming individual instances or individual users.