And I use “normal” in scare quotes, because, according to whom, exactly, capitalism? Society? Yourself? Some of the “weirdest” people I’ve met in my life where also some of the nicest and actually helped me out. People you’d peg as “normal”? Well I’ve had my fair share of shit with them. I’m not about to put up with some reddit lord trying to score points with cool kid podcasters by throwing people who feed the homeless under the bus, fuck you very much.
The essence of Brace’s whole “be normal” thing is really important and shouldn’t be dismissed because of the following, but it’s weakened a bit by his unexamined ableism, and weakened even more by the culture of reddit and the internet in general. Which is ironic because that’s the main thrust of the argument: don’t take terminally online meme “leftism” into your everyday agitation/education practice. Don’t alienate people by being smug or attack them for whatever the weekly twitter outgroup signifier is.
The culture of /r/trueanon has degraded spectacularly over the years, as is almost unavoidable in any online space-- but especially leftist ones, since the basic conclusion of leftist study is log off and engage with the world. Couple that with the suppression of proper leftism by the admins and algorithms.
I haven’t been on since the ableism struggle session a few months ago, but that was pretty revealing. Based on voting patterns, about 85% of people were on board with dialing back the ableism, but the 15% were more terminally online so made 75% of the posts and comments, thus disproportionately influencing the culture. Similar patterns with zogposting and acp and other reactionary shit, a lot of overlap with redscarepod and stupidpol.
But anyway, given all that, it unfortunately makes sense how the idea of engaging with the masses and meeting people where they’re at could be corrupted into its opposite.