The entire reactionary wave is The Backlash To The Internet.

The creation of the internet allowed anarchist (and similar) ideas to rapidly spread in influence. The resulting catalyzing culture of half-converted liberals (eg tumblr) went wide and irked selfish bastards who in turn unionized.

We won a fuck ton of ground in the 90s because neither the establishment or reactionaries really understood what was implicitly at stake in the early internet. This played out into inexorable cultural and social advances throughout the 00s. Gamergate was the enemy waking up.
Because they couldn't even come close to winning in the advanced market of ideas or via non-state activism, the reactionaries realized they had to seize the state and impose a draconian level of total slaughter and authoritarianism to put the genie back in the bottle.
And accruing small failures around the structure of the internet and our technologies catalyzed until everything was centralized platforms, the internet was basically dead, and billionaires and vapid clickbait infotainment grifters could seize its corpse to push fascism.
@rechelon I can recognize some of that as having happened, but the corposcum platforms didn't actually swallow everything, not manage to kill the net.

What they did is bury it away from widespread awareness, which is also a problem, but not quite the same one.

Whatever failures exist at a smaller more distributed scale are magnified by magnitudes in the corposcum platform, which are by default hostile to the users. It's only downhill from there.
@rechelon parentally unsupervised internet access is probably the singular reason i broke the conservative mold of the rest of my family, and years of free roam experience and graduating intellectually from ancap to ancom pre-gamergate helped me avoid the alt-right cesspit which i was demographically primed to fall into

@bcham @rechelon I had a similar trajectory, plus the internet allowed me to explore queer/trans identities. My parents sort of understood the danger, which is why my dad once took my laptop when he slightly suspected I had an email account he didn't know about and so couldn't surveil for deviancy lol

IRL influence from my sister helped me avoid alt-right shit. And gamergate was so obviously nonsense on its face I couldn't believe anyone actually gave a shit about the things they were allegedly mad about. But of course it wasn't really about that as pointed out in this post

@rechelon this is so true. Especially the huge uptick in queer visibility and people finding out and coming out as queer is in huge part due to the internet, due to media no longer being as top-down and corporate, by allowing queer people to find community and exchange knowledge and ideas in a way that is easy to access even for closeted people and even for people in the most queerphobic, conservative areas or in the middle of nowhere as long as there’s internet access.

I don’t know if I would have ever figured out my queerness and felt encouraged enough to express it, and if I would’ve made it through that early phase after I realized I was trans without the internet. And idk if I would’ve become an anarchist without it, not because I don’t tend towards anarchist values but because it’s so hard to just come across anarchist ideas irl, I might’ve never considered it, I might’ve never had that moment of “that makes so much more sense and is so much better than liberalism/social democracy/whatever you call the ideology of naive teens supporting the Green Party” without internet communities exposing me to anarchist ideas and given me the space to understand the basic concepts of anarchism/what anarchism is (the funny part is that I had met and even been friends with anarchists irl before that, they just never talked about why they believed what they did, they just sort of talked among themselves about it).

@rechelon ofc now corporate capture of the internet is progressed pretty far, but they’ll never be able to control all of it
@rechelon and the right has ofc learnt a long time ago how to game those systems like recommendation algorithms and do effective internet propaganda to spread their ideology, though the advantage we gain from it is greater than any the right does, I think or at least I hope (I think the right profits from social media walled gardens, while anarchists/marginalized people do well in more organic and decentralized structures than that, which also explains the rise of the right following the rise of corporate social media)
@rechelon ofc I’m not saying that there wasn’t rightist shit on the internet before gamergate, but it didn’t really allow them to spread their ideas much more efficiently than generally in society
@rechelon (I think, keep in mind that the internet was already being captured by social media when I was a teen, so my idea of the pre-social media internet might not be accurate)
@enby_of_the_apocalypse @rechelon young Green Party supporter to anarchist pipeline
@rechelon I guess queer isolation plays such a huge role in our oppression, the internet just greatly reduced that.