The Dystopic Leftist Youth of Reddit and Facebook
A look into the spaces where young people mock the “boring dystopia” that capitalism has built
“This post aided me on my journey to personal wealth and happiness,” reads the hover text on the upvote button. “This post is unprofitable and thus useless,” reads the text on its counterpart.
Welcome to /r/LateStageCapitalism, a Reddit page where even the content rating system is a satire of the constant monetization of our daily lives. It’s one of many online forums where a leftist brand of humor can flourish, composed of anticapitalist memes, caustic jokes about current affairs, and a sprinkling of underreported news stories and research papers.
When content on LateStageCapitalism achieves a certain level of popularity, it can break out to other subreddits or even the homepage, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. And beyond merely bringing socialist humor to a wider audience, this means the left is starting to gain ground in the meme wars — a battlefield the right has been dominating for a long time.
As commentators have observed, humor is a tool that has been explicitly adopted by far-right groups as a way of smuggling extremist ideologies into the mainstream. In a comprehensive report into online media manipulation…
