I came out of the Bush years as a liberal atheist skeptic teen and voted for Obama in 2008. Obama disappointed by 2012 and the libertarian stuff seemed kind of appealing. After all I was a very rational, logical person and didn't understand why people in charge didn't want to do the rational, logical thing. By 2014 I realized the libertarian thing was another dead-end and went back towards something more liberal. Gamergate was not appealing at all. I hated all that shit being spammed on 4chan and reddit. It always came off as sexist and manufactured. I did struggle with the ideas about privilege but not enough to join that clown show. By 2015 I was with Bernie. By 2016 I was jaded. My material conditions degraded enough to make me very angry. Luckily it was also around the time there was plenty of socialist rhetoric in the right places. I simply got lucky in the internet social media paremovedo machine. I bounced off the right pegs to place me in a position where I wanted change and socialism could provide it.

Then I kept finding footholds on bits of theory and history, slowly learning more and more. Podcasts helped out with some of that. Thanks to Trump enough shit kept happening to provide ample examples of why capitalism and liberalism is failing. Then COVID broke everything and that was it.

I think watching the internet be taken over by social media companies and then this engagement through outrage machine being built is kind of like watching industrialization take over the world. One minute you're an artisan in 2003, in IRC, in AIM, on a php forum. The next you're on the street outside of the "this totally real issue that's really important and everyone should pay attention to because it's why your life sucks, not us" factory. In retrospect it's so obvious what all of it was for, even going back to 2008 and Ron Paul's meme machine. The game was rigged from the beginning.