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When it comes to the presentation of radical aesthetics in any sort of media, both mainstream and niche, Leftist intellectuals tend to dismiss it as trickery and subterfuge. The example that comes to mind is Slajov Zizek talking about how the greenwashing employed by corporations like Starbucks was an attempt to lull us into a false sense of security so people would give up on critiquing the system or trying to change it. Or how the late Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism that movies like Wall-E “performs” our anti-capitalism for us so we can continue to be cynical consumers.

Now I think it is a pretty silly position. To assume that people are so susceptible to advertising copy and the promises corporations make is to not just hold people in contempt, it’s also to disregard statements like advertising researcher Gerard Tellis who in a 2003 survey of the literature in Effective Advertising admitted that “The truth, as many advertisers will quickly admit, is that persuasion is very tough. It is even more difficult to persuade consumers to adopt a new opinion, attitude, or behavior.” This has carried over even in the internet era of microtargeted ads.

Moreover if it was true, I would expect activists to have noticed by now, that whenever a new movie or TV show has some radical message comes out or a company with socially progressive branding pops up, they’d complain about it.

I can’t find anyone complaining about this sort of thing. Indeed I find that many serious activists are delighted when popular media which even somewhat accurately depicts radical activity or ideas is released.

Instead the closest thing I can find to media influencing action in a negative manner is in election years, which activists do complain about. But that’s not because the media spectacle discourages action, no, rather it’s because elections encourage people to engage in what is, when properly considered, pretty ineffective forms of intervention because so many people are engaged that people feel they have to get drawn in.

So what then of actual radical messages in mass media that is sold to us?

There is the cynical stance that is suspicious of any messaging which is packaged and sold to us by capitalists. That this undermines the radical potential because it is now a commodity.

I don’t think this is the case. The reason that capitalists selling radical ideas to a mass audience tends not to create mass radical action is not because those ideas become part of the spectacle and are robbed of all radical content. Rather it’s that they fail to appreciate basic things like revealed preference.

It’s not that when radical ideas get sold in a mass market manner they get diluted and become meaningless. Rather, it’s that buying stuff or consuming media with radical aesthetics is not very predictive of a commitment to actual radicalism. Unless the person buying the thing faces actual risks for having done so (which is why things like queer identities are meaningful), what they’ve done just isn’t that costly. As such expecting deeper radicalization is silly.

Moreover I don’t think there’s much danger in people who are serious mistaking those who superficially adopt radical aesthetics as serious allies. The aesthetics of most activists I know are kinda mundane.

Indeed, I think there’s a case to be made that radical messages in popular media can be popular.

Like or not we exist in a world in which many people’s understanding of the world is mediated through popular media. And that means popular media can be effective means of transmission for ideas in a rough and ready form.

A go-to example here would be something like the simulation hypothesis. The majority of people right now just aren’t going to read Nick Bostrom’s original paper on the subject. But give them a movie like The Matrix and they’d get the general gist, even if they fail to appreciate Bostrom’s application of the anthropic principle and probability. Likewise if you want to convince someone of the importance of, say, what a union can do, it probably helps if the person has watched pro-union movies.

Now there are limits to this sort of popularization. The biggest is probably that people can take the wrong message away. See for example for example conservatives being confused by the political statements of Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine or Elon Musk’s present aspirations to be an actual villain from Iain Banks’ The Culture series despite the ideological gulf between him and Banks.

Nonetheless despite such risks of misinterpretation, I still think, all else being equal, it is good to have more radical media out there than not because it gives people trying to communicate radical ideas more points of reference. For example if I was trying to explain insurrectionary anarchism to a normie, it’d help significantly if they were familiar with Nemik’s manifesto from Andor.

Note that this is not about passive media consumption prompting people to become radicals (although if that happens, great!), but instead the spreading of ideas such that radicals have an easier time persuading others because it gives people points of contact to express complicated ideas.

Such an approach is particularly fertile given how it’s increasingly easy to just bypass mainstream media entirely. This isn’t the 1950s, people these days have so many more options when it comes to fundraising, developing and distributing media and those options can be further expanded.

However the specifics of the ideas being included in media aimed at popular consumption matters. And it’s here that I can get to what I think is the real source of pessimism about anti-capitalist ideas in popular media. It’s not that capitalist marketing Leftist ideas makes them less effective. Rather I think that this is all a way to cope with the current lack of strategy on the Left.

Take, for example, a game like Disco Elysium, which is probably the most effective piece of communist propaganda in decades and has been incredibly successful in terms of reaching people and inspiring discussion. But in terms of helping encourage people to think about new ways to fight capitalism, the best it can do is gesture at the notion we might hold out hope despite how bad things are.

There is of course a place in the world for media that grapples with and portrays depression and hopelessness. But I don’t think that the creators would have made the game quite so bleak if they themselves didn’t feel hopeless about our possibility of fighting capitalism.

In my opinion the biggest problem facing the Left today is that it does not know how to effectively fight capitalism. Which in turn means that merely spreading anti-capitalist ideas is a non-starter because more people won’t really do anything.

And so it’s easy to dismiss media which does such, to see it as just another trick pulled by the system. If you’re in a depressive state and you’ve been offered false hope a bunch of times, it just makes sense you’d be skeptical and suspicious of further offers so as not to have to deal with yet another cycle of having your hopes raised and crushed.

However not all suggestions are created equal. One of the reasons that I have measured optimism about the future despite everything is that I think that the Left got some things significantly wrong and that any movement which corrects these mistakes doing better can be considerably more effective.

That includes more effectively spreading our ideas.