Basically if there were patty’s with some teeth they would enforce party discipline and education and that would lead to higher quality discourse online.
Not necessarily. Comrades that engage in actual praxis in RL mostly just don't care enough to engage in discussions online. I can certainly attest to that. Since I started organizing offline my interest in engaging with libs online has stopped almost entirely. It's time consuming, annoying, unpleasant and for the most part simply unproductive. 99% of people of any political affiliation do not engage in good-faith debate online - including me and most comrades here. The time I have for political activism is sparse and I can do more productive things with it than talk to a liberal who's just gonna reply with a sissy-pee social credit meme to a comment I took 30mins to write. RL discussions for the most part are much better in this regard, because the human component shines through much more and you tend to pre-select the people you engage with to a much larger extent. Getting into political discussions with people completely opposed to your view doesn't happen that much, whereas it is the standard online.
Is there anyway to work on like, an online party discipline?
For existing real-life parties going online maybe, but their energy is used much better elsewhere. For a bunch of randos like us? I don't think so tbh. We are not organized, there's no discipline, no organizational structure, no mechanisms to enforce things, no participation to come to conclusions and analysis.
I agree that communists in 2023 have to use the online space productively. Creating platforms like lemmygrad, producing content like podcasts, videos, articles, streams, etc is just much more worth-while (and even that's limited) and lends itself more to concerted efforts than discussions with dorky libs.
Haven't seen it, don't plan to, don't care to tbh.
But having talked to some people about it, this is my takeaway: "Messaging" is simply a new tool of marketing, especially "subversive" messaging. You're not buying a car - you're committing a revolutionary act of activism against climate change and fossil capitalism. You're not buying an ethically farmed, grass-fed, local steak, you're fighting animal cruelty and big farming lobbies with your consumption. You're not simply dressing up skandidly in pink to watch a multi-hundred million dollar Hollywood production of Barbie produced and approved of by its parent company, giving new legitimacy to that old rubber toy franchise and boosting sales numbers. You're totally subverting gender roles and criticizing capitalism by doing so.
Imo you're not. You're just buying a new car, munching another steak and going to the movies again promoting one of the most famous IPs of all time. It's the same thing we've done our entire lives. Changing the messaging around the act without changing the act, doesn't change the act. You're just doing the thing.
There can't be anything really subversive coming out of the hegemonic culture industry. By the very nature of its production, via the commodification it undergoes, it has already become toothless and assimilated. Neoliberal anti-capitalism is just the newest sales-pitch. It's along the lines of "diverse" CIA targeting officer recruitment ads. Just like capitalism can't produce true anti-war movies, it can't produce anti-capitalist or real anti-gender-role movies. It would be self-defeating if it did.
That being said, if you enjoy it more power to you. Nobody needs a grand narrative of subversion and messaging to go see and enjoy a movie at the theater. If you get something deeper out of it, even better.