Re: <nettime> Fascist "trolls" and back on track

Dan,

Even before your solicitation, I was prepared to be the American 20-something (thanks, also, for your post, Alice):

What an interesting experience it's been here on Nettime for the last few years as I've been writing a critical-psychological dissertation about "Internet Addiction" (a perfectly Foucaultian generational problem)! In between then and now I became deeply involved with a post-blockchain project called Holochain and so went from resistant net-asceticism to deep web, crypto-cultural exploration. What sets Holochain apart, at least in the core group, is its having started with eco-hippies who had been designing complementary currencies for intentional (and religious) communities for decades. Which brings me to the point about the 60's...

I'll make the same preface about criticizing the youth, but in the other direction. Please don't take my agreement with your points as Oedipal variety anger. I do wish to emphasize, though, that it's worth taking a good hard look at what's been created through the de-politicization of 60's social movements. In my (odd) tech world this has taken the form of solutionism + a staunch DIY ethos that refuses engagement with national governments and other major social institutions and thus also eludes any realistic political context. Simultaneously, in grade school as much as in grad school, teachers and professors sang the praises of the 60's greats. While first as moral heroes and later as exemplars of driving affective flows, we never got much more than celebrated lifestyles that never seemed to match up with the modes of reading the present from which they are ostensibly generated.

The primary rift between young activists on the left and right (though these terms are SO RARELY used) is that the young "left" believes that mass movements are now smaller, but that that's *ok* because the most important thing to uphold is being a good person...even if it never gets anywhere or benefits anyone. The young alt-light has a deeper understanding of power operating in the shadows and, contrary to Bard's Marxian heroism, accepts that it will not look like it did in the 60's. Unless of course you're at Burning Man or one of the numerous regional burns quite popular among gamers and others in the Southeast.

By the way, I use the alt-light label to denote folks who will confess their ultimately fascist ideals on lots of drugs but who have no problem working with a jewish woman (me) by day on tech we all understand as a powerful pharmakon. We happily hold our own hopes about whose hands these tools will fall into. Note that the kindness you spoke of indeed crosses these political boundaries. And why shouldn't it? As I said, these terms are never used. They are hardly identities for us, making cooperation a given on the backdrop of "you've got your fantasies and I've got mine".

Please understand that for me, like many young Americans, diversity has always been depoliticized and thus is often rightly met with the proverbial eyeroll of moralistic education. I'm from suburban California and then moved, first to the rural, then urban, south. The moralism is extreme off the heels of a disavowed Christianity, and I sometimes feel here as if I'm occupying a place so far to the left that I appear to be looping around to the far right -- ironically, because such morals feel impossible to uphold provided one is not white, male, privileged, etc. As I see it, without school or jobs, socializing is a huge motivator for involvement in activism. So, when your peers begin to morally lambast you harder than your parents for discursive missteps, prospects seem few. Compare this to the style of engagement of someone like Bard. At least he gave a sporty acknowledgement of your effort.

I often feel torn between participating in overtly activist spaces, what sometimes feels like "just being a body" and doing the not so glamorous work no one seems willing to do. Shake hands with people in positions of "power over". It's a choice between socializing and grant writing. This is where identity comes in for me -- I am grateful to be a woman when I have a minor surge of hope that it'll give me better opportunity to struggle to fund my peers and me to live how we want: in zero-waste communities, learning regenerative agriculture, and confidently networked enough to know that we can provide and receive swells of support in what are obviously impending disaster zones. Not a far cry from the pamphlet Ian just posted in the other thread, which was promptly accused of being masculinist alt-right literature. Sigh.

Thanks, Dan, and everyone, for your insights. I've wanted to express my appreciation for this group for a long time. <3

On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 7:30 PM Dan S. Wang <[email protected]> wrote:

Thank you, Angela.

Until Ryan singled out the tasteless and revealing remark about
Charlottesville, it hadn¹t registered for me. Why not? Because in Bard¹s
response addressed to me, his first line about my post being "so very very
brilliant" put me off to the extent that I didn't even read the rest of
it. I had seen enough to engage directly. My desire was to throw some
thoughts, spun out from that thread, for the list at large. My references
to Bard's lines and "arguments" were, I hope, taken as intended. Which is
to say, with an edge of ridicule.

The fascist shibboleths regarding identity politics can be dispensed with
and I thank Ian, Alice, Angela, Ryan, Ted and others for clearing this
space of that. I, for one, would be grateful to have the conversation
continued about the genesis of identity politics in various national
contexts, and its contemporary usefulness--or dysfunction. Without the
fascist Bard. So, back to the irregularly scheduled programming:

Here is an observation about the Millennial activist US subcultures to
which I have been exposed. In my experience both in activist and teaching
settings, today's twenty-somethings have an understandable fascination
with the 60s/70s period, of course as I did. Their relationship to a
comparatively more distant time is itself interesting to me, and, I would
say, presents challenges that sometimes are not met productively.

(Let me say here, before I get accused of hating on the kids, that the
young people are our hope in the US. GenQ, I call them, for Generation
Queer--the POC/mixed/queer rad youth who were the first ones out in the
streets in a rage on election night in 2016, the ones who are knitting
together causes and constituencies as intuitively as they take to the burn
of
the tattoo gun, the ones who are feeling the despair of climate
catastrophe in ways a 50 y.o. like myself cannot even imagine--and yet
press on, with a general kindness toward each other that I never expressed
as a young person. I am critical but that doesn't lessen my admiration. Btw
I have a 22 y.o. daughter, so I am not entirely personally disconnected to
the new generation.)

There is now a social movement canon in place that was not yet established
in my 80s student days; we were still living through a hangover period.
Many of the figures vaunted today as legend were still out and about, no
longer on the lam, resurfacing to haunt the college lecture circuit, and
still raising
ruckuses in perfectly human--which is to say, contradictory ways. On many
levels it was easier in the 80s for young activists to feel a continuity
with the old guard, people who were no more heroic than we
potentially could be. The fact that overall life conditions, particularly
around information technology and other kinds of speedy mobility, had not
made the quantum departure it would in the late 90s, also had the effect
of linking us to the earlier radicalisms, even with movements in retreat,
even when we were reacting against their excesses and blind spots.

For younger people now, the gap between the 60s/70s and the present day
must feel like the chasm between myth and reality. And yet, those are the
go-to touchstones. Panthers, SDS, Malcolm, Stonewall, etc etc. The
beginnings of those movements, the full _expression_ of those figures and
projects, remain inspiring. But it is in the defeats, failures,
cooptations, and disintegrations that the most valuable lessons lay. The
decline of the mass movements--and parallel opportunism of the right
wing--is missing in the received history. The reason for this? My take is,
liberal mainstream education seeks to include a diversity of narratives
but depoliticizes them. Thus, what gets taught--and consequently
internalized--is a moral narrative rather than a political one. For
example, it is the moral analysis of the Civil Rights movement that gets
emphasized in US high schools, not the problem of political powerlessness.
So US history gets taught as a forward march of moral progress, not a
back-and-forth contest over resources and labor.

The reduction of politics to a question of good and bad people deeply
afflicts radical political subcultures in the US, and I see it
particularly in the younger generation. I do not dismiss such moral
calculations at all, but I do think they can be destructive to
movement-building when the pseudo-politics of moralism play out in close
range, producing conflict horizontally among would-be allies, and not
vertically, leaving those who hold positions of 'power-over' untouched.
That the pseudo-politics often deploys a discourse of identity is where my
afore-described 80s context for the rise of identity politics would be
helpful, I think--to reclaim identity politics for it was and always will
be: a reserve well of power located in the deeply personal (a kind of
incipience, Hardt & Negri would call it) that even slavery could not
eradicate, and from which we may build out the broad tide of insurgency
that vastly
overflows the personal.

My critique of Haider's book is that he draws almost exclusively from a
fairly distant past for his models of a new class politics: Combahee River
Collective, etc. He makes no argument for present day models, does not
outline a potential model for today's conditions (even as he makes clear
that the Occupy movement held promise), and largely skips over the
'movement of movements' of the Zapatista-inspired 90s.

I think it is appropriate for Nettime, being a living relic of that 90s
moment, to be grappling with the question of new class formation now, i.e.
a class meaningless without POC/womyn/genderqueer/migrant leadership at
its very center--but that will, given the logics of oncoming plurality
math (first in the US, then in Canada, Australia, and European countries)
need to include for full political strength white segments beyond the
already 'woke.'

Any perspectives from actual 20-somethings would be most welcome, of
course!

Yours in infinitely divisible social difference,

Dan w.

From: <[email protected]> on behalf of Angela Mitropoulos
<[email protected]>
Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2018 at 3:31 PM
To: nettime <[email protected]>
Subject: <nettime> Fascist "trolls," meta

As briefly as possible, responses to various threads/remarks bundled up
below:

I've been on this list since, I think, 2003. This was the first time I've
ever suggested someone be thrown off. As someone else noted, times have
changed; but also, I can spot a fascist set of talking points because I've
learned how to do that. It's a skill, learn it, it might save someone's
life in a context where fascist trolling is also about inciting and
legitimating violence against Jews, black people, women, transpeople,
migrants.
https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-and-tactics-of-wh
ite-nationalism-b0bca3caeb84

I do not need to debate fascists to know that they exist, to understand
how they think, or to fight their influence. Including them in online
spaces has the effect of undermining the involvement of critical voices in
those spaces.

I think it's an egotistical indulgence to believe one can "debunk"
fascism. It isn't just an innocuous or discomforting idea in a
"marketplace of ideas," but--as an idea regarding the purported
fundamental inferiority of groups of people--an idea that pushes toward
restructuring the space and terms of involvement in debate by destroying
the assumption of equality.

This is the reason why antifascists have insisted on a policy of
no-platforming. Not all trolls are fascists, but all fascists are trolls.
Everyone lies, but fascists lie as a matter of course because it feeds
their sense of supremacy. So, fascists will of course whisper in your ear
about Marx, "identity politics," and "the white working class," as Bannon
has done (this is playbook). They are all sleaze and bullshit, like Trump,
even if it comes wrapped in faux-high theory to flatter the Nettime set.
On the problem of dismissing fascists as just trolls:
https://www.vox.com/2016/11/23/13659634/alt-right-trolling

I think anyone who invokes Marx's name in support of a 'class first'
position is a charlatan. I am confident in saying this because I've done a
lot of work to be able to say it with confidence. Put another way, I'm
prepared to wager than of the 4k subscribers to this list, I've read more
Marx more often over many years. Those who wave Marx's name over
reactionary positions are performing a deference to a mystical patriarchal
authority, while at the same treating Marx's writings with utter disdain.
I have criticisms of Marx, sure, because I treat him as a writer, not a
cult figure.

The practice of using black women as deflector shields to defend from
possible criticism of racism and misogyny is a media strategy loved by the
far Right. Ironically, it trades on the crudest kind of 'identity
politics' by implying that if x (Candace Owens, whatever) hold a position
then it could not possibly be racist or sexist. It's a version of "but I
have a black female friend" defense. It is an ad hominem in reverse, not
an argument about anything.

I wrote this some time ago on the media's fascination with Nazi profile
pieces: https://s0metim3s.com/2017/12/05/arendt-banality-nazism/

This is a concise account of why you cannot "debunk" fascism:
https://lithub.com/fascism-is-not-an-idea-to-be-debated-its-a-set-of-action
s-to-fight/

This is on fascist creeping, a handy term imo:
https://truthout.org/articles/exposing-and-defeating-the-fascist-creep/

Another handy term is "red-brown," which refers to a reactionary impulse
on what passes for the Left to align with fascists, and people who
presumably think that this time around they won't be murdered in a Night
of the Long Knives after they've served their purpose of consolidating
support for fascism.

I wanted to just thank some people for weighing in with clear eyes: Alice
Yang, Flick Harrison, Ana Ulin, Ian Alan Paul, Dan Wang, Alessandra Renzi,
Sean Smith, Ryan Griffis, Julia Röder, David Garcia, Nina Temporär, Frank,
bronac ferran. (I may have missed some people, too many threads etc,
apologies if I have)

And, Ted, finally, thanks for moving on it.

best,
Angela

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