How Tech Created the Woke Mind Virus

There’s been a rather lot of discussion about the “woke mind virus”, a concept popularized by venture capital. In their framing, the woke mind virus means liberals and leftists have been poisoned into some kind of hive mind group think, causing them to recklessly and violently attack, and seek to destroy institutions and fields… and billionaires like Marc Andreessen, perhaps his true beef lol. 

The venture capitalist’s issue with the woke mind virus emerges of course from the fact that social movements in America and globally, directly threaten the ownership, control, money and power of the venture capital class. Arab Spring, Ferguson, and Occupy are the origins of their retaliation campaign… what we see now is the true backlash which comes far after the resistance.

 Each carried within it the possibility of revolution, and thus what we see unfold in venture capital, is numerous new strategies to make sure these events never come to pass again. With control over the social media that once made mass movement possible - Twitter - technofascists are in the process of destroying the technology and communications infrastructure that the last 15 years of movements have innovatively used. Most importantly, the real-time, chronological timeline, a design pattern which has been monopolized by Twitter, but is vital to human communications, particularly for mass movements, is no longer available on Twitter. The infrastructure necessary for such things has been totally compromised, as not only Elon Musk purchased Twitter, but a number of our other worst fascist actors… hint: a16z. 

 The meme of the woke mind virus is a way to discredit the legitimate and existential concerns of the social movements in the last 15 years. They are aided in this smear because of the deplorable lack of theoretical and material rigor that we have seen in the reformist, opportunist left. Everything from our swift acceptance of assimilationist strategies like DEI departments, to the massive proliferation of wasteful and ineffective non profits, to absolutely hapless fake leftist parties like the DSA, has provided the enemy with frivolity galore to smear the actual movements; it has also allowed them to paper mache over the actual and material aspects of the movements, far beyond idiot fake leftists saying fake bullshit for clout on Twitter. These material issues include of Occupy Wall Street, which demanded a fundamental change in the economic system in America; Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, which demanded the end of police killings of Black people and especially Black boys; or the many movements against sexual violence, including within the tech industry, where women in tech were organizing against systemic rape and sexual violence years before #MeToo; I believe that the movements against sexual violence were also capable of catalyzing revolution and thus posed a since-underestimated threat. 

In the presentation of the “woke mind virus” op, there is the ability to escape any material dimensions of social movement in America, and it is a Trojan horse to justify continued attack on social progressive movements in America, while giving reactionary and fascist elements a vocabulary with a never-ending set of straw men — any idiot with a semblance of liberal or leftist politics playing the fool on Twitter — to use as fodder for their own indignation and ridicule. 

There is much to be said about the specific framing of this as pathology and pandemic, particularly amidst the ongoing Covid pandemic, in which tech elite were able to double their money and power while 1 million people died, and they did absolutely nothing. Marc Andreessen was so busy working on his latest fake manifesto, “It’s Time to Build”, and getting pissed it didn’t bring world leaders immediately to his heel, he forgot that he had knowledge of the air filtration systems in hospitals that could have been widely installed and had a significant impact on the pandemic’s parameters in the first 2 years, and he regrets not connecting the dots and presumably, putting his giant technology engine to work on it. Alas, tech’s greatest minds were working on bullshit for fascist takeover and doing nothing as America slipped even further into collapse. 

It feels like a cheap point to make as I am only fond of pinning great charges on Marc with great cases, only the best for my nemesis; this is more to say, how very little any of them were thinking of us, even as they held the power, ability, money, labor and instruments of production, including a number of new factory and biotech companies, to get involved in solving this issue; they chose not to, and this choice becomes a rueful 10 second interlude in a 3 hour podcast which is otherwise focused on fascist accelerationism; of course, accelerationism plays right into their hand of letting the weak and genetically inferior die out. A virus often kills its host, making its eradication urgent. At least, if it’s in the billionaire body. 

 While I have written extensively on how the discourse, theory and practice of the left has fallen into nightmare with lack of theoretical rigor, and consistent clout chasing and selling out — I also want to look at how venture capital, responsible for the social media and huge swathes of the web 2.0 media, actually helped to create, through technology, what I myself must conclude is, in fact, a woke mind virus — and one that was manufactured by them, and achieving the primary goal of deradicalizing movements, thus leaving weak movements who are now susceptible to open attacks by venture capital. 

Our Exhibit A is Buzzfeed News, funded by that exact same VC who now so sorrowfully whines of the woke mind virus. I think about Buzzfeed a lot in regards to this. Buzzfeed, few people know, was founded as a way to track viral activist movements, and crack the code of what makes things go viral, so they could emulate that in its own content and in its own advertising. i.e., they were doing a massive amount of data crunching and studying and testing to figure out what could make corporation’s content go as viral as, for example, protests about people fighting for their lives. Thus we ended up with Buzzfeed being considered at least nominally social-justicey, when this was coming far less from a journalistic perspective and more from this experimentation and testing over virality itself. Since it was designed to study, emulate, test, copy and productize for advertisers, viral social movement-related activity and patterns, we ended up with raw, genuine resistance, being pumped into the social media algorithm thresher. Thus we ended up with the Buzzfeed style, instantly recognizable: a formula for producing irresistible headlines, formats, and linguistics and information design elements, including listicles, “irresistibly” clickable links with headlines often in the form of questions or demands, and a generally slick, cool-factor packaging of the social movement that was happening organically, serving as fodder for this machine. I look at these as linguistic forms that have been algorithmically developed and which spread like a plague through the internet. They have produced profoundly changed and distorted behavior on all sides of the aisle. The constantly changing, live-streaming disruptive tools of the enemy, the destructive impact on technology infrastructure, has shaped our movements incalculably, and we still have very little understanding of what, technologically, did happen in respond to these movements. Technology once, thrice inadvertently facilitated global revolution — something they did NOT hope to see, and was not in their favor. Now, we see venture capital actively combatting social movements on the platforms. This is important context for the purchase and privatization of Twitter by our small rogue conspiracy of fascist venture capitalists, including a16z. 

As the sole, and at times lonesome proprietor of an independent technology press during the last bubble, focusing on long-form, materialist analysis of the technology and venture capital threat, it was so shocking to see movements that included not only social media elements but long form traditional essays, theoretical consistency, revolutionary praxis etc., getting turned into soundbites and advertising fodder by venture capital sites, and the movement fall to clout-chasing, infighting from social media arguments, and prestige media jobs, usually at these very same sites. 

One of the reasons that there has been such a loss of at least presumably progressive outlets is because they were all backed by venture capital as an op, and now are no longer useful to them; thus they are shuttering them, with the tech money that once backed the Intercept pulling out and the Intercept now forced to beg for $5 donations as it gets sued into oblivion without backing. Thus we learn again the danger of relying on enemy infrastructure and enemy money for movement building; and this leads us to the door of the actual culprit for the woke mind virus: the venture capitalist. This was a lab spill that they quickly turned into a bioweapon. 

Other social media companies started/funded by a16z  (Marc Andreessen), include Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter (now privately owned in part by a16z, the unheralded buyers), Product Hunt, Skype, Zynga, they are also behind Substack and the erstwhile Clubhouse. So they had and have social movements in their fucking grimy paws, this whole time, every platform that social movements were on, was owned by the enemy, the very material target of the effort. Alas, this often went unrecognized as the movements fed on tech sell-out money and started gorging on prestige, money, jobs and media platforms from the enemy.

 One of my hobby interests is in the idea of language and image viruses created by technology. An example of an image virus would be how Instagram has now debuted several body types which have virally and algorithmically proliferated for years, shaping beauty standards to the point of widespread permanent plastic surgeries; the beauty standard has recently shifted dramatically towards the white anorexic beauty standard, and it has been possible to watch this new image virus, spread through social media, through social media celebrities like the Kardashians in particular, into fashion, and into the street, where at least of my casual observation, there is far more visible eating disorder or advanced anorexia, than I’ve seen on the streets in the past years and indeed, studies show eating disorders are on the rise once more, starting at some point in the pandemic. 

Similarly, we see analytical frameworks invented by social media algorithms become entrenched, such as the representation argument, which came to dominate the media and social media, despite far more materialist viewpoints existing and in fact pre-dating, the emergence of the DEI/representation model as dominant. The framework “why aren’t there more X people in Y field/movie/magazine/industry etc.?” This provided the media and social media, backed by tech, with a never-ending source of marginally useful analysis that always went viral, and a funneling of that energy back into working within the system and in a reward feedback loop with it. 

The manufacture of clout, which serves venture capital incredibly as a driver of addiction, insecurity, content, engagement, isolation and traffic, is also a key factor in the elements of the “woke mind virus”. The movements turned into an absolute nightmare of social media ladder climbing chaos, and the various anti patterns that ripple out of clout chasing were highly destructive — like community cannibalism of leaders out of social status jealousy, or petty infighting becoming the common mode of discourse because it leads to large followings for, usually, one of the participants if not both. The emphasis on followings, often pretending to be a focus on communities, took over — these engineered dopamine hits by venture capital, providing a natural destructive force, particularly in continuity and stability of the movements; VCs want virality, large followings, burstiness, infighting creating huge traffic surges; all of these were anti-patterns that effected leftist organizing in profound ways. And once again in this case you see the VC performing a key role in the “woke mind virus”, which we can best understand as the de-radicalization of movements from the material into the absurd, thus making it a punching bag for the material, reactionary concerns of venture capital. 

Venture capitalists also created a number of formations to diffuse and engulf dissent, leading to fractures in the movement and the phenomena of “the package”, where venture capital bought independent activists out with fancy jobs, promises of “changing things from the inside”, high salaries and public limelight, book deals, funds, non-profits and the like. In order to square the material needs of the movement with the fact that large amounts of it had been absorbed into the apparatus, we produced a de-fanged dialectic between inside and outside, unable to clearly mark the lines of battle; the lines between us and our enemy were made permeable and manipulatable. This resulted in the discourse itself needing to justify its own selling out of the movement, and resolve the obvious cognitive dissonance. As a result, we got yet more spaghetti theory, as in order to pretend any of this made sense, fake theory after fake theory and fake analysis after fake analysis, was deployed to hold up the false idea that working within the system, was how to fix things, even as it became more clear by the day that we were headed for wide-scale movement death. Thus the dialectic of reformism was inscribed again and again over things that could have been revolutionary politic. A belief in reformism was necessary to continue to justify or explain the movements as they began to die due to reformism. 

Reformism is in fact a strategy that venture capitalists themselves adopted far before we did. We think it was us who chose this configuration, and we do bear responsibility for it, but its important to also understand the way that venture capital adamantly worked to ensure that movements would have a reformist, and not revolutionary character. To this point, I give you the DEI initiatives in tech. Most people don’t realize that many of the anti-tech movements started out with a strict anti capitalist ethos; when we went to war with them, it was them who reached out to our people, offering VC funds, jobs, departments, podiums, and an assortment of plays to vanity in order to contain the movement with carefully measured and ultimately temporary reform. We had been trying to build independent tech infrastructure… they wanted to make sure that didn’t happen, and all of a sudden everyone was getting $300k jobs at prestige VC startups. For them, this was an easy and frankly cheap way to fold dissent back into the industry, where they could control it. And it’s a playbook they ran very well, and continue to with ops like those against/from within the Amazon Union folks. Despite the number of DEI efforts in tech, mostly engineered by tech power itself and then upheld by people they brought under their thumb, the amount of representation of women +/ Black people by demographic, is lower than what it was 10 years ago in tech. It was their strategy, and by it, they won out over the once vibrant and independent anti-tech resistance of about 2012-2015, a brief window in time before the enemy had done us in, neutralized all our best people, co-opted all of languages and platforms, infiltrated us, attacked us with fascist mobs into hiding, deployed thousands of ops on us, and so on. 

Instead of producing sound theoretical and material values, the movements were lost in this churning mix of clout chasing (motivating people to come up with nonsensical discourse), media ops, assimilation into enemy bodies, infighting — the perfect recipe for the spaghetti discourse that the “woke mind virus” correctly identifies, without accounting for the reasons we are here. 

I spare no blame to the movements themselves. There were always people working within these movements to do actual material work; they were overcome by reformists and opportunists, and many of our best people, watched everyone around them sell out one by one to this machine, to succumb to the woke mind virus. 

The good news is that this history of events, leads me to my thesis that if the whole world had non-comprised communications infrastructure — independent social media — with intact, chronological, untampered with, real time feeds, revolution would occur. In fact, we have seen it to be true.

The bad news is that all of the technology platforms and media platforms we have now, are totally compromised specifically to PREVENT world resistance and revolution. This points to the need for independent infrastructure perhaps more than any other factor.

But consider it was them who manufactured the woke mind virus. And us who did nothing as it tore through our movements and brought us to our knees. Just in time for the rise of the fascist, colonial tech empire. Whee! 

Time to get more women into fascism, anyone?