The Way the Discourse Died
Holy shit people, what is going ON?!?!? The entirety of our comms has decayed to the point that there’s not even information in this shit — it is all pointless irony and stomach-churning clout scavenging, our only measure of a politic is in clout itself. We are trapped in an endless, morbid group exercise to transform horror and defeat into “takes”; every situation having only so many takes in it, we stretch the bounds of what is possible for even Ferdinand de Saussure to wrest out of a sign, winding up in metaphysical contortions for a pretense of usefulness as usefulness itself, is disregarded.
We’re about to get killed by technofascists, and you cunts are out here trying to score a point on some totally irrelevent shitbird and become a quasi-media figure with a Patreon podcast, to no aim, there’s not even media anymore. Most of you aren’t even making money off this, this that could be most generously described as a grift; not the attempt to revive the movement, but simply pick at it for bits while waiting for starvation to descend. The discourse has gone BACKWARDS, significantly, part of an overall time-warp, the return of the 90s, the 70s, smoking cigarettes, flare jeans, the Cold War; so is the discourse more than 10 years behind, still hawking representation, diversity, voting Dem, petitions for abortion rights, donate to a non-profit. The same fucking shit we’ve been saying and doing for 10 years, made dumber by desperation.
We’re like a beluga swimming upside down in a tank. They do that because they go insane from being in captivity and lacking stimulation. Our takes are not even stimulation, they are just a consuming brain rot. Years deep into this mindless circling of the drain, its brakish in this bitch, some foul fermentation of watery, toothless, imaginary off-shoots of structural critiques that have been twisted and distorted by people who have absolutely no qualifications to produce analysis or theory, who demonstrate no discipline or vigor, and no pride in their meta-political analysis, and yet feel it URGENT to create a contribution to the never-ending series of “takes”, a take being a point of political analysis or philosophy that has been stripped of its context and materialism, of its purpose to drive us towards action, and turned into pithy, snarky commentary on some passing news item, for everyone to congratulate ourselves on “dunking” a system that wants to exterminate us and doesn’t care about “dunks”, the likes are just more traffic for them, this industry lives off the chaotic convulsions of those it crushes between its feet, turning generational angst and cognitive recoil into advertising clicks; it loves your takes, its loves your clout seeking. We sure as fuck ain’t fighting the enemy, so we fight amongst ourselves to determine who harbors some obscure form of ableism, invented for the first time by the poster, never evidenced in reality or seen in the wild; people fracturing the discourse with scenarios that don’t even exist and the most idiosyncratic versions of identity politics, all of which narrow down the movement to a population of one, or see that as their goal — inclusion to the point of absurdity, to encompass imagined scenarios, far beyond when it could conceivably serve any purpose, other than us running away from the fact that this isn’t fucking working and we’re gonna have to actually fight.
Weird that the dialog is so incredibly far from force at just such a moment, and certainly no mention of guns, except to assure us that even as technofascist empires yawn to swallow our cities, buying guns is, in fact, still the wrong thing to do. There is no violent momentum WHATSOEVER. In fact, no one seems to seek an enemy any bigger than some other clout-gobbling idiot loser, battling it out with other clout-seekers for imaginary reputations based on vapid application of clearly unstudied texts to no aim. We’re all trying to get some kind of upper hand — not over THEM, but over each other; it is a King of the Hill scenario, but there is no top of the hill. Where has this taken us?
The decay of our discourse is part and parcel of the decay of our movements, which have fallen at the behest of a number of imperial, capitalist and political interests, but also through our own personal failings and the moral compromises you all made, and the weak moral character of the movement.
Our primary theory as a liberal/leftist body, over the past ten years, is this: if we change interpersonally, and we change at the level of our personal interactions with the world, we root out our systemic ableism and unconscious bias and so on, and we attain personal benevolence from corporations and institutions (a job, a grant, some small policy change) that serve us as individuals, we will change the world. And this has simply turned out to not be the case. Think of the massive volume of “takes” that have been made by us in the past 10 years, which have provoked only these extremely modest, reformist changes, currently in the process of being rolled back without a meaningful pressure from the left. Your wrong ass takes would fill great libraries of books you clearly never read. But oh wait, now reading is ableism, according to actual ops welcomed openly into the community.
The take is the only measure. We have dissected every possible combination of the -isms and the subtle this and the biased that; and we have mercilessly and tirelessly worked on education and awareness and sensitivity and bias and blah blah blah fucking blah, we need guns. Awareness is often the cover for clout seeking, self aggrandization, is a pressure valve allowing everyone to be content that something has been done. Awareness is deemed an inherent good, even though global levels of awareness around Black Lives Matter, abortion rights, MeToo, haven’t resulted in the must fundamental demands being met. The discourse crowds around awareness, even as it becomes crystal clear that awareness doesn’t work; the industry of awareness, the activism of awareness, is primary in the environment; but because everyone is already aware, we just swim around the tank again, hoping to reach some imagined threshold of awareness that will turn into any kind of hope against an enemy accelerating at a rate we have never once come close to. Awareness doesn’t work; and yet, awareness can make someone visible. And that is all we need, isn’t it? There is a reason clout seekers avoid literally anything outside of petitions, non-profit donations, and attempts at subtle changes to dialogs they fundamentally misunderstand.
Everyone wants to be a theorist, everyone wants to be an analyst. Around 2012, there was a coalescence of efforts that were SPECIFICALLY being led by radical/revolutionary/leftist feminists, especially of color, and in particular Black women, to create a politics of the marginalized for the technology age. This produced huge bodies of essential work on misogynoir, digital violences, sex work, transmisogyny, missing and murdered Indigenous women, the police and surveillance state. Many of these theorists had been working on Tumblr for years, and on Twitter, these ideas proliferated and these intellectual communities blossomed. It was a beautiful time in the movements in many ways.
And it didn’t last very long.
What happened was that these women were brutally attacked, absolutely terribly, by both the enemy and by “us.” They were hit with plagiarism, harassment, banning, gang reporting, raids by hate groups, doxxing, death threats, hacking, the whole gambit, very serious blowback from around 2012 - 2015, attacks from Reddit, 4/8 Chan, and sometimes Hacker News, but also, and perhaps most devastatingly, by “liberals” and the left. This Tweet Called My Back, a vital piece, has a great analysis of this and will give you a sense of where the discourse was at that time, and even in reading it you will see how far the discourse has strayed, that we are BEHIND where critique of these things were in 2012ish, and I think that’s important to call out because it shows that this discourse loop we are stuck in, the patterns that we are using, are actually not just stagnant, but regressive.
These women were maltreated terrible by all sides of the aisle, and there was life-long damage inflicted on many of them; most of the women I knew back then do not do this work anymore or at least do not do it in a similar way, and the loss to the movement has been incalculable. Everyone is currently acting like the risk to leftists from Twitter, is brand new in any way, when it was actually this group of theorists who first assessed and confronted that threat, as they laid the foundations for what became larger, digital-age movements such as Black Lives Matter, Diversity in Tech, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, MeToo, etc. In the critical development of a “new” revolutionary/radical feminism, they innovated ways of using digital platforms for wealth distribution, teach-ins, boycotts, for violence against women advocacy and for coordinating protests of many varieties, for producing community safety networks and support of artisans, etc., which seems common place now, and that is because of the work of these women, who were innovators of new forms of independent organization in the age of mass surveillance and social media giants.
These women, they were independent. They were not reporters, they weren’t academics, they weren’t DEI professionals, they weren’t non-profits. I have come to see how valuable that moment was, in particular that independence. Independence from corporate jaws showed a different future; but they closed down. The independence of efforts from direct reliance on, from being structured around, the enemy… that was everything. And this was a model for how to make the financial independence happened — distributed community fundraising, establishment of independent press, Give Your Money to Women etc. Creating formations of self-funding, to avoid the universally corrupting influence of corporation and the press. I came up during this era, and I see that vital kernel of independence gone now — and our movements have been corporatized within an inch of their lives.
The froth around this important intellectual period, wasn’t anything positive; and we never experienced it as positive. We recognized the hypervisibility as an act of terrorism, we recognized the incursion of mainstream media as an attempt at corporate capture, we recognized the hero-worship as degrading and counter-revolutionary. And yet, people saw in these efforts, the ability to extract takes and to build clout for themselves. Theorists at that time were recognized, rightfully, because they were making totally unique, very profound contributions, they were trying to architect, from evidence and analysis, the shape of a movement that could take us all the way home. And a lot of people were upset that these girls were doing just amazing.
As many of these thinkers gained platforms on the sites, there were the fans, with their utterly dehumanizing simping, and then frothing jealousy from people who just wanted what other people had only attained after years of intensive study, experience, sacrifice — for nothing. What did most of the “left” see? Clout. Big follower numbers. Speaking gigs. Praise from the community. Amazon Wishlist Presents. It so amazing to see time and time again how much people will sell out movements, for the smallest of things, for the smallest of petty individual desires. And so clout-chasing on the left was born; and I cannot emphasize enough, that this was done on the back of a movement of revolutionary marginalized women. The root of clout-chasing is actual jealousy and anger at revolutionary women, it was formed by plagiarizing them and ankle-biting them and seething with resentment at them, anything to take them down. The desire to destroy these women, is the basis for the clout seeking behavior you see today, and boy does it show!!!
It was also “cool” to be a cultural critic, so I think part of it was that people wanted to be perceived as intellectuals or something, and so they set out to get this for themselves, except for all they had was bastardized takes. And so on the left, out of nothing else than selfish desire for eyeballs and fake prizes from engagement, there was a take machine being built. These people had no pride in their practice, the takes never connected to a larger politic or body of work, it wasn’t about making contributions, it was about trying to get as much clout as possible. And it has grown like a mold.
People got extremely tired and angry and sick of their work being plagiarized, of people trying to “gotcha” them for clout, of just a huge slackening in the quality and care going into this work. This has snowballed and snowballed: everything you see now is intellectual dishonesty and absurdity, it is the analysis that comes out of people who do not actually value analysis. This was a huge contributor to the age of actual leftist intellectual production ending, wrapped in about 2016.
It is not “gatekeeping theory” to suggest that theory is an absolutely delicate, absolutely foundational, part of the movement; it is something that is assembled by individual analysts typically over the course of decades, it draws from hundreds of years of theory. Somewhere in “everyone gets to have an opinion” (democracy), we lost a GREAT deal of respect for just the practice of theory production. Women who were becoming known for their contributions, particularly to womanism, digital feminism, violence against women, and emerging tech, had DEEP histories to this work, incredible scholarship, often large bodies of work, or actively engaged in building such, and generally a lot of on-the-ground, direct experience and practice; they were taking incredible care with their production. This was transformed into “takes”, and “takes” — and how are takes different than theory? Takes are disembodied from a body of work; they are a reaching thought passing, not an accumulation of specific knowledge, a framework, material knowledge.
When the last vintages of that era of the movement, and what it could have been, died, it became the first movement of our era that got smashed; and all others that were smashed after that, have ties back to it.
So one of the reasons that the discourse is so bad, is because we had towering talents in our fields, and they, one by one, quit, became exhausted and traumatized to the point of not being able to work, broke up with their various affiliations, burned out, were censored, kicked off platforms, and erased, and terrorized by Nazi and fascist gangs. So we were losing people, people who were literally doing foundational work in new areas, our most vital REVOLUTIONARY talents were hunted out and terrorized by both external AND internal factors. There was never any defense for these women either from exterior or interior forces. Think of the far-reaching impacts of even singular contributors; prominent figures in sex work, Indigenous feminism, disability rights, police violence, violence against women, and other key areas, who defined our modern understanding of these areas, being effectively neutralized as political actors by a conflagration of interior and exterior factors. We were losing our people, left and right.
And this has happened continuously since, where we have a constant undermining and marginalizing of particularly leftist, women’s voices; moderate voices, such as those that promote voting Democrat as a primary politic, are left standing. And what were those original movements and intellectual traditions replaced with, in the world of leftist intellectual production? White men. The violence against these women, left a void in the analysis for white men to come through, able to sweep up the discourse, at significantly lower caliber, only after the absolute devastation from 2012-2015, which is when I personally target the most concentrated amount of violent backlash occurring. So timing wise, you’re reaching the end of that era, at the same time you are having the rise of the dirtbag left and the DSA, which literally changed what was considered the cutting edge of cultural and critical production, to disaffected white males in their mid 20s and 30s, and this in many ways sealed the coffin on an entire age of cultural and critical production.
As much as the smug Berkeley dropouts congregating to take over the East Bay with even more middle class gentrification, like to sneer at “online activism”, it was THESE women, innovating on social platforms like Twitter, that had come up with new ways of confronting oppression and creating justice for an entirely different age — technology — and were the FIRST to understand, use and try to fight these platforms. And they were creating extremely material consequences in the world, such as re-distribution of money (Trans Crowd Fund, Give Your Money To Women, and others), were the ONES organizing Black Lives Matter protests, were the ONES that were organizing anti-gentrification efforts, were the ones working to get representation for trans women in Hollywood, were the ones batting hard for victims of sexual and domestic and building networks to get women housing, medical care, abortions and lawyers. To dismiss revolutionary formations on these platforms is not only deeply racist and misogynist, but also denies the reality of technofascism, the necessity of fighting them on the battlefields that are unique to this era and these enemies. I don’t know if you noticed, but technofascists have captured Twitter, proving that this was never, ever a frivolous social discourse, but rather, a fight for fundamental global communications infrastructure. If you can’t take “online activism” seriously even now, as technofascists commandeer the #1 site of revolutionary activity *around the world* to swing the election Trump’s way, then you are hopelessly ill-equipped to be operating in this political environment. And yet somehow you are the ones that are.
A lot of the past 12 years of internet history can be seen as a multisided warfare against independent, women-led movements. No one even noticed in the desperation for clout, that we are actually losing extremely unique, extremely well-developed, extremely vast intelligences producing theory and analysis, into the void, nor were we trying to recover them. Many of the girls I ran with in those days, I can see the influence of their work all around me, but they haven’t been seen (or credited), since.
Where in the FUCK were men on the left while we were getting absolutely destroyed out there? One of the reasons that the discourse is bad is because men on the left have been treating the women on the left like shit, literally left them totally alone in literal ongoing wars over key pieces of infrastructure, and they have strong-armed, as white men always do, their way to the top of the clout-pole as women have been picked off by Nazis and clout-seekers, while totally failing to protect us from these types of attacks, which they were almost never subject to (and thus, don’t understand what we are truly dealing with as far as the actual fascist threat, which is pretty obvious as they put their heads in the sand passing out marketing material for Democrats at a critical moment in technofascist takeover).
Its funny for all the obsessive focus on individual experiences — individual influences, individual relations — this has NOT produced any help for… actual individual revolutionary people; nor, after ten years, has a coherent set of values for how we treat each other coalesced.
We have seen that even *if* this individualism was producing changes in individual circumstances (which it usually doesn’t), they are certainly not leading up a holistic change in circumstances that can be measured across the population; everything is not only staying the same across all benchmarks (poverty, violence, mental illness, health, death rate, etc.), but it is getting worse in simply huge sectors of society, like, the fucking economy, the subjugation of workers under technofascism, etc. The same way we see an individualistic/representation based perspective fail to impact the material conditions, we see it fails to meaningfully improve the discourse.
The discourse lacks focus because the movement lacks focus, because when an individual-based strategy bears out, it inevitably results in…. no structural changes. Again, the thesis behind all this was that if we can make small changes to how we treat each other at a very low and detailed manner, make prescriptions for it, increase the representation of the populace… I am not saying these are not worthy goals, I am saying that they have not produced outcomes in this context that we can measure in the most material facets (such as mortality, poverty, accessibility, even diversity efforts have not changed the demographics of industries), we are not even treating each other better, and any gains have been, again, on a very microcosmic level.
So we see the sickness in the discourse is a lack of MATERIALISM that is in the discourse, with the lack of an actual focus on the opponent and how to fight them, as opposed to a popularity contest between irony bros. We have been calling the aggregation of individual changes, these theoretical broad-based changes, never realized, revolutionary; but oppression is not being generated by the bottom up, it is being directly generated from the people at the top and ending up, the common enemy that sits between us. These issues of, disability, accommodation, ableism, micro aggressions, underrepresentation are the RESULT and GOAL of a larger oppressive and economic structure. You cannot make slight variations to the components of the machine, especially one hurtling forward at lightning speed, and reasonably expect a loosening of the noose. The things that we are talking about, will literally never stop until the top is overthrown. These are the ways that structural economy, structural power, structural violence, are manifesting in our lives, not their causes. When we run out of discourse, when it has become clear that we HAVE developed the Millennial politic, but its not working… we don’t change our game, we don’t switch it up. We seek ever more discourse.
I understand why we are desperate to avoid the reality, the only possible conclusion from the last 10 years of movements: there is no reconciliation that will happen, there is no reform that will occur, there is no resistance that will stand against these fucking assholes. And this forces only one conclusion: direct confrontation with the enemy. Revolution.
We are desperate to escape it, even as it is inescapable; the discourse itself is now distinguished primarily by its gymnastics, running away from the revolution in the room as they have never run from the enemy but rather towards its two-party systems and non-profits and tech-owned media. The discourse goes to any lengths to avoid directly stating the enemy and re-orienting our entire political body around the necessity of an extreme and violent escalation. We talk in increasingly minute interactions — bringing a bowl of soup to a neighbor. It is also worth mentioning that some of this discourse soup is surely spread by various intelligence agency ops, who have in the past infiltrated and sought to disrupt all sorts of cultural production, and certainly keeping us trapped in this contextless death spiral that bears no notion of severity, of connection to the real world.
Notable, that our deep plumbings of another’s takes for evidence of some cancellable offense, is not producing any surfacing of some hidden agenda in peers, nor is it is weeding out intelligence officers or CIA; open war criminals from Lockheed continue to have platforms talking about queer fucking whatever, who the fuck cares, this is an open op and after a few days of trying to turn it into personal clout, you all just moved on.
In the grasping at clauses, people who are brave enough to take more extreme positions then “you should vote for democrats”, are discredited to the fringes while people consider authoritative “leftists” to be those guzzling blood in Congress. We are not producing a discourse that is consistent, that is consistently applied, that is offering a PLATFORM for ACTION rather than serving as the action in and of itself — the beluga and the tank. Once we have good enough takes, we consider the matter shut. Another one for the books, that will go unread by future generations, because there aren’t any (generations).
The clout seeking has in particular torn the very social fabric of the internet apart, as unimportant and manufactured arguments based entirely around clout, result in constant petty squabbles, actual oppression Olympics, and the most convoluted logics for deeming some clique or another “abusers” — and never ONE TIME do you see people confront an ACTUAL power structure. In their entireeeee work of political “contributions”, huge numbers of these folks don’t go directly after power, not once. Don’t @ sign anyone who is actually important to society, don’t criticize venture capitalists, don’t pass along any higher action than a petition or the donation box of yet another non-profit sucking up our funds while doing nothing but bootlicking for grants. Its more nothingness, more void.
And so we arrive at just an overall level of tension and paranoia because everyone is just looking for a take to takeoff or a take to tank, to discredit someone else’s clout to get more of their own, just making shit up in order to have anything, anything at all to say, watching and waiting for yet another embarrassing school yard fight between us while entire Nazi states get armed.
A charitable version, I suppose, is that the discourse now revolves around this train of thought: It didn’t work, it’s not working, so *someone* must be doing something wrong; we have the takes wrong. So we spend most of our time and energy trying to prove to each other whose bad take is the worst, try to make more of them, hoping something sticks. Takes are the arbitrar of what is good and bad, rather than any action or plan or result in the material world and actions, so we cannot escape them.
And so the left, has devised its own form of roving, aggressive group sport. The left’s primary team building exercise on Twitter is to mainly drag someone, typically on our side because no one actually wants to stand up to their side, to the ends of the earth for some bullshit. It is not the Right that finds a “left” bad take and blows it up; it is our “side” that deems this an appropriate use of time, when all it is, is distracting, wasteful of energy, cheap entertainment, and feeds chum to the enemy. The left in particular LOVES to dunk on itself; this is a chief way they build clout. It is not about meaningfully criticizing actual system of power (which is anti-clout), it is about simply embarrassing someone, someone with no structural power even if they are an absolute fucking clout-chasing louse. We judge someone’s importance in the movement not by how they go at the throat of the enemy, but rather how they piece-meal reactive takes of internet topics du jour to a sea of other clout-seekers trying to do the same thing. Doing a “gotcha” on people, deliberately lying in wait to do this to people, and then the other side of that too, which is always being paranoid because people will go out of their way to twist, lie, project . I can’t tell you how many people have followed me for the sole purpose of hoping I “screw up” on something; I can tell, because at some point, they are willing to lie and distort at grand levels to “prove” I have “bad takes” as opposed to the “good takes” they originally followed me for. At this point, it’s a fucking playbook, and the level of structural analysis we have at this moment in time is at the level of “billionaires are bad”, and yet everyone can deeply research some dumb irrelevant bitch’s feeds, all day long, scouring it for a take.
In my line of work, I go after venture capitalists. Ten years ago I was calling out deliberant market fixing, demanding the transfer of VC wealth back to communities, and arguing for the immediate depose of the top venture capitalists. I was ignored; and 10 years later, tech fascism is being unleashed across the country, and it will be the defining force in this part of our political history. I have also been ankle-bitten, harassed, made fun of needlessly and without justification, plagiarized, ripped off, insulted, by the left, and have personally, just me, experienced from the left, more harassment than the fucking RIGHT does to me, and far more than the VCs that are currently and powerfully running the entire tech industry and actually happily building weapons to kill people. That fucks up everything real, real, real bad. The discourse, the movement, everything; when there is infinitely more smoke for some dumb cunt fake leftist than an entire technofascist superstructure. Of course the discourse sucks!! It runs like a coward!!
One peculiarity of our discourse is that it operates entirely individualistically… until it comes to the fucking enemy, and all of the sudden we see things only through big abstractions like “big tech” and “the surveillance state” and “the workers”.
Things we have attacked as monolithic concepts, in particular, political and corporate entities, these are made up of PEOPLE, doing the BAD THINGS, who need to be STOPPED. Confronted so, the sense of individual engagement suddenly vanishes. We sink into a navel-gazing, self-referential sabotage. The energy that should go into the heart of the enemy, goes around and around like bad blood.
Clout chasing and disingenuous takes and ego and jealousy and plagiarism and trampling of leftist women is the primary way the entire leftist substructure we are on, was formed. It has NOT formed on concentrated attacks on power, has NOT formed on running group missions or efforts outside of voting, petition-signing, and “awareness”, has NOT taken on the material structure, has NOT fought against *the enemy* in protracted online battles, doxxed them, gone to their houses; has NOT defended us, has NOT been able to adopt ANY overarching goal besides, “representation”, when we need a goal like, winning.
It’s not that personal politics don’t matter; its just that they don’t need to be THE singular organizing principle of what we do, especially when what our movements must achieve is making strides as a unified body against the enemy formations. You can be on the left and be terrible at theory, who gives a shit. We need all kinds of skills and talents. Not everyone can be or wants to be a trained seal clapping for favs. The most important issue of political difference I worry about is: Are you a fed? If not, will you fight them with me, fight them with force? Our enemies are literal serial killers and war criminals and mass murderers and global-scale human rights abusers; do you think you can handle a difference of opinion on sliced fruit among us? We will not achieve revolution when everyone on our side has come to an agreement on the right ways to treat each other personally; we will achieve revolution when we are working together, as a revolutionary machine, not against each other, but united in hatred of the enemy, and the desire to take the enemy for what he is worth: everything he has, which is ours, because it was stolen from us. I want to get our shit back. The goal must eclipse the clout chasing, it must eclipse the personal platforms, it must eclipse “more women in tech” and “more socialistic democrats (democrats)”, it must share a common vision and the common momentum towards revolution, and the discourse should flow from that primarily.
The beef between people loosely organized on the left, is purposeless and valueless beef, signifying only ego, becoming so incredibly deep and historied, as well as intensely emotional; in that people have more anxiety and fear of their own “side” dragging them than being attacked by the supposed enemy. In this matter I again, think we cannot discount too readily, intelligence agencies. Years and years and years of pointless, moronic INFIGHTING has produced a mesh between us all that is so full of holes I often worry that important information isn’t even making it around. I’m not casting judgement, my goal is to describe a material context what has happened. No one has fallen out with more people than me: I hate you dumb motherfuckers and will never, ever reconcile. I would fight you, I would order my militia to find you. Then again, I was never a dumb ass clout seeking snake or Democrat op.
Nonetheless, the dynamics of take-obsession, mean that there has been no reasonable way to debate such matters or rate their importance; and so instead of just quietly having ideological differences on a singular issue of no consequence; people take sides, the sides turned into warring factions, and there are often declarations of abuse using “you have to listen to women (about rape)” as the pretense for the much less particular, “believe anyone who is very obviously disingenuously calling abuse because someone told them to fuck off in a Tweet”. I think hearty debate is fine and even healthy, ACTUALLY advancing the movement, if there was a direction *to go in*, if this was all *headed towards any kind of real goal*, against which theses may be tested and settled; but we don’t, because we are not a revolutionary left but a reformist fake left, and so, we are left with… this, this not even debate, this stupid fucking, senseless, useless, time and energy devouring, fight to be seen as having better “takes” (usually disconnected, again, from any type of useful politic) in a battlefield of no consequence except the endless splintering of worse and worse positions as the “takes” run low and everyone gets more frantic. In this idiocy, no leaders have actually emerged. How could they, in this environment of absolutely no discrimination between shit that is important and shit that is a waste of time? Of disrespect for intellectual work that comes from spewing stupidity at your microcosmic fandom with no consequences for years on end?
Conflict about the finer points of these matters, matters much less when you are united with this person, however much of a dumbass they are, not on “takes”, but on a coordinated doxxing and deployment of movement energy towards pulling these sick fascist fucks out of holes and stuffing them like a foie gras duck with the barrel of a gun. Who shows up to a hunting trip is what I need more than any “take” to judge you. Practiced values are what matter, and this is something that the left isn’t even doing.
Parallel to clout chasing, of course, is the realization that clout chasing was actually engineered by social media corporations, and that the behavior is correlating perfectly with the goals of technofascist platforms like Twitter. The swarming of a bad “take” produces a feeding frenzy of traffic. Measuring someone’s ethics by their follower count is a fruitful anti-pattern for tech companies. Creating viral arguments, conducting viral “cancelling”, the number of tweets that are generated by all of this nonsense, the converging on single topics so that your take might be taken up in the overall take wave…. I’m gagging. This is fucking disgusting.
It speaks specifically to how corporations have corrupted our movements, I wrote more on this in regards to tech’s DEI complex here, but for today, I just wanted to note how deeply our movements and the intellectual production of our movements, have ended up seeking success through the lens of a corporation, not the people; clout being the most obvious case, where people are structuring their entire political existences and principles around a corporate-designed risk/reward system. Things declined significantly when corporations started really transforming social media into a pipeline into THEIR goals. Seeing the buzz around indie activism, corporations started hiring because of the number of Twitter followers, people getting hired because someone important saw their Tweets, got invited to a conference, and so on. In tech, and rapidly other industries, having a big platform makes you inherently more valuable to corporations - why? Because they are gonna turn you into their personal billboard! Which is exactly what happens. Now Twitter is intimately coupled to the job market, where it can both have extraordinary benefits (for individuals) and also catastrophic downfalls (for everyone). Your Twitter account can make you unhireable; it could also land you a higher playing jobs. Your co-workers are on Twitter too, even more collapsing the distinction between our lives and a performance we are putting on in order to protect our most fundamental resources, such as the ability to afford food and support families. So at that point you have just giant numbers of people on the left /liberals who are having to conduct their affairs under this kind of pressure, and of course the discourse is impacted beyond reason: de-radicalizing, reformist, made palatable, etc., or it just stops being produced at all.
Tech engineered this specific coupling of social media with employment; in its earliest forms, this was about tech corporations using people’s open source projects, and their side projects, conducted in the commons (Github), to be key decisive factors in hiring. This spread onto social media platforms that software engineers were using more generally, and surely there was influence from LinkedIn as well, whose increasing use of consumer features also makes it a place where there is tension and uncertainty between personal expression and the corporate avatar. Software engineers were the first ones they experimented with these techniques on; it spread out to every single kind of corporation.
The eyes of the corporation is everything on these platforms. First you have Twitter itself, where you have the corporate eye functioning in terms of suspensions and what it shows you on the feed, the algorithm, and so on, the you have the eyes of employers on it, not only your current employer but past and future, as well as your boss and your bosses bosses bosses, and using your Twitter to make decisions that literally control your access to basic resources. Before there were “influencers” , there were developer relations roles in tech, which has come to serve as a model of what employees could look like — never exclusively in marketing, but simply a person in all ways, who is being forced to forward the aims and politics and products of corporations, as the implicit terms of employment, and to make their own aims and politics and social production or passion work, compatible and consistent with the corporation.
And when I say corporations I also mean mainstream media and mainstream TV and major publishers and influencers and subject matter experts; huge parts of the dialogue have been sculpted by corporations, and by their employees under their eye, and it has very much intertwined material gains for the employee, with the politics of the company. As we can see in retrospect, corporations were hiring left/liberal people not because they actually wanted to change foundational parts of their business, such as structural sexism that would require total “re-imaginings” of what these companies were — they were hiring people to be buffers for public criticism, as illusions of parity and goodness, as evidence that “something is being done here about it!!!”, as even temporary hires to look progressive until they can sweep them out the door again, as is happening in tech right now with women and DEI departments, of course, being very much key targets of layoffs.
This has also been the truth of various organizations on the left itself, particularly nonprofits. The DSA uses Twitter very much like a corporate marketing account would, creating a singular face that could pump various messages about electing democrats and reading Jacobin and becoming a “dues-paying member”. Not at all to their credit, the DSA has been one of the largest and most organized collectives that rose up in the past 10 years (monoculture helps, the last time these dumbasses released demographics it was 90% white, more white than a tech company).
They have established a number of social media “committees” that develop a strategy to be used uniformly locally and nationally, they have dozens, more, of accounts for all of their different chapters and sub committees, they have specific talking points they are focused on at any time, they direct their leaders to stay offline to avoid any criticism, while working as a united group of literally 10s of thousands of reformers pushing the exact same agendas: DSA membership, support of Democratic candidates (donations, canvassing, bullying others into also voting). They have gained control of the leftist agenda to center it on electorism, as well as setting a very different cultural agenda — essentially, a bunch of snooty, dumb as shit, misogynist trash white boys who lie about reading Marx and consider the lie a qualification to evade what the canon prescribes; as well as a new breed of hellish female Democrat, “not like the other girls” boot-lickers, which, it was highly embarrassing to see them backing men so hard when they had never shown up for revolutionary feminists in … any way; in fact, female DSA members have been a significantly negative force as well, and they also provided cover for male DSA members, which they did, continuously, and covered it up, all of them did. They all literally covered up for a pedophile in their leading media outlet, Chapo Traphouse.
What in the fuck?
It is their agenda — using marketing strategies from Democrats and corporations — that has set the tone of the “leftish” discourse since like 2016, and I think that is one of the biggest reasons we’ve seen both a significant regression in the purpose and achievement of the discourse, as well as a DISTINCT de-radicalization of it; I archived a huge amount of leftist activity and formation across my career, and I can tell you with utter confidence that the dialogues we were having in *2012* are objectively superior to those we have today: superior in being more based in materialism, in actually connecting to a revolutionary lineage (The DSA’s ties to Marx are in marketing material alone), in presenting a nuanced view of capitalism with meaningful analysis of, particularly, transmisogyny and misogynoir and sex-worker exclusive feminism, in being MULTI-DISCIPLINARY, and in being respectful of, and part of, *development* of intellectual thought, rather than dominance of it.
Of course it was white boys who put a wrecking ball through the little that remained of a viable left equipped to meaningfully take on the state. They jacked techniques for indie fundraising from revolutionary feminists; who then got burned as Chapo Traphouse was pulling in $150,000 a month to support what it turned out later to be an actual pedophile, who skipped the country on the left’s dime. Not at all unsurprising from what I have known to be a REFUSAL to address sexual violence from these fake fucks.
And so, we come to the money. The left was suddenly able to come up with big cash for a dirtbag left podcast, meanwhile the women who had actually been developing this shit, were stuck often between poverty or going corporate, at which point their value to a revolutionary movement plummeted, as well as the time, energy, etc. they would be able to dedicate. And that is another reason why the discourse is so impoverished — we simply didn’t fund it in a way that was meaningfully outside corporate and non-profit and Democrat control, thus undermining its very purpose. There has been indie fundraising done over the years, certainly, including early tech feminist organizing on Gittip, the Trans Crowd Fund, early use of Patreon by cultural critics and revolutionary artists, and Give Your Money to Women; but this has failed to come anywhere near the amount that people happily funnel into non-profits (waste of time) or the dirt bag left (waste of space). The importance of keeping our movements financially independent, cannot be understated. Without independently funding our intellectuals, economists, militias, philosophers, and artists, they are forced into either poverty or the nonprofit / corporate space, both of which devour and destroy discourse in myriad overlapping ways.
We. Cannot. Have. Good. Discourse. Without. Paying. People. So. They. Can. Live.
We haven’t been able to support nearly enough people, independently, nor has there been a program, that is dedicated to creating and maintaining, independent funding and ideally, growing funding over time, to be able to have people who are exclusively working for the movement, for the people, to fund our own revolutionary core and revolutionary intelligentsia. What would have happened if Engels never supported Marx? And when you have the best minds in the movement, unable to do this work not only because of the extremes of abuse, but because they have to support themselves, their families, unless they get work doing this for some corporation’s branding efforts, in which case they immediately cease to become, well, independent, and are compromised in very serious ways?
But why would we want that? If this a zero-sum game of clout, why would anyone support someone else’s clout? This is yet another example of how clout is a fucking insult to the very basics of intellectual development, and undermines them in unendingly nauseating manners of movement sabotage.
The discourse that we see on the left is a global embarrassment. And perhaps the deepest, darkest reason, is because no one wants to admit that we are gonna die this way, following this white rabbit down; no one wants to admit that the hour is upon us. They (with our help) have slaughtered every single movement of the past 10 years. The resistance to Roe v Wade was pathetic, a sure litmus test of movement death.
We have a choice to make, and our discourse suggests that we have decided to slowly drive ourselves insane rather than taking the necessary action. The way to save the discourse, is the same way to save the movement: to go to the enemy in decisive acts of revolution. This isn’t just the discourse being shit, this is the spatter of a dying movement, the discourse is flecks from the vultures and remoras and scavengers that have come to cannibalize it.
The moment we commit to a revolutionary intent, the blood will start to move through the tissue of the left again. We have tried every direction but at the enemy. And this is fine, this is okay, this is process of the game of games; the discourse exists to eventually extinguish itself, leaving no recourse open besides revolution.
What we see in the discourse is a generational failure, but it also means we have reached a key juncture, where we have reached the bottom of the discourse that is useful at this moment in revolutionary history; it is a legal proof, a map, a record, an evidence of 10 years of movement stomping. It has served its good for now. When we begin to march it will be our banner again.