VC’s Fascist Mobs are Poised to Attack with Unprecedented Impact

Musk (acting on behalf of the PayPal mafia and the country’s top VC firm, a16z), just bought Twitter and immediately began restoring any number of abusive accounts by the scum of the universe, as well as cutting most of the content moderation, instituting account re-instatement, and I’m assuming making changes to the severity of the suspensions that they are handing out, as well as relaxing of the algorithms/filters/flags, etc.

The capture of Twitter by the PayPal mafia and a16z, is significant because Twitter is the center of politics all around the world, it is a ground zero of essentially the class struggle between, ultimately, capitalism and communism, leftists and fascists, liberals and conservatives, and so on. Philosophizing aside, it is an incredibly valuable political tool that should be owned by the people, but is now simply a very easy way for technofascists to manipulate the public discourse. They are fascists, so the fascists are the ones they are inviting on and to stay; not even just allowed to be on the service, but to be visible, to not have to follow any fundamental rules, to be able to engage in worse acts than ever before, with the ENCOURAGEMENT of the technofascists, of course. So, getting ORGANIZED FASCIST HATE GROUPS (misnomer: “online harassment”) , on board this political battlefield, is a fundamental part of the strategy to extract more and more from America. 

I’ve talked elsewhere about the origins of online harassment, so for the purposes of this article I will ask you to take as a premise, the idea that many of these hate groups are not Republicans or MAGA (even if they have borrowed techniques/co-mingle), but rather technofascist gangs who deepest origins go back to the 90s and early aughts, the earliest days of the internet, with computer programmers as founders and members. Reddit (VC-funded), 4 and 8 chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, KiwiFarms, and Hacker News (VC-funded) — all of these sites have been started and populated in large part by programmers, managed by computer programmers. And it is why this entire brand of attack took off in large part on women in tech — those were the ideological enemies in their jobs and in the field in general. 

So, do the math for yourself and you will come to the same conclusion: it is the tech industry that has propelled, enabled, platformed and funded, in numerous ways, all of these hate groups, who have innovated these techniques of mass terror for two decades. “Online harassment” my ass. While tech has fully controlled the orbiting hate sites around Twitter and has sometimes been able to keep them there at least in lightning strikes at targets, this is a major coup. Terrorism on political actors will WILDLY increase, and the scale of the worst attacks of the past ten years, are going to be the commonplace. We are in a more precarious position than ever before. 

There’s history before this, but about ten years ago is when some of these techniques were aimed, IIRC, primarily at Tumblr users from these hate forums. These were “SJWs” even back then, so that’s important to note that we have two major targets, women in tech and womanist and feminist leftists doing essentially cultural analysis on early sites, developing a new, rich politic for the digital age that developed over years. So in this sense it was always a battle between leftists and fascists, and on the tech industry side, a battle between total control of the industry by technofascists, who literally hate anyone who isn’t a white / Asian man, and the prospect of having to “share” wealth and power or have a meaningful threat to it from, of all things, WOMEN, absolutely unacceptable; deep misogyny is a key point of fascism and we will note that the CHARACTER of the misogyny was actually wrapped around fascist themes of mass rape and killing of women and children (children were often threatened along with their mothers). So both of these themes are totally consistent with , specifically, technofascists, and specifically and are directly related to their goals. 

 So these folks were consistently demonstrating a consistent political agenda — this is far different than the portrayal of these groups as free-ranging, purely opportunistic attackers. It indicates that this was, in fact, a battle of ideological issues, and one that was directly politicized from the very beginning, with consistent goals,  incredibly tied to the technology industry on many levels. 

OK, Twitter comes in. When more and more people were leaving Tumblr for Twitter, leftist movement (mainly led by feminists), started spilling onto Twitter. Around this time we entered into, what I will now refer to as the war for Twitter (which, we have lost). We saw a series of high profile attacks on women in tech, the Sierra case and the Sarkeesian case and the Roberts case; after the Donglegate attack in particular, which became worldwide news, there were continuously more and more “smaller scale” attacks on women in tech and this became something that was a common concern for women in tech, as well as for leftists organization overall that would threaten the tech industry in some way. Remember, these are fascists. They only had one goal in these attacks: get rid of them, ESPECIALLY leftists. (This explains why left-leaning women have been literally chased with pitchforks out of the industry while many centrist liberal women were adopted as useful tokens by the industry itself, and then ALSO participated in chasing leftist women out.) 

There was an absolute fuck ton of propaganda that started coming out of the tech industry at the same time all this is brewing. In particular, there was “hacktivism”, launched into the mainstream by Anonymous in 2003. Then there were some high profile cases of government reveals by computer programmers, Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden. There was Aaron Swartz, who nobly hacked JSTOR in attempt to free the information for the people; he later died in a way that, regardless of your exact theory, directly was tied to his prosecution by the US government. And Occupy is functioning very much as a political focal point during this period as well.  

So what’s happening is that you have a really vast range of situations, political notions, origins, individuals and notions that are all being loosely connected under the banner of “trolling/hacktivism”, and of course, the massive attacks on women in tech were described as “trolling”, both minimizing it and suggesting that the attacks were actually a moral act, the expansion of free speech and whatnot. Specifically the tech industry created and marketed the entire hacktivism brand: the primary figures were celebrated as heroes, and their worst sins traded for the most generous opinion possible, that these were in fact elevated and brave souls that were fighting the establishment; some were, some weren’t; but it was a vehicle through which you could point these things as fringe, but ultimately good for society. 

For the tech industry, this was a kindof camouflage; the more publicity all that shit got, the worse the abuse got; hacktivism became a stamp of approval for terrorism, and it was also a way to funnel concerns about the industry’s encroachment on society, into the idea that this is all coming from the government and so on, to suggest that technologists were not creating these surveillance apparatus (contradicted materially by the dozen companies participating in PRISM), but in fact, being edgy whistle blowsers and challenges to “the establishment”. So you have some legit cases of hacktivism, and even some threads here that are legitimately anti-government, most prominently Manning and Swartz. Certainly all the publicity around these events contributed to the desire of programmers to get involved in these groups as this was presented as just the epitome of cool, even in the most (eventually) extreme cases such as W//v, who was facing charges of hacking AT&T and Apple and was widely regarded as a technology hero until after he was tried, went to prison, and affiliated with the American Nazi Party. Around this time, we have the rise of Milo Yiano*****us, another technofascist, who is also presented as just another troll as his attacks ramped up and ramped up and ramped up, eventually targeting serious pieces of resistance architecture, such as the highly tech-critical publication I was running during this period. 

It is within this milieu of factors, that the attacks began to continuously grow and grow and expand and expand. If tech was anti-fascist, it easily could have disbanded these groups at that early hour, by doing a complete deplatforming at every level, as well as finding participants and blackballing them from the industry, publishing reports on the fascist activity, and, for the purposes of this train of thought, engaging in proactive investigations, legal action, victim restiution, industry trials, and so on. They could have started with firing the MANY open fascists and Nazis that are openly operating in huge numbers of tech companies; one of the industry’s closely guarded secrets is that open fascism is a norm and it is also normal to be forced to work with fascists, Nazis, violent misogynists, etc., as these are not grounds for dismissal from the industry. 

 The tech companies and the leaders of the industry, who are ALL fascists (Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Luckey), have been not only allowing this to happen, but actively nurturing these hate groups on VC-funded sites like Reddit and Hacker News. One thing that has been missed from the beginning is that these groups have ALWAYS been multi-platform; multi-platform because they were welcome on all of the sites and have been early adopters of all of these sites and are in ideological alignment with the industry overall. 

And that is how we got into really unprecedented attacks such as those of GamerGate. Its important to know in this moment, that the gaming industry is simply part of the tech industry, one of its many verticals; it is funded by VC, purchased by tech companies, co-located in Silicon Valley, etc. So this was very much in the overall lineage of attacks on women in the tech industry. And that was a critical moment because it showed that these fascist mobs had attained an entirely new level of ability. And that is because they were learning how to do it better. 

One thing that has been consistently missed is the development of a true modus operandi of technofascist attacks, and the adoption of that modus operandi, which allows for scale and efficiency and impact at previously unseen levels. While the  attacks appears to be chaotic, these people are operating with a sequential or simultaneous, coordinated, template attack, that is run with extreme efficiency and distributed strategizing, within an organized system that even has ranks and chains of commands and domain experts. This has produced a baseline of doxxing, flooding communications channels, threatening people’s families and children, sending death threats to their houses, SWATing them, sending hacked personal material to bosses, etc. 

This has been portrayed as essentially, some sort of amorphous group of disaffected young white men, and thus the remedies to them suggested, are cultural literacy and education, more awareness, more representation at tech companies that are platforming these groups, that type of thing; this response demonstrated a completely inaccurate read on what was going on. These are extremely highly organized people. Watching the attacks unfold in real time on their messaging boards, you can see people collaborating on digging up addresses, relying on backchannel information from friends in law enforcement, pooling access to various extremely expensive databases to deeply mine someone’s history, setting up organized hacking attempts on myriad platforms, collaborating on hacking techniques, digging up deeply personal information, etc. This is one of the reasons that this level of organization has been so successful, is because they are using the same PLAYBOOK again and again, so people were able to just jump in whatever ongoing attack or current project was happening, and contribute to it immediately, working with a crew of like-minded individuals. It was very much managed like…. AN OPEN SOURCE PROJECT. How strange! How bizarre! How strange that if you were a woman in tech and you criticized the motherfucking Linux open source community, legions of attackers would come out of 4 and 8 chan on you! These sites have laundered the attacks of tech elites, even as it was perfectly clear that the attackers were, in fact, technofascists from the industry. Over time, they have of course learned better and better tactics. 

The height of the attacks was on Leslie Jones, in rage that again, her professional career was doing amazing and that she violated their image of what should get the spotlight. Get rid of, get rid of. These attacks came out of Milo Yi***oppolus and Brietb**t. 

So at this point, we made a number of mistakes, which are elucidated at length in this editorial written in conjunction with my long term collaborator Lauren Chief Elk, but for our purpose, stem significantly from the fact that we didn’t establish a complete and accurate map of how this terrorism was founded, and ignored key commonalities and timelines suggesting that this was, in fact, coming directly from the tech industry, with very specific applications to the tech industry, and using tech infrastructure specifically owned by VCs or which there were heavy connections to, as its primary training and hunting grounds. 

We had a tendency towards abstraction, as opposed to materialism, throughout our response to these attacks. For example, we endlessly begged tech companies for like, sensitivity training, thinking tech companies would participate in de-platforming these attacks or otherwise chasing them off, even after these companies (most notably Reddit and Twitter) staunchly refused to do literally anything for years on end; meanwhile, we are sinking absolutely massive amounts of time and energy into petitioning them neverendingly for different policies — we begged Dick and Jack, for literally years, through all kinds of mediums and channels; as well as beseeching YCombinator to do something about Hacker News (they REALLY were never going to do that, their founder is a staunch technofascist). We’ve played this absurd game of us basically getting roughed up by these gangs over and over and over, and then running to these people’s colleagues, friends, treasured leaders and figureheads to complain. Of course it didn’t work!

Most problematically, this diversion of energy back into the tech mechanism itself, left us without other strategies. They were getting more and more effective; we were stuck in an endless feedback cycle with tech fascists about specific contracts at specific companies, even after it became clear that this was a continuous population of attackers that was able to move across sites quickly and were using a great number of different technologies to organize and persist after occasional bannings. They were recruiting and radicalizing new technofascists; we were signing yet another petition about platform policy changes or writing another article about the impact of online harassment on “underrepresented people”. So, they have learned a lot, and we have learned absolutely nothing, as was demonstrated in the recent KiwiFarms thing, where again, enormous amounts of effort were made to convince a notoriously fascist-enabling company, that has employed open fascists and openly platformed fascists, to cut off this one layer of a technical stack, getting the site kicked off one or two CDN providers. A great victory was declared and ON INPUT FROM A SINGLE VICTIM’S STORY, the entire archive was flushed. Problematic, if you were ever wanting to do something more serious than cause a mild inconvenience to what are clearly, organized, continuous, fascist groups, such as actually figure out who the FUCK these people are and getting rid of them. Tech feminists absolutely refused to consider other alternatives, as usual — their priority and allegiance is only for their personal convenience and careers and them personally not wanting to be harassed; they do not care if they are PERSONALLY and INDIVIDUALLY distorting the public image of what is going on in their desperation to *appear* that they are making progress, when in fact, they are not. Pet peeve topic but again, more on that in this 7-year old article myself and Lauren Chief Elk wrote. 

Moving on. We have admittedly seen somewhat of a reprieve particularly in the pandemic and after the transition to Joe Biden was complete. This is largely attributed to Twitter’s moderation policies finally getting better, and I do think that that is some of it, as well as them doing device-level tracking for permanently banned accounts so they can’t just ever-ongoingly make more. But I think there were also other factors, such as the pandemic also resulting in a significant decline in political activity overall after protests in the early days of the pandemic and specifically in Kenosha. It has been strange times, and organization on all sides fell off.

So now Musk has just bought Twitter, and because he is a fascist, he moved immediately to start getting alllll those other tech fascists we’ve been fighting, up on the site… not only permitted by the site, but an ENERGIZING of these groups specifically coming from technofascist billionaires — the transition is a call to resurrect and re-energize. As the Twitter sale progressed and high-profile psychopaths of various kinds are brought back, there was both backlash to the deal from the liberal/“left” side, and huge layoffs from tech intentionally targeting women and “DEI” departments/figures. All of this signals a new age of technofascist billionaires being able to effortlessly control and direct the hate groups they have spent decades supporting as they grew and grew and became more and more dangerous. 

See, we are completely unprepared for what we are about to get, which is a MASSIVE escalation in this activity, a MASSIVE expansion of targets, and a MASSIVE lack of recourse. Musk and the conspiracy he represents (PayPal Mafia + a16z), are going to give no quarter for any manner of form or petition or article or hashtag; and we have no other strategies. VCs and tech power are openly saying that “woke” is over, that “DEI” is over, that social justice is over, it’s unserious, its against “free speech”, the highest value of the land — much of what you can see happening is tech taking a full command of its fascist armies and issuing declarations. And for this case, the message is very clearly: ATTACK. 

Here’s what we can expect. We can expect absolutely no mercy from tech companies; they have made it perfectly clear that the age of moderation, banning and algorithmic detection of hate speech is over. It is technofascists leaders who have been the ones most affected by backlash to their mobs. They HATED it, and as you can see, have responded at a truly unbelievable scale. In fact, the issue about women and harassment has been one of the issues of greatest reoccurrence in the lives of technofascists, a constant PR problem as they were still masking their fascism in public. Farr more effort and airtime has been put into “online harassment” than, for example, the rights to a living wage for non-technical workers in these companies. This issue affected women in tech, and that is why this was the biggest agenda item: these Lean In bitches were fundamentally worried about themselves and their jobs, as they have been on every single fucking issue for the last 10+ years. So, in and of itself, this topic serves as a point of hyper concentration in the industry, and is emblematic of the entire topic of JUSTICE in the industry overall; thus this will very much be a public demonstration of tech’s opinions on THAT.  

If we had been serious about this, if we had a material strategy for this, we wouldn’t have legions of tech feminist non-profits that sell sensitivity seminars to fascists; we would have things like: 

- Investigators working together to map out how these operations are actually going down within these groups. These are PEOPLE WORKING TOGETHER to do things, and like in any groups, you’re going to have different people performing in different roles, you are going to see patterns, you are going to see who is consistently turning up and doing what, you are going to start to see who the leaders are, etc. There is no reason we shouldn’t have a map that is tracking these formations in a level of detail that makes it possible to act upon. You cannot defeat what you don’t have a map for.

- Doxxing groups systematically identifying online harassers and determining their true identity as well as an evidence file of their behavior across sites - they do NOT keep their identities well hidden, because they are the PREDATOR, and they EXPECT that roles will never be reversed because there has never been a material response to them. So despite the fact that many of them are software engineers, it is a completely different reality from “creating” online harassment to “defending yourself” from an organized defense unit. They have no experience in the latter, and that is a huge advantage. 

- The work of investigators/counter-doxxers should be creating public-facing reports that can be used by other parts of the organization as well as be made available to people’s mothers, employers, bands, basketball teams, their kids, their local newspaper. These reports also supply the information needed for special teams to approach the offenders directly; oftentimes one direct confrontation with them is all that is needed to wipe them off the playing feel. Again, none of these people are planning on getting their shit rocked. That is the ONLY advantage we have here. 

- It is not “moral” to sit by defenseless and let your movement get eaten by sharks just so you can claim some high ground of non-violence. We haven’t even been willing to utilize very basic counter-attack strategies such as turning the harassment back on them, proactively hacking their sites. What happens if, within one hour of posting fascist comments or participating in a fascist attack on women in tech, YOUR entire life falls down on YOU? Does your wife know what you are doing? Does your daughter? Do all your co-workers? Does your mom? Let’s find out!!! Maybe you need your name domain purchased so we can make sure everyone fuckin knows what these people did. Counter-attacks are absolutely necessary and they should be triaged and put into a ticket system when people are able to pick up the tasks that need doing. I think we should also consider bot-nets, as well as infiltration of these sites, as well as purchase of inside information (the last part may be too morally compromising, I would have to think about it more, but we should be getting imaginative about all of these areas). 

- We should be distributing cash (this also ties into #GYMTW) directly to victims, so they can do things like replace wages, leave their houses on short notice, obtain childcare and medical services, etc. This is a key part of securing safety. There is no reason that we can’t be funding and supporting the women who speak out and lead our movements, and then experience violent backlash. (Of course then we would have to admit that women are taking the most risks on the left and the ones shouldering the majority of the blow-back.) We should be proactively working to minimize fallouts from attacks on our side — this may mean have lawyers speaking to employers and other parties to explain the situation and educate that this is something that is happening on a broad scale and is a known quantity, not a fireable offense. 

- Just from having worked in this so long, I would recommend a much more specific strategy for dealing with online harassment; in the huge proliferation of non-profits, we’re still at the level of “how to lock down your security with two-factor auth”, which is great, but also which everyone knows at this point and is too late by the time it happens. After dealing with literally *at least* 100 incidents between myself, other feminists, personal friends and collaborators, my suggestions are very straightforward. Close your laptop, turn off your phone. If it makes sense to you, get to a doctor if possible, and if it makes sense for you, get medical support, it could be emergency therapy, a short course of anti-anxiety meds, an SRRI (though most kick in too late) or sleep aids. Anti-inflammatories can reduce lasting trauma from these events as well. This process, a massive attack, is something that deserves medical attention if the victim wants so, and that should also be recognized, as these attacks are serious health hazards that cause PTSD and other long-term mental health conditions. 

This staying online and fighting through it, an acute attack? It’s bullshit, it doesn’t accomplish anything. Get people onto a flight out of the country and into a nice rental somewhere to lie low. Continuing to stay online and respond to the attacks is certainly brave for some quantity of immaterial  and punishing courage, but we now understand that this does very little materially and doesn’t work to dissuade attacks, nor is it necessary for awareness, nor does it result in better outcomes from a trauma perspective. They feed off of it, they are sadists and highly goal-driven — but with a short attention span, for the most cases. The best thing to do, materially, regardless of how you feel about it or how anyone feels about a display of strength and conviction, is literally to log off. From 10 years of attacks, we need to put that knowledge into practice as soon as possible. 

This is getting long, and I hope that you will take this to heart. This is important: Working on actual direct combat, including digital combat, is urgent and mandatory. “Keyboard warrior” is something we should have taken a LOT more seriously, this was such an absurd and dishonest depiction of what has been a very complex, multi-decade terrorism, in the middle of a rapidly changing political landscape, and ongoing confrontations in digital space with material implications for all our lives. The scorn of morons for “online organizing” has been a HUGE factor in covering this all up. The DSA has had an absolutely disgusting attitude towards people who have been organizing “on Twitter”, aka THROUGH A COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM, the fact that they are mediating movement work, again, THROUGH A COMMUNIATIONS PLATFORM, is considered a matter of scorn; in its urgency to distinguish itself from the PRIMARILY BIPOC, REVOLUTIONARY FEMINISTS on the platform, who have CONSISTENTLY been the target of these attacks, it minimized and marginalized them, and this component of our struggle has been so neglected, that at the exact movement that technofascist billionaires are commandeering platforms specifically in order to host these fascist terrorist groups on a scale we have never seen before, we are the LEAST prepared. THEY have been training, THEY have been figuring out how to stay online, THEY have been figuring out new techniques. WE have been doing THE SAME OLD SHIT over and fucking over, and none of it has worked, not the conference talks, the newspaper articles, not the attempts to get women in tech companies to change policy, not the de-platforming that targets one specific site and a specific part of a complex technology stack, that can be, not trivially, but reliably be replaced at least to the point of guarantee of continuity. Its over. We need to admit that shit didn’t work and move the fuck on, quickly, because trust me, you are about to get absolutely the fuck clobbered out here.  

 As tech fascism grows and grows, of course tech platforms are a material battleground, of course fascist attacks using the internet are a huge deal and a huge part of the rise of fascism. To not take this stuff seriously at this point is truly inconceivable, as it is very clear that these attacks have had a profound impact on the left, shattering platforms, driving people off of the internet and out of activism in general, discrediting entire movements, causing fear of reprisal, claiming time, energy and money from the movement, stoking widespread anxiety and terror and trauma, and so on. Leftist men have NOT been subjected to this; as usual, they stand by and do nothing except jeer and neglect the leftist women who are the primary targets of these attacks. They literally sneer at women who have been THE FIRST AND DIRECT TARGETS of fascists, without wondering why they have been so safe — perhaps because they don’t throw any meaningful opposition. Perhaps because they treat women just as bad, and themselves harass women online. 

Prove me wrong. Organize some shit and defend your fucking movement, assholes.