Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age ofSurveillance Capitalism begins badly: the author’s house burns down. Her home is struck by lightning, it takes Zuboff a few minutes to realize the enormity of the conflagration happening all around her and escape. The book, written after the fire goes out, is a warning about the enormity of the changes kindled while we slept. Zuboff describes a world in which autonomy, agency, and privacy–the walls of her house–are under threat by a corporate apparatus that records everything in order to control behavior. That act of monitoring and recording inaugurates a new era in the development of capitalism that Zuboff believes is destructive of both individual liberty and democratic institutions.
Surveillance Capitalism is the alarm to all of us to get out of the house, lest it burn down all around us. In making this warning however, Zuboff discounts the long history of surveillance outside the middle class enclaves of Europe and the United States and assumes that protecting the privacy of individuals in that same location will solve the problem of surveillance for the Rest.
The house functions as a metaphor throughout the book, first as a warning about how difficult it is to recognize a radical remaking of our world as it is happening: this change is akin to a lightning strike. The second is as an indicator of the kind of world we inhabit: it is a world that could be enhancing of life, instead it treats life as a resource to be extracted. The third uses the idea of house as protection to solve the other two problems.
Zuboff contrasts an early moment of the digitally connected world, an internet of things that was on a closed circuit within one house, to the current moment, where the same devices are wired to the companies that make them. For Zuboff, that difference demonstrates the exponential changes that happened in between the early promise of the internet and its current malformation. Surveillance Capital argues that from the connective potential of the early Internet has come the current dystopian state of affairs, where human behavior is monitored by companies in order to nudge that behavior toward predetermined ends. In this way, Surveillance Capitalism reverses an earlier moment of connectivity boosterism, exemplified by the title of Thomas Friedman’s popular 2005 book, The World is Flat, which celebrated technologically-produced globalization.[1] The decades from the mid to late 2000s witnessed a significant critique of the flat world hypothesis, which could be summed up as an argument for both the vast unevenness of the world, and for the continuous remaking of global tropes into local and varied meanings. Yet, here we are again it seems in 2020, except instead of celebrating flatness, we are sounding the flat alarm.
The book’s very dimensions–it is a doorstop, on purpose–act as an inoculation against the thinness and flatness Zuboff diagnoses as predominant features of our world. Zuboff argues that these features are unprecedented, that they mark an extreme deviation from capitalism as it has been. They therefore require both a new name and new analytic tools. The name
“surveillance capitalism” describes information-gathering enterprises that are unprecedented in human history, and that information, Zuboff writes, is used to predict “our futures for the sake of others’ gain, not ours” (11). As tech companies increasingly use our data to steer behavior towards products and advertising, our ability to experience a deep interiority where we can exercise autonomous choice shrinks. Importantly for Zuboff, these companies collect not just data willingly giving, but the data exhaust that we often unknowingly and unintentionally emit as we move through a world mediated by our devices. Behavioral nudges mark for Zuboff the ultimate endpoint for a capitalism gone awry, a capitalism drives humans to abandon free will in favor of being governed by corporations that use aggregate data about individual interactions to determine future human action.
Zuboff’s flat alarm usefully takes the reader through the philosophical underpinnings of behaviorism, following the work of B.F. Skinner, a psychologist working at Harvard in the mid-twentieth century who believed adjusting human behavior was a matter of changing external environments through positive and negative stimuli, or reinforcements. Zuboff argues that behaviorist attitudes toward the world, considered outré in their time, have moved to the heart of Silicon Valley philosophies of disruption, where they meet a particular kind of mode of capital accumulation driven by the logics of venture, neutrality, and macho meritocracies. The result is a kind of ideology of tools and of making humans into tools, that Zuboff terms instrumentarianism, at once driven to produce companies that are profitable for venture capitalists and investors and to treat human beings as sources of data to be turned toward profitability. Widespread surveillance is a necessary feature of this new world order because it is through that observation of every detail of human life that these companies can amass the data they need to turn a profit by predicting and ultimately controlling, or tuning, human behavior.
Zuboff identifies key figures in the development of surveillance capitalism, including the aforementioned Skinner. Her particular mode of critique tends to focus on CEOs, and Zuboff reads their pronouncements as signs of the legacy of behaviorism in the C-Suites of contemporary firms. Zuboff also spends several chapters situating the critics of these surveillance capitalists as those who need to raise the flat world alarm. She compares this need to both her personal experience with the house fire and the experience of thinkers such as Hanah Arendt writing on totalitarianism. Here, she draws an explicit critique that conjoins totalitarianism and surveillance capital. Zuboff argues that just as totalitarianism was unthinkable as it was unfolding, so too does surveillance capitalism seem an impossible future given how we like to think about human behavior and its governance. Zuboff’s argument here is highly persuasive, since she is suggesting that the critics will always come to realize what it is they are critiquing just before it is too late to do anything about it. She also argues that behaviorism is in some sense the inverse of state-governed totalitarianism, since while totalitarianism attempted to discipline humans from the inside out, surveillance capitalism is agnostic when it comes to interiority–it only deals in and tries to engineer surface effects. For all this ‘neutrality’ over and against belief, it is equally oppressive, because it aims at social domination.
Previous reviews have provided an overview of the chapters in this book; I will not repeat the exercise, except to say that the introduction nicely lays out her overall argument and could be used effectively to broach the topic of surveillance for many audiences. The chapters outlining B.F. Skinner’s imprint on behaviorist ideologies are also useful to provide historical context to the current age, as is the general story of Google’s turn toward profitability as told in Part I. And, yet, the promise of these earlier chapters–particularly the nice turn of phrase, the “‘behavioral means of production” yield in the latter chapters to an impoverished account of our options and of the contradictions at work within tech companies. These lacunae are due at least in part to Zuboff’s choice of revolutionary subject–the middle class consumer.
Toward the end of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff rebuilds her house, this time with thicker walls. She uses her house’s regeneration to argue for a philosophical concept she calls the “right to sanctuary,” based largely on the writings of Gaston Bachelard, whose Poetics of Space describes for Zuboff how the shelter of home shapes “many of our most fundamental ways of making sense of experience” (477). Zuboff believes that surveillance capitalists want to bring down all these walls, for the sake of opening up our every action to collection and our every impulse to guidance from above. One might pause here and wonder whether the breaking down of walls is not fundamental to capitalism from the beginning, rather than an aberration of the current age. In other words, does the age of surveillance mark such a radical break from the general thrust of capital’s need to open up new markets and exploit new raw materials? Or, more to the point, for whom does it signify a radical aberration? Posing this question would bring into focus the need to interrogate the complicitness of the very categories of autonomy, agency, and privacy in the extension of capitalism across geographies, and to historicize the production of interiority within that same frame.
Against the contemporary tendency toward effacing the interior life of families and individuals, Zuboff offers sanctuary as the right to protection from surveillance. In this moment, that protection needs thick walls. For Zuboff, those walls need to be built by young people–one gets the sense that she is speaking across these sections to her own children and those of her children’s generation. The problem with describing sanctuary in this way is that it narrows the scope for both understanding the stakes of surveillance and recognizing where the battles for control over data will be fought.
As a broadside, Surveillance Capitalism works through a combination of rhetoric and evidence. Zuboff hopes that a younger generation will fight the watchers for control over their own data. Yet, by addressing largely a well-off, college-educated, and young audience, Zuboff restricts the people who are being asked to take up the cause, and fails to ask the difficult question of what it would take to build a house with thicker walls for everyone.
A persistent concern while reading this book is whether its analysis can encompass otherwheres. The populations that are most at risk under surveillance capitalism include immigrants, minorities, and workers, both within and outside the United States. The framework of data exhaust and its use to predict and govern behavior does not quite illuminate the uses of data collection to track border crossers, “predict” crime, and monitor worker movements inside warehouses. These relationships require an analysis that can get at the overlap between corporate and government surveillance, which Surveillance Capitalism studiously avoids. The book begins with an analysis of a system of exploitation based on turning data into profits, and argues that the new mode of production makes the motor of capitalism shift from products to information, a point well established by previous literature. Given this analysis, it astonishing that the last section of the book returns to a defense of individual rights, without stopping to question whether the ‘hive’ forms of organization that Zuboff finds in the logics of surveillance capital may have been a cooptation of radical kinds of social organizing arranged against a different model of exploitation. Leaderless movements like Occupy should be considered fully when describing hives, along with contemporary initiatives like tech worker cooperatives and technical alternatives like local mesh networks. The possibility that these radical forms of social organization may be subject to cooptation by the actors Zuboff describes never appears in the book. Instead, Zuboff appears to mistranslate theories of the subject that locate agency above or below the level of the individual to political acquiescence to a program of total social control. Without taking the step considering the political potential in ‘hive-like’ social organization, Zuboff’s corrective falls back on notions of individual rights and protections and is unable to imagine a new kind of collective action that moves beyond both individualism and behaviorism. This failure, for instance, skews Zuboff’s arguments toward the familiar ground of data protection as a solution rather than toward the more radical stances of refusal, which question data collection in the first place.
Zuboff’s world is flat. It is a world in which there are Big Others that suck up an undifferentiated public’s data, Others whose objective is to mold our behavior and steal our free will. In this version of flatness, what was once described positively is now described negatively, as if we had collectively turned a rosy-colored smooth world flat black. Yet, how collective is this experience? How will it play out if the solutions we provide rely on bracketing out the question of what kinds of people and communities are afforded the chance to build thicker walls? This calls forth a deeper issue than simply that of a lack of inclusion of other voices in Zuboff’s account. After all, perhaps fixing the surveillance issue through the kinds of rights to sanctuary that Zuboff suggests would also fix the issue for those who are not usually conceived of as mainstream consumers.
Except, historical examples ranging from Simone Browne’s explication of surveillance and slavery in Dark Matters to Achille Mbembe’s articulation of necropolitcs teach us that consumer protection is a thin filament on which to hang protection for all from overweaning surveillance apparati–corporate or otherwise. One could easily imagine a world where the privacy rights of well-heeled Americans are protected, but those of others continue to be violated. To reference one pertinent example, companies who are banking on monetizing data through a contractual relationship where individuals sell the data that they themselves own are simultaneously banking on those who need to sell their data to make money. In other words, as legal scholar Stacy-Ann Elvy notes (2017), in a personal data economy low-income consumers will be incentivized to sell their data without much concern for the conditions of sale, even while those who are well-off will have the means to avoid these incentives, resulting in the illusion of individual control and uneven access to privacy determined by degrees of socioeconomic vulnerability. These individuals will also be exposed to a greater degree of risk that their information will not stay secure.
Simone Browne demonstrates that what we understand as surveillance was developed on and through black bodies, and that these populations of slaves and ex-slaves have developed strategies of avoiding detection, which she calls dark sousveillance. As Browne notes, “routing the study of contemporary surveillance” through the histories of “black enslavement and captivity opens up the possibility for fugitive acts of escape” even while it shows that the normative surveillance of white bodies was built on long histories of experimentations with black bodies (Browne 2015, 164). Achille Mbembe’s scholarship on necropolitics was developed through the insight that some life becomes killable, or in Jasbir Puar’s (2017) memorable phrasing, maimable, at the same time that other life is propagated. Mbembe proposes “necropolitcs” to describe “death worlds” where “death” not life, “is the space where freedom and negotiation happen” where “vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring on them the status of living dead” (Mbembe 2003, 40). The right to sanctuary appears to short circuit the spaces where life has already been configured as available for expropriation through perpetual wounding. Crucial to both Browne and Mbembe’s arguments is the insight that the study of the uneven harms of surveillance concomitantly surfaces the tactics of opposition and the archives of the world that provide alternative models of refuge outside the contractual property relationship evoked across the pages of Surveillance Capitalism.
All those considered outside the ambit of individualized rights, including those in territories marked by extrajudicial measures, those deemed illegal, those perennially under threat, those who while at work are unprotected, those in unseen workplaces, and those simply unable to exercise rights to privacy due to law or circumstance, have little place in Zuboff’s analysis. One only has to think of Kashmir, and the access that people with no ties to this place will now have to building houses there, to begin to grasp the contested politics of home-building.[2] Without an acknowledgement of the limits of both the critique of surveillance capitalism and the agents of its proposed solutions, it seems this otherwise promising book will reach the usual audiences and have the usual effect of shoring up some peoples’ and places’ rights even while making the rest of the world and its populations available for experiments in data appropriation.
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Sareeta Amrute is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Her scholarship focuses on contemporary capitalism and ways of working, and particularly on the ways race and class are revisited and remade in sites of new economy work, such as coding and software economies. She is the author of the book Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2016) and recently published the article “Of Techno-Ethics and Techno-Affects” in Feminist Review.
[1] Friedman (2005) attributes this phrase to Nandan Nilekani, then Co-Chair, of Indian Tech company Infosys (and subsequently Chair of the Unique Identification Authority of India).
[2] Until 2019, Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution granted the territories of Jammu and Kashmir special status, which allowed the state to keep on it’s books laws restricting who could buy land and property in Kashmir by allowing the territories to define who counted as a permanent resident.. After the abrogation of Article 370, rumors swirled that the rich from Delhi and elsewhere would now be able to purchase holiday homes in the area. See e.g. Devansh Sharma, “All You Need to Know about Buying Property in Jammu and Kashmir“; Parvaiz Bukhari, “Myth No 1 about Article 370: It Prevents Indians from Buying Land in Kashmir.”
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Works Cited
Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
In Shadowlands, poet and non-fiction writer Anthony McCann writes about the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (in Eastern Oregon’s remote Harney County) by Ammon Bundy and his followers, a group McCann refers to as “The Bundyites.”McCann, who teaches creative writing at the California Institute of the Arts, describes and analyzes with generous feeling and a razor-sharp intelligence the occupation: its history, politics, philosophical grounds, assumptions, and consequences. The result is a work of in-depth political journalism that helps its readers navigate the current times.
In this interview, literary critic and political theorist Arne De Boever speaks with McCann about the politics of his book. While they share an office at CalArts, the interview was conducted by email as 2019 was coming to an end.
Arne De Boever: We live in complicated times, and Shadowlands strikes me as a book for these times. I struggle to describe the contemporary moment. “Confusing” is a word that comes to mind: it seems many of the old terms no longer make sense—many of them are being reevaluated—and that we haven’t quite come up yet with the new terms that will help us make sense of our situation. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the dictionary and the encyclopedia have become popular book formats recently in this time of disorientation: people need help redefining old terms or designing new ones to navigate the world. Or: people no longer know how to narrate the present. News often reaches us as leaked information, without a framing narrative, as if we’re no longer bothering to understand it all. When/ If narrative is provided, it’s often ideologically slanted, on both the “right” and the “left” (to use two terms that are also under pressure today).
Shadowlands stands out in this situation as a book that does provide a narrative, one that is, I would say, open-minded and honest. It does not bother with many of the traditional distinctions, even if it often goes back to tradition—the foundation of the United States of America, for example. Instead, it describes situations and assesses them, with feeling but especially through careful thinking. In that sense, it’s a rare account, one that’s about the desert but could perhaps also only have come from the desert, from the point of view of a person who’s tried to distance himself to some extent from the madness of the present. Was part of your goal in the book to provide a narration, some kind of orientation, in confusing times?
Anthony McCann: I’d say probably not in a direct way in the sense you describe, though it’s fair to say that I was trying to orient myself in some sense, through description—and descriptive narrative. I envisioned a narrative pinned to the momentum of the occupation tale and stained with its dark but also antic tonalities. I wanted a narrative that described lines, tangled-up narratives really, of political theology, of different kinds of messianic time, of different sovereign and un-sovereign geographies and of the psychic operations of history—of historical ontology. And I did hope that such a narrative would be one story of our present cultural/ political crisis, a story manifesting in deeply resonant landscapes of the American Intermountain West.
Those landscapes, their ecologies, and the relations—and non-relations—of those narratives above—of sovereignty, theology, etc.—to these specific patches of western earth were an important part of what the book needed to describe. If there’s an orientation going on here, I hope that some of it is toward the earth where we dwell, and must learn to dwell better—and I think that does happen at key moments in the high dramas of the Malheur occupation story, where the violence and absurdity of political abstraction manifests as the tragedy, comedy, and suicidal theatre of sovereign geographies as played out in these complex living landscapes, and in the relationships and huge timescales they bring into play. For example, in the very end of the occupation, where we have the settler dream of the Bundyites reduced abjectly to a patch of occupied dirt—their piece of claimed, Sovereign Property—out in the sagebrush, surrounded by the armed men of the State.
Q: Some of our times’ confusion congealed for me around the figure of David Fry, the last man standing at the Malheur Occupation, and one who only agreed to walk out if everyone praised him with a Hallelujah. “How had it come down to David Fry,” you write, “a long haired-young man from the outskirts of Cincinatti who had little to no familiarity with issues of public land? Like many Patriots, he was a libertarian. He was pro-gun rights, anti-abortion, and pro-marijuana legalization. Like Brand and Ryan Payne, he called himself a Messianic Jew—but he was also pro-Islam and liked to cite the Koran. The issue that seemed closest to his heart was the death of the oceans, an ongoing catastrophe he worried had dramatically accelerated with the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Half-Japanese, Fry was also one of the only nonwhite participants in the occupation. He’d clashed with some of the occupiers over their bigotry; he’d been ready to leave over the issue, but in the end he’d thrown his farewell note in the trash. His friend LaVoy Finicum had helped convince him to stay. LaVoy was the main reason he was here in the first place” (212). Fry seems very lost, and his lost-ness reflects, I think, the lostness of many others today: people are just all over the place, confused in complicated times.
A: And one of the reasons David seems so lost, is that he was literally lost. He had no idea where he was. He had no conception of East Oregon ecologically or historically, and never seems to have developed one. That the occupation—an occupation about land and the history of land use and public land policy—didn’t require this of him or anyone involved—including the national and international media—is symptomatic not just of a curious pathology limited to the Bundyites. It is generalized, I see it everyday, in everyone around me and I see it in myself. We have no idea where we are. We often live in and through our phones, for instance. This is a pathology that has many names. “Property” is one of the names it has in this book. David Fry’s lostness is the alienation involved in making the earth the ground of abstract value, exchangeable economic values, as well as the abstract political theology that the Bundy crew seemed to be extracting from their time on the refuge. If the Bundy thing seemed suicidal in some ways, and it did, it is partly because it is an expression of what we now must accept to be a patently suicidal civilization—and one that certainly does seem lost today. It was fitting—if horrifying—that the end of the occupation consisted of the FBI talking David Fry out of blowing out his brains, while he also argued—at the same time—on his other phone with his allies about the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice. David was arguing that Christ’s death was really a form of suicide, while his comrades were giving the familiar counterargument that Jesus, in choosing sacrifice, had transcended earthly life and therefore really chosen “life”, not death. I happen to think David wasn’t exactly wrong in that moment about Christ—this is something that troubled me throughout my devout early childhood. The form of life Christ chose does seem deathly; eternal, non-earthly—extraterrestrial even. The foundational sacrifice of Jesus, that pain ceremony and its martyrology, remains profoundly operative in our secular cultural and political life, and in our sovereign geographies. That in our panicked present the continued operation of this suicidal/ sacrificial logic manifests in more panicked forms—like the meltdown at Malheur—is probably unsurprising.
Bruno Latour has described really effectively—to my mind—the current political disorientation regarding “right” and “left” and so forth that manifests around the crisis of the earth we are now facing, and which manifests also in the Malheur story and in the seeming political confusion of someone like David Fry. Given that the narrative of progress toward the unified and global is effectively dead, given that modernity has discovered in the climate crisis its real earthly limits, it doesn’t seem strange that the political categories organized around the debate about the meaning and goals of progress have become unmoored. “Right”, “Left”, and “Center”, partake of a certain investment in “Progress” and in certain modes of controlling, channeling progression, or preserving certain local traditional forms of life against its homogenizing force. If “Progress” is over, then our politics tends to become incoherent, because they lack a referent, they lack a future. Latour proposes that what must come to pass is that the earth itself, as a new, enormous actor, up till now insanely unacknowledged in the Modern global order, becomes the new attractor for politics—as opposed to the dream of global progress. Coming “down to Earth” replaces “Progress.” This re-mapping of the political has a certain—perhaps too easy—descriptive elegance. It lends immediate coherence to our mess. With this map we can see that Elon Musk and much of the tech world, Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers, ISIS, American right-wing evangelical Christianity, all manner of business-centrists, et cetera all share an orientation away from the goal of common dwelling on Earth, toward what Latour describes as extra-terrestriality. Whether that non-earth oriented goal is hunkering down with your wealth and your power in the bubble (perhaps walled) that that wealth and power enables you to build around yourself, or whether it means becoming a cyborg in space or dwelling in heaven in eternity, all of it is oriented away from the reality that now confronts capitalist civilization: the imperative to turn toward the earth and toward each other and our fellow non-human creatures as earthlings. We are not space people, almost none of us are billionaires, and none of us are celestial beings passing through this earthly life on our way to a more glorified existence elsewhere, as Malheur occupation leader Ryan Bundy, a devout Latter Day Saint, explicitly describes himself and his brother Ammon in Shadowlands. Those of us among the “we” that, to paraphrase Latour, come to assemble in the feel of the pull of the terrestrial, do not, cannot conceive of our existences in this non-earthly way. How do right and left and center remain relevant categories in this new trajectory—I don’t know. Maybe they can, maybe they cannot. David Fry strikes me as someone pulled in multiple directions by old and new political (and religious) orientations—as most of us are in some way or other, if considerably less dramatically.
Q: Is Shadowlands is a book about American (U.S.) exceptionalism? You start the book by saying that much of what can be found in the book’s account is “disturbing”; but you also note that “the book is a tale of a country where the possibility of a truly dynamic popular democracy has not wholly died a quiet death at the hands of corporate money and power, nor been subsumed in the arena-worship of a post-Nixonian, proto-fascist demagogue. It’s a story where a vision of civic life remains at the core of human purpose and being” (xviii). Did that second dimension of the book always stand out clearly to you, or was it something you arrived at gradually, reluctantly perhaps, maybe even in spite of the assumptions with which you’d entered into this project?
A: Some of my initial concerns, which I think remain among my strongest concerns, had to do with the ways in which what gets called in the language of American Exceptionalism “the American Experiment” is pinned to the Earth making American worlds, territories—sovereign geographies. And also in how people negotiate living in the fiction of the nation, which is a sovereign fiction, with a horribly violent history that is also failing to operate in the present according to its supposed ideals. In one sense the book is concerned, as that quote you cited suggests, with people insisting—in very different ways—that those ideals, those beautiful, exceptionalist words come true. But the book seems and generally always seemed to me to be more concerned with the various (often theologized to some degree) practices through which Americans negotiate their relationships to their nation, to each other and the living earth that sustains them. Because of the nature of the movement at the center of the main events of this book—the Bundyite faction of what is called the Patriot movement—the language of American Exceptionalism is constantly present, which meant I had to engage with it and its uses, and also with its uses by others opposed (like myself) or simply indifferent to the particular anti-federal land program of what I call the Bundy Revolution. Which meant also that I encountered mobilizations—pragmatic and otherwise—of these concepts that were at times quite compelling, at times troubling and confusing, and at other times wild and frankly bizarre. At the same time the world views and ecological and political understandings I often found most compelling omitted or eschewed rhetorics of American Exceptionalism—as in the world views articulated by members of the Burns Paiute tribe who emerged quickly in January 2016 as some of the main and most effective opponents of the Bundy program at Malheur.
Q: Can you talk a bit more within this framework—American exceptionalism—about why you consider the Burns Paiute tribe’s opposition to the Malheur occupation to be so effective? What is it about the tribe’s relation to the land that frustrates “the American experiment”? I’m curious about the terms we might use to describe that opposition.
A: The tribe insisted immediately, with clarity and persistent messaging, that all of us understand that the occupation was basically what I called in Shadowlands “a Neo-Homesteader reenactment.” From the tribe’s perspective, here was a group of armed white men, amped up on nostalgia for the era of the white men who’d wrested the tribes’ land from them in the first place, taking over land that had been absolutely central to the tribe and their ancestors for thousands of years. The Paiute name of the Burns Paiute band—Wadatika—ties them intimately to the territory Ammon and friends had occupied. Wadatika means “eaters of Wada”: wada is seepweed, a type of alkaline marsh plant that in the region grows in the territory of what is now the refuge. Its seeds were a key food source traditionally for the tribe.
When Ammon Bundy said—in one of the first of the occupiers’ picturesque press conferences out in the icy sagebrush—that the group was here to give the land back to “the rightful owners,” he presented the tribe with a perfect entry point into the conflict. The Wadatika didn’t bother addressing in depth the issue of who “the rightful owners” would be. Tribal chair Charlotte Roderique instead used Ammon’s remarks at the tribe’s own packed press conference in the gathering center on their tiny reservation as an occasion to joke about how she’d been preparing her letter of acceptance for the returned territory, before undercutting the laughter in the room with a dry remark: “we know they didn’t mean us, we know they meant themselves.” She followed this with a brief primer on Wadatika history. In the nineteenth century, that history becomes a tale of violent removal, and then the refusal of that removal—a powerful story of attachment, of deep entanglement with the specific land formations and ecologies of Harney County. “We were the ones who came back,” she told me later that year, “nothing could keep us away.”
The story the Wadatika told was one in which no land is equivalent to any other—it’s one where a specific old Juniper tree has the cultural value that outsiders might associate with a ruin, or an artifact. At this deeper, perhaps harder to grasp level, of the Wadatika intervention, the tribe’s entrance into the conflict made the Bundyites look like not just a traveling settler re-enactment camp, but also like extraterrestrials, touching down on Earth from their usual circulation in the ether of the internet, to plant a flag in terrain they knew nothing of at all. Some of Charlotte’s humor at the press conference was dedicated to highlighting this—with joke offers of heading down to the refuge to teach the crew local survival lessons, how to make jackrabbit fur blankets and so on. Meanwhile, out at the occupied compound the Bundyites had begun rooting around in the records of the refuge following the main paths of knowledge they seemed interested in applying to this unknown terrain; the property and land transfer records stored in the files of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
This is one place where the book really lingers with what you frame as “American Exceptionalism”—what I call in the book Ammon’s “beautiful pattern”, borrowing one of his own terms. In Bundy’s “beautiful pattern”—a very nostalgic, and idealized Jacksonian vision of western expansion—land is claimed, settled and turned into the invisible of freedom. Ammon sees this as the proper path of God’s chosen nation, America, homeland of Liberty in the Latter Days of human time—and it was the work of he and his patriot friends at Malheur to restore it.
Q: Yes, what Bundy calls a “beautiful pattern” is definitely part of the disturbing material that can be found in Shadowlands. I’m wondering, on the one hand, if you’d include the tribe’s opposition to the Bundy occupation under what you call, in your book’s opening pages “the possibility of a truly dynamic popular democracy”? “Popular democracy”: does that term, not part of indigenous history, apply in this context?
On the other hand, I’m asking about this because it seems to me that when you hint at “the possibility of a truly dynamic popular democracy”, you’re actually frequently talking about the Bundys. This is something that surprised me in your book. The split between the “disturbing” elements of Shadowlands and its hinting at the “possibility of a truly dynamic popular democracy” seems to match the split between the first and the second parts of your book: your account of the Oregon standoff ends on page 216, and the book then goes on for another 200 plus pages, following the trial of those involved. It’s part one that, by and large, I found the most disturbing; it’s in part two that I found the most indications of hope for a dynamic democratic life—sometimes coming from the Bundys, sometimes coming from elsewhere. You open part two of your book by explicitly recalling the first few pages Shadowlands, when you write that while attending and writing about the trial, “I had a glimpse of another kind of American public life, different from the corporate-dominated one I knew, I saw flickerings of a different kind of nation, a dynamic one that could be lived everywhere, both inside institutions like courts and city halls and also out in the open, in the streets, face-to-face, every day” (220). Sometimes this is described as “a sovereign circus” (220); sometimes you call it, more neutrally, “sovereign practice” (242). Earlier in our conversation, the word “un-sovereign” also came up. Which is it? How to differentiate?
Am I wrong to say—and at some level I can’t believe that I am saying this—that your book also associates aspects of the Bundy revolution with “the possibility of a truly dynamic popular democracy”?
A: I don’t know if this book is a hopeful book about American Democracy—I think that depends on the reader. Which is not to say that the book doesn’t catch glimpses of what a less moribund, more democratic republic might look like. While I’d say that for me personally the more lastingly hopeful moments in Shadowlands re: democracy probably come in the third section and not with the occupiers, the book does catch glimpses of a more vital public life through watching the Bundy Revolution at trial in section two, and later in a month-long anti-private prison protest in the Mojave Desert. Something changed when the occupiers made the jump from the specific earth of Harney County, with its ecology, its complex history—of Natives and Settlers—into the abstract space of federal court, the terrain not of landscapes and bodies in living relation, but of the necro-palimpsests of the Law.
I’d certainly place the successful engagement of the Burns Paiute tribe in the scrum of the occupation in the realm of a vital democracy. Absolutely. That such terms would be foreign to a tribal leader in 1830 or whenever is true, but it is not true now. Charlotte Roderique, Jarvis Kennedy and other tribal leaders adroitly used the platforms the occupation made available to them to mobilize their history and perspective in defense of their tribe’s interest and also the interest of the larger community—non-natives included—in being left to work out their own relations to federal power and the landscapes and ecologies to which most folks who live out there are profoundly attached, if in different registers. In the third section of the book you also get the story of the High Desert Partnership that has gathered erstwhile antagonists into consensus-based groups that ground their work in their common attachment to the local earth of Harney County and have thus made for themselves a new successful political form, capable, since federal agencies are among the participants, in directing federal sovereignty to the enactment of interventions in the troubled ecology of the region’s wetlands, sagebrush steppe, and dry pine forest. This to me, this form, is the one where I would personally locate the most “hope” about a vital democracy in the book—not in the theater of the Bundyites. But there was much of interest in their political theater.
That the Bundyites had seemed to know nothing (and mostly care nothing) about the particular ecologies and histories of Harney County was, to my mind, at the heart of the offense of the occupation. They brought all this calamity and real danger (the situation could have ended so much worse in Harney County than it did, there are a lot of guns out there) to a terrain they didn’t understand or have much interest in understanding beyond how it might give temporary body and power to the set of abstractions they carried with them. It was those abstractions: Freedom, God, Property, which—as theologized as they were in that group (in both explicitly Mormon and more secular ways)—lit them up one and all with the sense of camaraderie and jolly, apocalyptic fervor. And that sometimes seems to have been the real purpose of their whole endeavor, as if they were there merely to fuel those feelings, as if they were extracting their fervor from land to which they were otherwise indifferent, land that when it comes to the refuge, had been home to the Wadatika’s ancestors for thousands of years.
But when they brought their sovereign circus into the space Ammon and others declared was the space they were hoping to get to all along—that space of reified, near extra-terrestrial abstraction that is Federal Court—suddenly I had to admit that the game had changed along with the terrain. Now they were proposing to disrupt the conviction machine that is the justice system, and were also being charged in a way that reinforced dangerous precedents—and potentially set new ones for the prosecution, and potential persecution—of contemporary and future protest movements of all stripes: conspiracy to impede federal officers from doing their duty. To be clear, the charges were being used against the Bundyites in a way that could absolutely make it a federal felony for two people to discuss a plan to do something like stand in the driveway of an ICE detention facility, and shout slogans in the attempt to temporarily halt an ICE vehicle, or discuss a plan to publish the names of ICE officers online in order to shame them. That’s totally the kind of behavior the charge could criminalize should a federal attorney’s office choose to move in this way, or should they be directed to do so by the Attorney General.
And it turned out the Bundyites had some talent and knowledge when it came to bringing life to those necrotic chambers of the Law. Suddenly their histories didn’t seem so entirely faked up—as they had when it came to their narratives about land in Harney County. They had points to make and they made them—and they all coalesced, I’d say, around one major issue. That the judicial system is a key part of the American republic, and that its life depends on the participation of the People, and perhaps even on their assertion there of their ultimate sovereignty. The sovereignty of “We the People” is the core tenet of their movement, and in court it was fascinating to watch them insist on it, and consider alongside that insistence the question of popular sovereignty and whether or not under our Constitution what they were saying about it was true. Under the US Constitution, are the People really sovereign? Or was the patrician intent of the Constitution precisely to dilute and restrain this sovereignty from operating effectively? And has that intent been largely realized? Suddenly in court these were the questions for me—and they are important questions (to put it mildly). They are at the heart of our political crisis, a crisis that’s been building for a long time but exploded in the fall of 2016, which was exactly when the first Malheur trial took place.
If there is anything instructive to be found in Bundyite agitation, and I think there really is, it would be mostly in the agitation itself. It would be in their specific, often successful— and I think actually transferable—tactical efforts to inject public life into the deathly spaces of court. It would not be found anywhere in the content of their specific demands re: public land which are both tiresome and dangerous, being essentially re-iterations of white settler grievance restaged for a post-frontier age.
I also found something very important in the way that their theologized faith in the Constitution exposes how theologized faith in the Constitution really is across demographics; this was brought home for me by how often liberal and centrist voices have sententiously cited the Constitution in recent years, sometimes even producing their own pocket copies of the document—just like the occupiers at Malheur—as a kind of magic talisman against Donald Trump. It turns out the Constitution wasn’t coming to save us any more than Robert Mueller was—it’s a highly flawed, ambiguous document that creates an enormously powerful executive, something that alarmed many people from its very beginnings.
Q:Shadowlands presents much of this Bundyite insistence on sovereignty using the language of “feeling”. Let me ask you about a passage early in the book that addresses political feeling directly. Perhaps you can briefly situate it in the book, and comment on it: “He and his comrades seem to have had a direct, brief experience of what, in political theory terms—terms foreign to the Bundy Revolution—is called Constitutive Power. This is the power to institute a nation and law that in a modern democracy is supposed to be invested, in the final instance, in the citizenry. It’s related to Popular Sovereignty, the name in political thought for the ultimate rule of the People that is central to all notions of democratic republican governance. Constitutive Power and Popular Sovereignty, when they descend from their throne in the lofty realm of political ideas, manifest in human bodies and experience primarily as feeling. It’s a rare emotion. If it is sustained and successful, it is called Revolution.” (31) This is about the transformation of the people—lowercase p—into the People.
At the beginning of part two, you write that “Where in our world did the People properly take place?” (220) was and remains one of your questions in the book.
In your book’s second part, it appears to be especially during the trial, in what you just called “the necrotic chambers of the Law”, that a practice of sovereignty you might actually appreciate comes to life?
A: The first quote you cite is about the experience of sovereignty as an experience of revolution—or the intimation of it—that the Bundyites who were there the big day in April 2014, down in the Toquop Wash (near Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada) experienced. This happened two years before the Malheur occupation; it was the moment when federal agents backed down due to the mass of protestors (a number of them militia members armed with long guns) that had gathered to support the Bundy family cause and halted confiscation of the Bundy family cattle for non-payment of grazing fees. (The Bundys had stopped recognizing federal jurisdiction on the public land near their ranch as part of a 20-plus year conflict involving the listing of the desert tortoise as an endangered species, and the growth of Las Vegas, among other things.) This is the foundational moment of the movement, when the people I call Bundyites came into being. (They call themselves “Patriots” if they use any term at all.) The Bundyites I met and the Bundys themselves refer to this moment constantly. (Those who weren’t there that day still refer back to it, visit the wash, post pictures of themselves there, et cetera.) That moment in the wash is what Alain Badiou would call an Event, and the subsequent subjectivation of the faithful—the militants—then birthed, as it does in Badiou’s theoretical model which derives from his reading of St. Paul as well as other sources, a form of life built of faithfulness to that event, to that subjectivation. And the Bundyites are nothing if they are not a messianic band of the faithful, living in their version of the final times where the God-inspired holy document of the Constitution “hangs by a thread.” Mostly the band is united through the connectivity of the internet, but just like many internet-based communities, that online sociality refers always to key face to face encounters—in this instance court cases, protest gatherings, and the famous standoffs at Malheur and Bundy Ranch.
But to the question of sovereignty. The moment of sovereignty the group experienced in that first, foundational event in the wash, to what degree it was illusory or not (they did drive the federal government from American territory for a long time), is an experience or intimation of what we call constitutive power. John Locke, so influential for the founders of the American Republic, wrote that sovereignty resides in the People only in these moments, of abolition and constitution of government. Otherwise, he says that sovereignty, if we are speaking of a republic, lies solely in the legislature. Given the tendency of the Bundyites, or the ones among them who read such things, to quote Locke, this formulation struck me as helpful in describing their activity. They sought out these extreme moments of constitutive—or abolitionary—power in Toquop Wash and at Malheur—and I think that the feeling of agency that was produced in those moments is no small part of why they did so. It’s also why their use of the land of Malheur for their sovereign settler ceremony gave so much offense—I’d say rightfully. They were appropriating territory they knew nothing of, in order to—in the language that Ammon explicitly uses—turn it into “freedom”.
But court was a very different territory. Now they were inside a State that had not at all been abolished. There they were in that big dead—or undead—thing that the State is, manifest as courtrooms and marble and armed marshals and security scans and judges and the churchly hush of the courtroom chamber itself.
When, on the first day of the trial, defendant Ken Medenbach, a chainsaw artist and anti-federal land activist (and now a congressional candidate) from the eastern Cascades, showed up in court with a custom-made shirt with the words of one of perhaps the most interesting court determinations on jury power, the majority opinion of Judge Leventhal in the United States V. Dougherty anti-war protest case of 1972, a decision that’s still basically in effect—it signaled to me as much as the whole court ritual and all that marble did that I was in a new terrain, not in Harney County anymore.
Q: There is a lot on this in the book. Can you briefly explain?
The Leventhal decision essentially states that the people as the jury have the power to determine law—that this power is essential to the functioning of the republic—but that the people need not be, and should not be informed of this power, because they already know it well enough. Leventhal states that added reminders of this power could lead to its abuse and that that abuse would be disastrous for the proper functioning of what I think we have to understand as a secret portion of popular sovereignty stowed away in the procedural folds of the Law. This is the legal situation now. Jurors have the right to judge Law, and the application of the Law in any case—but only if they don’t talk about it. Judges have the right, and most or all do, to sternly remind jurors that they can only judge the facts, but do not have the right to do anything about a jury’s not-guilty verdict.
It’s worth quoting from Leventhal’s decision which came in an appeal of Catholic anti-war protestors who’d vandalized Dow Chemical DC Headquarters in protest of the use of Napalm in Indochina. “Law is a system, and it is also a Language,” Leventhal wrote, “with secondary meanings that may be unrecorded yet are part of its life.” As it worked, he said, the jury system provided “play in the joints that imparts flexibility and avoids undue rigidity … with the jury acting as a ‘safety valve’ in exceptional cases.” As an example of exceptional cases Leventhal gave the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which numerous northern juries had refused to convict under—this had essentially overturned the law in practice in some northern states. Informing the jury of their right would ruin this flexibility, Leventhal says. “The jury knows well enough.”
This secret zone of flexibility where a jury can override the errors of the legislature or the overzealous prosecutor or both is exactly the sort of space that the more Sovereign Citizen-minded of Bundyites sought out (there are many “armchair attorney” types in the movement) as an occult space of popular sovereignty in the Law. This kind of space was where—and in a sense what—many of them seemed to want to be, regardless of if it meant going to federal prison for years for their stand. Ken Medenbach himself seemed especially indifferent to the prospect—it was a lot better than going to jail for drunk driving, he told me, which he said he knew about because he’d done that too.
And when Medenbach and friends were standing up to the increasingly juryless conviction machine of a justice system that incarcerates more people than anyone in the world, my interest, shall we say, took on a different quality and tone. Especially given the nature of the conspiracy charges they faced and how they might be used against dissenters in the future. (And are a bit less likely to be used now, after the failures of federal prosecutors to make them stick in this case.)
Q: So this is when a change happened.
A: What the Bundy crew was arguing for out in the desert strikes me as a huge mistake, one that would actually hurt the constituencies they claim to represent, the small-scale rancher especially, as well as further open up our wondrous remaining public lands to more industrial scale destruction just when climate change is making their ecosystems even more vulnerable. But in court what the Bundyites were fighting was something else: a specific set of charges, dangerous ones. What they were advocating—not taking plea deals, representing yourself, turning the space of the court into a public forum for political debate, empowering the jury to judge the Law and the proper applications of the Law as well as the facts in appropriate moments—were all things that need, to my mind to be considered if we are interested in making our governance structures more life-like, more invested with the energies and needs of the populace to find flexibility and life in the Law as Leventhal’s decision described it.
Q: Yes, that seems right—that’s what the book conveys.
A: I’ve been thinking about all this a lot recently as two deeply committed climate activists–Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya—head to trial in Iowa facing massive federal charges. They are being egregiously overcharged, as is the way of federal prosecutors—who seek to avoid jury trials through intimidating defendants into taking plea deals. This in a case involving desperate sabotage of a number of sites of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the defendants’ home state of Iowa. Reznicek and Montoya were leaders among the Iowa resistance to the pipeline, which runs down from the Dakotas, through Iowa to the Mississippi. The defense they plan to make—the necessity defense—goes right to the same sort of place that the Bundy defense went (if in a very different cause) arguing that the people have a right to intervene in dangerous situations (like climate change) regardless of the law, including in refusing to convict folks for breaking laws that are being unjustly applied. (Curiously, opposition to the DAPL and support of Standing Rock was actually a galvanizing cause among some in the Bundyite crowd, something I think really surprises coastal folks unfamiliar with the complexities and glaring contradictions of Intermountain Western libertarianism.)
Reznicek and Montoya’s acts of sabotage can be seen as attempting to both overcome and draw attention to a huge problem Amitav Ghosh and others have brought attention to in our current political life and in the struggle against all the various forms of Climate Denialism. I mean the way politics tends to be confined to what Ghosh calls “individual moral adventure” if there is no way, in the last instance, to interfere meaningfully in the material infrastructure of power, namely the flow of oil.
While the Bundy movement is mostly climate denialist (though their denialism takes the form of what sometimes seems like a more explicit, apocalyptic and paranoid, acknowledgment of what we are facing than we see among pro-capitalist, nominally Green progressives) they were addressing the problem of the people having no leverage at all, of popular sovereignty being successfully diluted through layers of representation so much so as to be practically inoperative. This brings up a huge historical question in the American context. Is this dilution a result of the Constitution being ignored (as the Bundy Rebels would argue), or is it the actual intention of the original document to dilute popular sovereignty as much as possible? This issue was one that really fascinated me while watching the Bundyites at trial, and becomes pretty important in the final chapter of that trial section, which interrogates, among other things, the phrase “We the People” and whether the document so fetishized by the Bundy crew empowers a popular sovereignty or leaves “the People” essentially deluded by its promise.
A quote that was a touchstone for me in thinking about all this in our contemporary political life comes from 1788, from the public debates leading up to the far from unanimous ratification of the US Constitution. Zephaniah Swift, a Connecticut attorney, early abolitionist and author of America’s first legal dictionary, wrote of the new large voting districts enabled by the new charter, that they (the districts) were “calculated to induce the freeman to imagine themselves at liberty, while they are thus destined to be allured and driven around as if impounded, being at the same time told that nothing confines them, although they have not the powers of escape.” As historian Woody Holton (in whose important work on popular democracy in the Constitutional Era I first came upon this quote) pointed out to me, the impounded cattle metaphor—besides having strange resonance with the Bundy movement and their UR-moment with the Bundy family cows—had special meaning in Connecticut at that time. The young state was a cattle center in those days and protests against the confiscation of the property of impoverished farmers (many of them American Revolutionary War veterans) unable to pay high taxes destined for the coffers of the speculators who’d financed the war at considerable profit, often took the form of the armed liberation of impounded cattle.
Q: That’s fascinating. Your reference to Badiou earlier on—a communist—seems just right and draws out a charge that’s been levelled at Badiou (by Jean-François Lyotard among others): that his theory of the Subject (capital S, who is faithful to an Event etc. as you describe) shares a lot with Carl Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign as whoever decides on the state of exception (Schmitt, it’s worth noting, is usually associated with facism). Part of what interests me in your answers, apart from the specifics that it brings to our attention and that deserve another interview altogether, is the mix of elements here, which is characteristic of your book. There’s the Bundyites; there’s Alain Badiou; there’s John Locke; there’s the climate activists, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Standing Rock; and there’s Zephaniah Swift, and the cattle. Some of these are combinable, but not all; and not all of each one of these is combinable with all of each other.
I’m wondering if I could present a few quotes to you to draw out some of this improbable mixing—they’re all quotes about sovereignty. You’ll recognize the first from your book; I don’t know if you’ll know the second and third. Let’s do this old-school: don’t look for them online. I’d just like you to comment on how they resonate with your book. I can tell you after where they’re from.
Here’s the first—could you situate it and explain?
“To Jason’s mind, popular sovereignty had by no means been given over to the government in the act of creating it, of constituting it. ‘The power absolutely remains there. The government does not exist without our consent,’ he said. That the founding charter was a contract, to his mind, established certain serious responsibilities—for the people as well as for the government. ‘If it’s a contract, who enforces it? You have rights but only if you claim, use, and defend them. And I claim them, I use them. I show up to be the press.”
A: Sure. Jason, in the above, is Jason Patrick, one of the most intriguing of the people who joined the core group of the Bundy Revolution. Jason’s a roofer from rural Georgia whose fortunes suffered severely in the crash of 2007-2008. When he was a child, his father, a Vietnam veteran, died of agent orange related cancer. Jason explicitly dates his distrust of the federal government and of the US military to this life event. (He personally holds that a standing army is unconstitutional, or has done so in the past—though I’d say he’s eliding anti-militarist tendencies in the early republic with the Constitution, which did provide the circumstances under which a standing army could be and was created.) Politically Jason’s a Ron Paul libertarian, and credits the Paul campaign with getting him involved in politics. Much of his activism has focused on opposition to police militarization, a huge issue for many libertarians. He’s protested about police shootings, SWAT raids, and the acquisition by local rural law enforcement in his area of a bear-cat type armored vehicle—the ridiculousness of which Jason drove home by pointing out that the only injuries suffered by local cops had been self-inflicted accidents. In 2014 he was moved by video of Ammon Bundy being repeatedly tased by Bureau of Land Management officers to travel to Bundy Ranch in Nevada where the Bundy cause became his.
During the Malheur trials he attempted to forge an alliance with Don’t Shoot Portland—a local Black Lives Matter community organization—over shared concerns about police militarization. He was not successful in this effort, as I describe in the book. The leader of Don’t Shoot Portland, Teressa Raiford, now a candidate for mayor in the city, becomes an important character in this part of the book as well.
Teressa’s explanation of why Jason was unable to get the traction he sought with her group is a key moment: she accuses Jason of making the error of thinking that he is his ideas. (“His views are who he thinks he is. He can’t let go of that.”) I think we can see in Jason’s “claim, use and defend” rhetoric above a bit of what Teressa is talking about. The phrase “claim, use and defend”, which is a refrain of the Bundyites, and which Jason liked to repeat in reference to more abstract political goods, like constitutional rights, the right to be the press, etcetera, emerges out of a settler context of land acquisition, and the claiming of things like water rights. Claim, use and defend refers to the sorts of land rights historically only white folks have been able to claim, use and defend, save in exceptional circumstances. That meaning lingers in those words, it is part of their historical being, what they are, beyond and beneath whatever immediate contemporary views regarding protest of police abuse and militarization Jason deploys them in, even if they are in support of the positions and actions of someone like Teressa. Still, I think it’s important to understand that Jason’s opposition to police militarization comes out of much thinking and research and a deep and impressive commitment of the sort few are willing to make. That commitment is a good reminder that dedicated opposition to police militarization, private prisons, mandatory sentencing, and the like comes not only from the left.
Q: Absolutely, and that’s something your book shows clearly. Here’s the second quote, which for me resonates with the first: “As democratic theorists have argued for some time, elections do not fully transfer sovereignty from the populace to its elected representatives—something of popular sovereignty remains nontransferable, marking the outside of the electoral process. If not, there would be no popular means of objecting to corrupt electoral processes. In a sense, the power of the populace remains separate from the power of those elected, even after they have elected them, for only in its separateness can it continue to contest the conditions and results of elections as well as the actions of elected officials. If the sovereignty of the people is fully transferred to, and replaced by, those whom the majority elect, then what is lost are those powers we call critical, those actions we call resistance, and that lived possibility we call revolution.”
A: This sounds a bit like Judith Butler? The prose doesn’t feel translated to me, and it sounds somewhat like what she was saying the last time I saw her speak, which was some time ago, at CalArts.
Q: You’re right, it’s from Butler’s public assemblies book.
A: I see why you’re bringing it up. I’d say it is almost the same argument that Jason is making, but without the American Exceptionalism. (Which is not a superficial distinction, by any means.) But I feel comfortable saying that Jason would agree with this statement. Whether the so-called founding fathers agreed with Judith Butler, Jason Patrick or each other is another story entirely. As is how much those intentions and confusions matter in the end.
Those who opposed the Constitution or were worried about the consolidations of power it enacted helped to push the reading of the “We the People” of the preamble toward a vision of a retained popular sovereignty and to limit just how much the Constitution was able to curb the popular powers of “democracy” which convention delegates had openly considered it their mission to curtail. This is one of the arguments of Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, historian Woody Holton’s excellent book about the making of the Constitution and its suppression of popular democracy in the early days of the republic.
And yet, pushback from historical opponents and critics of the Constitution notwithstanding, it’s still hard not to see the preamble in the light that Holton casts—as he said when I interviewed him for Shadowlands: “The Preamble starts with a bullshit phrase, ‘We the People’—‘don’t worry, you aren’t going to lose your popular sovereignty.’ But the rest of the preamble consists of very honest phrases about how the federal government is going to assert power over the people… ‘domestic tranquility’ doesn’t mean me sitting by the fireside with my family and my cat.”
Q: Let me give you the third quote, also taken from elsewhere, and also resonant for me in this context: “constituent power … can never exhaust itself into the institutions it has constituted. … a people ‘anterior to and above’ the constitution, that is, the presupposed people behind every democracy, can never quite reduce itself into a people ‘within’ the constitution, that is, into the people that the constitution identifies and recognizes as an institution. A constituent residue will, namely, always remains dormant in the institutions that the people may have constituted, and will re-emerge and activate itself if its political existence becomes threatened.”
A: That seems like it could be a lot of people. “A constituent residue” is what I’d venture the Bundyites imagined themselves personally to be, only they’d say they were simply “The People.” This is quite grandiose of course, claiming to be The People—though maybe it’s fair to say it partakes of a general grandiosity at the heart of politics in action. It takes a lot of nerve to proclaim a version of the People in the hope that that articulation will become a gathering site for a greater flock of living bodies of collective action, feeling and thought. (It wasn’t just because of the important role of real birds in this story that I thought often about flocking behaviors in the writing of this book.)
Because of the emphasis the Bundyites put on the actual text of the US Constitution, I keep returning to the question of whether a retained popular sovereignty or “a constituent residue” is figured in that document, or whether the American charter should be seen as an effort to restrain popular sovereignty to such an extent that it becomes mostly meaningless, as in the Zephaniah Swift quote above. There is certainly much historical and textual evidence to support this latter take. And I think this then dovetails with questions in our own time about how “the People”—whomsoever they might be—are effectively distanced from the levers of real material power in a petroleum-based economy. Still, at certain moments, the more optimistic take of someone like Butler can seem accurate to me as well.
A: The third quote is Panu Minkinnen summarizing Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory, and pointing out that Schmitt’s position can be found in the work of democratic theorists Bruce Ackerman and Jason Frank. It’s not too far from Butler either.
My point is that there is some overlap between Jason Patrick’s discourse, left liberal discourse as it can be found in Butler, and Schmitt’s thinking about democracy. What do we make of this? What does it have to do with our times?
Also, and going to your repeated point about the Constitution’s effort to restrain popular sovereignty: from another point of view, of course, the popular sovereignty that is evoked in the three quotes above appears as “anarchy” (Butler in fact uses this term to characterize what she calls the “interval” between popular and state sovereignty; Schmitt abhorred anarchy so the term certainly couldn’t be used to characterize his position). Does anarchy have a role in your thinking about the Bundys—you suggest that it does at least once in your book (208)? You note that seen from another point of view, the Bundys’ identification with “We the People” appears as “a kind of proto-guerilla insurrection” (37). What’s your position on insurrection? I’m trying to think, somehow, of how Shadowlands relates to The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, or Joshua Clover’s Riot Strike Riot’. Is it a criticism of those more radical politics? It seems that at some points in your book, you’re definitely more with the State than with the Bundy insurrection?
A: In response to your first question here—I think this is a time, as Wendy Brown has written of, of a major crisis in sovereignty for democratic republics—maybe this is the political crisis of “neo-liberalism” or “supply-chain capitalism” or whatever you want to call it. As Brown pointed out before we got our wall-building president, one way this manifests is in the right-wing dream of a walled sovereignty, as if the simple reifying magic of a wall could stop national and popular sovereignty from draining away, or being “contaminated” or whatever. I think it also has a lot to do with petroleum and the manufacturing of consent in the petroleum era. People of various political orientations are well aware of how distanced they are from the levers of power, and what the consequences are.
I do remember having conversations with anarchist-oriented friends during the occupation—and my own political yearnings are in anarchistic directions—about how strange it was to see this anti-State insurrection in which we had far more sympathy for the federal position, or for the position of those supporting that position. The Bundy position on land, while it is informed at times by an inchoate theory of the Commons (some even speak of the era of enclosure in England and so forth)—is really a disaster if applied in the current dispensation. There are too many billionaires ready to buy up land from cash-strapped states and localities should federal public land ever be turned over to those entities—and public land transfer to states and counties is the main stated goal of Bundyism. This would result in even further distancing of the rural proletariat from being able to work on and enjoy what are our current public lands, it would be disastrous for ranchers who would lose access to public grazing and it would be terrible for the public at large. Except in isolated cases of enlightened despotism where the billionaire in question locked up the land for conservation, it would be frightful for conversation efforts and all the non-human communities that struggle and thrive in the wildlands of the west. Federal public land is probably America’s greatest single common good, to lose it would have negative consequences on the society that I think would be irremediable.
An abstract or universal position on insurrection is always going to be problematic, especially since I’d say there’s no one—besides an absolutist tyrant (Kill them all! And make sure it really hurts!)—whose position is going to be consistent. Thomas Jefferson comes to mind, because he’s such a presence in Shadowlands. When it came to the desperate rural folks who rose up in Shay’s Rebellion of 1787 against regressive taxation, which targeted poor farmers—often American Revolutionary war veterans—as the source of funds to repay the loans of war speculators, Jefferson’s take was a tolerant, lenient, if patronizing defense of insurrection as an expression of retained popular sovereignty. As he wrote at the time: “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Jefferson is also the figure among the aristocratic leadership of the revolutionary moment who was closest to more populist radicals like Thomas Paine and whose position comes the closest to admiration for what we now think of as anarchism, stating famously that he thought it possible that a society that existed without government might be best, but was “inconsistent with a great degree of population.” But even Jefferson’s position on popular insurrection was deeply inconsistent, and along painfully predictable lines. The enlightened thinker was also a racist slaveowner—and so the man who rebuked his fellow aristocrats for creating an over-powerful executive in the Constitution, who scolded them specifically for—to his mind—using the false justification of the insurrection of Shay’s rebellion in order to create a more powerful and centralized federal government—is also the same man whose deep fear of the successful insurrection in Haiti found him enraged at the minimal diplomatic openness of his far more conservative sometime-friend/ sometimes-enemy John Adams to the government of that new republic. Jefferson remained terrified to his dying day of the prospect of handing enslaved persons what he called “freedom and a dagger.” And, of course, his is far from the only famous “universal” position to reveal itself as actually not universal, but white.
As for anarchism and the Bundyites—yes, they are often described as anarchists. And there is much in their antinomian milieu, and their emphasis on leaderlessness, sharing all and horizontal networks that sounds like some kind of right-wing Christian anarchism. And there are some among them who really bend this way. But the core tenets of the movement, if we take the ideas of Ammon and people like LaVoy Finicum as the core—are really something else, with a long history in the United States. If we listen to somebody like LaVoy—with his notions of governance reduced to the Constitution, private property, and the ownership of guns to enforce mutual neighborliness, we are talking about a fantasy of white frontier democracy. It’s Jacksonian settler democracy—revamped in the contemporary form of a nomadic, internet-based community, an assemblage of political feeling. The ideological parallels to the ideology of Jackson and his populist movements are pretty consistent in the words of the Bundy family and close allies like Finicum. It’s about minimal government, claimable land and the resultant freedom that was absolutely explicitly white and male in Jackson’s day, if it is only implicitly or latently so in the rhetoric of Bundyism—which tries to profess a contemporary version of universality that Jacksonianism most certainly did not.
Q: You mentioned Wendy Brown, whose work explicitly appears in the book. You add a section at the end of your book discussing some of your sources (Giorgio Agamben for example appears there as well, and you and I have discussed Agamben’s work together over the years). I know that some of your recent teaching was closely related to this book—your course on “Magic and the State,” for example. But Shadowlands treads remarkably lightly when it comes to all of that theoretical homework. Was that your choice? Your editor’s? I recall that two advance publications from the book that appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books were a little heavier on the theory.
A: Yes, those articles did make a few more—if brief—direct references to theorists, not so many really, but a few notable ones. When it came to writing the book, it seemed to me pretty quickly that the story of Malheur and the landscapes and the histories that traverse it were incredibly rich. It seemed to me that I needed to mostly stay in that story—but in a rather ample sense of the story, one that included its places and histories. There is a lot of thinking in the book, but to keep from thinking about the tale too much and too often from outside its own idioms, I wanted a lot of the thinking and primary terms of the book’s thought to emerge from the story, from its words, from its places and from its people, contemporary and historical, living and dead. It seemed to me the book needed to think inside the images and language of the tale, of the landscapes it touched, and the histories it pulled into view; it needed to get with those images and figures and phrases and stay with them.
A much more theoretical book wouldn’t have allowed that to the extent that seemed needed to me. It would have been abstract to a different degree than a more literary approach, and to me this story was partly about the potential dangers of really big abstractions—particularly the set of abstractions Ammon and friends sought to impose on the particular earth and history of Harney County, Oregon.
And I was pleased with how naturally the book found its own terminology in the words of the people in it: “The Beautiful Pattern”, “Communities of Dirt”, etc. So, the limiting of direct, extended and overt engagement with Theory with a capital T and with particular theorists, was a conscious plan of mine from the outset. That said, the work of certain theorists which I’d spent a lot of time unpacking with students at CalArts, proved very helpful in thinking about the story of Malheur as it unfolded.
Q: Michael Taussig’s work was an important reference for you.
A: Yes, Taussig’s work around magical practices of the State—especially his attention to the way State fetishisms congeal around ceremonies and objects which leak an aura of violence—was tremendously helpful in thinking about the lethality and the deathliness of State Magic that so marked the story of Malheur. An example would be in the shooting death of LaVoy Finicum, where the video images of his death became—seen through Patriot movement eyes—the images of a sacrifice in which Finicum, the living, breathing person with all his interesting flesh and blood complications and contradictions, was transformed into a political martyr, into a kind of secular (and not so secular) Holy Name. In the weeks before the combined FBI and Oregon State Police operation in which the leadership of the occupation was taken into custody and in which Finicum was killed, the undergirding teleology of the occupation, its theological drive, seemed to be funneling events toward some kind of culminating sacrifice of this nature. Harney County Sheriff David Ward, commented on this, calling the Bundyites a death cult. I don’t think Dave was wrong in that analysis. The theologized logic of the State is quite deathly and the occupation was dependent on that logic for the meanings—often expressed as intense feelings of community—the occupiers were able to extract from the “standoff” situation and circulate via the internet just through gathering and lingering in the proximity and under the continually building threat of lethal stately punishment. This was the dark side of what one of the wittier occupiers termed “Our Rural Electrification Project.”
The role of violence and death was brought home for me especially in the way patriot supporters of the occupiers flocked to the death site of Finicum in the days after his death—and the way this activity contrasted with the totally different traditionalist approach to sites of violent death described in the book by Burns Paiute Tribal Archeologist Diane Teeman. Diane describes how such sites are to be avoided, or only approached with ritual caution—how they are not sites for the ritual foundation of human geographies, not sites for congregating in and for the planting of flags and such. In the web of relations that traverse a living landscape, and intertwine the living and the dead, death sites are sites of danger for Diane and other Paiute traditionalists. Her take highlighted for me how much sovereign stately geography is pinned to earth with monuments to violent sacrifice of some kind, how deathly that geography is, how dead our official maps are with their unknown soldiers, battle memorials, Dead Father statues, tombs of great leaders, and all those dead Holy Names.
Q: This takes us back to the question of feeling. There is a lot of “feeling” in the book, especially on the side of the Bundys. But you too confess to having some strong feelings—about the land you live in, move through, and write about, for example. At the same time, you’re careful to say at several points in the book that you “disagree” or “agree” with your interlocutors—a choice of words that I read as deliberate, naming a mode of engagement that’s different from the “feelings” that are on display in much of your account. After completing this book, how do you feel about feeling? Is there too much of it out there (or in here, in us?)? Does it eclipse agreement or disagreement? You’re a poet as well, and poetry is sometimes—rightly or wrongly—associated with “feelings,” not so much with agreement/ disagreement. Did you come to this book because of your interest in feeling, and then somehow ended up agreeing and disagreeing in its pages? Was Shadowlands always intended to be a work of non-fiction? Was there a moment where you conceived of it as poetry?
A: I don’t know if I understand “agreement and disagreement” as being distinct from “feeling.” Opinion seems a site where reason often works in the service of passion. I think—and I get this simple argument from David Graeber—that our societal over-investment in our opinions may be partly a symptom of how democracy is impounded in the American Republic at present, or maybe structurally from the beginning as in Zephaniah Swift’s image. Overinvestment in opinion, Graeber suggests, is a symptom of, among other things, alienated voting—of political life being reduced to one gerrymandered vote, or one blue state or red state vote. If one doesn’t believe one actually has influence in the creation of meaningful consensus and collective action all you have is your opinion and you can make your stand for freedom there. I’d say there is some truth to this take and maybe that is why standoffs—and government shutdowns—seem such a political form of our time. I’d venture that in our now regular government shutdowns perhaps we see our legislators—and our media—become expressions of the dead end of opinion that they help to create.
When it comes to Shadowlands, I don’t think I came to the book out of a specific interest in feeling, and I don’t think that the book for me is mainly about agreement or disagreement with any of its parties, though there is plenty of that. As I say more than once in the book, I think the Bundyite position on public land is terrible. My “opinion” on that never changed really, but if the book had been about exposing how Bundy ideas about public land are bad—well—there’s just no book there. They are obviously bad ideas if you are ecologically minded at all. If you think just for a moment about local rural communities, they are also bad. (That’s not the same thing as saying that the federal government’s land management practices are uniformly good, they are certainly not. They are often quite dysfunctional. But that’s just simply widely known throughout the West—and it is one thing everyone, including federal employees, can mostly agree on, even if there is much dispute on the specifics.)
None of this is what’s really interesting about the people who occupied the refuge. More interesting is: why did this set of patently bad ideas—the Bundyite solutions to federal land management conundrums—energize these people, essentially none of them ranchers, in this intense way? “Feeling” is certainly part of the answer. Politics is always about mobilizing currents of feeling and turning them into power, which is one of the reasons I was so struck by occupier Neil Wampler’s figure for what he and his friends were doing: “Rural Electrification.” But more specifically, I found that the answer to what galvanized people about the Bundy thing had to do with the specific sorts of feelings the Bundys were offering, huge religious impulses really. That I found tremendously interesting, especially in the way that religious current connected to the ways history and past theological modes of understanding and being—“sovereign feelings” if you will—remain operative in living persons. All these feelings are surging in our apocalyptic moment. And I think we have to be serious about that: that this is a properly apocalyptic moment. That’s not hyperbole, it’s description. This specific human world we live in in this country will not last, it is not working, despite its present seeming—I’d say illusory—daily (often marginal) functionality, despite its ability still, for the moment, to maintain a large amount of people in relative physical comfort—fed, clothed, et cetera. The psychic discomfort, however, is marked across all sectors of American life.
And how could it not be. We have the return of the repressed past—and the ongoing white backlash that’s characterized our domestic politics since the Civil Rights era—fracturing the amnesia on which American dreams of an ethical freedom and prosperity are based. Meanwhile, dystopian hints of the world to come continually undermine hopes of a just future of shared prosperity—one example would be the realities of large homeless encampments in our largest richest cities, now partly populated, in California and elsewhere, by people displaced by climate change related calamities.
Given all that, I don’t know if I think there is too much feeling going on exactly. I think some people are just having to have more ugly feelings these days about American life than maybe they used to. And certainly the persistent, historical experiences of folks whose voices have been actively excluded from the public sphere, are now being heard with more frequency and amplification.
So I think what we are talking about when we talk about feeling right now is the distribution of feeling and the qualities of feelings in question, and the insistent demands they have on us. To me this seems to have a lot to do with technology on one hand—how present feeling can be made in a super-intimate but also freakily disembodied way through our devices and hyperconnectivity—and also, on the other hand, to have much do with the fact this this country as an idea simply doesn’t work right now, and may never work. The nation is largely built on amnesia and on lies about itself that it needs to believe to function. It seems often that it simply cannot handle its own historical weight. At the same time its economy, like the global economy, depends on ideologies of modernity and progress to not seem like institutionalized brutality, and those ideologies, like the economy itself have been revealed to be unsustainable. The Earth itself as an actor is informing us of this, of the limits of our American civilization. In response some dream of building walls, while others dream of expanding the American frontier myth to Mars—which seems mostly like a fantasy of finding a way to live like settlers inside our phones. Meanwhile in the milieus that flicker through the worlds that the Bundyites emerge from, some are preparing for societal breakdown in apocalyptic prepper or armed militia fantasy modes, or both. The conspiracy images that pass from mouth to mouth—and Facebook page to Facebook page—in that world include stories of how “rural Americans” will soon be rounded up and placed in FEMA camps in service of a global, secular humanist environmentalist agenda. These images—Mars Colony, Border Wall, FEMA Camp—are figures conjured in the various collective minds of a body politic that knows that at least some of the institutional forms of its world are soon to enter their death throes, or be massively transformed. If an American “we” exists, it knows something else is coming. We know that we don’t seem capable of authoring that future with any collective, compassionate, consensus of purpose. And we have a lot of feelings about that. Those feelings cannot be ignored or reasoned away; they must be collectively acknowledged, engaged, sat with and worked through. It’s very difficult to imagine that happening at the moment. Poetry is one place—a very small one!— that some people try to imagine this sitting with/ working through as possible. That said, I never thought to tell the story of Malheur in verse.
Q: One of the things I appreciated most about the book—and this continues our conversation about “feeling”—is that Shadowlands does not include knee-jerk reactions. When people “in your spheres” react to the trial of the Malheur Occupiers conveying “horror and shock”—“How could these guys get off? White privilege strikes again, etc.”—you don’t join “the chorus”. You write that “being at the trial had changed the terms for me—it had become a different battle in a different terrain” (318). Again and again, I was struck reading this book how much careful reading the Malheur Occupation and the trial afterwards requires. It seems only a very good reader could have made sense of it all. Is this part of what you tried to convey in the book? Were you reading the occupation and the trial in part to counter knee-jerk reactions on all sides? Another way of asking this would be: did you ever hope—perhaps in vain—that the book would be able to establish some common ground among more or less reasonable folks? Also—and we can perhaps close with this, we’ve covered a lot of ground: What are some of the reactions you’ve received to the book from people you’ve interviewed, or from the audience at your public readings?
A: Well, I want to be clear that the book does chronicle some of the “knee-jerk” reactions of its narrator, as well as the narrator’s sympathy with certain kinds of reactions—notably in the example you give above. I’m sure I would have seen the verdict in the same way, if I hadn’t been there—especially given how out in the Harney Basin the Bundyites had basically assembled a live-streamed wild-west reenactment of white settlement in a place where the violence of that original settlement was considerable and, crucially, in doing so had positioned themselves in the role of the aggrieved, a move that had become very familiar to anyone paying any attention to Fox News and other reactive expressions of white right wing grievance politics during the Obama years. In the milieu of 2016, without there being much coverage of the trial, and with most folks knowing little of the details of the events of the occupation, it’s understandable many people would have seen the trial results as an offense. Nobody knew, for example, that the federal government had built its case around a key piece of high impact evidence—occupier video footage of a crazy seeming weapons training, with semi-automatic rifles, out in the snowy marshlands of the refuge. It turned out, thanks to the intrepid work of two defense attorneys, Lisa Maxfield and Tiffany Harris, and the hunch of one of the many curious characters among the occupiers—Matthew Deatherage, an anti-Trump libertarian, and Montessori education and Tibetan independence advocate—that the person who led that training in that key piece of video evidence was an FBI informant. This was revealed literally at the very last moment of the trial—the defense tracked down this guy in Vegas and subpoenaed him, and so under oath he was forced to reveal his true identity on the stand. And that was the end of more than a month of testimony. The FBI, through the actions of its paid informant, was essentially leading the weapons training that was the government’s main image and proof of intimidation, and intimidation, specifically the intent to intimidate, was the fundamental issue in the trial, due to the nature of the conspiracy to intimidate charges.
The issue of intimidation is part of why the terrain had changed, now that we were in court. For one, as I said earlier, the use of the conspiracy to intimidate charge in the Malheur trial should probably be seen as potentially ominous by activists of all kinds. Anyone who has been involved in unionization campaigns has likely been accused of “intimidation” –disingenuously I’d say—for the simple act of knocking on doors and asking folks if they wanted to talk about the labor issues involved in the campaign. The Right consistently clamors for Black Lives Matter to be labeled a domestic terrorist organization, for its supposed intimidation of police officers. The president recently called for Antifa and anti-ICE protestors to be designated domestic terrorists, and those calls have been echoed all over the right.
In our political impasses, calling the other side “domestic terrorists” has become alarmingly commonplace. This becomes no less alarming in the light of the actual existence of demented and hateful persons in atomized social networks willing and able to return the historical outbursts of racist genocidal settler violence that accompanied the frontier and the extra-judicial anti-black violence of the reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, into the public spaces of post-frontier America, as in the atrocity committed this past summer in El Paso, or the massacre in Charleston in 2015. Charleston and El Paso are horrors that exhaust our vocabularies—domestic terrorism seems hardly sufficient a name for them, but if domestic terrorism is a thing, surely these are instances of it. At the same time it seems clear to me we have to be careful hurling this legal term around blithely as an epithet, as rhetoric—especially when that rhetoric derives from something as fundamentally troubling as the Patriot Act. And it is the Patriot Act’s definition of domestic terrorism that is behind the President’s and other—bi-partisan—uses of the term. That definition is fairly dependent on “intimidation.” And that’s a slippery word—a really complicated thing when it comes to the Law and the authorized use of the legal violence of law enforcement.
It’s complicated because neither can we say that “intimidation” is something the Law cannot or should not take into account. If we have law and law enforcement it must do this in some way—to prevent people from being threatened and abused in their communities and homes over disagreements political and otherwise, or in the terrifying and often deadly situations of domestic violence that occur daily across the country. But we can see quickly how slippery intimidation becomes as a justification for calling in the armed bodies of the State when we consider how clearly comfortable some persons—usually white—have been and continue to be in calling in the police to intervene in the allegedly “intimidating” presence of black persons, including children. And then this gets trickier when we get into political life, public life, where the issue of popular sovereignty enters. If ICE officers claim they are being “intimidated” by protestors protesting their work at their jobs, I’d say this might be best seen as an attempt to disable the ability of the People to call out the behavior of their government by using a charge of intimidation to intimidate people away from organized action. It’s similar with the often disingenuous charges of “intimidation” against door-to-door canvassers. But that doesn’t mean we can just ignore the issue of “intimidation” whenever the situation is a political speech one. We cannot ignore how extra-judicial intimidation has been central to white supremacy in the American context: a generalized climate of total intimidation, punctuated with cross burnings and actual murder have all been part of the nominally extra-legal effort to enforce, so often very successfully, the supremacy of white being and the priority of white property—including against the legally held property of non-white folks. In the Western context the Paiute of the Great Basin experienced the frontier versions of this kind of violence and intimidation—both in terms of assaults on their reservation and violent vigilante assaults on their individual property rights when individual Natives sought to take up the promise of white property owning freedom on its terms. And this forms the still rather recent—if selectively repressed—historical background of the neo-settler action of the Bundyites at Malheur. This is true even if the occupiers did not see themselves as attempting to intimidate the local citizenry, even if at no point did they engage in armed confrontation with the federal land management officials they were charged with conspiring to intimidate, even if they were able to continually highlight the fact that they were visited daily by lots of local people (often with their children in tow), bringing gifts of food and firewood.
But I want to return to your question and what you said about reading issues and events like the occupation and the trial. I’d probably use the word “description” as opposed to “reading”—but descriptive analysis is really “reading” so reading seems like a fine synonym. I wanted to approach the story in ways that culled out complexities, entanglements, ecologies, and histories with their often painful ironies. And I think the book does that throughout. Whether I have faith—and whether I had it during the writing of the book— that engaged description of this nature can really bring about more consensus-based action among current political foes, I’m not so sure. Maybe the book and its narrator occasionally feel this way as the story takes specific turns and dwells in them. (I don’t see the narrator as being identical to myself, I see him as a site, an object as much as a subject—wherein certain images and figures that emerge from the events can detonate and/ or develop. And where certain ideas or possibilities can have a stage.) Certainly, there are some moments where flickerings of possible collaboration across the so-called partisan divide appear in the book, and yet also many or most of those can be seen also as stories and images of impasse; the story of Jason Patrick of the Bundyites and Teressa Raiford of the Black Lives Matter group Don’t Shoot Portland is maybe the most compelling example. Despite their shared positions on police violence and militarization, and Jason’s support for Teressa and friends’ positions re: the racism of Portland policing, the different histories involved in Jason’s group and Teressa’s group, and the role of race in those histories—and the different notions of freedom involved—made alliance impossible.
The one place where consensus-based action across the famous partisan divide actually happens in the book, is with the High Desert Partnership in Harney County—where conservative ranchers and liberal environmentalists have been able to work with federal land managers on ecological restoration projects. There it is both the exhaustion engendered by decades of political impasse and the shared attachment of all involved to the land of Harney County that has allowed this improbable collaboration to sprout.
I think earthly attachment is also behind the methods of Shadowlands, behind my investment as a writer in embodied description. It seems to me I wrote the book in order to better understand the world I found myself in, in order to dwell better in the specific earthly place, the Intermountain West, where I find myself—and to which I have become profoundly attached.
Q: We’ve talked quite a bit about land. Other non-human beings have an important role in your book: the desert tortoise, and of course the birds that are so prominent in Shadowlands’ third section. As we’re wrapping this up, I’m just looking again at Joan Cocks’ book On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions, which takes from indigenous politics a criticism of human exceptionalism and a focus on relationality that undermines property as the basic value of sovereignty. Is it from thinking with the tortoise, and the birds, and—ultimately—the land itself that in your view other, perhaps un-sovereign political futures will come about?
A: I’d like to write a book that had considerable narrative momentum, as this book does thanks to the events of the occupation and the trial, where the main character was a landscape, and where its non-human persons were central actors. There are little glimpses of this in Shadowlands—but the book remains pinned fairly tightly to human events and persons.
Critiques of human exceptionalism have been growing in academic and non-academic circles certainly—and here the influence of Native thought, of feminist ecological thought, and of ecological history combined with new work in biology have really successfully undermined the notions of ahistorical nature and species autopoiesis that complement individualist and property oriented human histories. Instead terms like “assemblage”, “entanglement”, “symbiosis”, and “sym-poiesis” emerge across disciplines. (The work of Anna Tsing has been tremendously important to me as I reflect on my experience of the Malheur story—the whole saga can be seen as a story of life in a rural capitalist ruin, to use Tsing’s terminology.)
All these “new” ways of understanding earthly relations certainly help to draw attention to indigenous forms of knowledge which are finally being listened to in more and more sectors—though there’s a very long way to go there. Native perspectives, as well as climate science, ecology and the discoveries being made by biologists in other disciplines, all tend to undermine property as a basic unit of sovereignty—in multiple senses of “property” and “the proper.” The level of relationality that Diane Teeman asks us to contemplate in Shadowlands when she describes Paiute land relationships is totally at odds with white sovereign notions of property in terms of land ownership. It also undermines claims to the proper beyond just the big issue of sovereignty over land. In traditional Paiute practices, sovereignty over one’s self seems a much more complicated thing—one’s power, life force—called “puha” in Paiute—comes from outside, from the landscape, from the snowy mountains, from other non-human creatures, from fire, from everything, the web of relation that is landscape. And this means one’s puha is also part of that landscape, lingering in the things you use and make and the places you’ve acted, creating sites of power and danger—it is all relationality, an ecology that is also cultural and historical.
As a description of earthly life Western science has just been catching up with the profound insights at the heart of Paiute practice—which emerges from a very old culture that learned collectively, collaboratively to cull sustenance—and meaning and joy—from a landscape which outsiders see as frightfully barren. This required centuries of attention to the entanglement of everything. All this kind of wisdom was completely ignored when white sovereign property came to the Intermountain West. Only now is the larger culture just beginning to face the full extent of the ecological catastrophe that that invasion, and all the other forms that invasion took across the globe, was from its beginning—locally and globally.
And maybe this is what the Malheur occupation was ultimately about for me: the intertwining of Stately Sovereignty and private property in the auratic violence that is the secular theology—and sacred geography—of the American Thing. Our American property lines are lines of secular magic traced on the earth by surveyors, secret priests of the invisible church of our settler nation. (It’s important to remember that surveying was the first profession of “the father of the nation,” George Washington, whose illegal real estate speculation in Native land in the Ohio Valley can be seen as a prime motivation for his participation in the American Revolution.) Those survey lines are then reified materially and continually with legal violence and intimidation. This secular transmogrification is the abstraction of the incommensurable earth into scalable, exchangeable portions without regard to the entanglement, to the ecological relationships that are the basis of earthly life. And this abstraction, at the core of modernity, is killing us—if us is “modern” human civilization. It will probably kill us unless we turn in a new direction today. I read the Bundyites as doing the opposite of turning away, doubling down—fetishistically—on property and sovereignty. I read their fetishism not as an anomaly but as an extreme expression of American society at the impasse it currently finds itself in. It’s tremendously difficult to turn away from property and the way it organizes being, it feels impossible. Maybe it feels impossible partly because turning in a new direction also requires a kind of collective dying—and I think this is the often misunderstood argument of Roy Scranton—a dying to the world that has unsustainably and deeply imperfectly sustained (some of) us up till now. This kind of dying may be necessary for new possibilities to finally more fully appear. If this sounds like a religious practice as much as an intellectual, political or aesthetic one, it’s because it probably is. To my mind, any practice of decathexis from unsustainable, Western petroleum culture, also asks human beings to understand birds, tortoises and other living creatures—as well as landscapes themselves—as persons. On the American scene, this is something Native peoples have already been doing for a very long time.
This review has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.
a review of Colin Dayan, In the Ghost of her Belly (LARB 2019)
by D. Gilson
Death hung around my house. No way around fate, that’s what my mother told me.
“Once something bad happens, it will happen again.”
“My mother’s indifference dismantled my life,” Colin Dayan writes in her new memoir, for “out of the dust and confusion of my childhood, only the desire to escape emerges” (109). In the Belly of Her Ghost (LARB True Stories, 2018) is at turns a gentle meditation on escape and a violent exorcism of that constant, thrumming, haunting Oedipal yank, that tide that brings us back again and again to our mothers. Or, as Saeed Jones ends his own recent memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives (2019), “Our mothers are why we are here” (190). They are, he’s right. How could we, whether we want to or not, ever escape them?
The market of mother-fixated memoirs bubbles over. These include those written by celebrities, such as Melissa Rivers’ The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation (2015) and Wishful Drinking (2008) by Carrie Fisher. The seminal of the literary memoir itself has often been mother-obsessed, such as Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (1995) and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle (2005). Also, gorgeous tomes that break with conventional form, such as the graphic Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama (2012) by Alison Bechdel, or the comic-reveling Running With Scissors (2002) from Augusten Burroughs. There are lyric meditations on mothers in prosody coming from poets, such as Saeed Jones’ aforementioned How We Fight for Our Lives (2019) and The Long Goodbye (2008) by Meghan O’Rourke. There are those memoirs penned by the children of famous literary mothers, like Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother (1994) by Linda Gray Sexton and I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This (2016) by Nadja Spiegelman. And this is all not to mention the glut of memoirs by mothers themselves.
This list is hardly exhaustive, though even in its brevity, it begs the question: do we need another memoir about a mother, however extraordinary the circumstances between mother and child might have been. I might have been wont to answer, “Probably not,” but then Colin Dayan’s trailblazing memoir arrived in my mailbox, and I’ve been forced to reverse this impulsive answer completely. For Dayan’s slim memoir “doesn’t read like a conventional narrative,” Jane Tompkins explains in her Los Angeles Times review of the book, “It’s about a woman who tries to exorcise the ghost of her deceased mother through writing.” Tompkins is right; In the Belly of Her Ghost is an inherited reckoning. But I want to take the space offered by this longer review to talk about the book’s delightfully complicated existence. For “I know that I will never be free of the past,” Dayan chants, “that it will never quit feeding on the present” (79). Thank God we get to live in Dayan’s menacing, always-feeding, gorgeous, complicated present, a present that cannot shake off the past.
Namely, I believe Colin Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost generatively complicates four questions to which too many memoirs offer ready-made answers: 1) what is a mother? 2) what is a child? 3) what is race? and 4) what is the act of creative nonfiction-ing?
I: What is a mother?
“What has availed
Or failed?
Or will avail?”
—Robert Penn Warren, “Question and Answer”
Penn Warren’s poem is not about mothers or mothering or being mothered. But the questions he asks offer us an interesting entry into considering how the mother functions as a narrative device. Many memoirs celebrate the triumphant mother, the one who has availed; mourn the disastrous mother, the one who has failed; or imagine alternative pasts or futures of the one who will avail. In the Belly of Her Ghost offers no simple progenitor for us to instantly recognize and digest. Instead, Dayan offers us a complex figure who defies our recognition, queers it, and makes us re-approach the mothers in our own lives and in the other texts we consume. Aren’t we all always, after all, consuming mothers one or another? Or perhaps, instead, we find ourselves being consumed?
“Who was the sacrifice,” Dayan wonders, “my mother or me?” (43) The question comes early, but haunts the life, and afterlife, of the memoir, for sacrifice is always central to how Dayan and her mother relate, at times failing to relate, to one another. “As a child, I was in awe of the woman,” Dayan begins, “She laughed at me, screamed at me. She shunned me, but now, dead, she stays close. Sometimes she comes down the wall like a spider” (3). But who was this woman-cum-spider, and who is she still? The web of her identity confuses Dayan, and thus us, and draws one in. This mother was born in Haiti and could never, or would never, articulate her biracialness, though so much of her life was spent attempting to pass for white in public, while privately conjuring the songs of her childhood Caribbean home. Soon after this mother’s family immigrated to New York, she, aged 17, went on a date with man twenty years her senior. This man, “took her to the circus. He tried to teach her to ride horses and eat mussels” (7). Dayan never knows if her mother wanted to go with her father to the circus in the first place, but
That same year, my mother traveled from Brooklyn to a honeymoon in Mexico. They traveled around for two years, then to Nashville and, finally, to Atlanta. The South must have seemed to her like a cross between Haiti and New York. ‘I would have been an actress,’ she told me. ‘Then I met your father.’ But she never stopped acting. She lived to be looked at. (8)
By the time Dayan joined this cross-cultural family – her mother, a biracial Haitian immigrant, and her father, a Jewish immigrant from X – they were living in the cultural capital of the Jim Crow South. They were passing for white, or an acceptable shade of off-white, a type of sacrifice in and of itself that allowed them access to many, if not all, of Atlanta’s institutions. The family’s origin was thus muddled. For “in the south,” Dayan argues, “domesticity and chatter and ease are almost always accompanied by something gross. The sweetest memory depends on the shattered life of whatever is granted neither leisure nor mercy” (30).
We are almost always seeking out our origins, often to our betterment, and often to our detriment. In August of 2019, The New York Times launched the 1619 Project in observation of the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves arriving to Point Comfort, Virginia; the project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” This is a worthwhile endeavor, to be sure. Conversely, in late 2018 Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren joined a swath of white Americans taking home DNA tests – such as Ancestry or 23andMe – in attempt to prove valid her claims of “authentic” Native American heritage; CNN reports that Stanford geneticist Carlos Bustamante, who analyzed Warren’s results, “places Warren’s Native American ancestor between six and 10 generations ago, with the report estimating eight generations.” Such focus on race’s chimerical and arbitrary nature is dangerous. Or to echo Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin, Jr., “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It… [dishonors] legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.” On the one hand, our search for our very origin can be a productive act of cultural and artistic reckoning; and on the other, our search can lead us to the abyss of reinforcing the appropriative violence that is certainly one of our American heritages.
Thankfully, Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost does not become the former. And though it is certainly an origin story, the book succeeds, in part, because I believe Dayan is seeking not her origin, per se, but to understand, and to reckon with, the remaining ghost of her mother, or mothers, because, she writes, “the dead remain hidden in us. But from time to time they make themselves known” (127). I say mothers in the plural in the most literal sense possible. For yes, Dayan’s biological mother was the Haitian woman passing for white in Atlanta, the thwarted actress, the doll in a beaded gown who would pass by (and through) Dayan’s ear singing Sinatra or bits of songs in the haunting lilt of French Creole. But there was another mother in Dayan’s life, the one I find too few reviews of the book have given her due. This mother was the charged with keeping the household in order like a fine-tuned engine. This mother was a black woman named Lucille.
“Only two people mattered to me, and they are still on my mind,” Dayan writes (31). One was Thomas, the family’s yardman. And the other? “Lucille, the woman who raised me,” Dayan admits, “and, I almost wrote, ‘the love of my life’” (31). Whereas Dayan’s biological mother was, in many ways, a ghostly figure moving violently through Dayan’s childhood, Lucille offered corollary: “Lucille gave me joy… She taught me the kind of dread that as also desire: the longing to go out of this world and know what can’t be seen” (33). The caricature of the black “mammie” is all-too alive and well in Southern literature; one need only look as far back as Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 book The Help, which became a star-studded film. But even if Lucille might become such a caricature in lesser hands, in Dayan’s thoughtful, careful prose she is the mother Dayan needed — not perfect, but not ghostly, which is to say, present.
“Lucille told me bedtime stories,” (36) Dayan explains, and “she saved me from the Lord’s fury, even though she scared the living daylights out of me” (40). This both-and-ness, the story teller and the fear maker, existed holistically in the relationship between Lucille and Dayan, a mixture I suspect should exist between every mother and child, especially those of the American South. And lest we forget: though Lucille was black, it is clear Dayan was not exactly white, no matter how hard her biological mother tried to hide this fact. Lucille, thankfully to Dayan, did not try to hide this fact, but let the color of their lives pass over them as if it was a quilt not to be hidden away in the humid heat of Atlanta. Lucille “must have known my mother was not really white,” Dayan explains, “but it didn’t matter anyway, and she called me her baby. It was all confused.” The memoir relishes in that confusion – particularly of who is the mother, and of what race even means at every corner – and it is the better for relishing in that very space of perplexity.
And as with her biological mother, Dayan continues to be haunted by Lucille, too, a haunting that places the woman less as family servant, and more as competing matriarch, even in her various reincarnations in the afterlife. “Lucille died,” Dayan writes, “My story begins. She was never gone, but stayed with me in the dirt or in the wind, surprising me just when I thought I had survived the night terrors… She came before me just as she told me she would” (39).
It is perhaps easy to read both mothers as failing, and indeed, in many ways they “fail.” But they also persist, and as Jack Halberstam argues, “if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards” (2011: 3). Dayan’s matriarchal origins are so out-of-focus, they fail on the level of absolute knowledge; but is that a failure? Or instead, does the slippery nature of motherhood in In the Belly of Her Ghost offer us different, perhaps better, rewards? In short, yes, resoundedly yes. Or as Dayan’s mother tells her, “We’re in a hole. I cannot exactly catch onto the rope to get out without hurting you. So we’ll never find each other, but maybe there are other ways to make our lives mean something when words are dead” (139). In the Belly of Her Ghost offers us a completely unique and appropriately complex vocabulary to discuss mothers, mothering, and motherhood, a vocabulary we lack because the words are coming to us already dead, and the book, in its conjuring of the ghostly, brings them back to life. And as the slim volume centralizes the ghostliness of mothers, it also brings into question the existence of children.
II: What is a child?
“Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Children’s Hour”
Longfellow argues, oddly enough for the nineteenth century, that the night and all its mysteries belong to children. The night, that time full of mystery, yes, but also the unknown, and the unknown danger, and the unknown danger that you know is there and yet cannot name. In In the Belly of Her Ghost, Colin Dayan works in this lineage, queering the line between child and adult, daughter and mother at every turn.
And what is Dayan’s childhood, or better said, how do we come to spiritually experience it? For as Longfellow argues, Dayan’s childhood is lived “between the dark and the daylight.” We know Dayan’s childhood is perpetual, as she is always haunted by both her mother and Lucille, despite how much she ages. And despite where she visits or lives — Philadelphia, New York, Paris, Haiti, Nashville — it is always and forever a Southern childhood of Atlanta. For Dayan, and thus for us, that Southerness is palpable; “pussy and possum,” she writes, almost prays, “that’s about as close as I can get to my sense of the South: sticky, hot, and unusually cruel” (24). The comparison to other great Southern memoirs — especially Dorothy Allison’s semi-autobiographical Bastard Out of Carolina—would be easy to make, given Dayan’s shared focus on the potential and often simultaneous beauty and cruelty of Southern childhoods in their specificity. But whereas Bastard and other memoirs of the Southern canon enlighten readers to that particular brand of Southern poverty, Dayan offers us a unique vision of childhood in the South that I’ve yet to experience: one where glamour is always on the edges.
Glamour rests on the edges like the photographs that punctuate In the Belly of Her Ghost, photographs that, in essence, spawn the writing of the memoir itself, which originates with Dayan receiving her mother’s earthly possessions and sifting through them (almost like a spider, the creatures that also punctuate the memoir). One photograph shows Dayan and mother on the flagstone patio of their northeast Atlanta home. “We look uncomfortable,” Dayan writes, “caught in a pose that tries to appear natural when everything about it is strained” (110). Dayan is dressed in a ballerinas’ outfit, replete with tutu and tiara, a look we are led to believe was not her usual finery. But then there’s her mother, within whom, Dayan describes, a grace and “lightness takes shape, as my eye follows her legs, taut and lean under her tight skirt, up to the hip casually slung, to the right arm, with bangles on the wrist and a cigarette held loosely in her hand” (110). It’s the picture, quite literally, of mid-twentieth-century Southern metropolitan elegance. But of course, for both mother and daughter, that elegance comes at a cost of mysterious measure: “the eyes are strained,” Dayan continues describing her mother, “too much of the eyebrow is plucked, and the face, though beautiful, looks dead, the smile held too long” (110-111). The cost, I suspect, as is the cost in many passing narratives of the American South in particular, is the desire to both belong and to be. Or as Dayan’s father tells her earlier with a sigh, “it’s no good to be too strange in a country you love” (8).
Lucille and Dayan’s mother are not the only ghosts we reckon with here. That child in the ballerina get up, or that same child frying chicken in the kitchen with Lucille, or singing “Dixie” in Mrs. Guptill’s fifth grade class, later to irritate her parents and Lucille by taking the side of Civil Rights activists, that child that is Dayan herself, we reckon with her ghost, too, even though Dayan makes clear that “I hate my own nostalgia, [for] it goes against the grain of everything I believe in” (69). But what do we have beyond our nostalgia in the very act of writing a memoir? How do we answer the question of the children we were, and in many ways, will always be? This perpetual child is complex, admittedly, or as Kathryn Bond Stockton contends, “what a child ‘is’ is a darkening question. The question of the child makes us climb into a cloud… leading us, in moments, to cloudiness and ghostliness surrounding children as figures in time” (2009: 2). In the Belly of the Ghost forces us to face this cloudiness, this ghostliness, however, and shows us that we are all, as Dayan models, children or figures fallen out of time.
Dayan allows us to unpack, consider closely, and make altars of her mother’s things alongside her because she’s not only a child fallen out of time, but, as Dayan confesses, she always “longed for [Mother’s]things as if they might magically transform my childhood irrelevance” (140). We are allowed to journey with her in attempt to transform the very tropes of childhood in literature itself. We are led, all-too-often, to believe that childhood itself is something we grow out of and shed; what is the twisted moral of Peter Pan, after all, if not that we all, every last one of us, must grow up? In the Belly of Her Ghost offers the lingering ghostliness of childhood to which Bond Stockton alludes. It is as if, Dayan seems to be learning, and thus we alongside her, we are playing dress up with decaying clothes, and yet clothes that never leave us entirely. Such as a heavily beaded outfit of her mother’s Dayan finds in a box after her mother’s death. “Things, like ghosts, know what they want,” Dayan writes when she finds the “evening gown and jacket, covered in blue and white sequins… I remembered how it held her body in its weight and beauty. The dress was more alive than my mother’s smile” (141). But when Dayan gives the dress to Goodwill, the dress, her mother, her childhood, is not done with her: “I walked back to the garage. There on the floor lay a small sequined belt. I picked it up and held my mother’s tight little waist in my hand. It is not easy to tell a ghost story that is not meant to frighten” (141). Childhood, like the belt, like the act of playing dress up, wants us to return to it, to be haunted by it, however frightening that prospect might be.
Here, Dayan revels in the ghostliness of her childhood. She continues to live it, to face it, to make more and more life out of it. In the Belly of Her Ghost is “an elegy with a covert manifesto of hope,” Andrea Luka Zimmerman writes. This revelry, of both elegy and hope for the child that was, and yet, remains, is a necessary performance that too many memoirs are unable or not willing to take on. For this mixed-race child of immigrants always and forever on the edges of glamour and ruin is story that needs to be told.
III: What is race?
“The poet invents heroic moments where the pale black ancestor stands up
on behalf of the race… She can see silent spaces
but not what they signify, graphite markings in a forester’s code.”
—Elizabeth Alexander, “Race”
For those of us in the American South, whether by birth or migration, by choice or by necessity, and whether white or black or otherwise, we know race is key, albeit unstable centrality of our identity. Likewise, Roderick A. Ferguson contends that when “analyzed in terms of subjectivity, race helps to locate the ways in which identities are constituted” (207). Races constituted as non-white, at the height of Jim Crow in the South, nonetheless, are particularly analyzed and re-analyzed, subject to a haunting that will follow the body from birth well beyond death. Colin Dayan’s search for the ghost of her family’s — and thus her own — race is perhaps the squeaky mechanism that she must oil again and again. The pulley that, no matter how much she greases it, will not turn smoothly. In this way, In the Belly of Her Ghost becomes both a narrative of passing and of diaspora.
Dayan’s mother, at the bequest of her wealthy husband — a prominent business owner of Atlanta society, perhaps despite his Jewishness — publicly played down her Haitian identity. Thus, her passing as white became a timely desire for Southern ease in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Or as Dayan writes, “this denial of her history was not anything like a grab for white power and privilege, but rather a casual act performed in exchange for a lifestyle of luxury, which just happened to be white,” adding that “this false if stylish veneer killed her spirit and destroyed any chance for happiness” (9). Though it perhaps “destroyed any chance for happiness,” it provided afternoons of sitting with friends in fabulous dresses drinking cocktails and listening to Frank Sinatra. Nights at The Standard Club, an Atlanta golf course and dinner society. But on the flipside of her easy white life, Dayan’s mother had in her employ two distinctly black bodies: Lucille and Thomas. “I hear my mother ringing the bronze bell my father brought back from Czechoslovakia in 1946,” Dayan remembers, “In the morning when she awakened, she called for Lucille to bring her breakfast in bed” (32). So of course, the mother’s passing had a cost not only for herself, but also for those around her, her competing matriarch Lucille, who could never pass as white, especially. But what strikes me in In the Belly of Her Ghost now is the effect her mother’s passing had on Dayan herself.
This young Dayan, who craved, I believe, consciously or not, to align herself with the non-white bodies surrounding her. The Freedom Riders on television. The lunch counter protesters downtown near her father’s store. The Birmingham preachers on the radio. And of course, her other mother, Lucille, with whom Dayan created a secret, exclusive, and magical world all of their own. For, as Dayan recalls, Lucille
figured I was in the enviable position of being not too white or too black, which meant that I could find out more things about such people than she could. That’s how we lived: she told me secrets about how to win the fight and sent me out into the world not exactly like bait, but pretty close to it, like an expendable spy. We waited. Waited until I got old enough to be mostly on my own, and by that time, as she knew, I’d have learned my lesson about which kind of people to fear, when to hate, and when to brawl. (114)
For what are spies if not those who can pass (and what are children if not expendable)? As odd as it may be to claim, part of the magic—that strange concoction of glamour and tragedy always on the edges—of Dayan’s childhood is her role as expendable spy, the one who watches the world around her burn, figurative like Sherman’s Atlanta, and wraps herself “in a bundle of quotations…amulets stored up against my mother’s hatred and what I feared was a curse put on me” (45). For despite living in a seemingly white household, those curses brought from Haiti were always within arm’s reach.
Thus, that house was not only a house of passing, but a house, too, of diaspora. For as Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin argue, “diaspora offers an alternative ‘ground’ to that of the territorial state for the intricate and always contentious linkage between cultural identity and political organization” (10). If we think of the nuclear family as an analogue for the territorial state (and on the very micro level, the family surely is, especially a family like Dayan’s with its often warring factions), then cultural identity and political organization were always in flux, at war, and fluid in such a household containing a removed father, an always-acting mother, a set-in-her-ways alternative mother, and a ghostly child, all of whom were constituted of different races. It became a site of diaspora, though one difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain. As Dayan admits, “It is difficult to explain the kind of distortion that such incongruous mixing ushered into my life. I found myself a willing prey to such inconsistency, torn between a singular, sad fantasy of the South and the need to keep on walking on the wrong side of white devils. Either way, I remained haunted by the chimaera of whiteness” (73). Such unclear but persistent haunting marks a very contemporary form of diaspora, for as Brent Hayes Edwards explains, “seen through the lens of diaspora… traditional, even paradigmatic concerns… are thrown into question or rendered peripheral” (78). Whereas Dayan’s parents might have found themselves, as non-white immigrants themselves, aligned with the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights movements, they rejected their own diaspora. Dayan, however, even as a child, allowed herself to live in that place called Other, in alignment with Lucille, the mother she loved.
And this diasporic life is not something that leaves Dayan as she ages. “Now that I’ve returned to the South,” she writes, having moved to Nashville to become the Robert Penn Warren Professor at Vanderbilt, “an old fear beckons. That’s why Lucille keeps coming back to me. The white men are still tall and proud and their eyes bold and fearless… Their gaze takes me to a place of comfort that I don’t understand” (115). She doesn’t understand that place is a return to the racial questions of her childhood, perhaps, though she concludes that it is “something that gives me a respite from sensing that I don’t belong, that I am not right in my skin… I have a hunch that it has a lot to do with terror. [Those white men] still do not like me” (116). I suspect she will never understand. But I also suspect that this non-understanding of racial being is, in large part, what produced In the Belly of Her Ghost, so in a way, I pray Dayan never reaches the fulfillment of knowing.
IV: What is nonfiction-ing?
“Most nonfiction writers will do well to cling to the ropes of simplicity and clarity.”
—William Zinsser, On Writing Well
For those of us who teach memoir and creative nonfiction more generally, we’ve likely invoked William Zinsser, that monarch of our genre, a duke, perhaps, many times. I certainly have, telling my students, especially in the beginning stages of their sequence of creative writing workshops, to always aim for simplicity and clarity. That it is of paramount importance that your read always, at any moment, understand what is happening. We are not wrong to do this. Young writers often need to focus on simplicity, particularly of sentence structure, and clarity, particularly as they are often wont to, at the learned age of 19 or 20, explore the deep mysteries of their lives upon the page. So on the one hand, we quote William Zinsser and move on to talk about “the best” ways to plot an essay. And though this is sound advice for the beginning writer, as soon as we cross that line from novice to whatever-it-is-we-are-calling-ourselves-who-toil-and-then-publish this murky genre called nonfiction, we often through this advice right out the window (a cliché I would likely tell one of my students to strike).
Let me confess: there are moments within In the Belly of Her Ghost where I am utterly confused. “She answers me,” Dayan writes of her mother, long after her mother’s death, long after the professor is tucked into her Nashville home, “Still, in the morning, hanging by a thread at the edge of the window, she moves when I call her, ‘Hey, mother,’ with a lilt and depth that surprise me” (154). There is a photo of a spider, perhaps twisting in the light coming through that window by which she has built her web, that follows this paragraph. And where most writers would position the spider as a metaphor for their mother, Dayan believes the spider is her mother herself.
This is a surprising move, but one that fills me, so unexpectedly, with an unbridled joy that I cannot adequately express. Within the world of academic creative writers, it is not sexy to admit to a spiritual practice, especially one that, like Dayan’s, is constituted by parts of Christianity and mysticism. Most of us, it seems, are atheists, perhaps agnostics, and our un-belief is legion within the Ivory Tower. But on a very guttural level, I find myself questioning my un-belief through reading and re-reading In the Belly of Her Ghost, for Dayan succeeds in making so beautiful the thing I thought I had lost: that the ghosts of our pasts can haunt us and in turn, comfort us, however oddly, and make us never truly alone. Which is, in a way, a path to which we might, as Dayan so superlatively demonstrates here, approach the act of creative nonfiction-ing itself.
Dayan starts in failure, writing of her mother, and of her own writerly self:
As a child, I was in awe of the woman. She laughed at me, screamed at me. She shunned me, but now, dead, she stays close. Sometimes she comes down the wall like a spider.
For years I’ve been writing her story. Much of it remains incomplete, pages with titles like “The Lady with Camellias,” “A Daughter’s Lament,” or “Blues in the Night.” I tried in vain to forget her, but she has stayed around as close to me as my breath, hovering like dust hanging in the air. (3)
But as we’ve already seen, failure has its own unique benefits. By starting in failure, we are forced, thankfully, to take the spiritual journey this slim memoir requires of us. Lucille told Dayan the year before she died that “you can find God in an outhouse hole” (39). I believe, and how strange it is to even use that verb in this sense, that you can find God in In the Belly of Her Ghost. The ghost story Dayan so fears she is writing only to fright has, in surprising ways a levity we offered in our position as readers, hovering above the photos and the appropriately scattered collection of memories, the talisman and the bits of song in Creole and English, the devil’s bargains and the lord’s surprises and grit of things described so clearly we can almost feel them rough against our thusly bared skin.
Madison Smartt Bell writes of the memoir that “here for the first time [Dayan] turns her rigorous intellect toward her own life, onto her vexed relationship with her mother and subsequent suffering.” Smartt Bell is certainly not wrong, and he joins a chorus of reviewers and blurbers offering similar praise; but I’m thankful for the space this long review essay has provided me because I think most reviewers have overlooked the utter, strange, often funny joys that also underlie the book. The turning of motherhood, and childhood, and race, and the very act of memoir on its head, spinning us something new, a stunning web into which we find ourselves, luckily, caught.
REFERENCES
Boyarin, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin. 2002. Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dayan, Colin. 2018. In the Belly of Her Ghost. Los Angeles: LARB True Stories.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2014. “Diaspora.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. 76-78. New York: New York University Press.
Ferguson, Roderick A. 2014. “Race.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. 207-211. New York: New York University Press.
Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Jones, Saeed. 2019. How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.
You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
—Morpheus, The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski 1999)
In the 1999 film The Matrix, Morpheus presents the protagonist, Neo, with the option of taking one of two pills: taking the blue pill would close off Neo’s burgeoning consciousness of the constructed nature of his life in the Matrix; taking the red pill would allow Neo to remain in Wonderland, meaning he would remain conscious of the real world around him. In The Matrix, human beings who have not taken the red pill exist in a type of virtual reality. Thus, to “take the red pill” means to be awakened—to become conscious—to see the world for what it truly is.
The phrase entered popular vernacular in ways that the transgender Wachowski siblings undoubtedly never intended. In the context of The Matrix, taking the Red Pill means awakening to the oppressive mechanisms of control. But the phrase has been taken up by the far right to mean waking up to the oppressive mechanisms of feminism, progressive politics, and multiculturalism (Read 2019). Notably, on the popular content aggregator and forum website Reddit, the prominent men’s rights/pick up artist subreddit r/TheRedPill takes its name from this famous scene. However, instead of giving the user insight to see the world as one where robots have enslaved humanity, the Reddit “red pill” awakens men to the realization that they have been enslaved by women and feminism (Baker 2017; Ging 2019; Van Valkenburgh 2018).
This rhetoric may feel familiar to those who have been following the rhetoric of the alt right, who often point to the need to “wake people up” to a constructed reality where white people— particularly white men—have been oppressed by feminism and multiculturalism. Discussions surrounding the Manosphere, (a loosely connected online network of men’s rights activists, pick up artists, Incels [so-called Involuntary Celibates], and other male-focused social movements) in both popular media as well as academic scholarship point to the ways the Manosphere functions as a gateway ideology for the alt right (Futrelle 2017b). Often, the broad connection that links these two groups together is misogyny and anti-feminist sentiments that they use as a way to ground their group identity and the political goals of the various factions within them. These affective dimensions that appeal to the frustration and anger of men who flock to these groups then create a new cultural practice (Ahmed, 2004). Although what these men pride themselves is their ability to think logically about the “reality of the sexual marketplace,” what we see emerging is a stronger appeal to emotion that then shapes their relationship with the group itself, and is performed through misogyny.
The ways misogyny is performed on r/TheRedPill is under the guise of providing a “positive identity for men” by highlighting mechanisms by which Manosphere discourse and ideology can set up a foundation for further radicalization into more extremist thought. The ways the group strategizes in facilitating this radicalization as well as how it indoctrinates its members warrants further exploration, particularly to understand how such processes may occur. Particularly, the ways that the Manosphere’s ideology may set up a foundation for further indoctrination is important to highlight the radicalization process, since the Manosphere’s “pill” may be easier to swallow at first than outright white supremacy (Futrelle 2017b). Since the Manosphere and its many groups lure members into their communities by playing on their frustrations regarding sexual and romantic relationships, the ways that this radicalization occurs may be subtle at first but become more pronounced as time goes on.
r/TheRedPill is both a prominent community in the Manosphere as well as a sizable Reddit community on its own. With over 400,000 members scattered across a variety of affiliated subreddits (i.e., r/RedPillWomen and r/RedPillParenting), the subreddit is not just a notable case study for its sheer size and popularity within the Manosphere but also for the ways the community has expanded its boundaries to appeal to a larger group of people—including women. By positioning itself as a social movement, the radicalization happening within the Manosphere first attracts men by appealing to their sexual or romantic frustrations, and then promises to give them the tools to alleviate this frustration and become “better men” for it. Unlike MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), whose members voluntarily abstain from romantic or sexual relationships to reclaim their “power” (Futrelle 2017a), and unlike Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), who do not focus on pursuing sexual and romantic relationships, r/TheRedPill packages itself as a group that helps men successfully engage in sexual or romantic relationships with the added benefit of reclaiming one’s manhood.
To “Red Pillers” (what r/TheRedPill members call themselves and are referred to as outside of the community), feminism and society in general promote “sexual strategies” that favor women, thus giving women power in relationships, whereas The Red Pill community teaches men sexual strategies to take back the power in sexual or romantic relationships. Focusing on only heterosexual relationships, to “Red Pill” in this context means to invoke heteronormative gender roles that benefit the man in the relationship and subjugate the woman, a dynamic achieved by becoming what they call an “Alpha Male.” On the surface, r/TheRedPill is mostly aligned with the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) community, which teaches men strategies to seduce women, but cultivates a more intense focus on men’s rights activism.
Importantly, men who adhere to the teachings promulgated by r/TheRedPill view it as much more than sexual strategy—they view it as an identity, a community, and an ideology in which they base their realities upon. Recently, and particularly after the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, studies have emerged in both academia and within journalistic sources that attempt to lump together MRAs with Red Pillers and Incels as similar groups that belong in the Manosphere (Ging 2019). However, it is critical to understand that they are different and distinct from one another within the larger Manosphere ecosystem, particularly in terms of how they define themselves. Yet the common thread running through these communities that connects them to the larger alt right movement is misogyny. Misogyny, and the rejection of feminism, which many men in these groups view as a “cancer” inflicted upon “Western civilization,” are the glue that keep these groups within the same extremist networks.
“How Women Destroy Western Civilization”
The discourse in the forum focusing on the ways “Western civilization is doomed,” especially in so far as feminism and/or women can be blamed for it, is perhaps one of the clearest indications of the links between the Manosphere and the alt right. It is this misogyny that helps bind together these affective networks of rage (Ahmed, 2004), which drives the movements to attempt to subvert and replace a perceived dominant culture they feel is oppressive to [white] men. Although there are many Red Pillers who explicitly reject the association of the group with white supremacy, for there are indeed non-white Red Pillers, the rhetoric that both movements espouse is constructed based on three central claims: 1. That Western Civilization has been ruined by feminism; 2. That men are oppressed, and only by fixing this “imbalance” will Western Civilization be saved; and 3. That women who reject feminism and instead embrace “traditional” roles as wives and mothers, subservient to their husbands, are happier. Accordingly, men in the r/TheRedPill community do not necessarily reject women who are not virgins (unlike Incels, who insist on the virginity of women that they aspire to be with), but do believe that women are morally, intellectually, and physically inferior to men, thus providing the basis of the argument for why feminism has violated the “natural order” of things by giving women power (Manne 2017).
The violation of a “natural order” based in biological determinism in regard to race and sex is a core argument used in far-right circles, including the Manosphere, to justify their beliefs. And although they share many similarities in regard to the superiority of men over women, grouping the Manosphere and the alt right under the same umbrella is insufficient to understand the crux of their ideologies and the arguments they use to support them. The Manosphere often invokes a nostalgic remembrance of a past before feminism “tainted” women, just as white supremacist rhetoric in other parts of the alt-right also invokes this kind of nostalgic remembrance of a past that was white and patriarchal. However, in terms of how directly connected the Manosphere is to white supremacy, one piece of “literature” that r/TheRedPill uses to support their ideological beliefs about women and “hypergamy” comes directly from The Occidental Quarterly, a known white nationalist/white supremacist academic journal funded by the Charles Martel society (Southern Poverty Law Center n.d.). The Occidental Quarterly helps to blast open a gateway from r/TheRedPill to white supremacy and/or white nationalism. What r/TheRedPill and its affiliated subreddits and websites has demonstrated through publications like these is that the rabbit hole goes deeper than sexual strategy.
Hypergamy, in particular, is a concept that highlights the ways the misogynistic discourse of the Manosphere and the white supremacist movement (in particular, the alt right) are connected. Devlin, the author of the piece, begins an article by stating that “white birthrates worldwide have suffered a catastrophic decline in recent decades,” (see figure 1), and goes on to explain why hypergamy is the reason why. Specifically, hypergamy is defined as a sexual and romantic drive to be with the “Alpha Male,” regardless of current relationship status. In other words, women will instinctively seek out the most attractive, successful, or powerful man in a group to have sexual or romantic relations with, and this “hypergamy” drives women to only “mate at the top.” Devlin goes on to say that the sexual revolution of the 1960s shifted culture to be a “female sexual utopia,” and that this brought upon a new cultural norm where women had sexual rights, leading to the downfall of “white birthrates” and “Western civilization.” In sum, the article states that it is not only hypergamy that is responsible for this downfall, but that women having sexual and reproductive freedom is the cause of all of the modern day white man’s woes—sexually, romantically, economically, and culturally. Pointing to all of these collapses of a patriarchal, white, masculine world as the reason for the discontent of “Western civilization”, the concept of hypergamy is easily transportable across these extremist groups and easily embraced.
Figure 1. The first paragraphs of Sexual Utopia in Power
The reclamation of power is the fundamental motivation that drives these communities. This article, as well as many of the other readings that serve as the foundation of r/TheRedPill and Manosphere thought, are about reclaiming masculinity, reclaiming power, and reclaiming truth and reality in general. They not only give the men who flock to these communities an answer; they also completely disassemble the world the person knew before (thus the phrase “being Red Pilled”). The postmodern era is most notably significant for the collapse of the “grand narratives” that held societies together, and in particular in Western contexts these grand narratives were based in hegemonic masculinity, patriarchy, Christian religion, and whiteness. The ideologies of r/TheRedPill and the Manosphere promise a return to this grand narrative to ground one’s reality. This collapsing—and ultimate rebuilding—of a grand narrative and purpose that privileges male power over all else, then, helps develop a mind to accept more extremist thoughts and to act on them. Not unlike the tactics used by cults, who often exploit people who are seeking meaning, The Manosphere and the alt right provide meaning in the form of misogyny and white supremacy, creating an “affective fabric” that binds them together (Kuntsman, 2012).
It is worth mentioning that the material consequences of the extremist ideologies of the Manosphere have often resulted in mass violence. Elliott Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter, was a member of PUA communities online (McGuire 2014) and is often venerated in communities like r/Incels, where they refer to him as “Saint Elliott.” James Jackson stabbed an elderly black man to death in New York with a sword and was also a member of MGTOW. Indeed, MGTOW is the more extreme faction of the Manosphere and is often not concerned with the advancement of men’s rights. It thus lends itself easily to other extremist beliefs.
Along with r/Incels, MGTOW may be the most severe and extreme of all of the groups of the Manosphere. This does not, however, mean that r/TheRedPill and other Manosphere groups are not extreme or severe in their misogyny, but rather that their packaging of their misogynistic beliefs may be easier to swallow at first and lead men who flock to their groups down the rabbit hole even farther. By positioning themselves as advocating for the interests of men, and as groups that foster “positive identities” for them, they are able to recruit members who feel as though they are lost and without community—providing them with a sense of belonging and a group identity to subscribe to gives these groups their long-term sustainability (Hogg & Williams 2000). The acknowledgement of the ideologies of the Manosphere and its connections to the alt right has been established; however, understanding of how each group within the Manosphere recruits and indoctrinates its members will lead to further insight as to how they ensure their sustained existence in and outside of this ideological web.
Although there are distinctive differences among the groups in the Manosphere in terms of the levels of violence they advocate for, and what their activism and membership focus on, the common underlying thread among them is rage toward modern society and women. These differences, however, are important to understand in order to identify what draws men (and even women) to these groups. In particular, it is crucial to comprehend these differences to better strategize around the prevention of further radicalization. Thus, the underlying base ideology that fuels these movements, connects them to the alt right, and results in mass violence is one that warrants further investigation, particularly regarding the role of platforms in connecting them all together through algorithmically generated recommendations and the ease of navigating the digital communities that make them home (Massanari 2015; Noble 2018).
Rather than aimlessly wandering the digital wilderness searching for meaning, meaning is being given to them through these Manosphere groups who exploit the frustrations of men who desire romantic and sexual relationships. But these frustrations are manifestations of unfulfilled desires, and these communities are where these desires and frustrations are validated and strengthened. And as we have seen too often with the rise of hate crimes and mass murders, these violent desires result in violent ends.
_____
Julia R. DeCook is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago. She is currently working on publishing her dissertation which examined how various extremist groups responded to censorship and bans to understand how digital infrastructure sustains these movements. She is also a fellow with the newly formed Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.
Kuntsman, Adi. “Introduction: Affective Fabrics of Digital Cultures.” Digital Cultures and The Politics of Emotion. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2012. 1-17.
Manne, Kate. 2017. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press.
This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.
Introduction
This study produces a theoretical basis for understanding the political organization behind contemporary illiberal disinformation. I use the word “illiberal” because disinformation tends to attack liberal positions from both the left and the right, often deploying conspiracy theories and populist tropes. While I do not dispute the fact that liberal-oriented disinformation exists, the majority of disinformation is illiberal and pro-Russian in an “information war” waged against the post-war liberal order.[1]
Starbird, Arif, and Wilson (2018) found a “strategy of targeting, infiltrating, and shaping online activism” among information operations connected to Russia, while Hjorth and Adler-Nissen (2019) found conservatives up to 39% more likely to be exposed to disinformation.[2] It becomes important, then, to understand how disinformation flows influence popular discourse, and conservative discourse in particular, through the radicalization of social movements and the accentuation of certain aspects of them. In this study, I analyze the horizontal and vertical structure of disinformation networks, their ideological character, and their spatial scales.
First, I consider the form of illiberal ideology within disinformation within the historical patterns and generic definition of fascism, assessing its syncretism in light of a brand of fascist ideology associated with the Russian fascist Alexander Dugin. Second, I assesses the content of “junk news” dissemination via the “vertical” news syndicates of Russian media and the “horizontal” networks of news sites, blogs, and influence groups that help to spread disinformation through a process that I characterize as “refraction.”[3]
I call this process “refraction,” because it is similar to the way light entering a prism is bent into different colors. It is still the same conceptualization, but different components of it attune toward particular representations. By circulating the same “master narratives” of national decline and rebirth through an ostensibly diverse panoply of sources identified with differing and often combative ideologies—such as libertarian, far left, far right, and environmentalist—disinformation campaigns can gain the appearance of authenticity and media saturation.[4] As I show, these “master narratives” that are “refracted” into different angles or approaches often bear a consistent alignment with “multipolar” goals. This strategic approach involves both the production of “junk news” across a diverse tableau of websites, which tend to be either political or non-political, and its dissemination, far more often by autonomous actors than by automated bots.[5] I do not investigate the psychology of willing actors disseminating “junk news,” because that would require an entire study of its own, involving different methods and data sources.
Thirdly, to add a practical component to my study, I analyze the function of these media networks in light of Russia’s active measures during the 2016 presidential elections. I find that disinformation has been aided and facilitated through infiltration within and exploitation of broader left-wing narratives casting opposition to Russia-supported disinformation as “McCarthyism.” In this way, I show that disinformation can succeed when given cover by sectors of the media already deemed credible by a significant audience, and that even when utilized by the left, most often serves the interests of the far right.
I. Fascism and Geopolitics
In this section, I compare the major ideological positions and strategic devices of contemporary disinformation networks to those of the far-right and fascist networks. I describe fascist syncretism in relation to arguably the most influential fascist in the world, Alexander Dugin. I further describe the key geopolitical aspects of Dugin’s ideology as multipolarism, Traditionalism, and Eurasianism, and explore the strategic importance of “entryism,” or infiltration, to his movement. This ideological analysis helps to illustrate the material influences and tendencies of specific disinformation disseminators, while also forming a backdrop for broader information campaigns.
Fascism, Right and Left
Understanding the flows of disinformation across scales in their proper political context requires a precise understanding of the political ideologies involved, including fascism, the populist radical right, and the hard left. Close inspection of fascist ideology reveals a tacit tendency to fuse opposing positions in order to produce a syncretic, quasi-populist combination of elitism and popular mobilization. We need to understand fascism before elaborating the similarities and differences of the populist radical right and the “hard left,” which tend to engage in collaborative efforts to defeat liberalism at the polls or in the streets. I first take a genealogical approach, then a typological approach toward recognizing fascism’s relationship to other movements and ideologies in order to get at a “generic definition” of fascism.
Fascism must be understood as both an ideology with both revolutionary and reactionary features. The roots of fascism lie in reactionary juridical aspirations to total counter-revolution, which in the late 19th century contributed to a populist movement that appealed to workers, shopkeepers, and the upper-middle class in opposition to republicanism.[6] As the crisis of liberalism manifested in its failure to fulfill its own egalitarian promise, fascists exploited the violent rupture caused by revolutionary socialist opposition. Following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the Italian victory in World War I, fascism emerged as a movement of vanguard aesthetes, intellectuals, and war veterans who called for the obliteration of liberal bureaucracies in favor of a futuristic system based on classical archetypes reproduced by the New Man’s march, unfettered by compromise, into a world of national will. Fascists suffused the reactionary tradition inherited by proto-fascists like the antisemitic trade union, Les Jaunes, with modern elements of collectivism and ultra-nationalism joined with elitism.[7] In opposition to undeserving liberal elites who created the conditions for chaos by offering lip service to equality, they promised their own version of a future where “natural” elites could gain support from a purportedly anti-capitalist system.[8]
While fascists exploit revolutionary anti-capitalist responses to the failure of liberalism, they also benefit from a history of antisemitism and nationalism within the social movements of the 19th and early 20th Century.[9] I use the term “hard left” to connote such groups identified as left wing who nevertheless perceive the world through the inflexible lens of authoritarianism and conspiracy theories.[10] The “hard left” often abandons precise analyses of material conditions in favor of attacking individuals and groups like the Rothschilds, George Soros, the Bilderberg Group, or an esoteric “Zionist cabal” as the prime movers of world-historical events. Historically, such disdain for supposed conspiratorial “masters of the universe” has led members of the hard left to promote populist syntheses of right and left-wing opposition to liberalism.[11] At this juncture between hard left and radical right, fascist groups can gain hegemony by deploying syncretic ideology toward the generation of socio-political conditions more amenable to fascist movements. At the same time, these movements fail to deliver on their “revolutionary” promises, typically succeeding merely in providing a smoother socio-political basis for the accumulation of capital.[12]
Thus, fascists glean from revolutionary movements the auspices of a virile state even while finding “classical liberal” allies in their crushing of the radical mass movements they pretended to truly represent.[13] Fascist advocacy of a “national revolution” against technocratic liberal democracy deploys populist tropes against the rising tide of grassroots leftwing movements and invited collaborations with the anti-parliamentary left.[14] The fruits of these efforts emerged in Italy with an aesthetic-nationalist movement that openly conflated right and left terminology in efforts to produce a “New Man” who would bring about the “New Age.”[15] Hence, fascism in its early form represented an undoubtedly right-wing political ideology that offered a totalitarian solution to dissatisfaction with parliamentary compromises—a national revolution that would restore older forms of sovereignty, re-establishing patriarchy at the heart of a revival of classical myths and archetypes. In this sense, I follow Roger Griffin’s “new consensus” definition of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism—i.e., the rebirth of a mythical nation founded on myths of sovereignty and projected into a futurist “New Age” through the nomination of a subjectivity created by and creating a fusion of different, often conflicting and paradoxical ideologies, ideas, and commitments.[16]
Syncretism
Syncretism is not merely the fusion of left and right but the assemblage of contradictory concepts into a quasi-spiritual worldview (e.g., national socialism, elitist populism, esoteric political religion, and völkisch futurism) held together as if by magic. Although in general it exposes massive internal conflicts, syncretism enables the particular spatio-temporal adaptation of fascist movements to localized and historical phenomena in order to insinuate “palingenetic ultranationalism” into different conditions, while also opening the possibility of entryism within different political and social groups. In the same way, syncretism becomes a tool through which disinformation networks appropriate pre-existing online cultures, political groups, and social movements, warping their discourses toward the objectives of illiberal populism. Intentional disinformation flows suffuse not only right and left, but disparate socio-political subcultures from the organic food movement to anti-vaxxers to flat earth theories for the development of a syncretic geopolitical subject that conforms to the desires of authoritarian leaders.
George L. Mosse, among the forerunners of the “new consensus,” Sternhell, one of its critical contemporaries, and Emilio Gentile, a luminary in the current study of fascism, have all offered incisive interpretations of such tendencies, as has antifascist scholar Umberto Eco. For Mosse, fascism represented both the incitement of revolution against liberal democracy and the subsequent taming of that revolution through the incorporation of the masses—an “anti-bourgeois bourgeois revolution.”[17] Hence, through a conditioned populist resentment against the current bourgeois elites, fascism empowered frustrated groups within the bourgeoisie to overthrow the “system” and replace it with their own.
In his well-known essay, “Ur-Fascism,” Eco contends with the frustration at the heart of fascism and its implications for the “fuzziness” of fascist ideology. Fascism becomes “an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.” Only through this physical acting out of ideological fallacies can fascism oppose the “analytical criticism” that would otherwise level it, Eco argues.[18]
Throughout his work, Zeev Sternhell observes similar tendencies at root in fascism—namely fascist Georges Valois’s calling for a “fusion of nationalism and socialism.”[19] The currents that emerged in France and Italy, using syndicalist anti-parliamentarianism to fan the flames of mass action in the service of an idealized national myth, produced a collective, right-wing revolutionary subject. Hence, fascism emerged from a sense that the violent overcoming of intellectual and political oppositions could form an ideology of action over ideas.
In his important essay, Roger Eatwell expands on the contextualization of fascism, identifying a “spectral-syncretic model” for understanding its motivations. Drawing from the themes of “natural history,” geopolitics, political economy, and “leadership, activism, party and propaganda,” Eatwell approaches fascism across different stages and scales in order to obtain a fuller understanding of its necessary components.[20] Fascism could not reconcile entirely the ideological divisions of its time and was left with a partial incorporation of a number of different positions—the New Man and the classical archetype; Christianity and anti-clerical paganism; irrationalism and science; private property and social welfare.[21] For these reasons, fascism’s totalitarian approach to “political culture” actually spread immense ideological confusion that further enabled the Leader to make apparently pragmatic decisions.
This final point appears also in the work of Emilio Gentile on “Fascism as a Political Religion.” Gentile argues that “this syncretism of different beliefs within fascist ideology permitted the existence of diverse approaches, but none of these could hope to present itself as the only authentic interpretation of the ‘faith.’” The ideological split between fascism and the Catholic Church had to be closed by Fascism’s ultimate triumph over the Church as its genuine representative. Similarly, German fascism “‘Aryanized’ and ‘Germanized’ Christ and God.”[22] In other iterations of fascism throughout the world, for example with Brazil’s Integralistas, syncretism enabled the adoption of “Fascist rationale and leadership… but only in association with local and cultural traditions and innovations carefully selected and emphasized by leading intellectuals.”[23]
A Brief Introduction to Multipolarity
The syncretic alternative media networks that engaged in political discourse surrounding the 2016 presidential elections in the US shared in common a commitment to “anti-establishment” politics. Across international and local scales, this alternative media ecosystem typically framed Russia as a leading, global opponent to the establishment. The approach of syncretic alternative media networks, then, promoted a geopolitical understanding of the North Atlantic as the liberal, establishment base, sympathizing instead with Eurasian hegemony in a “multipolar” context.
Multipolarism emerged in the Soviet Union during the late-60s and 1970s as a realpolitik fix for the crises of Khrushchevian internationalism. Among its most important progenitors, Yevgeni Primakov developed crucial ties between the Soviets and the Ba’athist Parties in both Iraq and Syria.[24] Through multipolarism, the Soviets could support authoritarian-conservative nationalism as a bastion against the US and the State of Israel, which it deemed the global imperialist powers. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Primakov helped translate Soviet era policies, including intelligence operations, into the modern Russian Federation while serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs and then Prime Minister from 1996-1999.[25] After President Boris Yeltsin’s pro-Western tenure, the regime of Vladimir Putin drifted increasingly toward a “multipolarism” dedicated to Russia as an independent, Eurasian world power somewhere between empire and “civilization state.”[26] Today, Putin’s policies are often viewed as a vacillation between Primakov’s “pragmatic” approach and the syncretic approach advocated by the most radical progenitor of “multipolarism,” Russian fascist Alexander Dugin.[27]
Multipolarism suits Dugin’s brand of fascism, because it stems from the Soviet Union’s support for the authoritarian fusion of nationalist and socialist tendencies in opposition to liberal capitalism.[28] As a National Bolshevik who longed for an ultranationalist form of the Soviet Union, Dugin set the groundwork for the junction of left and right as a feature of disinformation campaigns that often promote Russian media over and against establishment “mainstream media,” and in some cases are openly affiliated with Duginist ideology. However, disinformation involves a complex field of shared interests, overlapping audience, and collaborative partnerships in which Dugin and his ideology play an important and influential role—perhaps even to the chagrin of some of its other progenitors.
Dugin’s Eurasianism and Traditionalism
Dugin’s geopolitical ideology, which he calls “Eurasianism,” stems from an effort to join multiple regions and diverse political and spiritual approaches into an overarching, imperial construct stretching from Dublin to Vladivostok.[30] Configured in accordance with a “multipolar” strategy, Dugin’s Eurasia would echo an agenda similar to the European New Right and its chief advocate, Alain de Benoist, who is one of Dugin’s intellectual heroes.[31] Arguing for a heterogeneous assemblage of homogenous ethnostates, such a multipolar world relies on authoritarian regimes masked as direct democracy through predicates of a community solidarity based on strict “natural hierarchies” associated with staunch, “blood and soil” patriarchy.[32]
Hence, Dugin argues for a Traditionalist approach that endorses far-right Russian Orthodoxy, Protestant fundamentalists, the kind of reactionary Catholicism advocated by Rexist Leon Degrelle and practiced by members of the Spanish Falange, and hardline Shi’a Islam, as long as they remain within discrete geographic regions. Dugin’s most influential book to date, Foundations of Geopolitics, situates post-war fascists within the genealogy of “classical” geopolitical theorists. Instead of full-blown Hitlerism, then, Dugin maintains a position of “conservative revolution,” referring to far-right Nazi collaborators like Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger as his immediate influences.[33] Despite his efforts to place some distance between himself and the old Nazi Party core, Dugin’s analysis results in a racist, occult screed about the prior existence of a Hyperborean “root race” of pure Aryan types.[34]
Nationalist Entryism
Amid the reaction to Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution in Russia, Duginism was transmitted into a street-level movement of “managed nationalism” that, alongside youth organizations like the Gladiators, Nashi, and the Slavic Union, could defeat liberal opposition to Putin’s administration within Russia, itself.[35] Dugin also helped create a new political party called Rodina (Motherland) alongside former left-wing economist and LaRouche associate, Sergei Glazyev, hoping to support Putin through “controlled democracy” by using nativism to draw working class votes from the Communist Party.[36] Although Rodina transitioned to the leadership of Sergei Rogozin, whose geopolitical vision is quite different from Dugin’s, Rodina and its leadership continued to draw leftists into a right-wing opposition to liberalism.
In accordance with their worldview, Duginists and similar far-right activists worked to enter the anti-globalization movement through an illiberal “anti-globalist” approach. Among the most open instances of entryism occurred among Dugin’s followers in Italy, where Claudio Mutti and his colleagues, Claudio Terciano and Tiberio Graziani, among other right-wing extremists, were allowed to affiliate with the Assisi-based Campo Antimperialista.[37] Although recent literature on the subject suggests that their interventions ended due to the controversy that it raised, the milieu fostered by active participation of fascists with left-wing anti-imperialists provided the space for important left-wingers to convert to the Eurasianist cause.[38] By the mid-2000s, the Campo had drawn in Holocaust denier Claudio Moffa and an important Marxist theorist named Costanzo Preve, who gravitated toward the Duginists, publishing with their presses and appearing with them at conferences.
In conjunction with the Russian Anti-Globalization Movement, later recast as the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, members of Rodina would emerge as an illiberal, reactionary force merging right and left through collaboration with other ostensibly left-wing, anti-imperialist groups from the Campo Antimperialista to associated left-wing groups in the US like the Workers World Party.[39] This considerable left-right crossover compounded ongoing organizational crossover across national and international scales, particularly over the question of geopolitical “multipolarism.”[40] Along with other interlinked think tanks like the German Center for Eurasian Studies and the Polish European Center of Geopolitical Analysis, propaganda organs like Graziani’s Geopolitica, and international conferences like Iran’s New Horizon, the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, Campo Antimperialista, and Workers World Party contributed to the development of an extensive international network supported by Russian soft power and largely favorable to the Kremlin’s geopolitical initiatives.
Conclusion
The ideology and strategy of “managed nationalism,” or state support of right-wing groups to dismantle the gains of the left, emerged across international and local scales in relation to Dugin’s participation in the ideological and practical reactionary movements of the early-mid-2000s. With the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the later conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, the Kremlin’s rhetoric and practices pivoted more toward Eurasianism, bringing Dugin and his associates greater influence.[41] For instance, Dugin’s compatriot, Sergei Glazyev, who opined about a Jewish plot to replace Russians, became Putin’s advisor on Eurasianism.[42] This geopolitical pivot brought with it a new form of “hybrid warfare” (often framed as “the Gerasimov doctrine”), which advances cyber-attacks, propaganda techniques, and disinformation in accordance with many of the “net-centric war” theory outlined by Dugin and developed further by the Command and Control Research Program of the Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense, in which Russia strives to win physical contests before they happen by controlling the information space through information operations that delegitimize their geopolitical opposition.[43]
It is important to note that the theories that drive modern covert action are opaque by nature, and Dugin’s is one of at least three leading, and often interwoven, influential theoretical formulations of hybrid war (with Evgeny Messner and Igor Panarin), which cannot be fully exposited in this article. In the next section, however, I will show the integral participation of Duginist networks in disinformation campaigns, and the deployment of discursive and strategic approaches associated with Duginism—particularly, as Starbird, Arif, and Wilson show, the “strategy of targeting, infiltrating, and shaping online activism,” syncretism, and geopolitical positions aligned with multipolarity.[44] Through this effort, we can gain a clearer understanding of the usage of extremism within disinformation campaigns.
II. The Vertical and Horizontal Structure of Illiberal Disinformation Networks
When presenting the media ecosystem that forwards the Kremlin’s foreign policy interests, the obvious imperative falls on describing its state-funded and state-run media, which have at many points spearheaded online disinformation. This section first unpacks Russian state media available in the West through RT and Sputink in Horbyk’s terms, as “a vertikal—a Soviet‐time term connoting a strictly hierarchical and monolithic power apparatus—in the media system.”[45] Next, it explores some different horizontal networks of influence groups and websites that help disseminate pro-Russian disinformation. Lastly, it shows tacit integration between the two.
The “Vertikal”
The origins of RT are somewhat murky, but can generally be located in RIA Novosti. A state-run Russian news agency, RIA Novosti created a non-profit called TV-Novosti, which then founded RT as “Russia Today” in 2005 amid the “managed nationalism” campaign. While TV-Novosti’s non-profit status gives RT the pretense of autonomy from direct state control, the organization is considered extremely important for the Kremlin’s domestic and foreign strategies. RT first emerged to promote Russian culture, but the experience of the 2008 conflict in Georgia and contested 2011 Russian legislative elections led to its transition into “a political tool to undermine the American position in global politics.”[46]
During Occupy Wall Street, RT promoted left-wing opposition to liberal economics by hosting a number of left activists from the US and other countries in Europe. In discussions ranging from economics to geopolitics, leftists found the attention they felt they deserved, and a platform to spread their ideas to millions of people. At the same time, RT provided platforms to Eurasianists like German Duginist Manuel Ochsenreiter, Polish activist Mateusz Piskorski, and Claudio Mutti’s colleague Tiberio Graziani. Piskorski would go to Polish jail on charges of spying for Russia and China, while Ochsenreiter stands implicated in a 2019 “false flag” firebombing of a Hungarian cultural center in Ukraine, which prosecutors believe is connected to Russian secret services.[47] As well, RT promoted conspiracy theorists like “great replacement” theorist Renaud Camus and French “9/11 truth” activist Thierry Meyssan, whose own media node, Voltaire Network, includes Dugin associate and Rosneft spokesperson Mikhail Leontyev among its stable of writers.[48] In this manner, RT groups together left-wing and right-wing illiberalism corresponding to a quasi-populist coalition in favor of the Kremlin’s geopolitical imperatives (e.g., support for Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s semi-clandestine occupation of the Donbass, and Euroskepticism).
RT’s efforts provide an aura of respectability to marginal Duginist activists, thus boosting their pet causes and projects. For instance, RT promoted an obscure fascist commentator named Joaquin Flores as an informed pundit. Hailing from Los Angeles, Flores helped moderate a left-wing MySpace forum in the early 2000s before moving to fascism based on his rejection of feminism and liberalism. He joined a spin-off of the fascist skinhead group American Front, called New Resistance, run by long-time fascist James Porrazzo. New Resistance helped bring Flores into the international Duginist network, through which he moved to Belgrade, developed political affinities with the far-right Serbian Radical Party, and helped broaden the Duginist online network. In the early 2010s, Flores joined the Center for Syncretic Studies (CSS), which focuses on developing the Duginist foundations of Eurasianism and multipolarism.[49] CSS’s media site, Fort Russ, provides news and analysis from a Duginist perspective. Through this work, Flores became a well-known figure among Duginists, but remained entirely obscure until RT’s promotion opportunities.
Another Duginist given public attention by RT is Andrew Korybko. One of the more prolific commentators in the Duginist think tank Katehon, Korybko has written a book about hybrid war addressing Syria and Ukraine, and between 2015-2016 he placed seven articles in the website of Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, which likely developed aspects of the strategy for intervention in the 2016 elections.[50] The leader at the time, a Lieutenant General of the Foreign Intelligence Service named Leonid Reshetnikov, also sat on the board of Katehon.[51] Though at this point Korybko maintains a high stature in Russian political life, RT’s attention both represented and propelled his ascent.
Hence, RT not only facilitates the spread of Duginist geopolitics through the promotion of its exponents, but it has become a key conduit relaying informational presentation from think tanks to the public. As well, RT came to promote conspiracy theories as ways of confusing its audience’s understanding of key issues in order to advance Russian policy interests. In the words of scholar Ilya Yablokov, RT became “a specific tool of Russian public diplomacy aimed at undermining the policies of the US government and, in turn, defending Russia’s actions.”[52] In particular, Yablokov observes, RT promoted the “underdog” vision of Vladislav Surkov, mastermind of “sovereign democracy” and “managed nationalism”—“conveying Russia as a ‘speaker’ on behalf of the third-world nations excluded from the US-led ‘New World Order.’” However, Yablokov argues that RT is not truly Duginist, since the “ambiguity and heterogeneity of the ideological foundation of the current Russian political regime makes anti-Americanism the only constant element of RT’s agenda.”[53] Such an orientation enables the support of populist political parties, usually of the radical right, which the Kremlin hopes to support as an increasingly viable alternative to the EU and NATO.
In December 2013, RIA Novosti and radio service Voice of Russia were brought together under the name Russiya Segodnya, which literally translates to Russia Today. Although the Kremlin denies that Russiya Segodnya and RT are connected, they share the same editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan.[54] Within a year, Russiya Segodnya reconfigured the previously-existing Voice of Russia into Sputnik News, which would feature international news and podcasts under the name Radio Sputnik. In the words of Roman Horbyk, “The launch of new state news agencies Rossiya Segodnia (based on the restructured RIA Novosti) and Sputnik, with budgets in the billions, marked the completion of a vertikal—a Soviet‐time term connoting a strictly hierarchical and monolithic power apparatus—in the media system.”[55] Created to counter “propaganda promoting a unipolar world,” Sputnik more explicitly delivered their terms of multipolarism and more openly advocated for left-right syncretism against “Atlantic liberalism.”[56] Sputnik would become more radical than RT in forwarding conspiracy theories, Eurasianism, and alliances between fascists and leftists in opposition to liberalism.
Additional fascinating examples of Russian state systems percolating into the alternative media ecosystem are Redfish, the New Eastern Outlook (or Journal-NEO), and Strategic Culture. Promoting stories of social unrest in opposition to neoliberalism, Redfish is a project supported by the Kremlin that bears the aesthetics of an independent alternative news startup giving it more social media appeal than RT, from which most of its publicly-associated employees hailed in 2018.[57] The publication of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, New Eastern Outlook produces conspiracy theories about Rothschilds and George Soros and Islamophobic material, and hosts articles by Duginist Catherine Shakhdam and conspiracy theorist Vanessa Beeley, among others. Although New Eastern Outlook has a far smaller reach than Sputnik and RT, it provides more appearance of diversity within a media ecosystem largely controlled by think tanks and the vertikal.[58] Similarly, the Strategic Culture Foundation emerged from a Moscow think tank run by former-Soviet politician, Yuri Prokofiev, to undermine US foreign policy, hosting disinformation purveyors who appear to present autonomous and unbiased findings on their commentary site, Strategic Culture.[59] In short, the post-Soviet vertikal functions as controlled state media despite giving the appearance, on occasion, of an autonomous “free press” that appeals to left-of-center dissenters and lay geopolitical analysts who feel underrepresented in Western media.
Horizontal Soft Power and the Alternative Media Ecosystem
If Russian state media marks a vertikal, soft-power groups and alternative media organizations make up the accompanying horizontal networks. Here, the term “horizontal” is used to connote relative autonomy from the state but not equal relations between sites. Some sites are obviously more privileged than others, as is reflected in differential support from the vertikal, but they nevertheless remain engaged in a common system of propaganda “refraction.”
Since Journal-NEO and Strategic Culture are directly connected to the Russian state, I have grouped them in the vertikal, but they behave more like horizontal network nodes, because their affiliations are opaquer. Soft power groups are often funded by the Kremlin or its loyal oligarchs, and typically promote round tables, academic conferences, and the dissemination of information and disinformation. The latter work of dissemination is commonly related to an alternative media ecosystem that engages a network of editors and journalists in the publication of articles that often reuse the same pro-Kremlin narratives with different “packaging” depending on the ideological bent of the site and its audience.[60] Soft power networks rely on fascists and far-right nationalists developing institutions that will propagate pro-Russian influence.
Soft-power groups explored by Anton Shekhovtsov’s monograph, Russia and the Western Far Right, include the group around the Italian journal Geopolitica, founded by Graziani, and its related French group, the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, founded by Natalya Narochnitskaya, who ran for election as a Rodina candidate. These two groups have had overlapping membership—for instance Narochnitskaya is on Geopolitica’s “Scientific Board” and US libertarian John Laughland has featured on the board of both.[61] Other inter-connected “think tanks,” publications, and institutions, such as Piskorski’s European Center of Geopolitical Analysis and Ochsenreiter’s German Center for Eurasian Studies, join in the promotion of pro-Kremlin propaganda efforts, including “election observation” for fraudulent elections in Eastern Europe.[62] While these European networks hold import for regional politics, an interlinked US-centered network similarly exists to support Russia’s geopolitical interests across the Atlantic.
Many of the current influence groups within the US promoting Russia’s agenda through disinformation have a common “roof” through the efforts of far-right political operator Edward Lozansky. Born in the Soviet Union, Lozansky moved to the US toward the end of the Cold War in order to lobby in favor of Russian dissidents. He gained useful friends among the US New Right, including Heritage Foundation founder, Paul Weyrich, who would prove instrumental in replacing regimes formerly under Soviet control with far-right nationalists. Lozansky worked to set up a new “American University in Moscow” and a related “think tank,” which would group together “non-interventionist” journalists and political activists. Through his university, Lozansky produced a semi-annual “Russia Forum” where both pro-Russia leftists and rightists, including influential Congressmen and prominent media figures, mingle and share ideas on media, policy, education, and political strategy.[63]
As of mid-2018, “Research fellows” at Lozansky’s university included members of RT and the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, as well as the head of Dugin’s Centre for Conservative Studies, Mark Sleboda, and Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute, who described himself as a “Traditionalist” in his Twitter profile before changing it in 2019.[64] Another “research fellow,” Gilbert Doctorow, worked through the Russia Forum in 2014 to re-found the 1970s pro-détente group, the American Committee for East-West Accord (ACEWA), with co-founder Stephen F. Cohen.[65] A contributing editor to The Nation magazine, Cohen helped bring important political and business figures onto the board of ACEWA, while the group took on far-right journalist James Carden to edit its website.[66] The ACEWA’s launch later that year in Brussels brought together a round table including Aymeric Chauprade, a far-right advisor to the Front National’s Marine Le Pen who had recently returned from “observing” the illegal referendum in Crimea (Chauprade is also a member of the red-brown Izborsky Club think tank with Dugin, Glazyev, Leontyev, and Narochnitskaya, and is also on the “scientific committee” of Graziani’s Geopolitica).[67] Lozanksy himself has appeared with Dugin both on television and at conferences, as well as fascist ideologues like Alain de Benoist and former WikiLeaks attaché Israel Shamir. Aside from co-authoring articles with Lozansky in the far-right Washington Times, Doctorow openly advocates de Benoist’s vision of an illiberal populism fusing left and right.[68]
Hence, Doctorow helped to foster in the ACEWA a pro-Kremlin organization linked to other soft-power groups around Europe through Lozansky’s Russia Forum. Along with the Russia Forum, Doctorow helped give a pro-alt-right propaganda site called Russia Insider its start. Russia Insider’s North American donations were “processed” by Consortium News, another pro-Kremlin site featuring syncretic political activists.[69] Among Consortium News’s stable of authors is Caitlin Johnstone, who calls for “shameless” alliances between the left and right in favor of the Kremlin’s interests, Pepe Escobar, who regularly appears at the conferences of Iran’s sanctioned, anti-Semitic New Horizon organization, and Max Blumenthal, who has been criticized for promoting conspiracy theories about Syria’s White Helmets and advocating a “multipolar world.”[70] Other fellows listed at Lozansky’s university think tank include a blogger named Anatoly Karlin, who has moved from his Da Russophile blog to the far-right Unz Review, and disbarred attorney Alexander Mercouris of alternative media site, The Duran, whose director hosts a program on RT. As well, Patrick Armstrong, James Jatras, and Anthony Salvia are interesting mentions on Lozansky’s list, because they were also listed as authors for Global Independent Analytics (GIAnalytics), a site that New Knowledge finds closely associated with the Internet Research Agency’s “troll factory.”[71] A glance at a sample of the members of Lozansky’s think tank who are connected to alternative news outlets and the sites they represent shows impressive content sharing [Table 1].
American University in Moscow
Ron Paul Institute
The Duran
Consortium News
Russophile/Unz Review
GIAnalytics
Rank
Edward Lozansky
X
X
X
3rd
Daniel McAdams
X
X
X
X
2nd
Alexander Mercouris
X
X
X
X
3rd
Gilbert Doctorow
X
X
X
3rd
Anatoly Karlin
X
X
4th
Patrick Armstrong
X
X
X
*
X
2nd
James Jatras
X
X
X
X
X
1st
Anthony Salvia
X
X
4th
Rank
1st
3rd
2nd
4th
2nd
4th
Table 1. An examination of cross-referenced authors and websites linked to the American University in Moscow’s think tank. The grey boxes signify that the author is a high-ranking member of or core writer for the site.
* Note that Patrick Armstrong appears to post in Consortium News’s comments, but does not appear to be an author for the site.
I analyzed the content sharing and cross-promotion of authors associated with the American University in Moscow in Table 1 by searching for the authors’ bylines within the websites in question. An “X” signifies that the author’s work appears in or is associated with the site or group in question. Association is used with regards to the American University in Moscow, while content inclusion is used with the other four sites. The most cross-published author in the group associated with Lozansky that I studied is Jatras, with Mercouris close behind and Lozansky, McAdams, and Doctorow tied for third. The sites that have cross-published every author are The Duran and the Unz Review, with Consortium News proving the most selective in this context. At the same time, Consortium News does quote McAdams as “a highly respected former Foreign Service Officer possessing impeccable credentials,” and while the Ron Paul Institute is only the second most selective, it also hosts an article quoting Gilbert Doctorow as a US-Russia relations analyst without an indication of bias. It is important to note that this set is only representative of alternative figures associated in 2018 with the American University in Moscow according to its website, and other connections with other sites are explored further in this article.
I could not find evidence that GIAnalytics, the group most directly tied to the Internet Research Agency by the Mueller Report, cross-published any of the other authors; however, the site is offline now, making it difficult to research their archives. Other than Lozansky’s think tank, GIAnalytics has the highest membership out of the sample of groups represented at the American University in Moscow, with Consortium News in close second. Importantly, Joaquin Flores features as a member of GIAnalytics, and his site Fort Russ found promotional space at Lozansky’s Russia Forum along with Consortium News and Russia Insider. This again shows open Duginist involvement within the “alternative media” networks mobilized and supported by Lozansky in the context of his institutions. Figure 1 shows clear connections between GI Analytics and other groups in the sample, such as Russia Insider and The Duran (DiResta et al., 2018).
Figure 1. Image of the GIAnalytics network produced by DiResta et al., 2018. Note the presence of Russia Insider, The Duran, The Saker, and Fort Russ, as well as Mercouris and Flores.
Lozansky and his fellows also receive promotion and airtime on Russian state media, particularly Sputnik Radio. One show host at Sputnik, Brian Becker, is the head of Party for Socialism and Liberation, a spin-off of the hard-left Workers World Party.[72] On his show Loud & Clear, Becker has hosted Mercouris, as well as McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute, whose board also includes Geopolitica and Institute for Democracy and Cooperation member, John Laughland. Duginist Mark Sleboda made it on Loud & Clear more than forty times in the first two years of the program. Another Duginist, Catherine Shakhdam, was hosted more than twenty times during the same time period. Lozanksy, himself, joined the Sputnik News program of Scottish socialist John Wight, Hard Facts, for interviews promoting the “multipolar world.”[73] Of course, RT has helped forward the same voices, for instance hosting Doctorow, Becker, and McAdams on the same CrossTalk program in September 2016 for a conversation about “Increased Tensions” between Russia and the US. The promotion of horizontal networks joining the hard left to Duginists through the vertikal suggests that the Eurasianist approach to the “multipolar world” plays a role in overdetermining the geopolitical oppositions between nationalism and internationalism, particularly through the uses and distortions of the notion of anti-imperialism.[74]
Site Overlap and Content Sharing
Studies of site metrics and content sharing have exposed significant overlap both among “master narratives” and audiences who visit pro-Russian sites responsible for disinformation. This overlap suggests that a strong subculture of internet users regularly access these websites for their understanding of current events. It also renders explicit different scales of dissemination, from vertical to horizontal to mainstream.
In December 2017 and January 2018, I ran the Audience Overlap Tool available through Alexa.[75] Using proprietary algorithms, the Audience Overlap Tool identifies and ranks the sites that audience members use to travel from and to a given site, and then presents a visualization of those sites based on their own audience. Thus, it both visually and numerically represents the clustering of sites. It should be noted that audience overlap does not necessarily imply shared ideology. A site might share an audience because people click to and from a ruthless critique. However, using empirical data and qualitative analysis, we can identify ideologically similar sites from ideologically opposed ones. This becomes complicated given the syncretic characteristics of disinformation schemes; however, where their agreement on specific issues becomes more pronounced than their general ideological differences, they are still considered similar and their clustering is considered to be representative of their similarity rather than their opposition.
It should also be noted that clustering becomes dependent on the variables, or sites, selected in relation to one another. I chose Russia Insider, Consortium News, and The Nation because they have important relationships in associated personnel, and added The Saker as another site anchored within the illiberal disinformation ecosystem. While those individual sites do not change with regards to their individual site cross-overs, the overall visualization reflects the way that clustering occurs in relation to the four sites. Had I chosen different sites within the same network, the overall clustering would not appear the same.
When I ran Alexa’s model, I observed significant clustering among Russian sites (vertical) clearly connected to Western-based pro-Russia media (horizontal), which shows a clear relationship with more mainstream sites autonomous from the disinformation ecosystem [Figure 2]. The Nation appears to present this bridge from the horizontal to the mainstream, while Russia Insider seems to present the site furthest embedded within the Russian media. As we will see in the next section, this composition appears to be further evidenced when examining the usage of “McCarthyite” as a slur during 2016 presidential elections.
In an investigation into the site metrics (clicks from incoming and outgoing readers) of the most frequented Russia-friendly site in December 2017, The Duran, turned up a cluster of related sites—especially The Saker and 21stCenturyWire, which harbor the closest affinity for Russian politics and Duginist positions outside of those self-described Russian websites, themselves. Most of its viewers clicked over from Facebook, Google, and YouTube; however, importantly, Russia Insider and rt.com accounted for the fourth and fifth most clicks, showing how the audience flutters between networks.
The fourth and fifth most entered sites from The Duran were Russia Insider and The Saker, which received more than 54,000 unique hits per month. The audiences for the Duran and The Saker show significant audience overlap with Russia Insider and Fort Russ, according to Alexa, suggesting a strong correlation between its politics and those of the Duginist network. Significantly, among the highest search engine keywords for those clicking on The Duran was “George Soros,” indicating a high degree of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists enjoying their articles.[76]
Figure 2. The site overlap visualization tool from Alexa produced this representation of discrete overlapping groups.Figure 3. Data visualization of content sharing networks found in Starbird et al. 2018.
This complex assemblage of groups not only shares significant audience overlap but engages in important content sharing. In an important academic study of this syncretic approach, “Ecosystem or Echosystem? Exploring Content Sharing across Alternative Media Domains,” scholars Kate Starbird, et. al., identify the same websites appearing to produce alternative frameworks and approaches to news stories, such as The Russophile, 21st Century Wire, The Duran, and Consortium News[Figure 3].[77] Each of these sites maintains “strong political themes reflecting distinct (and in some cases, seemingly conflicting) ideologies—including anti-imperialist left, libertarian, conservative and alt-right; as well as other more niche ideological leanings, including explicit anti-Semitism,” the authors state. Yet, the authors importantly conclude that these websites “are publishing the same content, but inside very different wrappers.”[78] A number of the same sites also appear in the study conducted by New Knowledge for the US Senate, because they either participated in or were directly supported by Russian disinformation “factory,” the Internet Research Agency.[79]
Table 2 assesses overlapping members across Lozansky’s think tank, the content-sharing conspiracy theory sites in Starbird et al, 2018; those associated with GI Analytics according to New Knowledge’s 2018 white paper; those who the 2019 Stanford study found published fake authors attributed to the GRU, [80] and the Alexa model’s findings of overlapping sites between Russia Insider, Consortium News,The Saker, and The Nation. It should be noted that lack of affiliation of a member of a site with the American University in Moscow’s think tank does not indicate no connection to Russian media, while the reverse is true: affiliation suggests a person is engaged in pro-Russian illiberal media efforts.
Lozansky fellow
Starbird
New Knowledge
Stanford
Rank
Consortium News
X
X
3rd
Fort Russ
X
X
X
2nd
The Saker
X
X
3rd
The Duran
X
X
X
X
1st
Russia Insider
X
X
X
X
1st
RT
X
X
3rd
Global Research
X
X
X
X
1st
Unz/DaRussophile
X
X
X
2nd
21st Century Wire
X
4th
MintPressNews
X
X
X
X
2nd
Voice of Russia/Sputnik
X
X
3rd
Table 2. An X marks representation of affiliation of a member of the website with Lozansky’s think tank and presence in studies on disinformation content sharing (Starbird et al., 2018), Russian meddling (DiResta et al., 2018), fake authors (DiResta and Grossman, 2019), and audience overlap (based on 2018 Alexa search).
Overlap in Table 2 mostly indicates whether the site is connected to Lozansky’s think tank, and whether it is observed as part of a disinformation ecosystem that involves significant content sharing (Starbird et al., 2018), audience overlap (Alexa), and is connected to the Internet Research Agency (Diresta et al., 2018) or published fake authors associated with the GRU’s disinformation efforts (Diresta and Grossman, 2019). The highest overlap occurs with The Duran, associated with Lozansky fellow, Alexander Mercouris; Global Research, a conspiracy theory site founded by former LaRouchite Michel Chossudovsky (who is also on the board of Graziani’s Geopolitica); and Russia Insider, associated with ACEWA cofounder, Consortium News member, and Lozansky co-author, Gilbert Doctorow. Next come Unz, Fort Russ, and MintPressNews. Voice of Russia, RT, The Saker, and Consortium News come in third place. The least overlap comes with 21st Century Wire, a site founded by a former associate editor of Alex Jones’s Infowars that includes, among other things, a 45-minute interview with Dugin.
By embracing politics associated with different factions and sides in political conflict, media can appeal to different audiences and bind them through a common thread. In most cases I studied, that commonality would be geopolitical. By spreading disinformation across discrete political platforms, the alternative media “echo-system,” as some have called it, could exploit popular discontent against “the establishment” and desire for radical analysis through a process of media saturation. Yet the saturation, whereby multifarious platforms disseminate the same content by sharing one another’s articles, carries a second effect of uniting those discrete ideologies in a singular geopolitical agenda. For this reason, the horizontal disinformation syndicate studied above can be seen as a combined, if decentered and complex, system with syncretic characteristics. While it is largely self-organized, it relies on subtle cues within a hierarchy of privileged interests to adapt and reproduce media narratives often spontaneously in real time.
Through this process, the syncretic media system engages in what I call refraction—a splitting and polarizing movement that reinforces the distinction between ideological “wrappers” that produce a “multipolar” assemblage of ideological positions out of a single ur-narrative under the aegis of geopolitics. While they vie for attention and publicity toward their own particular tendencies and leaders, the procedure tends to promote illiberal politics on an affective range and in matters of policy, whereby the commonality between ideologies is typically some variance of anti-establishment politics, and the establishment is generally viewed as “neoliberal.” Relying on Noberto Bobbio’s explication of the difference between left and right that hinges on the assertion of equality, the present study therefore finds that illiberal syncretism, while supportive of some left-wing tendencies, ultimately reproduces an authoritarian and therefore inegalitarian assemblage. There is perhaps no better example of the tacit support for authoritarian, populist politics than the disinformation media landscape’s engagement in the 2016 presidential elections in the US.[81]
III. Disinformation as Cover for Active Measures: A Case Study of the 2016 US Presidential Elections
During the lead-up to the November 2016 elections, some of the same journalists and media critics who denied Russian intervention and called people who recognized it “McCarthyites” were, at the same time, involved in pro-Kremlin influence groups with ties to Russian soft power organizations. Late in March 2019, special prosecutor Robert Mueller submitted his report to the Attorney General, William P. Barr, who promptly offered a summary declaring insufficient evidence in the case of collusion between the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and Russian officials. While many across the alternative news scene celebrated what they deemed vindication for casting doubts on collusion between Trump and Russia, they did not focus on the part of the Attorney General’s summary that described the special prosecutor’s findings of Russian intervention in the 2016 elections. Indeed, Mueller’s team exposed a sweeping disinformation operation extending from Kremlin-supported sources, and found that Russia’s GRU hacked the the Democratic National Committee and Clinton advisor John Podesta.[82]
The final part of this study describes the influence of alternative media sites, supported by disinformation, in promoting the narrative that the assertion of Russian election meddling represented “McCarthyism.” Because of my findings of overlap described above, I was unsure where the narrative of “McCarthyism” would have begun. I created a vertikal hypothesis that the term was initially fielded by disinformation agents among the vertikal and then percolated through the horizontal media system into the mainstream. My alternative hypothesis was that the narrative emerged in the horizontal network and found re-enforcement in the vertikal. A null hypothesis identifying “no difference” would suggest the narrative began and was propogated chiefly by actors not associated with either horizontal or vertikal.
After a careful, qualitative study of the evidence, my alternative hypothesis proved more adequate to explain the complex dissemination of the “McCarthyite” narrative than either the null or primary hypotheses. The claims of “McCarthyism” actually began with media figures connected to Russian disinformation circles closest to the US mainstream. Hence, in this case, there was a directional movement between Russian media, the horizontal structure of supporting sites, and the mainstream, but it flowed in the opposite direction from the one that would indicate a top-down, Russian operation, per se. Even if those using the accusation were still engaged in each cluster within the overall system, what I observed was something more like an incentive-based marketplace in which Russian media helped select and amplify particular networks and signals coming from discrete, autonomous and semi-autonomous actors within a syncretic network engaging in broad content-sharing.
Methods
My research question was whether pro-Kremlin influence operations helped forward pro-Trump narratives in the lead-up to the 2016 elections, and if so, what were their relationship to the international fascist movement? To answer this question, I performed a qualitative content analysis of the media listed by Google News referencing “McCarthyite” and “McCarthyism,” and then cross-referenced my findings with a Nexis Uni® search of the same terms with regards to the US presidential elections, from the end of the primary races to the end of Election Week. With this time span, we can understand better how the term “McCarthyite” increased in usage, as well as the extent to which its usage changed in relation to events taking place during the Republican and Democratic primary campaigns—particularly the release of the hacked Podesta and DNC emails.
The popularity of particular articles using the term, as well as their impact on other articles and the extent to which they were linked to, reveal key influencers with regards to the usage of the term and the context through which its meaning is constructed. The total number of articles featuring “McCarthyite” and “McCarthyism” in 2015 was 1,464, increasing by 21% to 1,772 in 2016, and again by 104% to 3,611 the year after that, illustrating a significant growth in the terms’ usage. The most referenced person was Donald Trump, followed by Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Bernie Sanders in that order, with the content indicating that most articles on “McCarthyism” were opposed to the notion that his campaign was supported by Russian active measures.
I first stratified the population of hundreds of reports from the time period of June 1 to November 12, 2016 (n=693 in Nexis Uni®), at the end of elections week, separating articles using “McCarthyite” and “McCarthyism” in reference to the elections from those referencing other events. I then took a semi-random sample of 40 articles from mainstream and alternative news sources serving a mostly-US-based audience for qualitative analysis. Because the data is time series-dependent, insofar as the quantity of articles using “McCarthyism” increased, my sample needed to reflect the proportion of articles published within that time series. By using this method, I performed an analysis of the trends in the way that “McCarthyism” or “McCarthyite” was used, the inter-relations between usages, and the popularity of specific usages in reflexive, temporal, and co-constructive context. Lastly, I analyzed the Google Trends spreadsheet for “McCarthyism” to gauge the level and time of public interest and see if Google searches for the term coincided with prominent articles and events.[83]
Search of “McCarthyism” (blue, n = 6,106) in Google Trends from June 1 to November 12, 2016 (searched on January 11, 2020)
Data analysis required a qualitative differentiation between left and right-wing sites that used the term, and how the term is deployed relative to the political orientation of the site. In this way, better understanding could be gained on whether or not the term is used in a “partisan” fashion, or if its usage is generalized across political boundaries (and whether the fusion of political opposites bears its own partisanship). Other key terms, such as “Russia” and “collusion,” as well as “liberal,” point us toward a qualitative comprehension of the purpose for the term “McCarthyite.” In sum, this approach, which assesses the influence of given articles while qualitatively discerning their political positionality, brings us to a closer understanding of the evolution of the deployment of the term “McCarthyite,” and the dynamics of political relations comprising the ideology of Trumpism and its opponents.
In short, I observed the usage of the term “McCarthyism” across different political platforms to understand the extent to which usage overlapped in terms of rhetoric, as well as deliberate cross-over (e.g., an interview of WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange on FOX News reposted on Sputnik News). The driver for the discourse of McCarthyism seems to have been Kremlin-sympathetic media networks, some of which actively engage with Kremlin oriented soft-power organizations. However the phenomena became widespread very rapidly as key influencers adopted and endorsed it. Hence, while decrying “McCarthyism” and conflating Russia with the left, a number of actors engaging in accusations of “McCarthyism” participated in a syncretic network with critical nodes in Russian media itself. This should not be surprising, since those involved in pro-Russia groups might level accusations to defend against people criticizing Russian interference. It follows that the claims of Russian interference have been supported by available evidence, so the accusations were often deceptive and functionally part of a broader disinformation campaign around the hacks and dissemination thereof that included conspiracy theories around murdered Clinton campaign staffer Seth Rich.
Allegations of “McCarthyism”
July 2016 was a busy month for the Clinton campaign as it geared up for the Democratic National Convention. On Friday, July 22, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 emails leaked from seven different accounts of high-level DNC officials like Communications Director Luis Miranda and Finance Chief of Staff Scott Comer. At least some of the leaks came from a hacker who went by the name “Guccifer 2.0,” allegedly a GRU cutout, but Assange denied that Guccifer or any other Russian source had provided the leaks, implying that they may have come from Seth Rich, a deceased DNC worker, while simultaneously stating that as a matter of policy WikiLeaks never disclosed the sources of leaks.[84] The salacious contents of the emails would preclude any party unity, as Sanders supporters grew outraged over emails that showed that the DNC unjustly favored the Clinton’s campaign.
The day after the leaks, Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN that they believed that Russia had hacked the DNC’s accounts and sent the emails to WikiLeaks, who timed the release to help the Trump campaign. Many enraged Sanders supporters rejected the implications. As the Democrats went into their Convention, they were more disunited than ever, with embittered Sanders supporters attacking the notion of Russian intervention as a distraction from the DNC’s sabotage of the left. After Mook’s appearance, journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted an image of Joseph McCarthy with the hashtag “UniteBlue” (Figure 4). The next day, June 24, ACEWA participant and then-editor and publisher of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, tweeted a RealClearPolitics article about Mook, adding the commentary: “McCarthyism 3.0/ Clinton Campaign Manager: Russians Gave Hacked DNC Emails to WikiLeaks In Attempt To Elect Trump” (Figure 5). The Nation’s editorial, “Against Neo-McCarthyism,” came three days later.[85] Between July 17 to 24, Google Trends shows a sharp increase of searches for the word “McCarthyite.” The term “McCarthyism” began to rise at this time and did not peak until election week, after which it dropped off considerably before rising even higher in January 2017.[86]
Figure 4. Tweet by Glenn Greenwald posted after Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook appeared on CNN to say that Russia had hacked the DNC servers.Figure 5. Tweet by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, the day after Robby Mook’s appearance on CNN.
Trump continued to gaslight the Clinton campaign, at once denying Russian involvement and enjoining Russian hackers, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”[87] That Saturday, Stephen F. Cohen of the ACEWA appeared on CNN, responding to claims that Putin might have hacked the DNC emails by insisting, “Vladimir Putin wants to end the ‘New Cold War’—and so do I.”[88] Vanden Heuvel further elaborate her position in an article published in the Washington Post the following Tuesday, declaring that the Democrats “are on the verge of becoming the Cold War party, with Trump, ironically, becoming the candidate of détente.”[89] Cohen joined conservative radio host John Batchelor for an interview published the next day titled, “Cold War, Détente, Neo-McCarthyism, and Donald Trump,” in which he claimed that Trump displays a “clearer advocacy for détente.”[90] In the meantime, nominally left-wing CounterPunch’s editor, Jeffrey St. Clair, similarly decried “the new McCarthyism,” and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting argued that Clinton’s approach “serves to stoke Cold War panic with Russia.”[91]
Writing for Jared Kushner’s former magazine, the Observer, an activist declared that “what Robby Mook did is pure McCarthyism.”[92] In the week and a half after the July 22 WikiLeaks release, the split in the Democratic Party between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters had become irreconcilable, with the party’s left flank insisting that “Russiagate” was a McCarthyite distraction from the failures of Clinton’s global outlook—an opinion that fed into earlier expressions of support for Trump over Clinton.
It should be recalled that, during this time, “Russiagate” referred almost exclusively to the since-proven claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for hacking the DNC and using WikiLeaks as a conduit for the dissemination of hacked emails. It should further be noted that the rise of the “McCarthyite” narrative appears to have begun with Greenwald, who openly aspires to boost the image of Russia in the US, and The Nation, which is directly connected to the ACEWA—The Nation’s Publisher/Editor, vanden Heuvel, and Stephen F. Cohen, contributing editor to The Nation and ACEWA co-founder, are married.[93] It is sufficient to say that their fiery rejection of Russian meddling afforded cover for ongoing Russian active measures, whether or not they provided that cover deliberately.
Similarly distressing instances have occurred with regards to other media disinformation campaigns, including the downing of flight MH17 and Assad’s use of chemical weapons. In these cases, Russian media has joined the fray after autonomous media networks have promoted different theories absolving Russia and Assad of crimes.[94] By promoting these seemingly-autonomous channels, the Russian vertikal appears merely to be supporting the syncretic pro-Russia media network’s critique of its own government, while actually drawing from actors with whom it is connected. As well, the vertikal functions like a “nested hierarchy” in a market-like system, identifying favored theorists, rewarding them with media attention, and outsourcing regime propaganda.
“McCarthyite” Hits the Mainstream
On August 2, the LA Times featured an editorial from Justin Raimondo, an editorial director for the libertarian site Antiwar.com, calling the suggestion of Russian intervention, “the sort of McCarthyism that we haven’t seen in this country since the most frigid years of the Cold War.”[95] Antiwar.com draws 128,067 unique visitors per month, many of whom click over from Consortium News and Pat Buchanan’s far-right website, American Conservative, according to my 2018 Alexa Audience Overlap Tool search. Among its overlapping websites are the usual suspects, including The Unz Review, which hosts the openly antisemitic Da Russophile blog by Lozansky’s think-tank participant, Anatoly Karlin.[96]
By August, websites had shifted the “McCarthyite” accusation from accusations of Russian hacking to claims that the Trump campaign might have been involved in, or known about, hacking the DNC server (the latter also being true, according to the Mueller report).[97] Following Raimondo’s editorial, Sputnik News posted two articles in quick succession on “the Clinton campaign’s rush into the comforting arms of McCarthyism” and how “the Clinton camp is obviously following in Joseph McCarthy’s footsteps.”[98] On August 9, Consortium News founder Robert Parry decried “Hillary Clinton’s Turn to McCarthyism,” and the fever pitch only increased as the campaign continued.[99]
Continuing the gaslighting of the Clinton campaign, on August 8, long-time Trump consiglieri Roger Stone admitted to communicating with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. A few days later, he exchanged public tweets with Guccifer 2.0, thanking them, and then engaged in private communications with the account over a couple of weeks. [100] Regardless of Stone’s open flirtations with a cutout for the GRU and WikiLeaks, which disseminated its hacked data, the Trump campaign denied any insinuation of contact with Russian agencies or political operatives (a denial later proven false).[101]
In mid-August, RT ran a five-minute piece titled “Parallels Drawn Between Clinton Campaign and McCarthy’s Witch-Hunt” featuring former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, a leading figure in the syncretic media ecosystem with bylines in all of the horizontal media sites studied in relation to Lozansky’s think tank.[102] On August 21, Sputnik announced “the resurgence of Cold War style McCarthyism and anti-Russian propaganda,” followed the next day by Huffington Post, which stressed the dangers of “Clinton’s present-day McCarthyism.”[103] The World Socialist Web Site extended the analysis the next day, attacking the New York Times for “outright lies in a manner reminiscent of McCarthyism.” By this point, as we see with Huffington Post, the “McCarthyite” narrative had become generalized and mainstream.
Two days later Julian Assange gave a widely-viewed interview to Megyn Kelly of FOX News, insisting that Clinton has “grabbed on the neo-McCarthyism hysteria about Russia and has been using it to demonize the Trump campaign.”[104] Sputnik International and RT both publicized the interview through their networks, and RT published an article the following Sunday criticizing Clinton for “Russophobia.”[105] That Tuesday, Antiwar.com published “The Campaign to Blame Putin for Everything,” excoriating “the historically Russophobic Clintons,” and the next day, August 31, Glenn Greenwald went on Democracy Now to denounce linking WikiLeaks with Russia as “a new McCarthyism.”[106] That same day, the New York Times published an interview with Julian Assange in which he accused the newspaper of “erecting a demon” by supporting Clinton.[107] Nevertheless, the Mueller report later confirmed WikiLeaks likely received stolen emails from the GRU through an encrypted file sent via email, a fact which few of the advocates of the “McCarthyite” narrative have reflected on, much less been able to convincingly rebut.[108]
The day after Greenwald’s interview with Democracy Now, the Observer criticized “an insurgence of neo-McCarthyism, alleging that the Trump campaign has ties to the Russian government,” and RT interviewed left-wing commentator Mike Papantonio, who called the question of Russian intervention “crazy, radical talk,” “all supposition” intended to distract from the content of the emails.[109] Two days after Papantonio’s interview, on September 3, RT turned on the left, inquiring into a “McCarthyism of the left?”[110] The following Wednesday, September 6, Breitbart was mocking “Hillary Clinton’s Absurd, McCarthyist Russian Conspiracy Theory” from their headlines, followed the next day by Consortium News’s scathing piece, “New York Times and the New McCarthyism.”[111] The period from September 4-11 saw an interesting rise in searches for “McCarthyite” according to Google Trends. Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Center tweeted on September 26 that Clinton’s claim that “Putin is hacking us” was an “insane conspiracy theory.”[112]
The frequency with which alternative news sites published articles denouncing the “mainstream media” for McCarthyism, as well as their crossover in terms both of audience and journalists, is fascinating for a number of reasons. Perhaps paramount among those is the inability to explain the hacked emails. Some sites turned to conspiracy theories surrounding Seth Rich, a former DNC employee who had been tragically murdered; further investigation was unable to demonstrate that Rich or his murder had anything to do with the leaks, and Rich’s parents currently have an ongoing lawsuit against FOX News and two of its commentators for its unsubstantiated allegations about Rich.[113] Another interesting facet of the research thus far is the repudiation of “mainstream media” in and even to the mainstream media, as with vanden Heuvel’s editorial in the Washington Post, Raimondo’s editorial in the LA Times, and Assange’s interview in the New York Times. Similarly important was the convergence of left-wing repudiations with far-right media like Breitbart lambasting the “mainstream” media and left-wing McCarthyism, even amid high site ratings and campaigns to oust left-wing professors from universities.
It is important to note that, at this point, not only had the term “McCarthyite” become diffuse but its narrative had also slipped into different meanings and contexts. The accusation that began with a denial of Russian hacking now involved general “Russophobia” and especially the idea that Trump was collaborating with the Russian government. Generally, the hysteria and anxiety surrounding the accusations of “collusion” were easily matched, if not exceeded, by the accusations of “McCarthyism” against those who correctly assigned blame for the email releases to Russian hackers disseminating through WikiLeaks. Again, it is important to stress that evidence does not necessarily show that the “McCarthyite” spin was centrally planned or conspired by the Kremlin, but that (1) it was propagated first by individuals like Cohen, Greenwald, and vanden Heuvel who have directly involved themselves in promoting Russia’s image, and (2) the Russian vertikal eagerly exploited it on behalf of a disinformation campaign in support of Trump’s campaign.
Just days after the articles from Breitbart and Consortium, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that the negative spin surrounding the revelations around Russian meddling resulted in a tightening race with ominous signs for the Clinton campaign.[114] While nearly 100% of Trump’s supporters insisted they would vote, only 80% of Clinton’s said the same, and only a third of her supporters claimed to be enthusiastic. As Jeff Greenfield wrote in Politico, “constituencies most critical to her campaign seem to have no sense of urgency about keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.”[115] Of course, other elements contributed to the disenfranchisement of Clinton’s base, as well; however, after each debate, Clinton came out the victor, suggesting that her policies and approach appealed to more voters who participated in CNN/ORC polls.[116] As others have argued, the release of the hacked emails, the proliferation of disinformation, and the later, associated FBI announcement regarding Clinton’s use of a private email server, contributed to the decline in her popularity between and after the debates but was not necessarily decisive.[117]
Importantly, many of those disillusioned with Clinton could be found among the Democratic Party’s base of non-white supporters actively targeted by disinformation.[118] Amid controversy over her comments on “super-predators” during the 1990s and the legacy of mass incarceration, as well as disillusionment with the Democrats’ handling of the Black Lives Matter movement, Black Agenda Report declared that “the Clinton campaign has ignited a neo-McCarthyist war on Russia and anyone who stands in the way of her agenda.”[119] Meanwhile, Sputnik continued its onslaught with headlines like, “When Hillary Clinton Gets Scared She Plays the Russia Card,” making an allusion that connected criticism of Russian interference to the “race card.”[120] Furthermore, it is now understood from millions of published tweets pushed out of the Internet Research Agency at the time, that Kremlin-controlled bot and troll accounts on social media used racial divisions to turn discontent and disenfranchisement against liberalism.[121]
The Elections and Aftermath
Clinton’s bad September turned into a terrible October when, on October 9, WikiLeaks produced a new bevy of emails from Podesta’s email account, leading to a deluge of fiery illiberalism throughout the syncretic ecosystem. That evening, Trump proclaimed, “I love WikiLeaks!” at a rally. Two days later, WikiLeaks wrote Trump, Jr., “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us… Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.” In an apparent exposition of collaboration, Trump, Jr., tweeted in support of Wikileaks two hours later, lamenting the “Rigged system!” and two days later tweeted out their link.[122] That same day, Roger Stone publicly denied collusion with WikiLeaks as “categorically false,” insisting that his relationship with Assange was only through a “mutual friend,” but that he had “a back-channel communications with WikiLeaks.”[123] He would later be convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering in efforts to obstruct federal investigators’ inquiry into the hacked emails and Russian interference in the elections.[124]
The week of October 9-16 saw the sharpest rise of Google searches for “McCarthyite” in the study period, indicating that, as the emails were released, more accusations of Russian meddling emerged, and activists responded with accusations of “McCarthyism.” As the weeks closed in on the November 7 election day, the flurry of articles cautioning against McCarthyism and Russophobia increased apace. From Counterpunch on Oct 18, left-wing organizer Srećko Horvat denounced the Clinton camp’s “‘soft’ McCarthyism,” while a Sputnik writer capitalized on the trends, lamenting that he was “The first victim of McCarthyism 2.0.”[125] The next day, Roger Stone was quoted in Breitbart as saying, “this is the new McCarthyism.”[126] At the same time, Consortium News ridiculed “The Democrats’ Joe McCarthy Moment” and nominally left-wing AlterNet blogger Ben Norton tweeted about Clinton’s claim that WikiLeaks received the emails from Russian intelligence, “McCarthyism is alive and well.”[127]
On RT on October 23, anti-imperialist commentator Daniel Patrick Welch declared, “Clinton [is] using anti-Russia red-baiting not seen since days of McCarthyism,” followed the next day by Consortium News’s recap of the Russian response to the recent debate in which Doctorow declared, “The main theme of American political life right now is McCarthyism and anti-Russian hysteria.”[128] Antiwar.com ran their piece, “’McCarthyism,’ Then and Now,” the following day, and three days later, on October 28, CounterPunch likened the charges of Russian interference to “the paranoia that accompanied the Red Scare in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and then reappeared with greater intensity in the form of McCarthyism.”[129]The Observer declared that “McCarthyism 2.0 Has Infected the Democrats” on November 1, with Sputnik insisting, “Washington Fails to Prove Russia Interfered in US Elections in ‘Big Way.’”[130] Pro-Palestine blog MondoWeiss quoted Carden of the ACEWA decrying “a very very ugly echo of McCarthyism” three days later, and then the day before the election, left-wing site Jacobin stated that, “to distract attention from the content of the emails, the Democrats have engaged in a modern-day version of McCarthyism.”[131] Again, the inclusion of sites like Jacobin and Huffington Post only further illustrates how widely the campaign to identify Russia’s hacking of the DNC as “McCarthyism” had spread throughout the alternative media ecosystem well beyond Russia’s apparent direct influence.
In the two years following the election of Donald Trump, the term “McCarthyism” would splash across some 5,260 headlines internationally, according to Nexis Uni®, producing an average of at least seven articles every day. The prominence of allegations of McCarthyism also increased. There is no doubt that the discourse of McCarthyism expressed a radical frustration with the liberal, centrist wing of the Democratic Party by a new generation of left-wing participants largely identified with Bernie Sanders. According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 12 percent of those who voted for Sanders in the primaries voted for Trump in the general election, meaning that, ceteris paribus, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would have swung to Clinton had those voters stayed home or voted with the party.[132] While this does not mean that Sanders helped Trump win the election, it suggests that members of the electorate to whom the radical left would have appealed, and who likely disapproved of the Obama administration, accorded, in general terms, with the crossover between right and left constituted by the network of sites ranging from Sputnik and Russia Insider to Consortium News and The Duran to The Nation and others.
IV. Discussion
The Meaning of McCarthyism
While the sites I studied all share a common geopolitical imperative aligned with the “multipolar world” and, more specifically, Eurasianism, calling them “Duginist” would be too broad a generalization.[133] They certainly take part in the same movement in favor of Kremlin-centered geopolitics, and they engage in substantial crossover, but they are different nonetheless. This study does not suggest that everyone engaging in the discourse of “McCarthyism” is a fascist or deliberately contributing to fascist discourse or connected to the Kremlin. It merely reveals the extent to which disinformation has influenced the geopolitical approaches of the Western left and right wing, while also establishing a pattern of far-left and far-right agreement encouraged by Duginist tendencies.
Importantly, the allegations of McCarthyism appear to have begun principally with horizontal networks tied to pro-Kremlin soft power, and extended to Russian state media’s vertikal soon afterwards. The groups within the horizontal networks that have been identified by myself, in Starbird et al., 2018, in New Knowledge’s 2018 report, and the Stanford 2019 report reproduced similar narratives. According to a Lexis Uni® search, The Nation was the top influencer among the sites that I studied, having published about a dozen stories featuring the keywords “McCarthyism” or “McCarthyite” in reference to the elections during the study period, inclusive of cross-posts from the conservative John Batchelor show. All but one of The Nation’s “McCarthyite” articles came from Cohen.
By contrast, Consortium News and Global Research each published some four such articles each during the five-month study period, not an insignificant number by any means, but small compared to Cohen’s output alone. By comparison, the Ron Paul Institute’s director, Daniel McAdams, tweeted twice about it, and both The Duran and Russia Insider posted a story on it. Antiwar.com and the Observer also featured prominently in my sample, but remained peripheral to my study outside of audience overlap and content sharing (Starbird et al., 2018). Perhaps, then, the most weight was likely given to the “McCarthyite” accusation from sharing and cross-publishing Cohen’s persistent articles, along with the important mainstream editorials by vanden Heuvel and Raimondo, as well as the generalized narrative saturation and refraction. In this way, disinformation networks helped stoke and guide the discourse on “McCarthyism,” but were not wholly responsible for their proliferation, as unaffiliated sites and groups took the proverbial baton during the race. It should be noted, though, that such independent activity is precisely the goal of disinformation.
This pattern suggests that pro-Russian disinformation efforts do not always emanate vertically from Russian media, but through an adaptive process of testing the bounds of political discourse and farming out opinions in order to ascertain and develop popular trends on pressure issues. The vertikal, then, appears to reinforce broader ideological trends that are developed in a more complex, multi-scalar fashion, rather than controlling them. However, it is important to notice that The Nation is one of the most important influencers in the US Left, so the direct, early interventions of individual editors and the magazine suggests that, in this case, the movement of disinformation across the horizontal structure did not flow in a necessarily bottom-up or grassroots fashion, but instead manifested through a weighted system of nested hierarchies. Furthermore, given The Nation’s proximity to the ACEWA, a pro-Russia influence group with ties to prominent figures close to the Kremlin, it is difficult to view its coverage as fully autonomous.
Of course, reward systems involve greater public notoriety through more prominent media and conference appearances. Following the election, The Nation began publishing breathless denunciations of “Russiagate” by journalist Aaron Maté, a contributor to The GrayZone Project, which spreads conspiracy theory narratives about Venezuela, Xinjiang, and Syria, among other places.[134] Through a November 2, 2019 Alexa search, I discovered that the most similar site to GrayZone is TheAmericanConservative, a far-right publication that names ACEWA editor James Carden as a “Contributing Editor.”
By building a bridge from the political margins to the mainstream, The Nation continued to make pro-Russia disinformation palatable to larger audiences interested in the merging of left and right. Through Maté, The Nation became one of the last sites conected to the public assertion that Russia did not meddling in the 2016 elections, going on Tucker Carlson’s far-right show as late as December 2019 as a contributor to The Nation to claim that no evidence could either tie Russia to the hacking of the DNC or disprove Trump’s false assertion that Ukraine had actually hacked the DNC in 2016.[135] A quantitative analysis by the Twitter account Conspirador Norteño shortly after Maté’s FOX News appearance found that “a significant portion of the amplification” of Maté’s twitter presence “is coming from #MAGA Twitter.”[136]
Using the tool Pushshift, which sifts through social media for trends and topics, I collected the total number of tweets using the term “McCarthyite” over the last five years [Figure 6][137]. The top ranked twitter accounts included Glenn Greenwald at the top, with Maté ranked fifth and his GrayZone colleagues, Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal ranked second and third, respectively. While Eli Valley lands in the fourth spot, his usage of the term appears to fall in a different milieu (anti-Zionism) from the context of Russian interference in the U.S. elections. Using the same tool to scan subreddits on the site Reddit for the same term, I found WayOfTheBern ranked second, left-wing podcast ChapoTrapHouse ranked fifth, and notoriously racist The_Donald ranked seventh [Figure 7].
These searches of social media sites indicate the influence of conspiracy theorists spreading the message on Twitter, and the confluence of left and right-wing subreddits disseminating the same message on Reddit. They also show to what extent the GrayZone has emerged as a hub for allegations of “McCarthyite” activity since 2017—a process likely helped along through Maté’s collaboration with The Nation.
Figure 6. PushShift.io analysis of top 10 Twitter accounts mentioning “McCarthyite”Figure 7. PushShift.io analysis of top 20 Subreddits mentioning “McCarthyite”
It has been shown that a number of the groups insisting that the accusations of Russian influence in the elections amounted to McCarthyism were actually engaged in Russian influence groups during that period, not least of which being the Russia Forum and the ACEWA. Most importantly, the spread of the trope of “McCarthyism” was stoked by important actors supportive of the Kremlin, and occurred virtually overnight by thousands of independent actors, including journalists who ran with the narrative in a number of different directions. However, the most staunch promoters of the narrative appear to have come from the horizontal network of disinformation sites reinforced by the vertikal. In this fashion, disinformation benefits from a kind of “social capital” model that might provide some explanatory potential for the ease with which disinformation spreads through social media. Hence, by tracking claims of McCarthyism, we have seen how right and left met during the elections in an illiberal and populist, anti-establishment movement that generally viewed Trump as a more viable candidate than Clinton on the basis, in particular, of his position as the “détente” candidate toward Russia and its allies.
Geopolitical alignments are critical, because they rely on phenomenological articulations of spatial association, rather than association by class or sociality. In this way, geopolitical alignments skew toward nationalism or similarly structured regionalism, even if they involve some degree of collectivist discourse of solidarity. It is, therefore, important to use caution approaching geopolitical arrangements, as such, working instead to deconstruct the claims that presuppose deterministic geopolitical thinking. The trap of syncretism, as Sternhell, Eco, Gentile, and Eatwell have noted, is alluring, but its inconsistencies produce chimerical ideologies given to authoritarian, nationalist systems.
Potential for Follow-up Research
The results of this study suggest many avenues for follow-up research and discussion. The syncretic, pro-Kremlin media networks described above form part of larger geopolitical networks that share many of the same interests. Importantly, they consist of a broader network incorporating far-right, left-wing, libertarian, and other ideological positions, making the network itself syncretic. On the other hand, within the network are not only left and right sites, but also syncretic sites that meld an array of political commentators, ideas, and theories together typically in support of conspiracy theories. Syncretism exists on different scales within this alternative media network, which maintains connections (as previously stated) based on audience overlap as well as personnel collaborations—as with Lozansky’s think tank, for example. The overlap and collaboration does not mean that over planning took place in dark, smoke-filled rooms, but that the network can be viewed as a system of discrete units with shared interests and goals, as well as common understandings which manifest in myriad verisimilar articles across disparate platforms and ideologies.
Ascertaining and describing the differences between the various groups, from Consortium News to The Nation to The Duran, would take an article in and of itself. That these different but intersecting ideological producers appear to fit within the same discursive frameworks and conferences intimates the populist, “big tent” approach to pro-Kremlin geopolitics provided by syncretic platforms loosely aligned with the multipolar world. Furthermore, more extensive research is needed into the networks of bots on social media, as well as the extent of their influence. This could be accomplished through the creation of an index that combines the number of retweets and Facebook shares with monthly website hits, processed into a quantitative scale. Learning more about the global influence of pro-Kremlin media would enable closer understanding of the behavior of the sites, although the potential for sources like New Eastern Outlook and Strategic Culture that are not as popular would remain relatively opaque.
Lastly, more geographical thought might be included in interdisciplinary research related to data science, communications, psychology, sociology, and international relations. Media strategies and policy proposals might emerge from this field that would enable the freedom of the press while delimiting the spread of damaging conspiracy theories and deliberate geopolitical propaganda that twists left-wing messaging toward the geopolitical aims of authoritarian regimes. While we might understand how disinformation spreads, we do not yet know why individuals promulgate it. Unlocking that question might provide the secrets to stopping the flow of disinformation not only at its source but at the point of consumption.
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Alexander Reid Ross is a PhD candidate in Portland State University’s Earth, Environment, Society Program and a Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. He is the author of Against the Fascist Creep (AK Press 2017), and his articles on disinformation and the far right have appeared in the Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data and The Independent.
[2] Starbird, K., A. Arif, T. Wilson. 2018. “Understanding the Structure and Dynamics of Disinformation in the Online Information Ecosystem.” Defense Technical Information Center, Technical Report; Hjorth, F.G. & R. Adler-Nissen. “Ideological Asymmetry in the Reach of Pro-Russian Digital Disinformation to United States Audience.” Journal of Communication, 69(2), 168-192.
[3] DiResta, R., K. Shaffer, B. Ruppel, D. Sullivan, R. Matney, R. Fox, J. Albright, B. Johnson. 2018. The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency. Austin, TX: New Knowledge; Starbird, K., A. Arif, T. Wilson, K. Van Koevering, K. Yefimova, D. Scarnecchia. 2017. “Ecosystem or Echo-System? Exploring Content Sharing across Alternative Media Domains.” Proceedings of the Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018), 365-374.
[4] Starbird et al., 2017; Levinger, M. 2018. “Master Narratives of Disinformation Campaigns.” Journal of International Affairs, 71(1.5), 125-134.
[5] Howard, P.N., G. Bolsover, B. Kollanyi, S. Bradshaw, L-M. Neudert. 2017. “Junk News and Bots During the US Election: What Were Michigan Voters Sharing Over Twitter?” COMPROP Data Memo, 26 March 2017; Starbird et al., 2017
[6] See Mosse, G.L. 1972. “The French Right and the Working Classes: Les Jaunes.” Journal of Contemporary History.
[7] Rainey, L.S., E. Gentile. 1994. “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism.” Modernism/Modernity, 1(3), 55-87.
[8] Landa, I. 2010. The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism. Leiden: Brill. 134. Importantly, fascists are quasi-populist, in so far as their use of völkisch and populist rhetoric is contradicted by their self-image as the “natural elite” within “the people” rather than “of the people” itself. Here, fascism is distinct from the populist radical right, which promotes an authoritarian, nativist agenda within the confines of parliamentary systems. While both utilize tropes identifiable both with left and right, fascism ultimately desires the overthrow of parliamentary democracy. Fascists might abide with participation in electoralism, but their ends are never met within the existing parliamentary context, partly because of their disdain for socialist successes within it. See Mudde, C. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
[9] Wistrich, R.S. 2012. From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, The Jews, and Israel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
[10] For more on the hard right, see Lyons, M., C. Berlet. 2000. Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. NYC: Guilford Press, 16.
[11]Fine, R., Spencer, P. 2017. Antisemitism and the Left: On the Return of the Jewish Question. Manchester: Manchester University Press. See also Lyons and Berlet, 144.
[14] Sternhell, Z. 1986. Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, Trans. David Maisel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[15] Dagnino, J. 2016. “The Myth of the New Man in Italian Fascist Ideology.” Fascism, 5, 130-148.
[16] Griffin, R. 1993. The Nature of Fascism. NYC: Routledge, 32-36.
[17] Benadusi, L. 2014. “A Fully Furnished House: The History of Masculinity,” In L. Benadusi, G. Caravale, eds. George L. Mosse’s Italy: Interpretation, Reception, and Intellectual Heritage. NYC: Palgrave MacMillan.
[18] Eco, U. “Ur-Fascism.” New York Review of Books. June 22, 1995.
[22]Gentile, E. 2006. “New Idols: Catholicism in the Face of Fascist Totalitarianism.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 11(2), 143-170.
[23] Da Costa, L.P. P. Labriola. 1999. “Bodies from Brazil: Fascist Aesthetics in a South American Setting.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, 16(4), 166.
[24] Andrew, C. 2005. The World Was Going Our Way. NYC: Basic Books.
[25] Katz, M.N. 2006. “Primakov Redux? Putin’s Pursuit of Multipolarism in Asia.” Demokratizasya 14(1), 144-152.
[26] Silvius, R. 2015. “Eurasianism and Putin’s Embedded Civilizationism,” in D. Lane, V. Samokhvalov, eds. The Eurasian Project and Europe: Regional Discontinuities and Geopolitics. NYC: Palgrave Macmillan. 78-79.
[27]Chebankova, E. 2017. “Russia’s Idea of the Multipolar World Order: Origins and Main Dimensions.” Post-Soviet Affairs, 33(3), 217-234.
[28] See Stein, E. 2017. “Ideological Codependency and Regional Order: Iran, Syria, and the Axis of Refusal.” Political Science & Politics, 50(3), 676-680.
[29] In particular, the Internet Research Agency promoted websites within the Duginist network. See DiResta, 2018.
[30] See Laruelle, M, Ed. 2015. Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe-Russia Relationship. NYC: Lexington Books
[31] Laruelle, M. 2006. Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the European Radical Right? Washington, DC: Kennan Institute; Bar-On, Tamir. 2013. Rethinking the French New Right. New York: Routledge.
[32] Bar-On, T. 2007. Where Have All the Fascists Gone? New York: Routledge; Bassin, M. 2016. The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
[33]Dugin, A. 1999. ОсновыГеополитикии (Foundations of Geopolitics). Found online at ratnikjournal.narod.ru.
[39] Michael, G. 2019. “Useful Idiots or Fellow Travelers? The Relationship between the American Far Right and Russia.” Terrorism and Political Violence, 31, 64-83; Clover, 271-272, 286-287; Laruelle, M.. 2016. “The Izborsky Club, or the New Conservative Avant-Garde in Russia.” The Russian Review, 75, 626—44. See also M. Lyons, “Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, U.S. leftists,” ThreeWayFight, February 2, 2015.
[40]Campo Antimperialista spokesperson Pasquinelli notably declared, “Fascism and the fascists are our main enemy today? Absolutely not. It really seems pleonastic to me to have to explain on a list of anti-Americanists and anti-imperialists who is the main enemy today. This means maybe be indulgent towards the fascists? Of course not. The fascists are all contained in Forza Nuova positions? Absolutely not. It’s in this area a great ferment, a heated discussion not only political, but theoretical. Should we follow this discussion carefully? Or we’ll piss over it? I think we have to follow it.” Cernigoi, C., “’Rossobruni’ e nuova destra ‘internazionalista,’” I Falsi Amici conference, December 7, 2013; Cernigoi, C., “Comunitaristi e Nazi-Maoisti,” Nuova Alabarda, February 2007.
[41] March, L. 2011. “Is Nationalism Rising in Russian Foreign Policy? The Case of Georgia.” Demokratizatsiya, 19(3), 187-207.
[42] “Putin Aide Says New Ukraine Leader Could Populate War-Torn Region with Jews,” Moscow Times, May 7, 2019.
[43] Fridman, O. 2018. Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’: Resurgence and Politicization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 75-84.
[45] Horbyk, R. 2015. “Little Patriotic War: Nationalist Narratives in the Russian Media Coverage of the Ukraine-Russia Crisis.” Asian Politics & Policy, 7(3), pp. 505-511
[46] Yablokov, I. 2015. “Conspiracy Theories as a Russian Public Diplomacy Tool: The Case of Russia Today (RT).” Politics, 35(3-4), 305-315.
[48] Bromley, R. 2018. “The Politics of Displacement: The Far Right Narrative of Europe and Its ’Others.’” From the European South 3, 13-26.
[49]Ross, A.R. 2017. Against the Fascist Creep. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
[50] Parker, N., J. Landay, J. Walcott. “Putin-Linked Think Tank Drew Up Plan to Sway 2016 US Election—Documents.” Reuters, April 19, 2017. Oscar Jonnson calls Korybko a member of the expert council at RISS in 2019. The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines between War and Peace. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
[51]A Bellingcat Contributor, “Russia Tries to Influence Le Pen to Repeal Sanctions,” Bellingcat April 29, 2019.
[54] Godzimirski, J.M., M Østevik. 2018. How to Understand and Deal with Russian Strategic Communication Measures? Policy Brief. Oslo: Norweigen Institute of International Affairs.
[56] Jainter, M., P.A. Mattsson. 2015. “Russian Information Warfare of 2014.” 7th International Conference on Cyber Conflict: Architectures in Cyberspace, 39-52.
[58] Ballacher, J.D., V. Barash, P.N. Howard, J. Kelly. “Junk News on Military Affairs and National Security: Social Media Disinformation Campaigns Against US Military Personnel and Veterans.” COMPROP Data Memo, 09 October 2017.
[59] Schreckinger, B. “How Russia Targets the US Military,” Politico, June 27, 2017.
[62]Lough, J., O. Lutsevych, P. Pomerantsev, S. Secrieru, A. Shekhovtsov. 2014. “Russian Influence Abroad: Non-state Actors and Propaganda.” Russia and Eurasia Programme Meeting Summary. Chatham House: The Royal Institute of International Affairs.
[63]Bevensee and Ross, 2018; Grant Stern and Patrick Simpson have done great work researching Lozansky’s past at the blog, The Stern Facts.
[64]US-Russia.org, “Think-Tank & American University.” The site was changed to conceal the names of the associates some time in 2018; McAdams’s Twitter profile can be seen by Google searching his full bio: “Executive Director, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Hypocrisy hunter. Traditionalist. Tweets are mine alone and often rude.”
[65] Young, C. “Putin’s New American Fan Club?” The Daily Beast, October 11, 2015. Michel, C. “Why Is This Russia ‘Expert’ Writing for an Anti-Semitic Outlet?” ThinkProgress, February 16, 2018. Doctorow left the ACEWA in March 2017 after around two and a half years with the group he co-founded.
[70] Di Giovanni, Janine, “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets,” New York Review of Books, October 16, 2018; Hasan, H. “’Fake News’: The Mainstreaming of Syria Conspiracy Theories,” Middle East Monitor, April 21, 2018; Lucas, S. “Who Are the White Helmets and Why Are They So Controversial?” The Conversation, October 7, 2016; Proyect, L. “Max Blumenthal and the Streisand Effect,” New Politics, March 14, 2018.
[74] Flock, E. “After a Week of Russian Propaganda, I Was Questioning Everything,” PBS.org, May 2, 2018; Vázquez-Liñán, M. 2019. “The Political Discourse of the Kremlin in Spain: Channels, Messages, and Interpretive Frameworks,” in T. Hoffmann, A. Makarychev, eds., Russia and the EU: Spaces of Interaction, New York: Routledge.
[94] Agarwal, N., Al-khateeb, R. Galeano, R. Goolsby. 2017. “Examining the Use of Botnets and their Evolution in Propaganda Dissemination.” Defence Strategic Communications, NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, 2. 90-91; Starbird et al., 2018.
[96]Unz is worth explicating for a moment, and not only for its impressive 163,703 average unique visitors per month in 2017. Developed by former editor of American Conservative, Ron Unz, after he controversially attacked Ivy League schools with claims that they prejudicially favor Jews, The Unz Review is a favorite of academic anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and fascist David Duke. Unz also plays host to a regular blog from Steve Sailer, a well-known figure on the far right. Aside from these clear right-wing affinities, Unz has helped finance left-wing anti-Zionist publications like Mondoweiss and CounterPunch. The Unz Review’s top audience cross-overs include white nationalist sites VDare, Taki’s Mag, and American Renaissance, as well as Consortium News, The Saker, and Antiwar.com. Although his Antiwar.com displays such audience overlap, however, it is important to note that Raimondo himself does not have a byline or feature in the horizontal network of sites represented in Lozansky’s think tank.
[119] Haiphong, D., “Hillary Clinton’s Neo-McCarthyism and the Real Father of ‘Extreme Nationalism,’” Black Agenda Report, September 21, 2016. It is also interesting to note that Black Agenda Report writer Margaret Kimberly is also close to the Workers World Party and its front groups, having joined a delegation to the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia.
[127] Parry, R., “The Democrats’ Joe McCarthy Moment,” Consortium News, October 19, 2016,. Norton, B., Twitter, October 19, 2016, https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/788915185016836096. Norton was a part of the left-wing GrayZoneProject, whose founder, Max Blumenthal, would later call “Russiagate” a “vicious backlash… against Trump’s moves toward detente.” A regular guest on Russian media, Blumenthal had attended the December 2015 anniversary gala for RT along with Jill Stein, conspiracy theorist Ray McGovern, and Mike Flynn, and followed the Kremlin’s line regarding the Syria Civil Defense (also known as the White Helmets), conflict in Ukraine, and other geopolitical issues. GrayZoneProject’s work on the White Helmets was significant enough to assist AlterNet in featuring prominently in Starbird et al., 2018. See Giovanni, J.D., “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets,” New York Review of Books, October 16, 2018.
During an exchange on my blog in 2014 with an individual named Anonymous—it must have been a very popular baby name at some point—I was told, “Yes, yes, David, show us on the doll where the Internet touched you, because we all know that all evil comes from there.” That discussion was in context to the internet industry’s anti-copyright agenda, but the smugness of the response, lurking behind a concealed identity while making an eye-rolling allusion to sexual assault, is characteristic of the tech-bro culture that dismisses any conversation about the darker aspects of digital life. In fact, I am fairly sure it was the same Anonymous who decided that I had “failed the free speech test” because I wrote encouragingly about the prospect of making the conduct generally referred to as “revenge porn” a federal crime.
Those old exchanges, conducted in the safety of the abstract, came rushing into the foreground while I read attorney Carrie Goldberg’s Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls, because Goldberg and her colleagues do not address conduct like “revenge porn” in the abstract: they deal with it as a tangible and terrifying reality. It is at her Brooklyn law firm where the victims of that crime (and other forms of harassment and abuse) arrive shattered, frightened and suicidally desperate to escape the hell their lives have become—often with the push of a button. These are people who can show us exactly how and where the “internet touched” them, and Goldberg’s book is a harrowing tutorial in the various ways online platforms provide opportunity, motive, sanctuary, and even profit for individuals who purposely choose to destroy other human beings.
Nobody’s Victim reads like an anthology of short thriller/horror stories but for the fact that each of the terrorized protagonists is a real person, and far too many of them are children. These infuriating anecdotes are interwoven with the story of Goldberg’s own transformation from a young woman nearly destroyed by predatory men to become, as she puts it, the attorney she needed when she was in trouble. The result is both an inspiring narrative of personal triumph over adversity and a rigorous critique of our inadequate legal framework, which needlessly exacerbates the suffering of people targeted by life-threatening attacks—attacks that were simply not possible before the internet as we know it.
Covering a lot of ground—from stalking to sextortion—Goldberg tells the stories of her archetypal clients, along with her own jaw-dropping experiences, in a voice that pairs the discipline of a lawyer with the passion of a crusader. “We can be the army to take these motherfuckers down,” her introduction concludes, and “What happened to you matters,” is the mantra of her epilogue. It is clear that the central message she wants to convey is one of empowerment for the constituency she represents, but the details are chilling to say the least.
Anyone anywhere can have his or her life torn apart by remote control—i.e. via the web. All the malefactor really needs is basic computer skills, a little too much time on his hands, and a profoundly broken moral compass. Psychos, stalkers, pervs, trolls, and assholes are all specific types of criminals in the “Carrie Goldberg Taxonomy of Offenders.” For instance, the ex-boyfriend who uploads non-consensual intimate images to a revenge-porn site is a psycho, while the site operator, profiting off the misery of others, is an asshole.
As Goldberg notes in Chapter 6, by the year 2014, there were about 3,000 websites dedicated to hosting revenge porn. That is a hell of a lot of guys willing to expose their ex-girlfriends to a range of potential trauma—these include public humiliation, job loss, relationship damage, sexual assault, PTSD, and suicide—simply because their partner broke off the relationship. This volume of men engaging in revenge porn does seem to imply that the existence of the technology itself becomes a motive or rationale for the conduct, but that is perhaps a subject to explore in another post.
One theme that comes through loud and clear for me in Nobody’s Victim—particularly in context to the editorial scope of my blog—is that the individual conduct of the psychos, et al is only slightly less maddening than our systemic failure to protect the victims. As a cyber-policy matter, that means the chronic misinterpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a speech-right protection and a blanket liability shield for online service providers.
Taking on Section 230
Goldberg’s most high-profile client, Matthew Herrick, was the target of a disgruntled ex-boyfriend named Juan Carlos Gutierrez, who tried, via the gay dating app Grindr, to get Herrick at least raped, if not murdered. By creating several Grindr accounts designed to impersonate Herrick, Gutierrez posted invitations to seek him out for rough, “rape-fantasy” sex, including messages that any protests to stop should be taken as “part of the game.” Hundreds of men swarmed into Herrick’s life for more than a year—appearing at his home and work, often becoming verbally or physically aggressive upon discovering that he was not offering what they were looking for.
With Goldberg’s help, Herrick succeeded in getting Gutierrez convicted on felony charges, but what they could never obtain was even the most basic form of assistance from Grindr. You might think it would be at least common courtesy for an internet business to remove accounts that falsely claim to be you—particularly when those accounts are being used to facilitate criminal threats to your safety and livelihood. In fact, the smaller dating app Gutierrez had been using called Scruff eagerly and sympathetically complied with Herrick’s plea for help. But Grindr told him to fuck off by saying, “There’s nothing we can do.”
Herrick, through Goldberg, sued Grindr for “negligence, deceptive business practices and false advertising, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, failure to warn, and negligent misrepresentation.” They lost in both the District Court and in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, principally because most courts continue to read Section 230 of the CDA as absolute immunity for online service providers. This cognitive dissonance, which chooses to ignore the fact that a matter like Herrick’s plight is wholly unrelated to free speech, is emphasized in an amicus brief that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed in the Second Circuit appeal on behalf of Grindr:
Intermediaries allow Internet users to connect easily with family and friends, follow the news, share opinions and personal experiences, create and share art, and debate politics. Appellant’s efforts to circumvent Section 230’s protections undermine Congress’s goal of encouraging open platforms and robust online speech.
Isn’t that pretty? But what the fuck has any of it got to do with using internet technologies to impersonate someone; to commit libel, slander, or defamation in his/her name; to deploy violent people (or in some cases SWAT teams) against a private individual; or to get someone fired or arrested—and all for the perpetrator’s amusement, vengeance, or profit? None of that conduct is remotely protected by the speech right, and all of it—all of it—infringes the speech rights and other civil liberties of the victims. Perhaps most absurdly, organizations like EFF choose to overlook the fact that the first right being denied to someone in Herrick’s predicament is the right to safely access all those invaluable activities enabled by online “intermediaries.”
No, Grindr did not commit those crimes, but let’s be real. What was Herrick asking Grindr to do? Remove the conduits through which crimes were being committed against him—online accounts pretending to be him. Scruff complied, and I didn’t feel a tremor in the free speech right, did you? If we truly cannot make a legal distinction between Herrick’s circumstances and all that frilly bullshit the EFF likes to repeat ad nauseum, then, we are clearly too stupid to reap the benefits of the internet while mitigating its harms.
Suffice to say, a fight over Section 230 is indeed brewing. As it heats up, Silicon Valley will marshal its seemingly endless resources to defend the status quo, and they will carpet bomb the public with messages that any change to this law will be an existential threat to the internet as we know it. There is some truth to that, of course, but the internet as we know it needs a lot of work. Meanwhile, if anyone is going to win against Big Tech’s juggernaut on this issue, it will be thanks to the leadership of (mostly) women like Carrie Goldberg, her colleagues, and her clients.
It is an unfortunate axiom that policy rarely changes without some constituency suffering harm for a period of time; and those are exactly the people whose stories Goldberg is in a position to tell—in court, in Congress, and to the public. If you read Nobody’s Victim and still insist, like my friend Anonymous, this is all a theoretical debate about anomalous cases, largely mooted by the speech right, there’s a pretty good chance you’re an asshole—if not a psycho, stalker, perv, or troll. And that clock you hear ticking is actually the sound of Carrie Goldberg’s signature high heels heading your way.
_____
David Newhoff is a filmmaker, writer, and communications consultant, and an activist for artist’s rights, especially as they pertain to the erosion of copyright by digital technology companies. He is writing a book about copyright due out in Fall 2020. He writes about these issue frequently as @illusionofmore on Twitter and on the blogThe Illusion of More, on which an earlier version of this review first appeared.
This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.
There are reduced expectations for the younger generation, and this is the first time this has happened in American history. Even if there are aspects of Trump that are retro and that seem to be going back to the past, I think a lot of people want to go back to a past that was futuristic—The Jetsons, Star Trek. They’re dated but futuristic.
—Peter Thiel, quoted in Dowd (2017)
In the scramble to explain Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, then-campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon’s claim to a Mother Jones reporter that Breitbart under his editorship was a “platform for the alt-right” (Posner 2016) generated widespread attention in mainstream media publications.[1] A rash of alt-right “explainers” appeared that attempted to familiarize the uninitiated with this so-called movement by outlining the obscure intellectual roots of the alt-right’s seemingly inscrutable meme-driven cultural politics. This paper begins from the premise that the alt-right is not a movement but a reactionary ideology, a “bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics,” better understood as an ideological “milieu” rather than a movement (Nagle 2017, 19 & 18). Through an analysis of alt-right meme practice and neoreactionary theory, I will show in what follows that the intellectual innovation of the alt-right and its neoreactionary co-travelers is to attach white identity politics to a critique of modernity that turns postcolonialism on its head. Where the latter attacks racism for compromising the democratic promise, the former attacks democracy for compromising the white race’s promise, which is to accelerate capitalism to the lost Hobbesian future of the CEO-King, a vision implied in Peter Thiel’s words quoted in the epigraph to this article. Neoreactionaries have resurrected nineteenth-century notions of racial degenerationism and race as civilizational index, sutured them to techno-futurism, and deployed this monstrous racist hybrid in the form of what look on the surface like left and postcolonial critiques of modernity. The components of this thinking are familiar, but this precise combination is novel. The intellectual and aesthetic practice of the alt-right can thus be described as uncanny: strange but entirely familiar, a return in the present of a repressed past. In short, the alt-right’s newness is a symptom of its oldness.
This argument draws on Corey Robin’s (2013) analysis of two key features of reactionary ideology, which, Robin argues, seeks to restore a lost past to a fallen present, and does so precisely by attacking the present on its own terms. This reactionary war against contemporary culture therefore tends to assume the aesthetic form of this culture—an immanent critique from the right that attacks the present culture to restore a past it has lost. Adopting Robin’s framework, I examine the attack on the present in the form of alt-right meme culture and the neoreactionary proposal for restoring a lost past.
Neoreactionaries have a name for the structure of the fallen present: the “Cathedral,” the term Curtis Yarvin (writing as the blogger Mencius Moldbug) coined to describe the academics and mainstream journalists who preach the official “faith” of political correctness (2008a). The notion bears resemblance to the “propaganda model” (Herman and Chomsky 1988) of mass media, but instead of mainstream media and academia colluding with capital, they are preventing its flourishing. In its broad contours if not in its politics, this “Cathedral” critique resonates with left critiques of identity politics and diversity discourse, both of which are central to what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism,” or the form of capitalism that captures resistance by materializing practices of agency, participation, and diversity in communication technologies (Dean 2002, 2009). Left academics therefore find themselves united with corporate capital around “enthusiasm for diversity, multiplicity, and the agency of consumers” (Dean 2009, 9), a state of affairs that has led many on the left to call for a rejection of identity politics. Hence Nagle, in her important if controversial work on the emerging reactionary ideologies, argues that the alt-right opposes “the new identity politics” of liberal online spaces like the social blogging network Tumblr that normalize “anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric” on the “cultural left” (Nagle 2017, 68).
I want to suggest here, though, that whatever the merits of identity politics as a scholarly approach or political strategy might be, the alt-right critique of identity politics is only the first reactionary gesture—the immanent critique of the present. The second move—the restoration of the lost past—does far more than violate the terms of diversity discourse; it seeks to install race as an interface that gathers humans in a global frame and sorts them hierarchically. Mobilizing memes as the aesthetic form of reaction, the alt-right popularizes this racial interface. Richard Spencer’s slogan—“race is real, race matters, race is the foundation of identity” (Caldwell 2016)—seeks to formalize racism as a political strategy, appropriating diversity discourse to claim white nationalism as a protected identity formation. Racist exclusion is the fulcrum of the proposed political order.
The uncanny is a useful figure for analyzing the reactionary attempt to restore a lost past. This formal racism is uncanny in the strict sense Freud (1919) defines the term: the appearance of “something long familiar” that was estranged “only through being repressed” (148). The appearance of this estranged object motivates ideological attempts to “integrate the uncanny” and “assign it a place” in a fallen present (Dolar 1991, 19). By focusing on the alt-right’s immanent critique of identity politics, we allow the alt-right to direct us to the “place” in the fallen present that needs critiquing, all the while missing the lost past that the alt-right seeks to restore. As a figure of encounter with the present, the uncanny directs us to the formal practice of assigning a place.
I begin with the first reactionary gesture—immanent critique—by examining the meme as a formal manifestation of what Dean calls communicative capitalism, and therefore as an entirely familiar form, even if the content of alt-right memes is bizarre. I then turn to the second reactionary gesture—the restoration of the lost past—by turning to the intellectual roots of the alt-right, focusing on Bannon’s summer of 2014 speech at a Vatican conference and its resonance with the neoreactionary thinkers Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, whose form of uncanny racism I will describe. The connection extends beyond shared sympathy: Yarvin’s start-up counts the Trump-supporting Thiel as an investor (Pein 2014), and Yarvin reportedly communicated through an intermediary with Bannon while the latter was still Trump’s Chief of Staff (Johnson and Stokols 2017). I conclude by suggesting how attention to ideological form makes it possible to critique reactionary ideology without replicating the first reactionary gesture and arriving at the same place of critique that reactionary ideology selects, a danger that haunts any attempt to contextualize reaction.
First, a brief note on terminology: the alt-right is a contested term, but is best understood as a shorthand for anti-politically correct reactionary ideology that developed its meme aesthetic in message boards, particularly 4chan (see Nagle 2017, 12 & 19). Neoreactionary thinking is a specific intellectual tradition that influences many alt-right adherents. This paper does not seek to define the alt-right, and indeed such definitional questions tend to impose a misreading of the alt-right as a coherent movement rather than a reactionary ideology. Nor does this paper deny the existence of extreme right organization (Berlet and Lyons 2000; Berlet 2004); rather, it seeks to analyze the “metapolitics” (Lyons 2017) of an ideological “fascist creep” (Ross 2017).
Memes and the Allegorical Interface
After Trump’s 2016 victory, alt-right partisans began claiming the election as a turning point in a meme war that most mainstream audiences nevertheless knew little about until mainstream journalists began publishing “explainers” on the subject. A journalistic genre of recent vintage, the “explainer” responds to the perpetual news and commentary stream by expanding the nut graph into a contextual framework for understanding complex or obscure issues, stories or trends, allowing those who find themselves “out of the loop” to “grasp the whole” of the story (Rosen 2008). The alt-right, with its cornucopia of obscure memes and references—from the mystical “meme magic” of the pseudo-religious Cult of Kek (more on this below) to the infamous Pepe the Frog to racist approximation of African American Vernacular English of “dindu nuffin”—would seem to demand the explainer treatment, particularly for those who discovered the alt-right only after Trump’s hiring of Bannon brought the alt-right to mainstream attention. As I show below, mainstream explainers tend to attempt to uncover the ostensibly obscure symbolism of alt-right memes.
Before turning to the explainers, though, it is necessary to attend to the meme and its function in reactionary ideology. The critical impulse is to reveal that which ideology conceals, but the alt-right does not conceal its racism; there is no cover (Topinka 2018). Instead, there is an attempt to repurpose the form of communicative capitalism to critique the present. As a form, the meme is ideally suited to such a task. The meme form encourages inclusion, participation, and bricolage—all the tools once associated with emancipatory politics and now absorbed into communicative capitalism. In this sense, the meme offers a perfect reactionary tool: reappropriative in its form, it reacts against the present by repurposing it.
Indeed, the meme is a privileged form of communicative capitalism; it is an allegory of exchange, where culture exits only to be repurposed, and where the symbolic submits to circulation. Although their content may appear obscure, the form of alt-right memes is entirely familiar; in this sense, they are uncanny allegories of communicative capitalism. Building on and contesting the media formalism of Lev Manovich and the hard media determinism of Friedrich Kittler, Alexander Galloway’s (2012) recent work on control allegories argues that media cannot be reduced to their technical predicates—storing, transmitting, and processing—or understood as “objects” bearing a set of formal characteristics that afford certain determinant effects. Galloway (2012) proposes the notion of the “interface” to examine media as forms that inaugurate sets of practices. Mediation is therefore a “process-object” (46), a space of flow, transformation, and transition where the “inside” of technical media encounters the “outside” of the social world. This encounter between technical media and social technique is, for Galloway, an allegory of how contemporary power works: technical apparatuses tend to encourage sets of practices that produce a flexible, modular, and endlessly transformable form of power.
A technical apparatus might encourage a reactionary response as well. Consider Urbit, the “personal sever” created by Curtis Yarvin, also known as Moldbug, the neoreactionary blogger. The Urbit interface inserts an “opaque layer” between the user and the combination of cloud services users rely on (Wolfe-Pauly 2017). Rather than outsourcing computing to cloud services, Urbit offers general purpose personal server that “holds your data; runs your apps; wrangles your connected devices; and defines your secure identity” (Wolfe-Pauley 2017). Urbit seeks to reclaim the sovereignty that Benjamin Bratton (2016) argues has been vested in “the Stack” of computing and cloud services (particularly Facebook, Google, and Amazon) that now comprise planetary-scale computation. As creators Galen Wolfe-Pauly and Yarvin suggest, Urbit restores digital independence and reclaims sovereignty by returning to users exclusive control over their data. Instead of more participatory culture—“toiling on Mark Zuckerberg’s content farm” (Yarvin, quoted in Lecher 2017)—Urbit offers what neoreactionaries call “exit.” It is software as an allegory for the neoreactionary age.
The meme form relies on participation from users competent in digital remixing. To meme is to participate through reappropriation. Scholars have tended to read this participatory reappropriation as democratizing and politically liberating (Coleman 2014)—even, at times, when meme practice becomes explicitly racist (Phillips 2015, 97).[2] Yet moving too quickly from technique to politics risks misunderstanding both. Amidst the recent attention in mainstream culture given to memes forged on the website 4chan’s message boards, it is also tempting to claim that “4chan invented the meme as we use it today” (Beran 2017). However, the meme form emerges from message board formats rather than any particular community. Börzsei (2013) thus traces the meme’s genealogy to Usenet, where meme use signals familiarity with message board discourse and offers a means of performing digital competence. Memes emerge from a constellation of interfaces—photo editors, image hosting sites, meme generators for image macro memes, and message boards—that encourage exchange, appropriation, and repurposing. As such, the meme is an allegory for communicative capitalism, which does not capture each instance of resistance through cultural reappropriation so much as engulf resistance in its very form.
Memes function through deixis: they signal location in a culture, relying on in-group agreement for understanding. The meme operates through the digital media aesthetics of the “stream” (Lovink 2016), where the signaling of links in circulatory networks replaces symbolic representation. This accounts for the uncanny familiarity of alt-right memes, since their obscurity requires laborious explanation to “understand;” that is, of course, unless one already knows the references. But the obscurity to outsiders is a basic function of the meme form itself. Consider the “Most Interesting Man in the World” meme, an example of the image macro, which in turn provides the basic grammar for the meme: an image, typically drawn from popular culture, is overlaid with text, which itself typically references popular culture or tropes from internet culture (the image might be also be drawn from a viral video, but, as Shiffman (2011) argues, something that “goes viral” does not become a meme unless it becomes the subject of imitation and transformation).
This meme imitates the performed cultural sophistication of the “most interesting man” but transforms it to apply to internet culture, where no geek would be caught using Internet Explorer. Even such a banal meme as this requires some familiarity with a range of cultural discourses and figures: the “Silver Fox,” the Latin lover, and geek culture. This meme is as strange as any alt-right meme, and equally void of symbolism. It is a tethering of cultural domains, the formal manifestation of the reappropriation that dominates internet culture and communicative capitalism. By ignoring the meme form, the explainers approach the alt-right as inscrutable, when in fact the alt-right practices a vernacular aesthetic form. To be sure, alt-right memes rely on a relatively esoteric referential repertoire, but the form in which this repertoire appears—the meme, an allegorical form of communicative capitalism—is entirely familiar.
The Alt-Right Explainer
Capitalizing on Breitbart’s connection to Trump through Bannon, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopolous (2016) published “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” on Breitbart, an article that helped establish the generic conventions for the alt-right explainer: ride the momentum of the tenuous links between the alt-right and Donald Trump, identify the intellectual base (including neoreactionaries, especially Moldbug), point up the contrast with two of the main wings of mainstream American conservatism (anti-globalization, anti-theocracy), and demystify “meme magic” by explaining what memes—especially Pepe the Frog—mean. Similar explainers soon echoed in the nave of the “Cathedral.” The Daily Wire, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, Vox, and TheNew York Times published explainers following Breitbart’s pattern, as did the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer. Citing the left’s purported culture war victory, the Weekly Standard claims that the alt-right’s racism is merely a rhetorical response to the “left’s moralism” (Welton 2015), and the New York Times explainer (an op-ed by Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard) emphasizes that alt-right racism is partly a result of the undue expansion of what it means to be “racist” (Caldwell 2016), an expansion Caldwell redresses by carefully distinguishing malignant white supremacists from the purportedly more benign white nationalists. In the face of such prevarication, the Daily Stormer’s “Normies’ guide to the alt-right” makes for bracing reading (Anglin 2016). Although it follows the generic conventions Breitbart established, it rejects the latter as a latecomer, claims racism as the fundamental fulcrum of alt-right ideology, and calls racist trolling a form of “culture-jamming” directed against so-called “normie” culture (Anglin 2016). The Daily Stormer, unfortunately, sees things more clearly than the “Cathedral” on this score. This racist trolling takes form in the meme, which becomes a mechanism of ideological assault and community-building.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign famously responded to one such meme—shared most prominently by Donald Trump, Jr. and Roger Stone—that featured a photoshopped film poster for The Expendables, retitled as “The Deplorables,” with the original actors’ heads replaced with a number of prominent Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential campaign: Roger Stone, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Eric Trump, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Jr., Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopolous. Trump is the central figure in the image. Hovering over his left soldier, Pepe the Frog looks smugly on, his red-blond hair coiffed in Trump’s signature style (Chan 2016). The photoshopping is clumsy, and the film referenced is archetypical Hollywood mediocrity, but to explain this meme is to marvel at the range of discourses it summons: from the visual and textual pun on The Expendables—which is in turn a play on Clinton’s dismissal of Trump supporters as belonging in the “basket of deplorables”—to the visual enrollment in Trump’s campaign of Pepe the Frog himself, whose bizarre internet career has by now been thoroughly chronicled.[3] The meme sutures a complex intertextual tissue, with each reference signaled on the aesthetic surface of the meme.
The explainer genre encourages a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970) that seeks to wrest some underlying meaning from the meme. The Clinton campaign formalizes its explainer of this meme as a question-and-answer session between the innocent and the knowing: “Who is that frog standing directly behind Trump? / That’s Pepe. He’s a symbol associated with white supremacy. / Wait. Really? White supremacy?” (Chan 2016). The dialogue falls into the trap of attempting to demystify Pepe. The Clinton campaign approaches the meme with a surface-depth aesthetic model, asking what the meme symbolizes, and this representational reading misrecognizes the meme form. As a result, the explainers fail to reckon with the uncanny familiarity of these ostensibly obscure aesthetic forms. As is often the case in critical theory, the explainer positions the audience as the innocent questioner in the Clinton campaign’s explainer—What? Really? A white supremacist frog? The alt-right is truly esoteric! Hence the headline of the New York Times explainer: “What the Alt-Right Really Means” (Caldwell 2016). Or the Vox headline for its explainer: “The Alt-Right Is Way More Than Warmed-Over White Supremacy. It’s That, but Way Way Weirder” (Matthews 2016). Or from the Huffington Post: “My Journey to the Center of the Alt-right” (O’Brien 2016). These headlines suggest that the alt-right’s racist ideology is obscure (even though it has always been a feature of American politics) and that its aesthetic practices are inscrutable (even though the meme is a primary aesthetic form of participatory media). Thus the Weekly Standard blames the alt-right on the “left’s moralism” and the New York Times diagnoses the undue expansion of the meaning of “racist” as the cause of the alt-right’s reactionary politics. By failing to reckon with aesthetics of the meme form, these “explainers” unwittingly redeem “meme magic” and its racist politics as something obscure and inscrutable rather than familiar and intractable.
As an allegorical form of communicative capitalism and the aesthetics of the “stream” (Lovink 2016), the meme operates by signaling links—including to racist subcultural formations—rather than by encoding symbolic representation. Updating for the digital age Richard Dawkins’s 1972 notion of memes as the genetic expression, selection, and variation of cultural units, Limor Shifman (2012) offers a rigorous definition of memes as “building blocks” of complex cultures that propagate quickly, reproducing through imitation and transformation (189). A form of Henry Jenkins’s “spreadable media” (Jenkins et al 2013), memes exist in circulation, transforming through “remixes” (Wiggins and Bowers 2015) that blend cultural domains and generate the meme’s circulatory momentum. This remixing and repurposing wrenches objects from their cultural domain, creating a new, thickly referential memetic context. The meme is thus a form that transforms in circulation. To “get” the meme, one has to recognize both the cultural domain the meme references and how the meme is dislocating that cultural domain. Although memes are thickly referential, with dizzyingly complex circulatory histories, they are not typically rich hermeneutic texts. They signal and enact cultural convergence, but they do not symbolize it. Hence the awkwardness of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” the Clinton campaign brings to Pepe. Those who use Pepe in white supremacist memes do not smuggle him in as a covert symbol. His appearance signals a trajectory of transformation in circulation, not a symbolic repertoire. The Clinton campaign is thus right to associate Pepe with white supremacy but wrong about the meme, which signals circulation without symbolizing.
By “unmasking” political correctness as the true cause of racism, mainstream explainers follow the first reactionary gesture, repeating the contours of the reactionary immanent critique. In a widely shared Medium post, Dale Beran claims that Pepe, the “grotesque, frowning, sleepy eyed, out of shape, swamp dweller, peeing with his pants pulled down because-it-feels-good-man frog” represents in an ideology that “steers into the skid of its own patheticness. Pepe symbolizes embracing your loserdom, owning it” (Beran 2017). This attempt at a hermeneutics of Pepe ignores that the alt-right does not make memes out of the “feels good man” Pepe; the alt-right Pepe wears a smug smile, openly declaring his troll status. Such a pathos-laden reading of “steering into the skid” shares with Laurie Penny’s (2017) reading of Yiannopolous’s followers as duped “Lost Boys” a tendency to position the “loser” status of the geek (the archetypal perpetual virgin housed in his parents’ basement) as an alibi for misogyny and white nationalism. Indeed, Beran claims the left’s “radical idea of sexual-difference-as-illusion,” which is “meant to solve the deplorables’ problem” by “dispelling it as a cloud of pure ideas” is in fact an “Orwellian” declaration to “these powerless men” that “‘There’s no such thing as your problem!’” (Beran 2017). Beran’s critique here echoes Nagle’s criticism of the “anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric” on the “cultural left” (Nagle 2017, 68). It is certainly possible to criticize such rhetoric, and reflexivity is surely a crucial political practice. But it is also notable that these critiques replicate the reactionary gesture: the left has won the culture war, diversity is ascendant, and the straight cisgender white male has lost his position—political correctness is everywhere run amok. The left therefore becomes the cause of the alt-right, and alt-right’s reactionary thinking becomes justified, if misguided. Indeed, these “Lost Boys,” dispossessed by the regime of political correctness, have also lost agency, and their hateful meme magic is a mere symptom of this fall. The critical impulse is to unmask the discourse by assigning it a context, but this is precisely its weakness in its approach to reactionary ideology. The alt-right’s blatantly racist discourse offers little to unmask. Its esoteric memes turn out to be banal cultural references. Unmasking its discourse tend to replicate the first reactionary gesture by arriving at the same place—the same cultural context—to be targeted for immanent critique.
Reactionary Critical Theory
I turn now to the second reactionary gesture—the restoration of the lost past. Alt-right and neoreactionary racism is uncanny—old and out of place, yet entirely familiar. Attending to the uncanny as a figure of ideology—an attempt to assign a place to that which is out of place—allows an approach to reactionary ideology that does not replicate the gesture of its immanent critique.
Neoreactionary ideology tends to adopt the form and style of critical theory. Of course, neoreactionary thinker Nick Land was once a celebrated academic critical theorist, particularly in the UK, where he became something of a cult figure for his “dark Deleuzian” capitalist accelerationism and experimental theory-fiction, which he developed as part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the 1990s.[4] The infamous reactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug also offers a critical genealogy of modernity on his Unqualified Reservations blog, particularly in the fourteen-part “Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” (2000a-d &c). Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” text attempts to formalize Moldbug’s prolific if rambling blogposts into a neoreactionary theory of capitalist acceleration grounded in a despotic sovereign political order. Moldbug and Land follow the form of a left and postcolonial critique of modernity, but turn the critique on its head: the modern promise of equality and democracy was not compromised (by slavery, colonialism, and capitalism); the promise is itself the compromise that prevents capitalism’s flourishing. Modern notions of equality legitimate any grievance as oppression, and democracy compels the state to recompense any grievance claim. Democracy and equality therefore combine to promote personal failure. Neoreaction seeks to replace democratic voice with exit, or the right to leave any polity at any time, and to restore sovereignty in the figure of a CEO-King who seeks only to maximize value and therefore to accelerate capitalism. Race serves a crucial function in this theory: ministered to by the “Cathedral,” race mediates between citizens and state, sanctioning grievance claims and incentivizing dysfunction. However, by properly reprogramming race through neo-eugenics rather than modern notions of equality, it could become the accelerationist motor capable of restoring the lost future of capitalist sovereignty before its corruption through enforced diversity.
The obsession with restoring lost ethnic sovereignty links the more abstruse neoreactionary thinkers with populists such as Bannon, who also adopt the form of left critique to advance reactionary thinking. Although Bannon’s status as a political star did not long outlive his tenure in Trump’s White House, which ended on August 18, 2017, he remains a pivotal figure for his role in linking the openly fascist politics of figures like Aleksander Dugin and Julius Evola with mainstream political discourse. In his 2014 speech to a conference in the Vatican, Bannon channels left critical theory, citing Marx in a critique of the “Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism,” which seeks to “make people commodities, to objectify people” (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). Identifying a “crisis in the underpinnings of capitalism,” he diagnoses the post-crash bailout as symptomatic of a system that favors elites over the working classes (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). As a reactionary, though, Bannon proposes to rescue the future by restoring the past. Bannon praises Vladimir Putin, and his “advisor [Aleksander Dugin] who harkens back to Julius Evola” for “standing up for traditional institutions” and national sovereignty (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). Acknowledging Evola’s fascism, Bannon nevertheless argues that “people want to see sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism” and a return to the time of America’s founding when “freedoms were controlled at a local level” rather than by elites in global command centers such as New York, London, and Berlin (Bannon, quoted in Feder 2016). Bannon’s thinking here precisely follows the reactionary paradigm Robin outlines: Bannon develops a withering critique of the present order—one that overlaps in places with left critiques of finance capital—and offers as a solution the restoration of a fallen order.[5] Although they distance themselves from populist fascists like Bannon, Land and Moldbug share the same reactionary preoccupation. Land’s systematization of Moldbug sketches a program for fulfilling Bannon’s desire for sovereignty. This program relies on race as a formal explanatory category—a mode of immanent critique—and an interface that ran reconfigure the political order, assigning a place for the lost future of the CEO-King.
The Cathedral and History
As I have argued, following Robin (2013), reactionary politics combines two gestures: first, an immanent critique of the present, and second, a call to restore a lost past. This impulse surfaces in racist meme culture, but it receives a more rigorous treatment in Land and Moldbug, both of whom wage a critique of the present in service of a resurrection of the past. I turn now to the neoreactionary “Cathedral” critique—the first reactionary gesture—in order to show how it sanctions a call for a return in the present to neo-Victorian racism—the second reactionary gesture.
Land and Moldbug are profoundly lapsarian thinkers. For them, progressivism—the conspiracy the “Cathedral” sustains—is the fall that obscures and indeed encourages the degeneration of the races. Land (2013) argues that the progressive Enlightenment follows the “logical perversity” of “Hegel’s dialectic,” enforcing the “egalitarian moral ideal” through progressivism’s sustaining formula: “tolerance is tolerable” and “intolerance is intolerable.” This formal structure guarantees a “positive right to be tolerated, defined ever more expansively as substantial entitlement” (Land 2013). If progressivism is the fall, tolerance is the juggernaut that tramples any attempt at ascent. For Land, the American Civil War is a moment of original sin that that “cross-coded the practical question of the Leviathan with (black/white) racial dialectics” (Land 2013). Of the Civil War, Land writes:
The moral coherence of the Union cause required that the founders were reconceived as politically illegitimate white patriarchal slave-owners, and American history combusted in progressive education and the culture wars. If independence is the ideology of the slave-holders, emancipation requires the programmatic destruction of independence. Within a cross-coded history, the realization of freedom is indistinguishable from its abolition. (Land 2013)
The Civil War thus installs a “cross-coded” history running on parallel historical tracks between progressive and dark enlightenments, emancipation and independence, voice and exit. This genealogy allows Land to identify a formal mechanism that propels the “only tolerance is tolerable” formula of the Progressive Enlightenment. The anachronistic insertion of “progressive education” and the “culture wars” into the stakes of the Civil War does not trouble Land because his analysis is formal rather than historical: the “cross-coded” history leads inexorably to progressivism, which in turn functions as a transhistorical epistemological and ontological force. Hence Moldbug claims, bizarrely, that Harvard’s “progressive” curriculum has not changed in 200 years, that British politics has been moving steadily left for 150 years, and that progressives—among whom he includes all mainstream Western politicians—have no enemies to the left (Moldbug 2008a).
The “Cathedral” conspiracy therefore assigns a context for reaction. If neoreactionary thinking appears to be out of place, it is only because of the long reign of progressive dogma. The reactionary desire for a lost past follows close behind. Moldbug thus routinely cites the pre-1922 texts available on Google Books to pierce the “Cathedral” veil, approvingly linking, for example, to Nehemiah Adams’ 1854 account of his trip to the south, where he found himself surprised to find the slaves “were all in good humor, and some of them in a broad laugh” and charmed by the “unbought” friendliness of slaves (Adams 1854). Elaborating on the dubious claim that the “neat thing about primary sources is that often, it only takes one to prove your point,” Moldbug brags that high school students “won’t be assigned the primary sources I just linked to” (Moldbug 2008d). He cites the same source in a post defending and indeed advocating Thomas Carlyle’s view on slavery, suggesting that those who view slavery as “intrinsically evil” would “quickly change their tunes if forced,” like Adams, “to function in an actual slave society” (Moldbug 2009). The “Cathedral” conspiracy excuses Moldbug from evaluating Adams’ account, or from consulting the numerous contemporary accounts of slavery’s evils. If high school students wouldn’t be assigned it, that’s only because it violates “Cathedral” dogma. And since Adams’ account predates the Civil War (though not Enlightenment itself), it is therefore more likely to see the truth before the fall. Piercing the mists of this transhistorical progressivism, we see that “Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery” (Moldbug 2009). To take the measure of these aptitudes, Moldbug turns to an uncanny form of racism that functions as an interface for gathering and sorting human populations.
Race as Interface
Land and Moldbug accept race as a means of categorizing human aptitude within a global hierarchy. This notion of race plays a crucial role in their thinking, which describes the following racial dynamic: Insofar as progressivism incentivizes inaptitude, it also encourages racial degeneration. This is race as a technology, as Wendy Chun (2009) has described: race has particular affordances for enframing human populations, and this enframing shapes the contours of social and political orders. Extending Galloway, this is race as interface, as a form that gathers humans into a global frame and sorts them hierarchically (see also Weheliye 2014).
Land and Moldbug’s uncanny racism resurrects a notion of race as an interface for gathering and sorting global populations first deployed in late Victorian eugenics. Like the eugenicists, Land and Moldbug rely on race as a mean of categorizing humans based on their biologically determined aptitude. In 1869, Francis Galton called this aptitude “hereditary genius,” and offered it as a scientific explanation for the advance of certain civilizations over others, with Europeans, of course, at the apex of racial hierarchy (Galton 1869). Land and Moldbug adopt a range of figures (although no trained geneticists) in articulating a new version of race science called “human biodiversity,” which includes the relatively banal argument that humans are not neurologically uniform coupled with the dubious and insidious claim that this “biodiversity” can be best measured by plotting genetically-determined racial categories to IQ distribution.[6] Yarvin makes this argument without his typical circumlocution in a Medium post (which he later deleted) that attempted to persuade delegates at the LambdaConf functional programming conference against boycotting his presence because of his slavery apologetics (Breitbart sympathetically chronicled Yarvin’s plight).[7] Yarvin insists he does not equate “anatomical traits” with “moral superiority” but makes the explicit argument for a genetically determined racial hierarchy as measured by IQ in the comments section of the Medium post (Yarvin 2016). Here Yarvin is trying to speak to what Moldbug would call the “Cathedral,” defending himself from committing the moral sin of racism as the bad ideology of individual viewpoints. He also criticizes mass incarceration—the first reactionary gesture. Yet Yarvin also summons race in its uncanny neo-eugenicist form to suggest that “Malik cannot be magically turned into a Jewish math nerd” (Yarvin 2016). This is the second gesture, a proposal that neo-eugenicist racism can explain and resolve the problem of mass incarceration and “the destruction of African American society” (Yarvin 2016).
Another crucial connection between neoreaction and Victorian racism is the use of race not only to categorize humans by aptitude, but also to plot the potential for civilizational achievement. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty offers a canonical description of Victorian Liberal conceptions of the hierarchy of races, which Mill leverages to justify violent repression in India: savages cannot “practise the forebearance” that “civilized society” demands, and they therefore require “despotic” governance to restore sovereignty and subdue passions (209). Land’s claim that Europeans are genetically predisposed to “low time preference” is formally indistinguishable from Mill’s preoccupation with forbearance. However, neoreaction reverses the racial trajectory. For liberal Victorian racial theorists, exposure to Enlightenment civilization could advance a given race beyond savagery. Land’s neoreaction reverses this trajectory: the exposure to Enlightenment formula that “only tolerance is tolerable” encourages further dysfunction in the lower races. This argument adopts another strain of Victorian racism: racial degenerationism, or the notion that races could devolve to be increasingly ill suited to civilization. Racial degenerationism found practical application in criminal atavism, the theory that criminals resembled “prehistoric man” and behaved “in a way that would be appropriate to savage societies” (Ellis 1890, 208). Adopting a similar assumption, Land suggests that “barbarism has been normalized,” in “lethally menacing” cities where “civilization has fundamentally collapsed” (Land 2013). Indulging in racist moral panic about urban decay—another anachronism in this age of urban “revitalization”—Moldbug argues that most American cities would benefit from martial law, and Land (2013) identifies white flight as the “spontaneous impulse of the dark enlightenment”: it is all exit and no voice. Land’s investment in white flight is also a libidinal investment in the fear of violently virile black bodies, which finds its parallel in the alt-right’s obsession with cuckoldry and “cucking” racialized as a white man watching his white wife dominated by a “black bull.” The purposefully excessive “cuck” discourse offers a means of indulging the fear of the black body while at the same time enjoying the act of violating tenets of “Cathedral” faith. The crucial point, though, is that “cuck” discourse not only operates to critique political correctness; it also signals an understanding of race as interface for governance, that which promotes degeneration but also—properly reprogrammed—promises acceleration to a lost future.
Conclusion
Before an antifa (anti-fascist) protestor sucker-punched Richard Spencer in the face in Washington, D.C. on Trump’s inauguration day—a moment that quickly achieved meme status—a bystander asked Spencer if he liked black people. Spencer smirked, shrugged, and said, “Sure” (Burris 2017). Identity politics poses a double trap for approaching the alt-right: Criticize the alt-right for bad identity politics, and they can easily dodge the accusation by parroting mainstream acceptance of diversity discourse, or point to the fact that political correctness is mainstream and therefore part of the power structure that so clearly needs dismantling. Criticize identity politics, and cede to the alt-right the choice of battleground. I have argued here that alt-right critics tend to make just such a concession. By focusing on the first gesture—the immanent critique—we risk missing the form of reactionary ideology, which includes a call for restoring a lost past. Spencer attempts to distill this call into a slogan: “race is real, race matters, race is the foundation of identity.” This slogan adapts Land and Moldbug’s racial formalism, but instead of an exit from grievance democracy, it argues for inclusion within grievance status. Hence Moldbug’s (2007) coy refusal of white nationalism: “I’m not exactly allergic to the stuff,” he writes, but white nationalists only recognize the symptom, missing the cure. The critique of “cucks” and the obsession with “red-pilling” offers a more nakedly libidinal, pop cultural take on the “Cathedral,” but, according to Moldbug, the alt-right fails to recognize that the entitlement state cannot expand to include white nationalist grievance, because to do so would violate “Cathedral” dogma. Bannon’s strong sovereignty more closely approaches the cure, but insofar as nationalism entails protectionism, he fails to follow techno-futurism back to the futuristic past that neoreactionaries desire.
Land proposes as a formal fix “hyper-racism,” his vision for accelerating the “explicitly superior” and already “genetically self-filtering elite” through a system of “assortative mating” that would offer a “class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector toward neo-speciation” (Land 2014). This is eugenics as a program for exit, not only from the progressive Enlightenment but also from the limits of humanity. Despite its contemporary jargon, this hyper-racism is indistinguishable in its form from late Victorian eugenics, which also recommended a program of “assortative mating.” Of course, now eugenics places us on a vector toward neo-speciation; so it’s back to the past, but now it’s futuristic.
The “Cathedral” conspiracy justifies and motivates this recuperation of uncanny racism. Clearly, the “Cathedral” conspiracy shares much in common with rudimentary applications of Gramscian notions of hegemony or Hermann and Chomsky’s (1988) propaganda model. Ideology critique and reactionary critique tend to mirror one another. This is because both attempt to assign the uncanny object to a place, to contextualize it, whether as a justified response to the “Cathedral” or as a misguided response to left moralism. Reactionary thinking tends to fully indulge the critical impulse. Behind every veil, it finds the “Cathedral.” This libidinal investment in unveiling resonates in the alt-right obsession with “red-pilling” and cuckoldry. Just as neoreactionaries fear that the “Cathedral” faith promotes black dysfunction, the alt-right fears “blue-pilling” as a form of penetration by the Other.
To those of us reared in the “Cathedral’s” halls, this is all repugnant. It is also uncanny: Haven’t we moved beyond this racism? Of course, the alt-right has a memetic response to this critique: “I mean, come on people, it’s [current year].” The alt-right has fully anticipated critical unmasking and absorbed it into the meme form, which refuses symbolic decoding and provides a formal interface for the participatory reappropriation and bricolage that characterize media practice in this age of communicative capitalism. Ideology critique and reactionary critique are similar in form: both attempt to recuperate the uncanny, to assign it a place. It is therefore crucial to attend to the uncanny form of reactionary ideology, which develops an immanent critique of the present in order to find a place in which to restore a lost past. Rather than following the alt-right to the purported excesses of identity politics, it is crucial to reckon with reactionary racism as the fulcrum of a proposed political order. This is not just a call to examine “structural racism,” because neoreactionary racism and alt-right racism have yet to harden into structure. It is instead a form, an interface between certain technical predicates (race as a gathering and sorting mechanism) and the social (the lost white future of the CEO-King). Reactionary ideology attempts to recuperate this uncanny racism; ideology critique must do more than cite the desire for this recuperation.
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Robert Topinka is Lecturer in Transnational Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is currently working on the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project entitled “Politics, Ideology, and Rhetoric in the 21st Century: The Case of the Alt-Right.”
[1] This work was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for “Political Ideology, Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the ‘Alt-Right,’” (AH/R001197/1).
[2] As Nagle (2017) documents, Gabriella Coleman (2014) continued to write approvingly of 4chan as late as 2014, when the forum was dominated by extreme racism and misogyny, and she also celebrated the hacker “weev” despite his open Nazism (102-105). In her book on trolling, Whitney Phillips (2015) argues for the redeeming qualities of “racist statements forwarded by people whose stated goal is to be as racist and upsetting as possible” because, unlike more subtle racists, “at least trolls advertise” (97). Although Phillips is right to argue that there is no value in simply condemning trolls, it is similarly difficult to see the value in well-advertised racism. The history of celebratory studies of participatory culture weighs heavily on such accounts.
[3] The explainers cited in this paper all recount a version of Pepe’s history. For an academic treatment, see Marwick and Lewis (2017: 36).
[4] On “Dark Deleuze,” see Culp (2016). For a succinct account and critique of Land’s accelerationism see Noys (2014: 54-58). For more on the controversy surrounding Nick Land’s planned 2016 appearance at the London art gallery LD50 and the seminar series he offered in 2017 at the New Centre for Research and Practice, see Shutdown LD50 (2017) and “Against Nick Land and the Reactive Left” (2017).
[5] This contradictory impulse to restore the past in the future is a key feature of fascism. In an analysis of National Socialism, Jeffrey Herf (1981) calls this “reactionary modernism.”
[6] On HBD, Land and Moldbug’s sources include prolific eugenicist bloggers such as “hbd chick” and Steve Sailer, controversial popular genetics writers including Charles Murray and Nicholas Wade, and the physicist Stephen Hsu, whose recent interest in the genetics of intelligence has generated controversy (see Flaherty 2013). Galton, Land, and Moldbug share a similar strategy of racial typing. Galton adopted Quetelet’s use of the Gauss-Laplace distribution to identify physical generations in human populations, which Galton sought to index with racial categories (Galton 1869: xi, and Wozniak 1999).
[7]Breitbart lists four articles under the “Curtis Yarvin” tag as of May 3, 2019. For the first defense of Yarvin’s presence at LambdaConf, which, incidentally, was published the same day as Breitbart’s alt-right explainer, see Bokhari (2016).
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Works Cited
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Berlet, Chip and Matthew N. Lyons. 2000. Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1919 [2003]. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny. London: Penguin Books. 123-162.
Galloway, Alexander. 2012. The Interface Effect. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Galton, Francis. 1869. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences. London: Macmillan and Co.
Herf, Jeffrey. 1981. “Reactionary Modernism: Some Ideological Origins of the Primacy of Politics in the Third Reich.” Theory and Society 10:6. 805-832.
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Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
In presenting the economic part of the U.S “deal of the century” for Israel/Palestine, Jared Kushner managed to describe the woes of the Palestinian economy in great detail without mentioning the Israeli occupation. He invoked a fantasy of economic prosperity for Palestinians as if Israeli forces are not present in Palestinian space. At the same time, the Trump administration moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s political sovereignty over the illegally-annexed Syrian Golan Heights, where a new Jewish-only colony, “Trump Heights”, was unveiled. Both US ambassador Friedman and chief negotiator Greenblatt announced their support for the annexation of illegal settlements in the West Bank. This is a masterful application of segregation in the mind: Israel can expand as if Palestine does not exist. Palestine can grow as if there is no occupation.
How did the Israeli military occupation, initially opposed by all the UN member-countries, become normalized to the point that the Israeli and US governments are emboldened to discard the façade of a “temporary” occupation and embrace the idea of a “Greater Israel” apartheid state in which a Jewish minority will rule over a Palestinian majority through undemocratic means and military might? This process of normalizing the occupation was carefully crafted in the boardrooms and offices of economists and statisticians, especially from the OECD, using the legal apparatus of “economic territory” to accept annexation as a de-facto reality.
Statistical borders
It’s been a longtime practice of Israel Central Bureau of Statistics to account for the economic activity of Jewish settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and by doing so to extend its statistical borders beyond the Green Line. In the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), it only accounts for the economic activities of the Jewish population, thus racializing Israel statistical borders. The establishment of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 1994 was used by the Israeli authorities as an excuse to ignore the vast majority of the population of the OPT, and treat the area as if it were a sparsely-populated Jewish-Israeli region.
This practice became the center of dispute between Israel and the member states of the OECD when Israel negotiated its way to become a member of this exclusive club. The OECD countries did not approve of Israel extending its statistical borders along racial lines. Israel, on the other hand, was not willing to concede the economic overreach of its sovereignty.
Shlomo Yitzhaki, the chairman of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) suggested to the OECD that Israel include the Jewish settlement in its national accounts as an EEZ: Exclusive Economic Zone, as a means to resolve the impasse and allow Israel into the OECD.
The EEZ itself came to the world as an international law apparatus that the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea brought to life in 1982. The EEZ was used by the international community as a means to pacify the post-WWII world, with its growing addiction to fossil fuels, by drawing a new set of borders that extend beyond the political borders termed adequately “economic territory.” Since 1994, when the EEZ came into effect, any coastal state on the planet suddenly had two set of borders, political and economic. The latter could extend up to 200 nautical miles into the land lying at the bottom of the sea along its shores. In this territory, named “Exclusive Economic Zones,” a country could assert economic monopoly over the exploitation of fossils now seen as natural resources. It could, as in the case of Norway, exploit these natural resources and form a wealth fund that would guarantee the economic security of its citizens. Or it could outsource the exclusive right to profit from these resources and tax them in return for a percentage of the revenue. It could also give it away for free to a handful of multinational corporations. Lastly, it could leave them be, out of concern for the welfare of the planet and its inhabitants.
Yitzhaki’s unorthodox use of the EEZ terminology that treated the West bank as an ocean and the Israeli settlers as fossils did not change the fact that he was suggesting a segregated racialized statistical approach: in the OPT, only about 600,000 Jewish Israelis would count, and 4.5 million Palestinians would simply not be included in the statistics. The OECD rejected Yitzhaki’s offer, and demanded that Israel send statistics which do not include the OPT at all.
The compromise reached was that Israel would ascend to the OECD in 2010, and within one year would provide the OECD with new statistics that distinguish between Israel in its internationally-recognized borders and the OPT. Israel broke the agreement, and the OECD used its own economists to try to come up with such a segregation. It failed, of course, and ended up publishing reports on Israel exactly as Yitzhaki wanted: they included statistics on all Israeli citizens in Israel and in the OPT, and ignored the 4.5 million Palestinians who live in the OPT and under full Israeli economic control.
Anyone trying to write the story of the segregated economy in the territory of historic Palestine faces several obstacles. Israel continues to violate its agreement with the OECD and does not provide two sets of national accounts, one with and one without the EEZ. In the statistical data that Israel’s CBS shares with the public, the economic activity in Israel’s economic territory is not categorized to activity in the OPT and activity inside Israel, so there is no easy way to calculate statistics on Israel in the bounds of its political borders. Aggregating the national accounts published by the Israeli and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) is not an easy task either, because the ICBS and PCBS use different methodologies, conduct their census in different years, and use different definitions for delineating regions. This is especially apparent in the largest Israeli city and the largest Palestinian city – Jerusalem – which both the ICBS and PCBS claim as part of their economic territory.
The one economy
Israel has a global reputation as a modern country with a booming high-tech economy and excellent education and health systems. On the UN’s Human Development Index, Israel is ranked the 22nd most developed country in the world (as of 2018). This view of the Israeli economy is only made possible by tacitly accepting the segregation embedded in the Israeli political system.
A telling sign of how segregation came to define the Israeli economy was the response in Israel to the first OECD report on Israel from 2010. The report criticized Israel’s segregated education system and the high correlation between religious and ethnic identity and poverty. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s response was “if we discount the Arabs and the Ultra-Orthodox, our situation is excellent!” It should be noted that in his statement he asked to discount not the Palestinians of the OPT, but rather the Arab citizens of the State of Israel, who make up approximately 22% of the population, plus approximately 15% of the population who are Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Netanyahu wishes to present to the world an Israeli economy in which only 63% of the citizens, and only about 42% of the population in the one economy, matter.
What, then, does the statistics of the one economy really look like? What is the average GDP per capita for the whole region of Israel/Palestine? What is the percentage of unemployed people, and of people who live under the poverty line? What is the average working wage? The methodological obstacles which face these seemingly simple questions show how radical the idea of inclusion is, even just from a statistical standpoint. Such calculations require cutting and sewing together nearly incompatible statistical reports that present unsynchronized data collected according to different methodologies.
GDP per capita is perhaps the easiest to measure, although the informal economy, especially in the Gaza Strip, makes the error margins for such a calculation frighteningly wide. The World Bank reports that the total GDP in the OPT (for Palestinians only, not for Israeli colonists) was US $14.7 billion in 2018[i]. The World Bank also reports that in Israel that year (here colonists are counted, but Palestinians in the OPT are not), GDP was US$ 353.3 billion.[ii] If we divide this by the total population of 13,824,813 people (adding together the ICBS and PCBS population estimates for 2018), we arrive at a per-capita GDP of US$26,619. This puts the average prosperity of the one economy somewhere between Kazakhstan and Romania in the world ranking. The difference, of course, is that income and wealth are distributed much less equally in Israel/Palestine than in Kazakhstan and Romania, because upper class Jewish Israelis in northern Tel-Aviv enjoy a lifestyle that is comparable to that of wealthy Europeans and unimaginable to the residents of the Gaza City slums, which are equivalent to Brazilian favelas or impoverished neighborhoods New Delhi. Tel Aviv and Gaza are just a few kilometers away along the same coastline.
When it comes to other economic indicators, such as poverty, unemployment, average wages, etc., the methodological gap is too wide to breach without a team of statisticians and economists.
Conclusion
When the one economy under exclusive Israeli control is discussed, the political debate about Israel/Palestine takes on a completely new perspective. The Oslo Agreements signed in the 1990s have received tremendous support from the international community because they simplified the issue and framed the Palestinian struggle for freedom and human rights as the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” as if two nations, two countries, are fighting over a piece of land. The economic reality on the ground calls for a much different perspective: there is only one country. In the entire area only one central bank is allowed to print one currency (bearing the Israeli national symbols). Taxes are controlled and collected by the Israeli Ministry of Finance, and the Palestinian Authority as well as the Hamas government in Gaza are granted limited local autonomy by the Israeli authorities not unlike a municipal council which is entrusted with a limited ability to collect some local taxes and manage a small budget.
Within this economy, divisions run deep and wide. Palestinians in Gaza live in prison-like conditions separated from the rest of the world, but Palestinians in the West Bank are also restricted to strictly controlled enclaves surrounded by apartheid roads and walls, which are traversable to Israeli colonists but not to the native population, which includes millions of people. Even inside “Israel proper” (i.e. the internationally recognized 1967 borders), non-Jewish citizens are subjected to various levels of segregation and discrimination. Moreover, Even Jewish citizens of Israel are living in a highly hierarchical and unequal society, in which ethnicity, religious affiliation, family background, and gender can accurately predict one’s economic prospects.
Every OECD report which comes out under these conditions is contaminated by the realities of Israeli apartheid. Many economists at the OECD do not concern themselves with Israel/Palestine at all. They write about the rising inequality in OECD economies, the importance of investing in education, transparency in taxation, investment in renewable energy, and combating climate change. Each one of these reports presents data based on the lie that in the Israel exclusive economic zone Palestinians do not exist. Even if the impact on the OECD-wide statistics may be small when averaged across all OECD members, there is still a small toll paid by each OECD report, by taking the Israeli statistics at face value and failing to call out segregation.
Dr. Dotan Leshem’s book The Origins of Neoliberalism: Modeling the Economy from Jesus to Foucault was published by Columbia University Press in 2016.
Dr. Shir Hever’s recent book is The Privatization of Israeli Security by Pluto Press, 2017.
The future of education is technological. Necessarily so.
Or that’s what the proponents of ed-tech would want you to believe. In order to prepare students for the future, the practices of teaching and learning – indeed the whole notion of “school” – must embrace tech-centered courseware and curriculum. Education must adopt not only the products but the values of the high tech industry. It must conform to the demands for efficiency, speed, scale.
To resist technology, therefore, is to undermine students’ opportunities. To resist technology is to deny students’ their future.
Or so the story goes.
Shoshana Zuboff weaves a very different tale in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Its subtitle, The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, underscores her argument that the acquiescence to new digital technologies is detrimental to our futures. These technologies foreclose rather than foster future possibilities.
And that sure seems plausible, what with our social media profiles being scrutinized to adjudicate our immigration status, our fitness trackers being monitored to determine our insurance rates, our reading and viewing habits being manipulated by black-box algorithms, our devices listening in and nudging us as the world seems to totter towards totalitarianism.
We have known for some time now that tech companies extract massive amounts of data from us in order to run (and ostensibly improve) their services. But increasingly, Zuboff contends, these companies are now using our data for much more than that: to shape and modify and predict our behavior – “‘treatments’ or ‘data pellets’ that select good behaviors,” as one ed-tech executive described it to Zuboff. She calls this “behavioral surplus,” a concept that is fundamental to surveillance capitalism, which she argues is a new form of political, economic, and social power that has emerged from the “internet of everything.”
Zuboff draws in part on the work of B. F. Skinner to make her case – his work on behavioral modification of animals, obviously, but also his larger theories about behavioral and social engineering, best articulated perhaps in his novel Walden Two and in his most controversial book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. By shaping our behaviors – through nudges and rewards “data pellets” and the like – technologies circumscribe our ability to make decisions. They impede our “right to the future tense,” Zuboff contends.
Google and Facebook are paradigmatic here, and Zuboff argues that the former was instrumental in discovering the value of behavioral surplus when it began, circa 2003, using user data to fine-tune ad targeting and to make predictions about which ads users would click on. More clicks, of course, led to more revenue, and behavioral surplus became a new and dominant business model, at first for digital advertisers like Google and Facebook but shortly thereafter for all sorts of companies in all sorts of industries.
And that includes ed-tech, of course – most obviously in predictive analytics software that promises to identify struggling students (such as Civitas Learning) and in behavior management software that’s aimed at fostering “a positive school culture” (like ClassDojo).
Google and Facebook, whose executives are clearly the villains of Zuboff’s book, have keen interests in the education market too. The former is much more overt, no doubt, with its Google Suite product offerings and its ubiquitous corporate evangelism. But the latter shouldn’t be ignored, even if it’s seen as simply a consumer-facing product. Mark Zuckerberg is an active education technology investor; Facebook has “learning communities” called Facebook Education; and the company’s engineers helped to build the personalized learning platform for the charter school chain Summit Schools. The kinds of data extraction and behavioral modification that Zuboff identifies as central to surveillance capitalism are part of Google and Facebook’s education efforts, even if laws like COPPA prevent these firms from monetizing the products directly through advertising.
Despite these companies’ influence in education, despite Zuboff’s reliance on B. F. Skinner’s behaviorist theories, and despite her insistence that surveillance capitalists are poised to dominate the future of work – not as a division of labor but as a division of learning – Zuboff has nothing much to say about how education technologies specifically might operate as a key lever in this new form of social and political power that she has identified. (The quotation above from the “data pellet” fellow notwithstanding.)
Of course, I never expect people to write about ed-tech, despite the importance of the field historically to the development of computing and Internet technologies or the theories underpinning them. (B. F. Skinner is certainly a case in point.) Intertwined with the notion that “the future of education is necessarily technological” is the idea that the past and present of education are utterly pre-industrial, and that digital technologies must be used to reshape education (and education technologies) – this rather than recognizing the long, long history of education technologies and the ways in which these have shaped what today’s digital technologies generally have become.
As Zuboff relates the history of surveillance capitalism, she contends that it constitutes a break from previous forms of capitalism (forms that Zuboff seems to suggest were actually quite benign). I don’t buy it. She claims she can pinpoint this break to a specific moment and a particular set of actors, positing that the origin of this new system was Google’s development of AdSense. She does describe a number of other factors at play in the early 2000s that led to the rise of surveillance capitalism: notably, a post–9/11 climate in which the US government was willing to overlook growing privacy concerns about digital technologies and to use them instead to surveil the population in order to predict and prevent terrorism. And there are other threads she traces as well: neoliberalism and the pressures to privatize public institutions and deregulate private ones; individualization and the demands (socially and economically) of consumerism; and behaviorism and Skinner’s theories of operant conditioning and social engineering. While Zuboff does talk at length about how we got here, the “here” of surveillance capitalism, she argues, is a radically new place with new markets and new socioeconomic arrangements:
the competitive dynamics of these new markets drive surveillance capitalists to acquire ever-more-predictive sources of behavioral surplus: our voices, personalities, and emotions. Eventually, surveillance capitalists discovered that the most-predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes. Competitive pressures produced this shift, in which automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior at scale. With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. In this phase of surveillance capitalism’s evolution, the means of production are subordinated to an increasingly complex and comprehensive ‘means of behavioral modification.’ In this way, surveillance capitalism births a new species of power that I call instrumentarianism. Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of ‘smart’ networked devices, things, and spaces.
As this passage indicates, Zuboff believes (but never states outright) that a Marxist analysis of capitalism is no longer sufficient. And this is incredibly important as it means, for example, that her framework does not address how labor has changed under surveillance capitalism. Because even with the centrality of data extraction and analysis to this new system, there is still work. There are still workers. There is still class and plenty of room for an analysis of class, digital work, and high tech consumerism. Labor – digital or otherwise – remains in conflict with capital. The Age of Surveillance Capitalismas Evgeny Morozov’s lengthy review in The Baffler puts it, might succeed as “a warning against ‘surveillance dataism,’” but largely fails as a theory of capitalism.
Yet the book, while ignoring education technology, might be at its most useful in helping further a criticism of education technology in just those terms: as surveillance technologies, relying on data extraction and behavior modification. (That’s not to say that education technology criticism shouldn’t develop a much more rigorous analysis of labor. Good grief.)
As Zuboff points out, B. F. Skinner “imagined a pervasive ‘technology of behavior’” that would transform all of society but that, at the very least he hoped, would transform education. Today’s corporations might be better equipped to deliver technologies of behavior at scale, but this was already a big business in the 1950s and 1960s. Skinner’s ideas did not only exist in the fantasy of Walden Two. Nor did they operate solely in the psych lab. Behavioral engineering was central to the development of teaching machines; and despite the story that somehow, after Chomsky denounced Skinner in the pages of The New York Review of Books, that no one “did behaviorism” any longer, it remained integral to much of educational computing on into the 1970s and 1980s.
And on and on and on – a more solid through line than the all-of-a-suddenness that Zuboff narrates for the birth of surveillance capitalism. Personalized learning – the kind hyped these days by Mark Zuckerberg and many others in Silicon Valley – is just the latest version of Skinner’s behavioral technology. Personalized learning relies on data extraction and analysis; it urges and rewards students and promises everyone will reach “mastery.” It gives the illusion of freedom and autonomy perhaps – at least in its name; but personalized learning is fundamentally about conditioning and control.
“I suggest that we now face the moment in history,” Zuboff writes, “when the elemental right to the future tense is endangered by a panvasive digital architecture of behavior modification owned and operated by surveillance capital, necessitated by its economic imperatives, and driven by its laws of motion, all for the sake of its guaranteed outcomes.” I’m not so sure that surveillance capitalists are assured of guaranteed outcomes. The manipulation of platforms like Google and Facebook by white supremacists demonstrates that it’s not just the tech companies who are wielding this architecture to their own ends.
Nevertheless, those who work in and work with education technology need to confront and resist this architecture – the “surveillance dataism,” to borrow Morozov’s phrase – even if (especially if) the outcomes promised are purportedly “for the good of the student.”
