I really appreciate the recognition that social media IS a form of civil association. I think the error of writers like Riley is a misrecognition of what drives a civil association: it's not in-person meetings; it's the sense of camaraderie, belonging, and purpose. One facet of our current era that I wish were discussed more in serious circles is the prevalence of conspiracy theories and the communities that have arisen around them. QAnon in particular has fostered online communities in which people find a sense of purpose. Hannah Arendt emphasizes the role of "pseudomysticism" in driving nationalist movements, and to my mind, that is exactly what QAnon provides--an ideological framework in which anyone left of center is a Satan-worshipping, human-trafficking black-hat committed to the destruction of white, Christian Americans. These aren't online mirages; these folks gather in person for things like conferences, rallies, and raids on the Capitol. It seems clear to me that the oligarchs are adept at harnessing these civil associations for their own destructive ends.
On the conspiracy theory thing, I’ve been wondering about what’s happened to this group of people that we can’t seem to convince with evidence? First I thought maybe it’s a mass delusion, but turns out people in that field really don’t like that. 😬 So down the rabbit hole I went in search of what it might be called and found an interesting article about the Socio-Epistemic Model of Belief in Conspiracy Theories. I haven’t finished it yet, but hopefully there’s something in there that might be helpful in figuring out how to communicate with people that don’t seem to recognize reality.
Skimming through it I find it full of links to reputable sources. The writer, Joseph M Pierre, is a professor at UCLA and writes both for a wider public (eg in Psychology Today) and for an audience of his peers, so I think he's as genuine as you could wish for. A closer look shows his arguments are always backed up by research and that research is cited, so readers can check for themselves. Pretty good, I'd say!
I think one has to consider psychosis, whether due to mental illness or abuse of certain drugs. It may not be enough for a clinical diagnosis, but it's there.
For example if you look at the infamous "Qanon Chart" (a Google Image search should pull up many versions) this is undoubtedly the product of a psychotic style of thinking.
I don't think it explains all conspiracy theorists, I think there are multiple explanations.
But people who display psychotic thinking often are linchpins of those communities, any analysis that doesn't account for the possibility is going to miss something major.
In such cases the key is to not argue with the beliefs. Focus on solving shared problems and maintaining an emotional relationship. The problem is this only works if there are shared problems and a relationship between two people, it doesn't really work if it's just someone you don't know making public arguments.
and where we might be on the line. Would we even know if a more efficient persuasion machine were being used on us? (I feel insane thinking about mind control)
I'm going to flag that to read later. I have also felt totally bewildered by the tenacity of conspiratorial belief. I've thought maybe there's a natural tendency for human morality to devolve into a dualistic distinction between good guys and bad guys, for the sake of economy of thought, and the only way to make that work is to create a caricature of your "enemies," but that's just me speculating.
I mean, it's worth remembering that people clinging to all sorts of falsified beliefs, not just conspiracies per se. The Great Disappointment springs to mind, in which at least four large sects still exist based on a prediction that Jesus would return in 1848.
I’m not sure if anyone is interested in what Lessig is doing, but I think it’s important because I hope we can find a way to communicate with people who disagree with us deeply, but he’s having conversations with his old high school friend who is a trump supporter. I was shocked at how differently he sees the situation when it seems so obvious to me. Here’s the link to the conversations, two so far: https://equalcitizens.us/anotherway/
I’m probably missing something, but Dylan Riley’s argument against the fascism thesis to describe the current moment actually exactly describes the current moment.
I was confused on the first read for that exact reason. This must be what so many politicians and their traditional base fail to understand: it's the idea that Trump and his cohorts transcend the political that is most appealing. Transcending (and demolishing) the old way clears the path for all the unabashed misogyny, racism, greed, etc that has been building in coalition via these online networks. They are absolutely "exploiting the crisis". This coalition has arisen, in large part, in direct opposition to the counter narratives that have relied on more traditional political means to accomplish it's goals.
I think this is a key element Musk and his elves add to the mix - the enemies remain abstraction (mostly wokeism) but because engineers are saying it, it’s “depoliticized”, “rational”, “non-partisan”. Make fascism seem like it’s just techies fixing things. Trumpism is getting a lot of mileage out of that.
An important distinction of the new online forms of civic association with old in-person ones is that they are exceedingly granular and self-sorting. People with niche interests who might not have anyone in their towns that shares them can now be connected remotely. Those communities of mutual interests, if they have any political valence, will tend to be much more politically homogenous than an analogous group would be in real-life, i.e. a local football club is going to draw a mix of enthusiasts with a mix of beliefs that group norms will form around, whereas such a group online will be more nationally and internationally focused and its politics will have to account for a much wider and more divided range, usually either quarantining politics away from primary discussion or taking a stance that becomes part of the group identity (say, Barstool Sports vs Defector). Which is great for all those groups individually but bad for society broadly, because they are less likely to trust or work with each other.
I'm not sure where Im going with this except that in-person civic associations are still around, degraded but necessary, we all live somewhere and not just online archipelagos, and we probably shouldn't be governed by the extremely online.
"What if instead of a civic decline we understood the social media world as the rapid development of new forms of civil association, a development so rapid and explosive that the political elite has trouble adapting?" I stumbled into writing something along those lines while revisiting the "mediating structures" of Berger and Neuhaus. Their mediating structures so vital to democracy were ultimately vague as hell and just don't hold up in the era of social media, though they sure paved a lot of roads for our present hellscape. https://jamestalley.substack.com/p/no-really-we-do-live-in-a-society
I've also been trying to make sense of online publics and their effects on democracy over the last few weeks, although the discursive imprint of this phenomena is so diffuse, ambiguous, and irony-pilled that it's difficult to say what's real and what's just social media performing its classic mirroring function and reflecting my intuitions and biases back at me. So far, my basic takeaway is that online communities are "like realspace publics in their ability to capture our imagination, but malformed in their ability to act upon the world." The free, frictionless ability to associate or de-associate with your chosen set, the performance of self at a distance instead of a more complete sense of a person that comes about through actual proximity and revealing moments that test/build moral conviction, the privileging of entertainment and critique over work and action... these things create the appearance of radical political coalitions and associations while simultaneously destroying the conditions that these coalitions have historically required in order to transform societies. To oversimplify things a bit, I've gone from "online is not real life" to "oh shit, online actually is real life" to "online is not real life, but the fact that so many people act like it is is maybe one of the central crises of our time."
I have a little personal theory that the place one spends the majority of one's life *is* their "real life." With so many people spending so many hours a day on social media and other online spaces, then for them, online *is* real life, and offline/IRL is unreal and unimportant. I'm backing this up with feelings and observations, not facts, but I have found it personally useful to understand why it feels so weird interacting with heavily online people. (And I write this as someone who's been online for more than four decades!)
Yeah, I agree that lots of people have voluntarily made online their "real life." My point is that social media is a poor simulacrum of a robust public square in that it a) lacks many of the best features of offline communal life and b) isn't actually conducive for its users building political power that can radically reshape offline society. Social media is obviously great for generating political discourse, and that can persuade large swaths of people, but this accomplishes very little if the people you reach are (for the most part) just more "locked-in" heavy users who almost exclusively engage in politics through their own posting/media consumption habits. And I say that as someone who has fallen down this rabbit hole several times in my young adult life!
The new civic associations forming online seem to be built around the same identity hierarchies that traditional fascists appealed to—nation, race, gender. The attention economy’s technology stokes the same mass resentments and hatreds, just with new tools. If, as Riley argues, fascism emerges from crises of political representation in moments of rapid civic development, then maybe these digital communities organized around reactionary identity politics aren’t so much a counterpoint to the fascism thesis as they are its next phase. It’s worth asking whether the ephemeral, noisy, and antagonistic nature of being online actually strengthens the fascist appeal to an embattled but authentic community - one that sees itself as constantly under siege by a hostile establishment. In that sense, maybe what we’re seeing could be called something like "platform fascism"? Something less about rigid organization and more about the chaotic, self-reinforcing loops of digital grievance culture.
"A recent conversation with a friend online reminded me that I should attend more closely to what the tech-right thinks about race and gender. In the past, I’ve used the concept of reactionary modernism to describe the worldview of the tech-libertarian right, a combination of a dedication to technological progress with a reactionary social vision."
This is almost too kind. What most of them are are people with too much money and memories of a third-rate Shadworun campaign who decided being the Corporate Oligarchs in a Cyberpunk Dystopia sounds a lot more pleasant than being the scrappy freedom fighters in a Cyperpunk Dystopia.
As a millenial who's grown up w/ Internet, I appreciate your going beyond clichés on social medias. Wondering though whether it's not useful to separate what is associational and what is atomizing on different kind of platforms though. A lot of the associational, revolutionary potential came from Facebook and some of its very connected to real life features, as the ability to organize events and the groups (not only w/ the Arab revolutions but also w/ other social movements like the Gilets Jaunes in France). It also comes with group chats, including the "Message" feature in Twitter. (Back in the days, it also came from the much regretted message boards !)
Twitter/X (the public arena side of it) is slightly different. It used to be (still is when you tune out the noise) a formidable way to get informed, it allowed people to connect on an individual level (like different researchers on similar topics), it became a public arena that allowed new subjects to come into proeminence (#MeToo being the prime example), but it's so confrontational and some of its way of functioning have always been almost sociopathic, even before Musk took over and even when you don't take into account the way it's been used for influence by a whole lot of private/corporate/national interests. For instance the quote-tweet : in terms of normal human communication, for instance, it's super bizarre not to reply directly to someone who talks to you but do a QT about it. You shun the person but advertise publicly to all your audience how stupid you thought his/her remark was. In general, Twitter/X is built on a promise of potential wide reach, access and relevance that is illusory for most people, who are commenting or tweeting to no avail. All of this increases frustration within people who already feel they're not being heard, which possibly makes them more prone to strong emotional responses toward those they feel are ignoring them and to radicalization, turning to mobbish behaviour (especially true for the incel/misogynists, who conflate the projected Twitter/X disdain w/ the real life disdain they think women have for them. Unsurprising that women are most targeted by online mobs, and that misogyny is greatly used as a radicalization funnel by far right groups).
It's also an incredible radicalization tool for people who are more proeminent. Twitter/X presence blurred the boundaries between public and private personas and made all the attacks much more personal. It made public persons more directly accessible to public criticism, as well as to insanely violent, personal or vile attacks which are also public. This of course has an effect on their nerves and stress response. It also makes it much more easy to resort to bad faith tactics and to dismiss valid criticism because a bunch of weirdos go mobbish over these criticisms. Not to mention that Twitter/X's granularity makes it incredibly easy to take things out of context, which gives a huge boost to all bad faith tactics.
There would be much to add about the toxic ways in which the associational sides of social media and the public arenas sides intersect (when people organize in group chats to target attacks on someone or on a tweet) ; or about how much Twitter/X's way of functioning, which rewards criticism, dissent, and divergence, allows new voices to emerge but ultimately does often have an atomizing effect on attempts for large scale coalitions and organizing (I kind of agree w/ Ross Barkan's NYT essay remarks on this, saying that a lot of the Twitter organizing had failed to build new coherent, lasting organizations ; will be happy to be proven wrong).
As we're seeing now, it also tends to drown out in commentary the very legitimate causes for alarms.
These things, like the rest, have been made much worst in recent years by Musk's takeover and the numerous influence campaigns that are staged on Twitter/X, but this existed before.
Not sure any of this commentary is really groundbreaking, but I'm absolutely bewildered by the level of verbal violence as well as shuttering to other opinions you find in any little small interaction on Twitter/X currently. This is absolutely not a normal way for people to behave toward each others.
On your thoughts on Riley's "Civil overdevelopment" thesis (his read on Gramsci's organic crisis) and your scepticism towards the Dimitrov line in your previous post. I'm really pleased to see the discussion going in this direction. One of the more frustrating things about the whole "F question" debacle, is not only the irritation and frustration at the bad faith of the naysayers in casting aspersions and ad hominems and refusing to properly engage with the substantive arguments. But also the extent to which this "heat and light" is blocking a move from the merely descriptive "check list" approach to more strategically important questions of theory - i.e. proposing causal models of what is driving the rise of far right anti-democratic forces.
Cards on the table, I'm an advocate of the Three Way Fight tradition which does not provide a finished answer to the theory question, but starts from the position that the Dimitrov line ain't it. (Now all we have to do is get the rest of the left to catch up - a slow process!). For the wider readership the Dimitrov line, as reduced to a slogan, is that fascism is "...the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital". Which was revived in the USA by the Black Panther Party in the early 70s.
Now, to get to my point, there's an element of continuity between this line and Riley's "Civil overdevelopment" line. Not so much by commission but omission - namely it assumes the unchanging class unity of the bourgeoisie. Riley's line is that the power balance between the bourgeoisie and society is disrupted by the uneven (over)development of civil society (an historically specific effect of the pre-war, pre-welfare state conjuncture where the SPD were able to honeycomb the 'unrecognised' sphere of reproduction with its sporting, educational and cultural organisations) making the bourgeoisie "weak". In 1920s Germany the problem was not that the bourgeoisie was weak - call the Junkers what you like, weak they were not - but that it was divided. The unwillingness to conceive of a divided bourgeoisie (a correlate of what Mike McCarthy calls "class abstractionism") lies behind the Dimitrov formula's identification of "finance capital" as the main culprit. As you rightly pointed out in your previous post, this is not "finance capital" in its modern sense, identified by the FR with the "bad" "abstract" capitalism (cf Postone), but the Comintern's then theory of "state monopoly capitalism" - i.e. this was the dominant faction of the capitalist class.
An alternative theory would be a "Bourgeois decomposition" theory - a Weimar style division of the "ideological classes" (the army, civil service, bureaucracy, permanent state) and opposing factions of the capitalist class in the face of a social-economic crisis that demanded an united strategy. I argue that's what we have today, in face of the impending climate catastrophe, we have a Big Carbon faction (that are openly funding much of the far right media sphere) and a (recent) alliance with Silicon Valley techno-feudalists. The SV techbros have belatedly given up their "post-Carbon capitalism" dalliances (Musk's fortune is still based on Tesla's "post-Carbon" business, NB) and thrown in their lot with Big Carbon in their desire for unregulated management (death to GDPR!), the construction of massive power-sucking new data centres for the big AI enclosure of the "General Intellect", etc.
The key here is that other causal theories are available. I don't think that the decomposition theory is mutually exclusive with your emerging "civil society attack on the superstructure" model. But I think it explains why the non-consensual Big Oil/Big Data faction are "going round the outside" route of fascism, rather than waiting to gain hegemonic consensus over the rest of their class
“In this context the democratic demands of civil society tend to develop against the regime of political parties and are often expressed as skepticism about all forms of political representation.”
I think an important facet of what’s going on here is that everyone agrees California is badly run, with the only disagreement being how that should be fixed. That’s one small but important facet of the mix that turned so many of these guys from milquetoast neoliberals to open fash.
Love the disco reference. Perhaps curiously, after the last days of disco, in its imperial decadent phase, routine in high-rent pick-up clubs and Disco Duck had spread to suburban senior centers, disco entered a witness-protection program, changed its name, and continues to percolate and proliferate in underground dance clubs to this day. Viva la resistance!
“we must start building real things again, particularly arms.”
“What if instead of a civic decline we understood the social media world as the rapid development of new forms of civil association, a development so rapid and explosive that the political elite has trouble adapting?”
Not for the first time, the thought occurs to me—Orson Scott Card got there first
(Probably others too, but ‘which sci-fi dystopia are we most like’ is not a game I’d like to play)
I really appreciate the recognition that social media IS a form of civil association. I think the error of writers like Riley is a misrecognition of what drives a civil association: it's not in-person meetings; it's the sense of camaraderie, belonging, and purpose. One facet of our current era that I wish were discussed more in serious circles is the prevalence of conspiracy theories and the communities that have arisen around them. QAnon in particular has fostered online communities in which people find a sense of purpose. Hannah Arendt emphasizes the role of "pseudomysticism" in driving nationalist movements, and to my mind, that is exactly what QAnon provides--an ideological framework in which anyone left of center is a Satan-worshipping, human-trafficking black-hat committed to the destruction of white, Christian Americans. These aren't online mirages; these folks gather in person for things like conferences, rallies, and raids on the Capitol. It seems clear to me that the oligarchs are adept at harnessing these civil associations for their own destructive ends.
On the conspiracy theory thing, I’ve been wondering about what’s happened to this group of people that we can’t seem to convince with evidence? First I thought maybe it’s a mass delusion, but turns out people in that field really don’t like that. 😬 So down the rabbit hole I went in search of what it might be called and found an interesting article about the Socio-Epistemic Model of Belief in Conspiracy Theories. I haven’t finished it yet, but hopefully there’s something in there that might be helpful in figuring out how to communicate with people that don’t seem to recognize reality.
Do get back to us!
Who's the author?
https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/download/5273/5273.html?inline=1#r50 and please let me know if this isn’t a reliable source. It’s hard to tell when you aren’t used to digging around in a particular area
Skimming through it I find it full of links to reputable sources. The writer, Joseph M Pierre, is a professor at UCLA and writes both for a wider public (eg in Psychology Today) and for an audience of his peers, so I think he's as genuine as you could wish for. A closer look shows his arguments are always backed up by research and that research is cited, so readers can check for themselves. Pretty good, I'd say!
Thank you! I'll let you know
I think one has to consider psychosis, whether due to mental illness or abuse of certain drugs. It may not be enough for a clinical diagnosis, but it's there.
For example if you look at the infamous "Qanon Chart" (a Google Image search should pull up many versions) this is undoubtedly the product of a psychotic style of thinking.
I don't think it explains all conspiracy theorists, I think there are multiple explanations.
But people who display psychotic thinking often are linchpins of those communities, any analysis that doesn't account for the possibility is going to miss something major.
In such cases the key is to not argue with the beliefs. Focus on solving shared problems and maintaining an emotional relationship. The problem is this only works if there are shared problems and a relationship between two people, it doesn't really work if it's just someone you don't know making public arguments.
I keep thinking about this graph
https://nielseniq.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2024/09/Picture20in20article-1.png
and where we might be on the line. Would we even know if a more efficient persuasion machine were being used on us? (I feel insane thinking about mind control)
I'm going to flag that to read later. I have also felt totally bewildered by the tenacity of conspiratorial belief. I've thought maybe there's a natural tendency for human morality to devolve into a dualistic distinction between good guys and bad guys, for the sake of economy of thought, and the only way to make that work is to create a caricature of your "enemies," but that's just me speculating.
I mean, it's worth remembering that people clinging to all sorts of falsified beliefs, not just conspiracies per se. The Great Disappointment springs to mind, in which at least four large sects still exist based on a prediction that Jesus would return in 1848.
I’ll probably never figure it out but why not 🤓
Well and I’m also wondering if it explains what these statisticians are finding…because I’m just inherently cautious of taking this position
https://youtube.com/@electiontruthalliance?si=anQyN8gwVXAp_V3s
I’m not sure if anyone is interested in what Lessig is doing, but I think it’s important because I hope we can find a way to communicate with people who disagree with us deeply, but he’s having conversations with his old high school friend who is a trump supporter. I was shocked at how differently he sees the situation when it seems so obvious to me. Here’s the link to the conversations, two so far: https://equalcitizens.us/anotherway/
That last link doesn’t have the most recent conversation: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/another-way-by-lawrence-lessig/id1436210825?i=1000692272575
And I got these ideas from a professor named lessig
I’m probably missing something, but Dylan Riley’s argument against the fascism thesis to describe the current moment actually exactly describes the current moment.
I know! This is what I've been saying!
I was confused on the first read for that exact reason. This must be what so many politicians and their traditional base fail to understand: it's the idea that Trump and his cohorts transcend the political that is most appealing. Transcending (and demolishing) the old way clears the path for all the unabashed misogyny, racism, greed, etc that has been building in coalition via these online networks. They are absolutely "exploiting the crisis". This coalition has arisen, in large part, in direct opposition to the counter narratives that have relied on more traditional political means to accomplish it's goals.
I think this is a key element Musk and his elves add to the mix - the enemies remain abstraction (mostly wokeism) but because engineers are saying it, it’s “depoliticized”, “rational”, “non-partisan”. Make fascism seem like it’s just techies fixing things. Trumpism is getting a lot of mileage out of that.
An important distinction of the new online forms of civic association with old in-person ones is that they are exceedingly granular and self-sorting. People with niche interests who might not have anyone in their towns that shares them can now be connected remotely. Those communities of mutual interests, if they have any political valence, will tend to be much more politically homogenous than an analogous group would be in real-life, i.e. a local football club is going to draw a mix of enthusiasts with a mix of beliefs that group norms will form around, whereas such a group online will be more nationally and internationally focused and its politics will have to account for a much wider and more divided range, usually either quarantining politics away from primary discussion or taking a stance that becomes part of the group identity (say, Barstool Sports vs Defector). Which is great for all those groups individually but bad for society broadly, because they are less likely to trust or work with each other.
I'm not sure where Im going with this except that in-person civic associations are still around, degraded but necessary, we all live somewhere and not just online archipelagos, and we probably shouldn't be governed by the extremely online.
good points!
"What if instead of a civic decline we understood the social media world as the rapid development of new forms of civil association, a development so rapid and explosive that the political elite has trouble adapting?" I stumbled into writing something along those lines while revisiting the "mediating structures" of Berger and Neuhaus. Their mediating structures so vital to democracy were ultimately vague as hell and just don't hold up in the era of social media, though they sure paved a lot of roads for our present hellscape. https://jamestalley.substack.com/p/no-really-we-do-live-in-a-society
Interested to see how you develop these ideas. Henry Farrell's recent post on the "social media crisis" came to a bunch of similar conclusions: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis. (In my humble opinion, I think my comment there is also pretty good.)
I've also been trying to make sense of online publics and their effects on democracy over the last few weeks, although the discursive imprint of this phenomena is so diffuse, ambiguous, and irony-pilled that it's difficult to say what's real and what's just social media performing its classic mirroring function and reflecting my intuitions and biases back at me. So far, my basic takeaway is that online communities are "like realspace publics in their ability to capture our imagination, but malformed in their ability to act upon the world." The free, frictionless ability to associate or de-associate with your chosen set, the performance of self at a distance instead of a more complete sense of a person that comes about through actual proximity and revealing moments that test/build moral conviction, the privileging of entertainment and critique over work and action... these things create the appearance of radical political coalitions and associations while simultaneously destroying the conditions that these coalitions have historically required in order to transform societies. To oversimplify things a bit, I've gone from "online is not real life" to "oh shit, online actually is real life" to "online is not real life, but the fact that so many people act like it is is maybe one of the central crises of our time."
I have a little personal theory that the place one spends the majority of one's life *is* their "real life." With so many people spending so many hours a day on social media and other online spaces, then for them, online *is* real life, and offline/IRL is unreal and unimportant. I'm backing this up with feelings and observations, not facts, but I have found it personally useful to understand why it feels so weird interacting with heavily online people. (And I write this as someone who's been online for more than four decades!)
Yeah, I agree that lots of people have voluntarily made online their "real life." My point is that social media is a poor simulacrum of a robust public square in that it a) lacks many of the best features of offline communal life and b) isn't actually conducive for its users building political power that can radically reshape offline society. Social media is obviously great for generating political discourse, and that can persuade large swaths of people, but this accomplishes very little if the people you reach are (for the most part) just more "locked-in" heavy users who almost exclusively engage in politics through their own posting/media consumption habits. And I say that as someone who has fallen down this rabbit hole several times in my young adult life!
The new civic associations forming online seem to be built around the same identity hierarchies that traditional fascists appealed to—nation, race, gender. The attention economy’s technology stokes the same mass resentments and hatreds, just with new tools. If, as Riley argues, fascism emerges from crises of political representation in moments of rapid civic development, then maybe these digital communities organized around reactionary identity politics aren’t so much a counterpoint to the fascism thesis as they are its next phase. It’s worth asking whether the ephemeral, noisy, and antagonistic nature of being online actually strengthens the fascist appeal to an embattled but authentic community - one that sees itself as constantly under siege by a hostile establishment. In that sense, maybe what we’re seeing could be called something like "platform fascism"? Something less about rigid organization and more about the chaotic, self-reinforcing loops of digital grievance culture.
Please link all your nation columns from your newsletter posts so we don't miss any thanks.
“The centre cannot hold…”
The centre right didn’t even want to.
"A recent conversation with a friend online reminded me that I should attend more closely to what the tech-right thinks about race and gender. In the past, I’ve used the concept of reactionary modernism to describe the worldview of the tech-libertarian right, a combination of a dedication to technological progress with a reactionary social vision."
This is almost too kind. What most of them are are people with too much money and memories of a third-rate Shadworun campaign who decided being the Corporate Oligarchs in a Cyberpunk Dystopia sounds a lot more pleasant than being the scrappy freedom fighters in a Cyperpunk Dystopia.
I was thinking, "that has to be a Last Days of Disco reference" -- and it was! One of my favorite movies
Hey, is "this material may be protected by copyright" supposed to be in there or is it a paste-up error?
mistake, fixed
As a millenial who's grown up w/ Internet, I appreciate your going beyond clichés on social medias. Wondering though whether it's not useful to separate what is associational and what is atomizing on different kind of platforms though. A lot of the associational, revolutionary potential came from Facebook and some of its very connected to real life features, as the ability to organize events and the groups (not only w/ the Arab revolutions but also w/ other social movements like the Gilets Jaunes in France). It also comes with group chats, including the "Message" feature in Twitter. (Back in the days, it also came from the much regretted message boards !)
Twitter/X (the public arena side of it) is slightly different. It used to be (still is when you tune out the noise) a formidable way to get informed, it allowed people to connect on an individual level (like different researchers on similar topics), it became a public arena that allowed new subjects to come into proeminence (#MeToo being the prime example), but it's so confrontational and some of its way of functioning have always been almost sociopathic, even before Musk took over and even when you don't take into account the way it's been used for influence by a whole lot of private/corporate/national interests. For instance the quote-tweet : in terms of normal human communication, for instance, it's super bizarre not to reply directly to someone who talks to you but do a QT about it. You shun the person but advertise publicly to all your audience how stupid you thought his/her remark was. In general, Twitter/X is built on a promise of potential wide reach, access and relevance that is illusory for most people, who are commenting or tweeting to no avail. All of this increases frustration within people who already feel they're not being heard, which possibly makes them more prone to strong emotional responses toward those they feel are ignoring them and to radicalization, turning to mobbish behaviour (especially true for the incel/misogynists, who conflate the projected Twitter/X disdain w/ the real life disdain they think women have for them. Unsurprising that women are most targeted by online mobs, and that misogyny is greatly used as a radicalization funnel by far right groups).
It's also an incredible radicalization tool for people who are more proeminent. Twitter/X presence blurred the boundaries between public and private personas and made all the attacks much more personal. It made public persons more directly accessible to public criticism, as well as to insanely violent, personal or vile attacks which are also public. This of course has an effect on their nerves and stress response. It also makes it much more easy to resort to bad faith tactics and to dismiss valid criticism because a bunch of weirdos go mobbish over these criticisms. Not to mention that Twitter/X's granularity makes it incredibly easy to take things out of context, which gives a huge boost to all bad faith tactics.
There would be much to add about the toxic ways in which the associational sides of social media and the public arenas sides intersect (when people organize in group chats to target attacks on someone or on a tweet) ; or about how much Twitter/X's way of functioning, which rewards criticism, dissent, and divergence, allows new voices to emerge but ultimately does often have an atomizing effect on attempts for large scale coalitions and organizing (I kind of agree w/ Ross Barkan's NYT essay remarks on this, saying that a lot of the Twitter organizing had failed to build new coherent, lasting organizations ; will be happy to be proven wrong).
As we're seeing now, it also tends to drown out in commentary the very legitimate causes for alarms.
These things, like the rest, have been made much worst in recent years by Musk's takeover and the numerous influence campaigns that are staged on Twitter/X, but this existed before.
Not sure any of this commentary is really groundbreaking, but I'm absolutely bewildered by the level of verbal violence as well as shuttering to other opinions you find in any little small interaction on Twitter/X currently. This is absolutely not a normal way for people to behave toward each others.
Congratulations on the new column!
On your thoughts on Riley's "Civil overdevelopment" thesis (his read on Gramsci's organic crisis) and your scepticism towards the Dimitrov line in your previous post. I'm really pleased to see the discussion going in this direction. One of the more frustrating things about the whole "F question" debacle, is not only the irritation and frustration at the bad faith of the naysayers in casting aspersions and ad hominems and refusing to properly engage with the substantive arguments. But also the extent to which this "heat and light" is blocking a move from the merely descriptive "check list" approach to more strategically important questions of theory - i.e. proposing causal models of what is driving the rise of far right anti-democratic forces.
Cards on the table, I'm an advocate of the Three Way Fight tradition which does not provide a finished answer to the theory question, but starts from the position that the Dimitrov line ain't it. (Now all we have to do is get the rest of the left to catch up - a slow process!). For the wider readership the Dimitrov line, as reduced to a slogan, is that fascism is "...the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital". Which was revived in the USA by the Black Panther Party in the early 70s.
Now, to get to my point, there's an element of continuity between this line and Riley's "Civil overdevelopment" line. Not so much by commission but omission - namely it assumes the unchanging class unity of the bourgeoisie. Riley's line is that the power balance between the bourgeoisie and society is disrupted by the uneven (over)development of civil society (an historically specific effect of the pre-war, pre-welfare state conjuncture where the SPD were able to honeycomb the 'unrecognised' sphere of reproduction with its sporting, educational and cultural organisations) making the bourgeoisie "weak". In 1920s Germany the problem was not that the bourgeoisie was weak - call the Junkers what you like, weak they were not - but that it was divided. The unwillingness to conceive of a divided bourgeoisie (a correlate of what Mike McCarthy calls "class abstractionism") lies behind the Dimitrov formula's identification of "finance capital" as the main culprit. As you rightly pointed out in your previous post, this is not "finance capital" in its modern sense, identified by the FR with the "bad" "abstract" capitalism (cf Postone), but the Comintern's then theory of "state monopoly capitalism" - i.e. this was the dominant faction of the capitalist class.
An alternative theory would be a "Bourgeois decomposition" theory - a Weimar style division of the "ideological classes" (the army, civil service, bureaucracy, permanent state) and opposing factions of the capitalist class in the face of a social-economic crisis that demanded an united strategy. I argue that's what we have today, in face of the impending climate catastrophe, we have a Big Carbon faction (that are openly funding much of the far right media sphere) and a (recent) alliance with Silicon Valley techno-feudalists. The SV techbros have belatedly given up their "post-Carbon capitalism" dalliances (Musk's fortune is still based on Tesla's "post-Carbon" business, NB) and thrown in their lot with Big Carbon in their desire for unregulated management (death to GDPR!), the construction of massive power-sucking new data centres for the big AI enclosure of the "General Intellect", etc.
The key here is that other causal theories are available. I don't think that the decomposition theory is mutually exclusive with your emerging "civil society attack on the superstructure" model. But I think it explains why the non-consensual Big Oil/Big Data faction are "going round the outside" route of fascism, rather than waiting to gain hegemonic consensus over the rest of their class
“In this context the democratic demands of civil society tend to develop against the regime of political parties and are often expressed as skepticism about all forms of political representation.”
I think an important facet of what’s going on here is that everyone agrees California is badly run, with the only disagreement being how that should be fixed. That’s one small but important facet of the mix that turned so many of these guys from milquetoast neoliberals to open fash.
Love the disco reference. Perhaps curiously, after the last days of disco, in its imperial decadent phase, routine in high-rent pick-up clubs and Disco Duck had spread to suburban senior centers, disco entered a witness-protection program, changed its name, and continues to percolate and proliferate in underground dance clubs to this day. Viva la resistance!
“we must start building real things again, particularly arms.”
“What if instead of a civic decline we understood the social media world as the rapid development of new forms of civil association, a development so rapid and explosive that the political elite has trouble adapting?”
Not for the first time, the thought occurs to me—Orson Scott Card got there first
(Probably others too, but ‘which sci-fi dystopia are we most like’ is not a game I’d like to play)