Time for a Little Anarchy

Looking for a leftist aesthetic

Let me be the first to say I too am weak. If you tilt your cigarette toward me, I will accept it. If the barista is hot, I’ll drink too much coffee. If you open up the bar, you’ll find me annihilated. If you post a thirst trap, consider me caught. And if you build an app that promises event a hint of dopamine, I will be the dumbest little gerbil in your experiment. No matter the drug, I’m your quivering, anxious husk of a user. Which means I don’t judge anyone for doing these drugs, especially when they’re set in front of us for free.

Last week, I re-deactivated my Bluesky account. Like the time before, it rushed through me and ran its course in only five or six days, and stopped working. I don’t know if it’s the platform itself or my many years of learning to play the game of Twitter — which the creators simply xeroxed — but it’s by far the easiest way for something I type to “do numbers.” But I quickly realized, or remembered, that I don’t enjoy the platform. Watching people I respect modulate their personalities to go viral fills me with a certain disgust, like watching your former drinking buddies go on stumbling around now that you’re sober. A little distance, and you see the illusions for what they are. Suddenly the whole thing gets repulsive.

Because I’m writing this on Substack, I want to focus on one particular refrain I saw again and again, which was people threatening to mute you or block you if you shared links to anything written on Substack. Others were “begging you” to delete your Substack account and migrate it to some other platform. Still others insisted that posting on Substack made you a Nazi, which is to say that what started as legitimate criticism — that Substack tolerates some hate speech under the guise of fostering open discussion — had arrived at the bottom of a familiar drain, puddled there with the rest of the sludge of the fatally online left’s fascist sloganeering.

The fatally online left’s fascist sloganeering! What a statement! What nonsense! What are you even talking about! Unfortunately, the history of social media leaves me with few better descriptors. I’ll unpack that shortly. First, I think it’s worth making some simple comparisons between the two platforms — one of which, obviously, I continue to use, and the other I keep deleting after embarrassing benders.

Bluesky, as I’ve said, is an unimaginative copy of pre-Musk Twitter. Despite some genuine interface improvements¹ Bluesky looks and functions identically to one of the most dangerous and consequential websites ever created. While its creators seem to view it as a haven or a sanctuary for liberal users in self-imposed Twitter² exile, users are nonetheless invited to become petty aristocrats, theatrically dismissing and disqualifying whoever doesn’t fit neatly into their coterie of sycophants. Obviously you don’t have to use the platform this way, but it’s how the platform, architecturally, wants you to use it. Eventually the platform wins. This is more or less a rule, by the way: a platform will always trump you. Its will is stronger than yours.

Substack, on the other hand, is the only major platform outside of OnlyFans that invites users to pay creators for their content.³ Since relaunching this newsletter in July, I’ve made about a thousand dollars just from emailing vaguely organized thoughts to subscribers. For someone living on food stamps, this is a big deal. Yes, it troubles me deeply that Substack, Inc. is so committed to the techno-libertarian ideal of “free speech” — which is just a way of redirecting consequences from those who speak onto those who get spoken about — that they’ve formally invited fascist idiots like Bari Weiss to contribute. It also bothers me that Substack, like any online platform, has “disrupted” more traditional forms of media. While legacy media’s list of failures is very, very long, it’s nonetheless an industry that didn’t deserve to get destroyed by a handful of naïve dopes in California — which began long before Substack came around, but which Substack seems to have taken to a more systemic level. Even New York Times columnists, not exactly known for their struggles to find money and attention, have departed the Grey Lady for the Orange Bro. And of course Substack eclipses, or simply eliminates, the role of the most important people in the writing world: editors. As wonderful as it is to read fresh, unique, and daring essays on this platform, almost all of them betray the absence of an editor. Part of what makes writing work is that moment when the editor asks a question that makes you want to die. An editor’s discipline and provocation is indispensable to good writing.

Despite all of this, Substack is where I, personally, have found writers who’ve challenged me, who’ve subverted my expectations, who’ve framed familiar arguments and conflicts in helpful new ways — ways that leave me feeling as though I can do something. Bluesky — and again, this is my experience — has the opposite effect. It makes me want to disengage, unfollow, and shut down. Its manipulation of all personalities leaves me with contempt for those I want to support. What’s worse, the insistence that many users have on being able to control the behavior and tastes of others (e.g. by blocking you or bullying you if you don’t delete one of your revenue streams) is such a callback to one of the left’s most spectacular mistakes that it’s difficult to believe they were awake these last five years.

A helpful concept I often return to is Franco Berardi’s distinction between connectivity and sensitivity, which Jenny Odell explores in How to Do Nothing. Connectivity “is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units… In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information.” Sensitivity “involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter… [that] requires and takes place in time” and risks leaving the units or entities changed in some way, “a bit different than they went in.”

On social media, a connective architecture uses people as a means to an end; a sensitive one uses what people say or write to serve its readership or customer base. As “problematic” as Substack is, a platform where you can risk changing your mind about a complex topic is hardly a Nazi hangout. Yes, fascists do make money on the platform. But so do antifascists. While neither is likely to change the other’s mind; and while the fascists are still publishing the same blithering stupidity that they’ve been able to publish in many centrist or right-wing publications, I’ve seen many Substack writers and readers express relief at getting away from the dogmatic, sloganeering nonsense that dominates — and atomizes — most leftist online circles. Even though Substack pays a handful of right-wing extremists to write, it seems to me far more harmful to disappear into a self-congratulatory “resistance” bubble and look for reasons to disqualify your allies. In this way, Bluesky resembles a sort of permanent 2017, where everyone who doesn’t get on board with your niche agenda is somehow causing you harm or trauma — an ethos that, at the time, I admittedly bought into. It conforms to the victimography I wrote about in Image Control: a map where any transgression, even if only imagined, is permanently fixed to identity, both unforgivable and insurmountable. As I joked with a friend, if “X” is the Matrix for fascists who want to believe they’re winning this shitty video game they’ve made out of our reality, Bluesky is the Matrix for liberals who want to exempt themselves from any action whatsoever. The promised “blue sky” of another microblog is the same lie from the film: an illusion to pacify us while our political crisis continues to scorch the earth.

While not unique, social media is exemplary of how a leftist slogan or aesthetic can become a fascist tool, weakening solidarity and driving people who should be working together into vastly different camps. It’s basically a mirror version of the way centrists don’t understand the difference between tactics and ethics — that it may not be polite or “civil” to punch a Nazi in the face or make a CEO afraid of violence, but it’s certainly the right thing to do. This is also why the left has so few leaders: the near total adoption of social media aesthetics means that no one is un-problematic enough for any kind of mass movement. Taken together, it’s hard not to conclude that connective platforms, in their cooptation of leftist ethics by fascist aesthetics, are a kind of libertarian psy-op meant to root out and eliminate solidarity among leftist movements or coalitions. The logical endpoint of all these platforms is an ideological silo where no one is pure enough to help you, which leaves you defenseless against the grand libertarian project: a tech autocracy where all your choices are made for you.

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In 2022, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd released a “cover” of one of the band’s signature songs. Dropping the key to A-minor and removing the guitar solos (a predictably shitty move; David Gilmour fought to include them on The Wall), Waters’ “Comfortably Numb 2022,” with its pulsing bass and droning organ, seems uncomfortably suited to our time. If that weren’t enough, the video depicts a wasted city under a dry, stormy sky. People-shaped shadows stoop over little black rectangles in their palms. The only building with power is a strange, spidery complex that rises in the distance — revealed when Shanay Johnson’s chilling vocal solo shifts into a plea: “Hear me, hear me, hear me when I call.” It’s simple and banal, but these are rather simple times: We know what to resist, and we aren’t resisting it.

I know I’ve been beating this drum pretty hard lately — and doing all the plugging that comes with it, since I wrote a book about social media’s subversion of leftist politics. This will be the last piece I write about this particular topic for a while, I promise. But the matter seems increasingly urgent. With this administration⁴ we seem to be at an inflection point or a crossroads. The stakes are the highest they’ve ever been.

The purpose of dismantling the federal government is to privatize every aspect of our relationships and interactions with one another, up to and including, one has to suppose, “surge pricing” for potable water. The goal is to annihilate the public altogether, replacing it with individual, isolated consumers. The easiest way to do this — and to enforce it — will be through apps. Amy Webb has written about this extensively (if speculatively — and a touch sinophobically) in The Big Nine, a book in which she extrapolates a banal dystopia based on trends in the tech industry. Refrigerators that monitor what kind of groceries you buy in order to keep your insurance premiums affordable. Windows that play translucent ads unless you pay them not to. Movements monitored and restricted to specific zones (for this one they can probably thank Israel more than Silicon Valley). An “AI” health assistant that narcs to your insurance company and advertises healthy choices throughout the day. Amazon housing. All the usual things one would expect of corporations intent on harvesting more and more money from of a vulnerable population, especially with no laws or regulations — and certainly no DOJ — to intervene. Logically, anyone who can’t afford this kind of lifestyle is simply eliminated through disease, starvation, or “detention.” There are already too few resources, and it’s the job of Silicon Valley technology to make sure the bulk of it flows uninterruptedly to the country’s new owners.

This vision may sound paranoid, if not outright hysterical, but it’s simply the neoliberal society we live under today taken to its logical terminus. With the dissolution of the government, all that stands between us and these corporations is the public’s will to reject it — while there’s still a public to do so. Sure, we have a handful of states willing to sue, but I’m still not clear what anyone thinks is going to happen once these cases arrive at Trump’s Supreme Court.

The fact is, right-wing ideologues have manufactured the platforms on which most of us have embraced our own subjugation — and they’re only going to refine them. They’re only going to improve them. Celebrating a version of Twitter that caters exclusively to people who think like you doesn’t exactly seem like an antifascist endeavor. Nor does spectating the (intentionally theatrical) collapse of the federal government and tweeting at your representatives to do something seem like an empowering way to spend your days. I’m not saying that writing newsletters is any better, believe me. If you find out what works, tell me, but I know for a fact what doesn’t. Social media is precisely what got us all here, and I can guarantee that doubling down on it — that continuing to treat it like a political town hall — is an apocalyptically bad idea.

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Maybe what fascinates me about the will, in all my writing, is that I don’t have one. It’s what I’m always trying to cultivate, to solicit. It’s what style is, in every sentence, and what structure is, from the first line to the last. I write to convince myself of what’s possible. Fiction in particular — but also a well written essay — feels like an alteration; something in the world has changed, and it’s because I added to it. Which tells me, as a writer, that the world is alterable. It can change because we can change it.

Here’s one way I define style: The moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend; it gets bent. Right now, that arc is bent almost unrecognizably by the willful greed of a handful of “visionaries” who’ve convinced us to turn away from the world and experience it through a screen. Their style is data-driven, quantifiable, reliable, and logical; there is almost nothing Musk or Zuckerberg or Bezos or any of their peers can do or create⁵ that is in any way surprising, innovative, or unpredictable. There is no reason to be shocked at their encroachment into totalitarianism because their logic, their philosophy, was always totalitarian; all neoliberal endeavors are totalitarian. But this predictability is their weakness. This lack of imagination is their blind spot, and the only adversity they’ve come to anticipate is rejection — which is what fuels them. They can’t fathom a way of being in the world that doesn’t align or network with their values, that doesn’t base itself on some arbitrary scoring system. In a word, they are pathetic.

Most significantly, they think life is something to control. Illness, death, disaster, protest, violence, refusal, sabotage, creativity, revelation — they may think about these things in the abstract, but they do not understand them. Yet most of us do. It’s very human to know what illness can do to you and your family, what violence can do. Most of us understand death as inevitable, not a technological dilemma. Most people are creative, whether they realize it or not (this is something social media has illustrated — how so many millions have a relentless instinct to play with language). And of course, most people on the planet know that life cannot be controlled, as we’ve never had the gift of such delusions.

As much as I hate slogans, I do have to say that “become ungovernable” has a certain ring to it — and seems especially apt for the tech autocracy that’s about to wrap its clammy hands around the public’s throat. One can’t say too much in an online newsletter hosted by a corporation that has one’s personal information on file, so I’ll just say that to be ungovernable carries many, many possibilities, from the simplicity of rejecting cookies or blocking Instagram’s access to your microphone and camera, all the way to what can only be imagined. And there are far more people here to imagine a better world than there are people trying to control this one.

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Thank you for reading Entertainment, Weakly. If you can, please consider supporting these essays with a paid subscription. It helps me immensely.

1. Here’s my favorite example: Bluesky warns you whenever you’re about to post an image without an image description. They’ve built a basic level of accessibility into their platform, and made it user-friendly for everyone to be accommodating to visually impaired users. This is a baseline of antifascist UX design, which I hope to write more about in another newsletter.

2. Lest anyone get confused, I believe that leaving Musk’s idiotic X is an unambiguous, uncomplicated good thing to do. It’s a rare easy decision, like selling your Tesla or making billionaires afraid to go outside.

3. Content is a hideous word, but I don’t have any illusions about what I’m writing to fill the frame this platform has created.

4. Which is frankly a new government — more on that another day.

5. The algorithms marketed as “AI” are the tech industry’s revenge on everyone who has the creativity they’ve always envied.