"Commies! Commies! Commies!"

On Know-Nothing Bozo, the Non-Wonder Dog

Photo by Austin Lowman on Unsplash

Correction: Apparently, I do like anarchists, or at least, people I like already are coming out of the fucking woodwork, telling me they are anarchists. Consider me schooled.

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Linguistically speaking, few things irritate me more than jargon; casual use of in-group language irks the shit out of me. I’m a universalist—I like people, and I like clear communication that doesn’t exclude, because that’s how you get everyone on board. Let me be clear: If you are using jargon to communicate outside of a mission-critical workplace context, you are an asshole.

We’re digging out the Chisel of Rhetoric today. Your old pal Rollins is a trifle cranky this week anyway, and an article in an anarchist publication called Crimethinc entitled “The Billionaire and the Anarchists: Tracing Twitter from Its Roots as a Protest Tool to Elon Musk’s Acquisition” popped up in his Mastodon feed this morning.

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The author’s critique is not wholly without merit, but the article’s ideological slant deprives the reader of context, and the language the author uses is annoying, and I don’t like anarchists. Let’s pull it apart.

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Elon Musk has taken possession of Twitter, claiming he will make it “a common digital town square.” What kind of town square is owned by a single plutocrat? The square in a company town—or in a monarchy. What will this mean for ordinary people who depend on platforms like Twitter to communicate and organize in the digital age?

While it is certainly true that Elon is not doing what I would call a bang-up job with his new toy, the author seems to argue that the government should be in charge of the town square, or that it should in some way be owned directly by “The People.” My two-word rebuttal to the idea that the government is competent to run the town square would be “San Francisco.” My two-word rebuttal to the idea that random yahoos are competent to run the town square would be “CHAZ/CHOP.”

The conflicts that played out within the capitalist class during Trump’s presidency effectively pitted an upstart coalition of nationalists and old-money capitalists (such as the oil lobby) against the partisans of neoliberal business as usual, exemplified by the vast majority of Silicon Valley. If not for these intra-class conflicts, Trump’s effort to consolidate control of the US government for his particular brand of nationalist authoritarianism might have already succeeded.

Ascribing any degree of Machiavellian competence to Donald John Trump is a tell (remember those?) that the author is constructing a straw man deserving of its own festival in Pershing County, Nevada. Trump is the world’s greatest salesman, and that’s the extent of what makes him extraordinary. He could sell ice to the Inuit, and he displayed an understanding of his constituency that far outstrips that of the average Washington swamp creature, but he’s otherwise not particularly politically gifted. He certainly doesn’t have the organizational capacity to “consolidate control” of anything.

Grassroots movements spearheaded resistance to Trump’s policies and street-level support,

Artist’s rendition of the planning process of said grassroots movements below:

but Silicon Valley also took a side, culminating with Twitter booting Trump off their platform in the wake of the bungled coup attempt of January 6. This underscored what had already been clear since summer 2020: Trump had not built up enough support among the capitalist class to maintain his grip on power.

You’d think a bunch of paranoids with an axe to grind regarding the activities of the intelligence and security services would take the time to point out the infiltration of the crowd on January 6, or the mistreatment of those arrested, or any of a dozen other varieties of well-documented governmental shenanigans and hijinks perpetrated against ordinary people who were present. This is what I mean by “context.” Isn’t this an article approving of participatory social movements?

What if Trump had been able to make common cause with a critical mass of Silicon Valley billionaires? Would things have turned out differently? This is an important question, because the three-sided conflict between nationalists, neoliberals, and participatory social movements is not over.

1. Whaddaya know. Participatory social movements do seem to be something the author’s in favor of.

2. I have a question for the folx at Crimethinc: Did any of you take a single class in political science in college? It has always struck me as odd that leftists are as a rule both highly educated and politically active, yet the only political system with which they have so much as a passing familiarity is socialism. (Which, it’s worth noting, is internationalist; leftists are allergic to national borders the way Dracula is allergic to garlic, and they treat anyone who isn’t like they’ve got Klan robes hanging in their hall closet.)

3. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but nationalism and ethno-nationalism aren’t synonyms. There is a rich tradition of tolerance in civic nationalism, nationalism’s traditional American flavor. Yet the moment these people see the word “nationalist,” they clutch their pearls and reflexively call the police like they came across a family barbeque in a black neighborhood.

To put this in vulgar dialectical terms:

Thesis: Trump’s effort to consolidate an authoritarian nationalism
Antithesis: opposition from neoliberal tycoons in Silicon Valley
Synthesis: Elon Musk buys Twitter

Understood thus, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is not just the whim of an individual plutocrat—it is also a step towards resolving some of the contradictions within the capitalist class, the better to establish a unified front against workers and everyone else on the receiving end of the violence of the capitalist system. Whatever changes Musk introduces, they will surely reflect his class interests as the world’s richest man.

Jargon has entered the chat.

Marxists have some conceptual tools to recommend them. The “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” model of understanding a problem is not, to my mind, one of them. Inherent in that model is the idea that the status quo is a problem that needs fixing (which is sometimes true, but it’s not good to model every aspect of the society that loaned you the money to get an education where you learned to write scathingly about it that way), and the creepy, disingenuous solution is always to modify the status quo in such a way as to keep a facade of tradition to satisfy the hoi polloi’s psychological need for continuity while changing the underlying substance so that it suits the preferences of the intelligentsia. That’s why they change dictionary definitions of ordinary words in the dead of night. Everybody’s still allowed to use the English language, it’s just that nothing means what it used to!

With Musk’s purchase of Twitter, we see the conclusion of a cycle of innovation and cooptation in the field of communications. In the late 20th century, the dominant political and technological models were monolithic and unidirectional: network television, mass-based political parties. In response, anarchists and other rebels experimented with independent media and underground networks, producing innovative horizontal and decentralized models like indymedia.org. Tech corporations eventually monetized these models as the participatory media of Web 2.0, such as Facebook. Yet from the turn of the century through the uprising of 2020, the lingering horizontal and participatory aspects of the internet in general and social media in particular continued to empower those who sought to achieve more self-determination—witness the “Thank you Facebook” graffiti in Tunisia after the so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2010-2011.

Over the past decade, however, corporations and governments have introduced more and more online surveillance and control. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is the latest stage in a reactionary clampdown with grim implications.

Don’t you belong to/believe in/follow an ideology famous for the line “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house?” You might want to read

Yasha Levine

's excellent book Surveillance Valley, which puts the lie to the idea that the internet was ever intended to be a democratizing force. It was designed from the ground up as a surveillance tool. People who think networked telecommunications are in any way secure from nation-state actors are wrong. They aren’t and they never have been. The internet is not designed to be friendly to “underground networks.” It makes a dandy megaphone (as long as they don’t switch it off), but playing Secret Squirrel on the web is an unusually dumb misapplication of a tool.

Musk and his colleagues see capitalism as a meritocracy in which the shrewdest and most hardworking competitors inexorably rise to the top. Hence, presumably, their own success.

Of course, if Musk wishes to prove that his success is not just the consequence of privilege and luck—of fortune and good fortune—he could demonstrate this easily enough by giving away his wealth, cutting his social ties, changing his name, and repeating his supposed rags-to-riches feats a second time. If he were able to climb the pyramid a second time without the benefit of growing up white in apartheid-era South Africa (setting aside the question of his father’s emerald investments for now), we might have to grant a hearing to his claims that the market has elevated him on account of his personal qualities—though that still would not show that capitalism rewards the efforts that are most beneficial for humanity.

According to the Silicon Valley narrative, platforms like Twitter are the inventions of individual entrepreneurs, propelled into being by the finance capital of canny investors.

There’s a lot wrong with capitalism as it’s practiced today, but among the differences between capitalism and other systems the author may prefer, such a socialism/communism or anarchism, is that capitalism has a fairly lengthy track record of making the majority of the people who live under it happier. This has not been as true as it once was in recent years, I grant you, but the reasons for that turn away from the light are not nebulous or mysterious. They have to do with specific legal decisions, in particular ones regarding the regulation and deregulation of industry, that occurred at specific points in American history.

Draw a distinction between people and institutions—the people who have run the institution have made bad, even catastrophic decisions, but the institution itself is both salvageable and worth salvaging. (

Matt Stoller

has the receipts. I encourage anyone who wants to feel a little better about the prospects of fixing the mess we’re in to read him—he thinks there’s hope, and he’s The Guy on this subject, so I’m inclined to think there’s hope, too.)

But Twitter did not simply spring, fully formed like Athena, from the head of company co-founder Jack Dorsey. In fact, it was a modest refinement of a model already demonstrated by TXTmob, the SMS text messaging program developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy for protests at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Blaine Cook and Evan Henshaw-Plath, anarchist developers who worked alongside Dorsey at his previous company Odeo, helped refine TXTmob and later took the model with them into the conversations with Dorsey that gave rise to Twitter.

If the unrelenting urgency of social media in general and Twitter in particular can be exhausting, that’s to be expected—the infrastructure of Twitter was originally designed for street communications during high-stakes mass mobilizations in which information must go out immediately, boiled down to its bare essentials. It’s not a coincidence that, despite its shortcomings, the platform has continued to be useful to street activists and conflict journalists.

The point here is that innovative models do not necessarily emerge from the commercial entrepreneurism of the Great Men of history and economics. More often, they emerge in the course of collective efforts to solve one of the problems created by the capitalist order. Resistance is the motor of history. Afterwards, opportunists like Musk use the outsize economic leverage that a profit-driven market grants them to buy up new technologies and turn them definitively against the movements and milieux that originally produced them.

1. No they fucking don’t. Innovative models emerge from both collective efforts and Great Men, and the insistence that Great Men do not/did not exist, aren’t/weren’t actually that Great, or are/were always bad is one of the things that piss me off the most about collectivists and collectivism. The reason anarchists and socialists don’t like hierarchical models of society and mistrust Great Men is that they aren’t good at navigating social hierarchies themselves and they don’t produce anything of value. An honest Marxist once told me that the word for the form of government favored by the woke is, properly, “marginalism,” or government by and for those on the margins. Marginalism is a society of weak people saying that weakness is good, actually, in other words, which tracks roughly 1:1 with what I've observed regarding wokies.

2. No it fucking isn’t. Competition and cooperation moving dynamically and in tandem is the motor of history. Individuals cooperate to make things, then those groups compete over which thing is better. Within those cooperative groups, there is a microcosm of competition within the group, a hierarchy in which people compete, regulated by social conventions, which are sometimes codified into regulations and laws. Nature is fractal that way.

3. In order for there to be resistance, there has to be something to resist, and that something has to have produced value in order for it to have grown big and strong enough for Vandals and Visigoths to take an interest in looting it…er, resisting it. Why else wage culture war based on the idea that the institutions of society are worthless? If the woke didn’t think there was something of value to it, they’d find a way to leave, dropping out of society like the hippies. They don’t, of course, because they know society is valuable; they just either aren’t willing to produce or capable of producing anything of value themselves, so they’re gonna take the shit other people built.

4. Tangential to #2, the author, and socialists and anarchists in general, seem to have a chicken-egg problem with regards to understanding the processes that generate social change. They also don’t seem to understand human nature except through a grievance lens, which I find pretty funny; their mental models for understanding people’s behavior through analysis of their group economic interests are insanely useful, but they don’t ever seem to use them to see what they must look like to the people on the other side of their critique. “The mileux and movements that produced” Twitter are openly hostile to people like Musk. Hell, the quoted article is openly hostile to him. I’m not sure why the author seems so surprised that he’d use their own weapons against them. Like, do you think people don't hit back?

5. Critique is not creative. The fact that you can use negative dialectic to tear something down doesn’t mean you also know how to build anything useful. People who create things of value tend to be successful and happy. People who tear shit down tend to be resentful and miserable. I’ve certainly never met a happy Marxist or anarchist.

We can identify two stages in the capitalist appropriation of the TXTmob model. In the first phase, a framework that was originally designed by volunteers for the use of ordinary protesters was transformed into a publicly traded corporation, around the same time that the open spaces of the early internet were being colonized by the for-profit surveillance systems of Web 2.0. In the second phase, this publicly traded corporation has been transformed into the private plaything of a single entitled tycoon—with consequences that remain to be seen.

“Ordinary protestors” is a truly fascinating linguistic construction. Really, the same could be said of this entire paragraph.

First of all, “capitalist appropriation?” I think most people would say something more like “developing an idea to the point it’s super valuable and then riding that motherfucker until the wheels fall off,” which, coincidentally, also describes what any normal person would have done in Jack Dorsey’s shoes had they had Dorsey’s talent, skill set, and proximity to venture capital. Most people would love to be rich, you goon. The only people who turn their nose up at that kind of money are either mentally ill, totally lacking in the capacity to create anything of value and thus pulling a “The Fox and the Grapes,” or already rich themselves. There’s no moral principle that says “it is wrong to build a company that manufactures a valuable product/performs a valuable service, making you richer than God in the process.” You can do what you like with the thing you’ve made when you’ve made it—the guy who started Patagonia just gave his company away. But he had already created something of value, so he had it to give away when he decided it was time.

Second, protestors aren’t ever ordinary people. They’re definitionally people with grievances. The author is an activist, or professional protestor. In other words, s/he is professionally aggrieved. The fact that s/he thinks in terms of dividing protestors up into ordinary/not ordinary reminds me of conversations I’ve had with both cops and strippers, two demographics who will tell the most gnarly violent or sexual stories imaginable completely casually, often without seeming to realize that they come off as jaw-droppingly insane to ordinary people. Let me guide the author back to the real world, a place with which I have passing familiarity: activists and protestors are not normal. People that politically engaged make up ~7% of the electorate in either political direction, and they are universally regarded as batshit insane, even by their nominal allies.

As to “the open spaces of the early internet,” let me here quote from Surveillance Valley:

On June 2, 1975, NBC correspondent Ford Rowan appeared on the evening news to report a stunning exposé. Baby-faced with light blue eyes, he spoke straight into the camera and told viewers that the military was building a sophisticated computer communications network and was using it to spy on Americans and share surveillance data with the CIA and NSA. He was talking about the ARPANET.

“Our sources say, the Army’s information on thousands of American protesters has been given to the CIA, and some of it is in CIA computers now. We don’t know who gave the order to copy and keep the files. What we do know is that once the files are computerized, the Defense Department’s new technology makes it incredibly easy to move information from one computer to another,” Rowan reported. “This network links computers at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, more than 20 universities, and a dozen research centers, like the RAND Corporation.”

Emphasis mine.

Back to Crimethinc:

Musk claims that his goal is to open up the platform for a wider range of speech. In practice, there is no such thing as “free speech” in its pure form—every decision that can shape the conditions of dialogue inevitably has implications regarding who can participate, who can be heard, and what can be said. For all we might say against them, the previous content moderators of Twitter did not prevent the platform from serving grassroots movements. We have yet to see whether Musk will intentionally target activists and organizers or simply permit reactionaries to do so on a crowdsourced basis, but it would be extremely naïve to take him at his word that his goal is to make Twitter more open.

The author must be defining “‘free speech’ in its pure form” as “speech that can only ever exist in theory,” because all speech has similar, if not identical implications. Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. And no, the moderators of Twitter didn’t prevent the platform from serving grassroots movements, if we’re defining “grassroots movements” as “leftist movements of which the author approves.” The moderators did, however, stomp the shit out of plenty of grassroots movements founded by, for example, parents heartbroken by the medical establishment’s callous disregard for their children’s futures, including the health of their bones and joints, not to mention their fertility, and who wanted nothing more radical than to not have social workers empowered by the state to take their kids away from them cart their children off to have their healthy breasts and genitals amputated until they’re eighteen years old. Twitter’s content moderators were all over those grassroots movements like blue on checkmarks.

Imagine that you do not believe that Elon Musk deserves to have more power over what occurs on Twitter than the roughly 238 million people who use it today. For the purposes of this thought experiment, imagine that you believe that no one deserves to have such disproportionate power over the means via which human beings communicate with each other. In other words, imagine that you are an anarchist.

Under most circumstances, I’d offer some witty reversal or reinterpretation of the author’s language to highlight the absurdity of what s/he is saying. But to be honest, the balls on this character are intimidatingly huge, and I’m kind of lost for words looking at the dominance on display.

Kidding. Musk fucking owns Twitter. I realize you don’t recognize private property as being legitimate, hoss, but everyone else does. And no, I’m not putting myself in your shoes. You’re self-evidently crazy.

What can you do to ensure that people can control the technologies that connect us? Can you establish new platforms that answer directly to those who use them? More importantly, can you popularize those, drawing users away from the closed playpens of corporate social media? Can you draw people together in other forums, spaces that can’t be bought and controlled by billionaires?

With enough money, there is very little one can’t buy.

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Social networking websites are not on the list of things not for sale. Figure out a means of decentralization that prevents a billionaire from buying your network out from under you, is my advice; I'm hardly unsympathetic to the idea of maintaining the independence of Bohemias for as long as possible, but there's a lifecycle to cool spots that doesn't meaningfully change. Everything created has a beginning, and everything created has an end.

Effectively, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter returns us to the 1980s, when the chief communications media were entirely controlled by big corporations. The difference is that today’s technologies are participatory rather than unidirectional: rather than simply seeing newscasters and celebrities, we see representations of each other, carefully curated by those who run the platforms. If anything, this makes the pretensions of social media to represent the wishes of society as a whole more insidiously persuasive than the spectacles of network television could ever be.

I will defer to anarchists on pretensions; their subject-matter expertise exceeds mine. As to the rest of it, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Everything is ultimately cyclical.

Twitter itself is likely a lost cause, but we should not hastily cede any territory via which we might communicate and organize against our oppressors. In a globally networked world, our adversaries in governments, corporations, and reactionary movements will continue to take advantage of digital technology to act with speed and coordination. We can’t afford not to do the same, even if in the long run we seek much richer forms of connection than anything that digital technology can provide.

Personally, I preferred James Earl Jones’s Darth Vader to Hayden Christianson’s. Hayden just didn’t have the gravitas.

…we’re LARPing, right? I only ask because I used to hang out with LARP nerds, and this is the way they talk in-game.

It’s you against the billionaires. At their disposal, they have all the wealth and power of the most formidable empire in the history of the solar system. All you have going for you is your own ingenuity, the solidarity of your comrades, and the desperation of millions like you. The billionaires succeed by concentrating power in their own hands at everyone else’s expense. For you to succeed, you must demonstrate ways that everyone can become more powerful. Two principles confront each other in this contest: on one side, individual aggrandizement at the expense of all living things; on the other, the potential of the individual to increase the self-determination of all human beings, all living creatures.

“A Jewish woman travels to the Himalayas in search of a famous guru. She heads east, traveling by plane, train, bus, and oxcart until she reaches a far-off Buddhist monastery in Nepal. An old lama in maroon and saffron robes tells her that the guru she is seeking is meditating in a cave at the top of the mountain and cannot be disturbed. She has traveled far and insists that she absolutely must see this guru. The lama eventually relents but requests that she not stay long, bow when addressing the guru, and say no more than eight words to him. With the help of a few lamas, monks, and Sherpa porters, she trudges up the mountain. Exhausted, she reaches the top and the cave where the guru is meditating. Keeping within the eight-word limit, she bows and says what she came to say: “Sheldon, it’s your mother. Enough already, come home!”

The good news is that their narrative about where innovation comes from is a lie. Anarchists had more to do with the origins of Twitter than plutocrats like Musk. We can create new platforms, new points of departure for connection, new strategies for changing the world. We have to.

Here is a tell for you to remember: When dealing with problems in the real world, the moment you see someone pipe up with the claim that the real problem has to do with a narrative—any narrative—you know for a certainty you are dealing with a thumb-sucking poseur.

People who think in terms of symbol manipulation think in terms of magic. There’s nothing wrong with that; Heaven knows I write about little else. But magic is for what magic is for. It is not for living in or relating to the real world, unless it is your job to do magic full time. My actual day job in the real world is mostly unrelated to what I write about on this blog, because making magic pay is hard. Everyone wants to do symbol manipulation for a living; it’s much easier than working.

Make no mistake: if you find yourself dealing with someone who insists that political problems are really about the story being told, and they don’t tell you up front that they’re engaging in symbol manipulation, you are dealing with someone who is so full of shit it’s turning their eyes brown; such people are almost invariably disgruntled wanna-be elites who are trying to use magic to crash the system for their own benefit, or because they are crazy or have a grievance against it. In the real world, the story is never the important thing, logistics or organization or some other boring, practical aspect of taking care of your people is. But people who do nothing but critique and tear things down and write communiques like this don’t actually know how to do anything useful. They just know how to justify trying to take your shit.

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1. Google if you want to read this masterpiece in its original form. I’m not linking them directly, because I don’t feel like giving them clicks.

2. To be clear, I’m not without principles; Alan Moore neatly summed up what can’t be bought in his masterpiece V for Vendetta as follows: “[It] was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us...but within that inch we are free.”