Transcribed from the 31 January and 7 February 2021 episodes of The Fire These Times podcast and printed with permission. Edited for space and readability. Audio of the whole interview (and a full transcript) here.
As people develop more autonomy and power, states are going to double down on what they can do to stop that. But a lot of this is very hard to stop.
Emmi Bevensee: I’m a data scientist; my background is mostly in researching fascist groups and weird forms of fascist creep on the left. Recently, I helped run a project called Emotional Anarchism. I ran a symposium about decentralization and economic coordination, where we had a big conversation about how central planning is bad but also capitalism is bad, so how do we do economies? I wrote a paper about ecofascism. I just had a big article where we analyzed QAnon email server logs—the people at the center of QAnon had set up their email server wrong and made the logs of everyone they email public, so we archived it and did a bunch of data analysis.
Elia J. Ayoub: You’re like me, you have no idea how to summarize what you do.
You have a piece entitled “It Takes a Network To Defeat A Network: Anti-Fascism and the Future of Complex Warfare.” What is it about? Walk us through some of the main arguments.
EB: There’s something that’s been bothering me and some friends for a while: the vast majority of leftist theory has not been updated with the advancements of complexity theory, information theory, the modern technically interconnected world, cybernetics, or all these things that have happened since the industrial revolution. We started thinking about how we could use these frameworks to create better paths for resistance, and make predictions that are grounded in emergent trends in these spaces that we think would better serve a wide range of resistance movements.
We settled on a few specific topics. One of the first ones we started talking about was conflict generally, and war specifically. Not just violent warfare, but below the threshold of violence: hybrid, “grayzone,” or information warfare, where we highlight emergent trends towards individual super-empowerment, i.e. one person (or a very small cluster of people) can do a lot of damage, have a lot of impact.
8chan was a joke in the old days; it was extremely niche. I tried to pitch articles about it all the time, and people said, This is way too niche. And then: Christchurch. And now we have QAnon storming the US capitol. Because of the internet and the complexity of our modern system, very niche things can have huge impacts. That’s the information side of it, and there are all these weird disinfo actors: they can be state-backed or grassroots, and they interact in complicated ways.
On the warfare side, I’m interested in 3D-printed guns and drone warfare—not because I’m excited about the concept, but because there’s a one hundred percent chance they’re going to become an increasingly large part of our future, so we should understand the implications of them. And the implications are weird. They favor asymmetric actors: Houthis set up a hobby drone and used it to attack an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. That’s huge. Let’s talk about the politics of a non-state actor using a $25 toy and rigging it to destroy massive infrastructure in one of the most powerful states in the world!
It raises historical questions. The invention of the AK-47, in some ways, facilitated the decolonization of Africa. There are serious, complicated arguments to be made about that; all kinds of other fucked up stuff happened, and guns are guns, but these types of asymmetric developments have really complicated implications for the structure of different forces in conflict with each other.
As people develop more autonomy and power, states are going to double down on what they can do to stop that—but a lot of this is very hard to stop. You could make 3D printers illegal, but you can still make 3D printers. There’s only so much you can do to stop any of this. It begs the question about what states are going to do. Probably adopt a Chinese surveillance model?
That stuff is pretty scary, but there’s some exciting trends about the structure of interconnectedness favoring asymmetric actors. Some communities are already good at networks; anti-authoritarian communities, for example, have an advantage in this terrain in terms of carving out spaces; antifascists have been pioneering networks. One interesting tactic is OSINT (open source intelligence), which is using information that’s available on the internet—it’s like really high-tech googling.Antifascist communities have pioneered the technique of having a small, highly trusted group that’s very private and works together but also utilizes huge swarms of people. These used to be pretty niche techniques, but they’ve already hugely expanded.
Now with the B-level coup attempt on the US capitol, there are liberals getting in on this tactic. They’re not very good at it—actually, they’re pretty irresponsible, and a lot of antifascists are mad about that. But it’s become understood in the mainstream that we can work in crowds of ten thousand to identify a dude who brought tactical gear to kidnap people in congress.
Ideally, these anti-authoritarian left communities are inherently good at internationalism. The vulgar, anti-internationalist, tankie movement is a mutation. We should be acting in solidarity with people instead of states, because their conflicts are nested. They’re going to have conflicts with imperialists over here as well as local conflicts with power actors there. Most people understand that, and that comes from wanting to believe, contrary to fascists, in an open society.We want to believe in empathy. We’re not naive, but we recognize that our problems are interconnected.
A swarm can have grassroots dynamics, or it can be manipulated by a state. In my opinion, there’s very probably state actor involvement at high levels in QAnon.
Another example of the complexity theory of conflict is states engaging in information warfare—but it’s not the Cold War anymore, and there’s the internet; it’s extremely chaotic. There’s an outlet called Katehon, transparently run by Russian intelligence, who were propagating conspiracies about 5G causing Coronavirus—and now Russia has some of the worst infection rates in in the world. In the Cold War, it would have been advantageous for them to try to fuck up the United States by getting a lot of us to die in a pandemic (obviously we can do that very well on our own), but now because of the internet and the complexity era, they’re fucked by Coronavirus too. And now there’s QAnon shit. The information warfare of the old era is just insanely short-sighted at this point.
EA: I’ve been thinking a lot about the disinformation problem. I’ve had both Eliot Higgins and Peter Pomerantsev on the show, and a few other folks who either focus on Russia/Ukraine or on Syria, sometimes both. There have been a lot of missed opportunities between Ukrainians and Syrians to link up. I’ll try and do an episode on that.
You mentioned the 8kun/8chan shit that’s been happening recently, especially since the coup, and you recently published a scoop on Bellingcat. Can you start by summarizing what the fuck happened on January 6? The online dynamic of it, anyway.
EB: Yeah. I’m a data journalist; I like to scrape far-right websites, analyze what they’re up to, and then publish articles about them (which seems to make them mad for some reason). I’ve been paying attention to 8chan and the chan world for a long time. GamerGate is an example of where complex swarm tactics emerged on the right: We can have these anonymous message boards—they’re just forums where you post a picture and then say a racist thing!—and we can use them to coordinate large-scale doxxing and harassment campaigns against female journalists and female gamers!
So they found their power, and that’s how the alt right started. Then 4chan (slightly) cracked down on the most genocide-prone elements of their user base, the most hardcore neo-Nazi LARPers, so those people moved to a platform called 8chan. 8chan was the super-racist version of the racist site 4chan. They were very brutal in the way they would attack people; a lot of us who were active in those scenes developed a thick skin for their style of attack. I won’t go into that, because it’s depressing.
8chan was run by a pig farmer in the Philippines named Jim Watkins, who got his start running child sexual abuse websites and trying to circumvent Japanese pornography laws using message boards.Jim’s a creep. He’s cartoonishly evil. He’s too on the nose—he’s like Erik Prince of Blackwater; he’s too evil to be real. Anyway, he has a son named Ron Watkins, and together they became the center of QAnon. Q-drops had used to happen on 4chan, but they started happening on 8chan; there are arguments about whether Jim or Ron—or both—are Q themselves.
So aside from inspiring multiple mass shootings by being a concentrated force for hardcore white supremacy and swarm tactics, they also became the center of QAnon by hosting the Q-drops. QAnon built the energy for everything that came to happen with “Stop the Steal,” and ultimately the march on the capitol.
EA: What exactly are swarm tactics? What happens when they do that?
EB: Antifascists and fascists do this tactic differently, but there are some similarities. Fascists have no ethics of warfare—I’ll doxx your grandma. I’ll call your child’s school. They’re trolls: they come out of the worst part of old Anonymous culture; they want to be maximally edgy, and they don’t really stand for anything. Whereas antifascists tend to try to be careful, and don’t do civilian-casualty-equivalents. If they do, they get harassed by the community; they get blacklisted.
The swarm tactic is using the internet to leverage tons of people acting at the same time for a common purpose. There’s some real advantages to having large numbers: someone will recognize their neighbor from the capitol breach, or recognize a mountain range in sub-Saharan Africa in a picture because it’s near a friend’s village. Having a huge number of eyes on a problem, you can cover more ground—especially if you’re working in a semi-coordinated way. It’s very powerful. If you’ve tried to do OSINT research alone, the hardest part is having so much information to go through. It’s hard to parse without your brain melting out your ears.
That’s the advantage of swarm tactics, but there are a lot of different forms of it. Fascists also like to do “brigading.” They’ll have a Telegram group where they’ll say, Okay, this antifascist account is getting too effective. I want everyone in this Telegram channel to report them, and try to get that person’s Twitter removed.
EA: Amazingly similar to pro-government trolls in the Arab world—that happens quite a lot as well. They seem to be just as organized, often, or they mix in with bots, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell them apart.
EB: Yeah, there’s also parallels with shabiha organizations, the way a state can leverage paramilitary forces in a hands-on/hands-off way. This also happens in Latin America. Whenever the Mexican government wants to attack the Zapatista autonomous zones, they can’t do it “legally” with the Mexican army, so they have to use these patriotically-named paramilitary groups. Or it’s like Donald Trump: Yeah, I (don’t) hate the Proud Boys! It sure would(n’t) be too bad if they beat up all my political rivals! That’d be funny—but anyways, don’t do it!
Tankies control a lot of left infrastructure in the US. They’re often able to mobilize old white socialists, get people on the streets, have tons of signs printed. There’s a sense that if you challenge them, then you’re pro-war. But Elia, these people are so ridiculous.
EA: There’s a lot of affect in the way he does things. In the middle of the attempted coup, what did he say? You’re very special, I care about you. That’s some very Cult 101 shit. I’ve seen this in Lebanon with Hezbollah.
EB: Yeah. A centralized actor can leverage a swarm—a swarm can have grassroots dynamics, or it can be manipulated by a state. In my opinion, there’s very probably state actor involvement at high levels in QAnon—or I would be embarrassed by the Kremlin if there isn’t. The US does this shit everywhere, all over the world; the Kremlin does this shit everywhere, all over the world. They’re all incompetent, but they’re also very powerful, so I’d be shocked if there weren’t some involvement. But swarms are complicated: states can’t control them. You can’t control the entire QAnon movement; it’s way too big, it’s way too chaotic. You can do a Q-drop, but if it gets too weird, people will just come up with a new conspiracy.
We had a scoop with 8kun where they didn’t update their email server for like five years, and it made everyone who they were emailing visible. Their emails were pretty interesting. Ron Watkins was the admin, until he stepped down to grift full-time on Stop the Steal. He’s largely responsible for the Dominion conspiracy; he was cited in the Kraken brief by Sidney Powell. And he was cited and retweeted extensively by Donald Trump, and he went on OANN. He got a really powerful grift going for Stop the Steal, and he was admin of 8kun (and 8chan previously) during all this, so we got all his emails. It’s probably his fault! He was saying, I’m a network security analyst. I’m the best in the world—and he had an email server that was exposing all their traffic, their IP addresses, the entire structure of their databases, and everything else on their fucking website.
There were really interesting email contacts. Jim was actively coordinating with high level QAnon celebrities like Neon Revolt. Jim was also extensively emailing a woman who was a senior contract specialist at a US army base in Alabama. We can’t know the exact content of their messages, but we know that she’s who he emailed most. Not that I think she’s Q—I don’t. I think she’s a really weird conspiracy Boomer, maybe his e-girlfriend or something. But it’s still really wild that he was connecting her with all these QAnon celebrities and talking with her so much, and she probably has some clearance level.
We sent Jim and Ron right-of-reply, of course. Ron did not respond. Jim responded six times. He was like, It’s not like I was emailing the FBI! which was a message to his QAnon followers saying, Don’t worry, I’m not in the deep state. But the email logs show he was emailing the FBI.
EA: You’ve also focused on Grayzone and that sort of shit. It appeals to a lot of people who I would describe as “tankie-lite.” They’re not on the “left,” and they wouldn’t go read Stalin’s autobiography; it’s not that level of dedication. But it does revolve around a binary logic, campism. I just recorded an episode with Rohini Hensman. She wrote a book called Indefensible about how the rhetoric of anti-imperialism is used by people who I would describe as “alt-imperialist” or “psuedo anti-imperialist” or—
EB: Or straight-up neo-Nazis.
EA: Yeah, absolutely. There is such a thing as fascist anti-imperialism, it does exist. Being anti-imperialist in itself does not make you progressive or anti-authoritarian. Someone who is “good” on domestic issues in the US can be horrifically bad on anything that’s not related to the US. They jump to the other extreme, and they become completely identical, from my standpoint, to someone on the far right.
How do you understand that phenomenon? In your view, what are some of the similarities between this and what we would understand as entryism and the syncretic nature of fascism?
EB: This is eight books’ worth of topics, and it’s very complex, so take anything I say right now as an invitation, or as a set of questions, rather than as the final word on this. I have my views on these issues, but I encourage people to challenge them, and complexify them, and make them better, stronger, and more accurate.
There are a few dynamics at play. A lot of this shit comes from the US and the UK particularly, but it’s in other places too. My generation grew up knowing that the US and the UK lied about weapons of mass destruction in order to invade Iraq. We grew up with a visceral understanding that our government lies to everyone in order to justify war. That became the cornerstone of Boomer socialist organizing, and antiwar organizing in particular.
In the US, there are old antiwar infrastructure organizations, like the ANSWER coalition, which are horrible on Syria. They’re indistinguishable from the [neo-Nazi] Syrian Social Nationalist Party [SSNP] at points; they mingle with hardcore antisemitic organizations (and I’m not conflating critiques of Israel with antisemitism; I’m talking about actually antisemitic organizations); and they control a lot of infrastructure in the US, so whenever there’s a call to war, they’re often able to mobilize a bunch of old white socialists, get a few people on the streets, have tons of signs printed, and stuff like that.
A lot of the world has seen what plays out when you allow your movement to ally with the far right. Your movement gets destroyed. Just because you share one goal doesn’t mean you share any values. It’s seen as “practical,” but it’s not practical at all. It’s sabotage.
There’s a sense that If you challenge them, then you’re pro-war. But Elia, these people are so ridiculous! Where I live, there’s a huge Syrian population. A lot of these people are from east Aleppo. Our antiwar “left” Boomers wanted to welcome these people and show their support to them, so they bought regime flags. They bought regime flags to welcome Syrian refugees of aerial bombings! They’re so disconnected. They have no concept of people’s lived realities and traumas, or of the geopolitics. Even if you have a critique of Islamic fundamentalism, you don’t bring the flag of someone who just barrel bombed people to those refugees. It’s just wildly inconsiderate, and re-traumatizing. That kind of stuff is pretty common.
I used to live and work on the Syrian border, on the Turkish side, for like a year—I was working with Syrians for two or three years in total, in a dedicated way. So when I came back to the US and met a lot of my old leftist friends (even good-faith ones who aren’t tankies, like anarchists), because of the infrastructure that the “tankie-lites” hold (not just on the streets, but also in media organizations), there was an extreme amount of disinformation—to the point where I would get in physical confrontations with people at demos.
I have all of these people’s stories in my head, the types of things that are not even questions of debate among Syrians. The Overton window is so far from the actual things that are considered questions among Syrians, it was just baffling to me. It felt like being gaslit in a really intense way. And I’m white! My trauma is vicarious. It’s nothing compared to the people whose stories I heard. But it was so baffling to me. That was how I started getting interested in this phenomenon.
I mentioned there’s this old infrastructure, not updated since the Iraq war. How do you parse information when it’s coming from somewhere that you don’t live and you don’t understand the culture? And meanwhile you’re getting spoonfed really elaborate disinformation operations from multiple state and state-backed actors. It’s pretty hard. I’ll give sympathy that it’s hard to know what’s going on. I’m sympathetic to that, but there’s a fundamentalism to the way it works. I can’t organize with a lot of the socialists here because their politics are so bad on the Middle East that I can’t even be around them. They’re like, We need to stage a vigil for Soleimani! But why though? Have you ever considered not?
There is also the tension of populism. There’s the Duginist view, pure red-brown (red-brown meaning leftist aesthetics and fascist politics blended together). Dugin is a wacky Russian philosopher, but he has held some degree of power in the Russian state at various times. He was very influential in the Russian military, like with Gerasimov, who was the chief of staff—but he’s also viewed as a wacky figure, and he’s losing influence to the pure Russian nationalist chauvinists. Anyway, he has this vision of a hard-left and far-right populist alliance against liberalism. Most leftists would not get behind something like that when it’s stated that clearly. If I say, Hey, liberalism is bad, right? they’re like, Yeah! But then if I say, So you wanna ally with neo-Nazis about it? they’d be like, Wait, what?
But a lot of people are just straight-up about it now. There are conferences. A lot of figures on the “left,” people on the periphery of The Grayzone, but also people like Ajamu Baraka, who was the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party—
EA: And who visited Damascus.
EB: Yeah, he went on junket tours. He also went and spoke, twice, at an explicitly red-brown conference in Iran featuring out-and-out tankie spies who work with Syrian and Russian intelligence, alongside a dude who was involved in a false-flag bombing of a Hungarian cultural center for the AfD (a fascist political party in Germany). David Duke went to this conference one time. A bunch of CODEPINK people went too, though Medea Benjamin and Gareth Porter later said it was a mistake. Pepe Escobar said it was a mistake too—I had no idea!—but then he kept going back every year after that. So there are people who are explicitly doing this.
But in the more reasonable spectrum, there are more diluted forms of it—that’s a product of shared goals. There are a lot of people who think Israel is bad, and not all those people have the same politics. A lot of people think liberalism is bad, and those people can also have really different politics. But there’s an idea in left culture that We need to build a big movement with as many people as possible, and in order to do that, we need to have populist rhetoric.
Antifascists used to be very unpopular in the US because they were always critical of this kind of populism; they would make controversial statements. In the Cascadia movement in the Pacific Northwest in the US, there was a conference at one point, and an Indigenous speaker was going to speak there—and Rose City Antifa said, No, you guys cannot have this speaker! He explicitly allies with Neo-traditionalist revisionism that’s hugely anti-queer, and he does speaking tours with neo-Nazi circles because he wants to build a patchwork nationalism, and we don’t think you guys should ally with this person.
Things like that were really controversial at the time. But now a lot of the world has seen what plays out when you allow your movement to ally with the far right: your movement gets destroyed. Just because you share one goal doesn’t mean you share any values. It’s seen as “practical,” but it’s not practical at all. It’s sabotage.
EA: Can you talk a bit more about your time on the Syrian-Turkish border, and how that informed your views on Syria-related politics?
Climate change is the quintessential example of a complex problem that transcends nationalism and sectarianism. Because if we fuck up, we all die.
EB: Yeah. I guess I was always somewhat anarchist (maybe more than somewhat), but my mentors were mostly old-school PoC socialists. I was really into post-colonial theory and subaltern theory, and I grew up in the Iraq War era, too, so I held a lot of these views. The US is a horrifying actor in international politics, but when I was younger, I had an overly simple view of the enemies of the US and the internal struggles that people have in other places. So one of the most challenging things for me, once I started having a really robust Syrian community, was people saying: We want a no-fly zone. Everyone I knew wanted a no-fly zone. Literally no Syrian I knew thought that was a bad idea.
And I’m like, Oh, well, um, don’t you know that the US is imperialist? If you get our boots on the ground, it’s game over. And they’re like, Are you fucking kidding me? Yes, we know. (I had a bunch of Iraqi friends too, and they also said, Yes, we know). But you need to understand what Russia is doing and what Russia is going to do, and what’s happening in the situation. There are no beautiful clear-cut choices that we have here.
None of these people were stupid. None of them lacked an anti-imperialist understanding of the world—it’s in their experience; it’s in their familial memory. It’s not some abstract theoretical thing like it is for my USian ass. So actually, my anti-imperialism was a form of chauvinism; it was a form of paternalism. That was confusing for me to deal with. And I’m not talking just about [Syrian] “liberals.” I’m talking about hardcore Marxists and anarchists too—a wide range of people. Some of these friends I had were Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, but were anti-Assadist, and were tortured. So yeah. That really changed my perspective a lot.
The other thing that really impacted me was getting into open-borders work. Now I live on the US-Mexico border. The lessons I learned from the Syrian refugee crisis, and what we would call “hospitality” here—there’s a lot of felonies around this topic, so I’m just gonna leave it alone. But yeah, I learned a lot about hospitality culture.
I also think Syria is what got me into antifascism. Because the reason I started working with Syrians—probably there’s weird white people stuff in there, but in my heart of hearts, I honestly believed that our struggles were interconnected and that I needed to follow the leadership of the Arab Spring, because they were pioneering new technologies of revolt and rebuilding their societies. It was a very exciting time.
However different Syria and the US are, I believed there were a lot of similarities. We have complex religious issues in a similar way. We have paramilitary issues. We have a rural side and a city side. We have a lot of similar deep structures. So my sense was that I could learn something and possibly contribute some skills. One of the things that I wasn’t thinking about at the time, but that became really clear, was how fascists can co-opt good-faith social movements. A lot of my friends were very brave, but they weren’t people who had fought in multiple wars. They were very powerful organizers, but when groups came in who had huge amounts of war experience, they were able to take over the village because they could protect it better. I realized, Oh, that’s how fast it happens. That was a lesson I needed to learn about the US as well. I got really interested in antifascism from that.
This was 2015; I was there during the height of the refugee crisis, and when I came back to the US I was already studying fascist currents here, and I thought, Oh, this is going to happen here. It’s not going to be the same, because we have stronger institutions in the US, for one: we have civil society, and we’re a capitalist imperialist country—there are some obvious differences. But I saw things that my friends had told me stories about, and I thought, It’s happening. That’s how I got into antifascist research and why I became concerned about entryism.
EA: I moved to the UK in 2015 from Lebanon; Between 2015 and 2016 is when I started getting more active on Syria than I had been before. When I was still in Lebanon, it was largely just Arab Spring and supporting refugee rights, and very low-level. But 2015-16 is when I started noticing stuff on Facebook, how far-right shit was being replicated on the left. That was the year before the fall of Aleppo; there was a lot of intensification of conflict, more barrel bombs, more chemical warfare. I started seeing very obvious—it felt like an open secret, how the far right and left were basically identical. I developed an obsession with tracking who would go to Damascus, in terms of Westerners and foreigners, on the invitation of Assad and the regime. Sixty or seventy percent of them would be on the far right, and thirty percent would be on the “left,” like Ajamu Baraka and many others.
The Stop the War movement in the UK came out of the months preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But in 2016, one of their guys published an article against the no-fly zone in Syria (which was barely being discussed anyway; it was never going to happen), with this amazing sentence: “Ask Libyans about no-fly zones.” The problem is, in that piece there were no Libyans quoted. And all of the Libyans that have been asked (polls have been done on these things), it’s pretty clear a lot of them are like, Well, it’s not our first option, but there are no other options. Indeed, the majority did somewhat support it, if not happily.
That’s miles away from the sort of reactions I used to see. If there were protests on the streets of London you would see the ready-made signs of the Stop the War movement—at almost anything: it could be a demo to stop student tuition hikes, and you would see these signs. But there was not even a fraction of those protests when it came to actual barrel bombs.
Peer-to-peer technology asks us to solve these problems ourselves, rather than outsourcing it to some central body, trusting Twitter to decide our discourse for us and to protect us from traumatic content.
There were proposals at the UK parliament at the time, not even to have a no-fly zone, but to drop food over besieged cities. Even that got no real support on the British left. Nothing whatsoever. Whenever I would go to protests against Bashar al-Assad, ninety-five percent of the people there were Syrians. At protests by the Stop the War movement, there would be one or two Syrians and that’s about it. You were more likely to see a Hezbollah flag.
To drive that point home, there was a protest in London in 2015 or early 2016. It was about Syria, I can’t remember what exactly. I went there with a Palestinian friend, and there was a guy with a Hezbollah flag in the middle of the protest. We went up to him, assuming he was some Lebanese weirdo (because they do exist, they’re everywhere). But he was Pakistani, judging from his accent, and was given the flag by a random Lebanese guy and told to wave it, and he did it because he thought this was the anti-imperialist thing to do.
He genuinely meant well—he had no fucking idea what Hezbollah was or what they did, and he didn’t even know they were in Syria. Then the Lebanese guy came up, and dismissed me and my Palestinian friend as “imperialist.” All of this is to say: it’s extremely complex, and it gets even more complex when you start entering into the sub-categories of identities.
Part II
Elia J. Ayoub: I mentioned before I had two questions, so this is the second one, also about entryism. I have a morbid curiosity about ecofascism.
I’ll preface this question with a brief story: at the end of 2019, in the middle of the protest movement in Beirut, I was taking a workshop on permaculture and sustainable economies, and within ten minutes someone brought up overpopulation in Africa. There was no context; no one was talking about population in the first place.The position that this person stated—I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as ecofascist, but it flirts with it. It’s under the surface; it’s very easy to make the jump and become ideological.
That’s just one section of the tendency; then there is the darker shit. And in between the naive and the extreme, there are things that are pretty mainstream. It’s mainstream to have “concerns” about overpopulation that are not based on any sound science.
Emmi Bevensee: The thing with ecofascism is that climate change is a depressing reality that our communities understand, broadly speaking, and recognize as existing, and it’s hard for us to emotionally process as a species, because it’s the quintessential example of a complex problem that transcends nationalism and sectarianism and everything. If we fuck up, we all die.
It’s hard. It’s emotional. Historically, the right and syncretic fascist movements have fetishized nature, and whiteness as dominion over nature—but have also denied climate change. Tankies have done this to a degree too; there’s some crossover there. But it’s mostly a far-right thing. However, you cannot deny climate change forever, so eventually, if you’re a fascist, you have to wrap some sort of fascist ideology around the increasing reality of climate change.
They do that a lot of ways: they say it’s not human-caused but it exists; they say it exists but it’s caused by China. The Atomwaffen accelerationist thing is to say it exists but it’s good because it’ll destroy civilization and We strong white people will survive (I’ve always found this idea humorous, that basement-dwelling alt-right edgelords are going to survive the apocalypse and seed a new society of Übermenschen). There are a lot of angles they can take.
But because green movements are broadly leftwing, ecofascists have to appropriate a lot of aesthetics and histories. If you go into ecofascist Telegram chats, they’re posting propaganda from the Earth Liberation Front, or from Earth First!, and they will claim that as their heritage. But even those organizations have some problematic history. In the early days, it was a populist thing: We’re all united against civilization; It’s a post-political problem. They had “buckaroos,” far-right people who recognized climate change but were racist and anti-queer. That’s how we got the hardcore TERFy greens like Derek Jensen and Deep Green Resistance, social conservatives who believed in climate change. Now Derek Jensen is beloved by Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer.
But Earth First!, to its credit, was like, This sucks. And they started organizing, as a green organization, against the Klan. They started developing more nuance about environmental racism, the way these issues are disproportionate and racialized—it’s not just a political issue. It follows with other analyses of power that we have, and is interconnected with all these things. So they started cutting people out. But now there is an increasing movement of this “green-brown” thing.
EA: When we talk about the media landscape, and how these fascist movements and far-right ideologies organize, part of the problem isn’t just how “free speech” is exploited by people on the far right, but the algorithms on websites like Facebook and YouTube. They tend to encourage extremist behaviors, because that is most likely to keep people online.
Social media platforms, intelligence agencies, police, and corporations have really powerful analytics tools that they use for really sketchy things, and my belief is that we need to give way more people access to tools for making sense of our online conversations, as a means of overcoming information warfare.
EB: There are a lot of battles. Just like geopolitics isn’t just a binary of two countries opposing each other, but is all kinds of corporate, political, and grassroots interests interacting in networks, there’s the same dynamic in battles that are happening around super-empowered harmful internet content. There are many different fronts of this conflict.
One of the fronts that I’m interested in has to do with peer-to-peer technology, which is a more decentralized model of computers communicating. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer technology; there’s also social media and texting platforms, server hosting. As fascists and conspiracy websites get kicked off of US infrastructure, usually they move to Russian infrastructure; if they get kicked off Russian infrastructure or it’s too sketchy or unstable, then they start to entertain peer-to-peer technology. It’s a last resort, because a lot of the technology isn’t as streamlined as they’re used to. But it’s way more resilient.
On every fascist website now, you can donate in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. Groups like Atomwaffen and The Base have started using peer-to-peer texting platforms. The Christchurch attacker’s manifesto kept getting taken down, so people started uploading it to IPFS, which is a peer-to-peer file hosting system. But the most famous example was the platform Gab, which is an alt-right echo chamber, a big “free speech” social media platform. They were connected to a mass shooting and got booted from all this infrastructure, so they switched to a technology called Mastodon, where instead of having one big server that hosts your website, there is a whole network of servers that work together to host your website as peers in a community. They moved to this technology and they’ve been running fine on it ever since.
The peer-to-peer thing is interesting to me because it takes a lot of the central issues of algorithms and censorship, “free speech,” and puts it in a new domain that’s much more complicated and that we’re not used to at all. There’s something I want folks to understand: we should hold Twitter accountable for platforming fascists, but also, at the scale that Twitter exists, moderation is an extremely non-trivial problem. I’m not giving them a free pass; they don’t do nearly enough. But we can only do human moderation so much, and at a certain point all that human moderation is going to be paying people in the Global South to view a lot of very harmful or traumatic content. So even if that’s your solution, you’re still outsourcing your trauma to predominately poor people.
But if you want them to do machine learning—the way that marginalized communities use a term and the way the communities that hate them use a term are deeply contextual. I don’t want to get banned for using the word queer, but I would also think it was funny if a fascist got banned for calling me a queer. We have very different usage. Machine learning can learn a lot about context, but it’s not that good at it. And it gets even more complicated when you get into questions that different marginalized groups disagree on among themselves. In order to write a machine learning algorithm, you have to create training data; in order to create training data you have to make rules for what is considered harmful content.
I worked on a project at my university: they were studying toxicity in communication online and were creating training data. They were studying “rude” or “mean” content online, and I was trying to explain to them that calling someone an “illegal,” as a noun, is specifically a hate term. And they were like, No, we’re STEM bros, that’s a technical term. I was like, You have no context of the communities that you’re building algorithms for! So now you’re going to kick me out of the project because I made everyone uncomfortable. That kind of shit is the reality.
So why don’t platforms just create machine learning? They can. They put huge effort into machine learning ISIS content, but even that auto-moderates evidence of war crimes in Syria and starts flagging Muslims doing things as Al Qaeda. There are some hard problems there, and once we get into peer-to-peer land they get even harder because there is no central body that can just take something down.
I’m a huge peer-to-peer supporter, to be clear. I love the technology. But I mainly love it for us, for the exciting things it can do for us—because we’re going to get censored too. Twitter is going to take down all of us. Queer sex workers been knowing about this. Peer-to-peer technology asks us to solve these problems ourselves rather than outsourcing it to some central body, trusting Twitter to decide our discourse for us and to protect us from traumatic content. Peer-to-peer is more human.
EA: Can you talk a bit about social media analysis? What is it and how can people use it? And what is the ideology behind it?
EB: A long time ago, I started beefing with 8chan, and I came up with the idea that I would write programs to scrape all the data from 8chan, analyze it, and make a database. That sent me down a really long road: I started realizing that researchers have all these tools, codes they can use to analyze social media and do it fast. Information warfare happens so quickly that we have to be able to react, but most of the people I was most interested in working with—activists, journalists, antifascists, researchers—didn’t have the technical capacity to run these code pipelines. So I started thinking about how we could make it easier for people to visualize trends across a bunch of different social media platforms, so that we can answer questions as they’re happening.
“The left” is an entirely incoherent term. I use it as a shorthand on Twitter, because it’s very few characters, but I have very few values in common with a lot of people who consider themselves leftists.
I started building these tools, and a co-op sprung up around me and we started building all this stuff. We built a thing called SMAT-app, an easy, free interface for looking up things like what links people are sharing with QAnon on 8chan, Twitter, or Reddit, or when Stop the Steal became really popular. It’s interesting to see things like, Oh, this happened first on 4chan, we see it a day before it hit on Reddit. We were working on this with a lot of people, alongside people in Mexico doing different cool projects, and we started indexing a ton of data sources: Parler, 8kun, Gab (we also have Reddit and Twitter Verified, but those aren’t ours).
Then the coup happened, and Parler went down, and all of the sudden every journalist was asking, Who has Parler data? Well, Emmi and Emmi’s friends have Parler data. I went from being a really niche nerd to fielding twelve mainstream media requests a day, and doing all these interviews. There was a heroic effort by others to archive all of Parler before it went down. In the Parler data, you can see people openly organizing—I don’t know what it is about the right committing felonies on livestream and social media, but they just love it. They’re all about that self-incrimination life. Baked Alaska, this alt-right fashy brawler dude, just livestreamed breaking shit in Nancy Pelosi’s office. Now he has a warrant for his arrest. That’s on you, bro!
So we built all these tools, but they’re free. We give away our data for free, and we work with journalists and activists. There are a lot of different ways to use the tools. Social media platforms, intelligence agencies, police, and corporations have really powerful analytics tools that they use for really sketchy things, and my belief is that we need to give way more people access to tools for making sense of our online conversations, as a means of overcoming information warfare.
I’ve run a bunch of OSINT trainings, and I usually teach SMAT when we run them. One time I had a person who is Kurdish in the training; she was interested in Syria/OPCW stuff, and she started researching OPCW and chemical weapons questions using SMAT, and started finding really interesting things. That’s the heart of what I’m into about it. It’s my ideological framework that we need more people working on problems, rather than some elite vanguard—whether it’s the CIA or the tankie vanguard. I don’t believe that’s how problems get solved, especially extremely complex ones.
People have interest and expertise; this person knows a lot about geopolitics in her country and region that I don’t know about, so she can investigate specific questions. The Mexican researchers I worked with are doing stuff around Mexican politics that I don’t even know about. That was my goal: to get more people able to do this research.
EA: One of my biggest regrets is not being able to do something similar when it comes to archiving and data collection in Lebanon. There are people who have done interesting things, but it’s mostly at small-ish levels. With the pro-Assad shit that I saw expanding really quickly on Facebook, I’m almost certian there was a government hand behind a lot of it. This became a bit more well-known with Cambridge Analytica and Brexit shit, but when it comes to Syria I’m sure there were significant early influences—maybe people have already done that research. But when it was happening, I wish I knew how to collect the evidence.
EB: One thing I’ll pitch is for people to get the browser add-ons for archive.org and archive.today. When you find a webpage, you just click a button and it’ll archive it. It is really useful for researchers later when webpages go down.
I did a three–part series on red-brown media ecosystems, where I looked at the far-right side of the spectrum, the pure red-brown side, and the left-leaning side. For that research, having archives was extremely necessary, because these actors are so sketchy that they’re constantly deleting things and changing their story. Having archived proof was really helpful.
EA: I have three more questions. I’ll start with something I know we have in common: our difficult relationship with the term leftism. I know there are such things as the post-left and I know that anarchism is there but not really there, and there are complicated things happening. But I sometimes wonder if the binaries that were created in the nineteenth century, post industrial revolution, are still valid in today’s context, especially with the internet and increasing global warming. I say this while recognizing that there are interesting frameworks that are useful. I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
One of my earliest experiences of disillusionment with the “left,” other than the Syria stuff that we’ve been talking about (and I can also cite Ukraine and Hong Kong more recently on that count), has been going through the history of Indigenous movements in China and the Soviet Union and parts of Latin America. In Latin America this is more well-known among people on the left, because the governments that did so much horrible shit tended to be rightwing and militaristic, and backed by the Americans. But the stuff that the Soviet Union used to do, and the stuff that the Chinese government used to do and is still doing—there isn’t an existing framework that is as clear as Israel-Palestine. This is very clear on the left: it is very easy to be pro-Palestine, but then you go to Xinjiang and Hong Kong and Belarus, and it becomes “more complicated.”
Those are things that for me are not complicated. They’re just as straighforward as Palestine. The experience of Indigenous communities in these countries (and more recently in Latin America now that “leftwing” governments there have dark stuff on their hands as well)—I still struggle with these terms.
Can you talk about how these things that are supposed to be clear, are not clear? I’ve had so many conversations with people who are Marxists (and some anarchists as well) talking about “alt-imperialism” as an exception: It’s this weird thing, and it happens a lot for some reason, but it’s an exception.
People had been managing common resource problems for thousands of years before colonization. The “tragedy of the commons” is largely disproved. But once we get into scale, it becomes much more complicated.
At what point are exceptions no longer an exception? I know people who have stopped calling themselves leftists, even though they have progressive views, due to these things.
EB: A lot of Indigenous movements I’ve drawn inspiration from definitely don’t identify with the left, because it’s founded on white European views that are younger. There’s a great video called “Playing Indian,” about how most European theory was appropriated from Indigenous contexts, by creepy anthropologists who fetishized the Iroquois Confederation and so on, and how those weird contacts, which were deep misunderstandings, were very formative in early Marxist theory (and anarchist theory as well). Meanwhile, the Quakers were chilling with Indigenous people and trying to develop relationships (not that they were perfect), rather than doing this weird thing that white leftists were doing (and still do).
That’s a good example. From the beginning, the Quakers were trying to build relationships and interact respectfully with sovereignty, while the leftists were trying to get clout through appropriation. That’s as old as European leftist history.
All that being said, for me “the left” is an entirely incoherent term. I use it as a shorthand on Twitter, because it’s very few characters, but I have very few values in common with a lot of people who consider themselves leftists. This is one of the standard post-left critiques: there is no shared value system across the left. A lot of people who would consider themselves leftists—I try not to have enemies, but they would be my enemies if it came down to it. I would be really actively opposed to them. Tankies are among those: I would be absolutely opposed to central economic planning by a vanguard committee. I would oppose it with everything I could oppose it with, because it sucks. It sucks mathematically, it sucks humanly, it sucks politically.
There are stupid, boring, semantic debates: Is Stalinism even in the left? Or, Is authoritarianism on the right? I’m fucking up the quadrants so bad!I probably am a “post-leftist,” but the post-left sucks too, historically. Just really cringey. I would like to believe in left internationalism, a heart to these things that could be good. But it’s on such watered-down terms that me and the person I’m talking to are going to be missing each other in fundamental ways, having different conversations, even if we’re in similar in-groups.
I try to be more clear about specific values or specific issues, rather than specific political teams. The right talks a lot about “virtue signalling” on the left, and then they take it in the weird direction of vice-signalling: It’s cool that I’m a shitbag! But there is a ton of virtue-signalling bullshit on the left, people who use it as a sphere of social capital to build influence, and build little micro-cults.
A lot of the geopolitical stuff looks like that. It works because it’s easy. As a geopolitical view for people just getting into this stuff, the tankie view is: Look, we want to help the workers of the world against the bourgeoisie, and the US is the ultimate enemy, so anyone who is vaguely opposed to the US (even if they are working deeply with the CIA and Israel in all these ways, like Assad), as long as they say they are anti-US, you have to support them! You can’t say anything bad about them or you’re literally in the CIA yourself!
It’s really hard to set out complexity as a political program, because it’s hard to explain. I’m not going to tell you what you need to think about this geopolitical issue, I’m just going to tell you it’s complex, and you should look for these tensions, and you should look for the way those tensions move and change. It’s not easy for people to join a community like that.
EA: The problem of scale is something that you understand much better than I do. There’s a lot of math involved. You’ve mentioned a piece you wrote, “Social Anarchism and Parallel Economic Computation,” that is not easy to read—I understood some of the math stuff, but not as much as I want to. Can you talk about that piece, some of the arguments you made there, and why?
EB: My most unpopular affiliation on the left is that I’ve worked a lot with a website called C4SS, the Center for a Stateless Society. They’re unpopular because they’re not very sectarian about ideas. They’re nerdy and curious, so they’ll entertain a lot of ideas as long as they’re not fascist. They are an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian website, but they’ll deal with old capitalist works like Hayek, and ask questions like, How does this relate to our modern understanding of information theory? Is this true? How does it affect our social forms?
To me, those questions are really exciting. I used to be a very “red” leftist, but I started to have nagging doubts about the program we were supposed to get behind, so I started reading some “heretical” literature. I’m more nerdy than I care about my social status, so I went through some transformations. I became really interested in mutualism, and I began to realize that economic coordination is an extremely difficult project. Lots of fascists and far-right people harp on the problems of central planning in Communism—Miese’s mentor was a fashy Austrian dude; Hayek supported Pinochet. However, they weren’t one hundred percent wrong about the existence of coordination problems.
Our emotional and interpersonal work really influences not just how effective we are as communities of troublemakers, but also how much joy we can bring into our spaces.
This has been borne out by problems in the Soviet Union. But in general, coordination problems are a whole field of math and computation, and they’re really hard. The idea that we can just make “The People’s Walmart” or “The People’s Amazon” and produce and deliver everything a society needs through machine learning is just not real. It’s not a thing.
Computationally, there is an extent to which we can do that. And pre-computationally, Iroqouis longhouse systems through matriarchal lineages were pretty good, on a local level, at coordinating by need the different things that people brought in, and using complex social systems for managing the commons. People had been managing common resource problems for thousands of years before colonization. The “tragedy of the commons” is largely disproved.
But once we get into scale, it becomes much more complicated. Elinor Ostrom is credited with disproving the tragedy of the commons, but all she did was point out Indigenous people had solutions to these problems for a long time, and her work doesn’t tackle climate change or anything that big.
Markets are a taboo topic, because capitalism is horrible, but what I realized is that most market socialist models of coordinating economics rely on replicating price systems in some way, because price systems “prove” preferences. But our preferences are so complex that if I tried to tell you all my preferences, it would take a fucking long time—and also I would be wrong. My revealed preferences would be different.
The way I explain real versus stated preference is that maybe on Netflix you’re like, I’m going to watch five documentaries about interesting things!—that’s your stated preference. Your revealed preference is you watch Adventuretime for eight hours.
It’s hard to get at revealed preference without some sort of exchange mechanism, and it’s especially hard to scale those complex problems. So I started asking questions about whether there are ways to create equitable systems that can still solve complex problems at scale. I ran a mutual exchange at C4SS with people from across the anti-authoritarian political spectrum. There was a person arguing we could do cybernetic communism. I was arguing against that. We were all over the place on that issue. But that’s how we like to do it.
EA: You were part of a collective on the topic of Emotional Anarchism. What is it? Why did you get into it? The thing I like about it is that you don’t need to be an anarchist to find it useful.
EB: I don’t even know if I identify as an anarchist. I just find it a useful ethical and analytical framework for thinking about goals. It’s the basic statement that our freedom is interdependent—I can’t be free without you being free—and we should try to maximize our interdependent freedom. That’s the framework for me, and that’s why I like anarchism, anarchist theory, and anarchist communities. But it’s not a static thing in my mind, so I don’t really care if people identify that way or not. Lots of dickheads identify as anarchists.
The Emotional Anarchism project was a statement: that our interpersonal work is a domain where we can be maximizing freedom. Even in a utilitarian way, it impacts our social movements. Anyone who has been around has watched many different movements get completely destroyed by sexual abuse and cover-ups, or has seen women, femmes, and queers doing a lot of emotional labor and getting no credit for that.Only someone on the frontlines who fights is “militant”—invisibilizing all the other work that goes into making community spaces work at all.
When I started the project, I was coming out of a really deep depression, so I was interested in projects where people were trying to build autonomy over mental and emotional health, and also over medicines. We were talking to a lot of groups who were trying to home-brew hormones to help trans women escape the oppressive, bureaucratic pharmaceutical pipeline.
We started thinking about emotional issues through the lenses of anarchist analysis. One of our premises was that self-help sucks because it ignores structural politics—it’s a form of gaslighting and victim-blaming. You can medicate all you want, but if cops are shooting you, SSRIs are only going to help so much. So there’s the structural side, and then there’s the side in which our emotional and interpersonal work influences not just how effective we are as communities of troublemakers, but how much joy we can bring into our spaces.
We have a whole book written. There’s a blog, but there are many more essays in the book and we just haven’t found the right publisher yet. There’s an essay in the book about activists I know who love joy and fun—and are very militant and do a lot of amazing stuff, but just do so much fun stuff for our community. We interviewed them about what joy means to their organizing models. We interviewed peer support groups dealing with mental health and substance abuse, and talked to people about the fun side of these things as well.
EA: This has been a fascinating chat. Thanks a lot for your time.
EB: Yeah! It’s super nice meeting you. Stay in touch!
Featured image excerpted from “Red Fascism,” painting by Fareeha Khawaja
