Chapter 1: What are the dark subcultures influencing online politics?
I really love what you do. I think it's very interesting, very unique. That's incredible high praise from the greatest cinematic podcast that I think exists. I mean, there's only so many people in the game that produce really beautiful video footage. And I think you seem to be in maybe the top spot there. So it's a great honor.
Thank you. Some may accuse me of all style and no substance. I'll take whatever I can get. How do you describe what you do? You meet somebody at a cocktail party and they say, what is it that you're interested in? What do you say?
I suppose I first tried to avoid the cocktail party, if at all possible. But I used to say artist because that was what I did. I would show work in galleries and museums. Now I say artist and internet culture writer. I'm a podcaster, though. Most people know me for podcasting. So about a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago, I launched Doomscroll. We're now on episode...
And so it's a real transformation in that I used to publish to an audience of like 10,000 dedicated intellectuals. And now it's like 100,000 weekly viewers. And it's just a very, very different game.
And what is it that you're interested in? What is it you focus on?
I mean, I guess it goes back to 2018. I wrote this book. It was a self-published book, really a long-form essay called Politogram on the Post-Left that was looking at the memetic activity of teenagers, 12 to 17 at that time, mostly people on what we would then call the post-left.
That means a little bit of something different now, which you might associate with like post-liberal, new right, what have you, previously Bernie supporters, now people who've gone through that like Bernie to Trump pipeline. That's generally what we call post-left.
At that time, it meant eco-anarchy, green anarchy, anarcho-primitivism, people who would reject industrial society and were 14 years old posting on Instagram. And I wrote a pretty extensive ethnography of how those people got into those politics.
That sounds niche.
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Chapter 2: How are young people's political beliefs evolving today?
Oh, I mean, I think the rise is clear. It's right-wing populism across all of the advanced world, right? Like, you see this in Hungary, Poland, Italy, like, too many countries to name the United States, obviously.
But, basically, the constituencies that, like, in my parents' generation, used to vote with the interests of labor, the constituencies that used to form the Labor Party, are now voting for these right-wing populist candidates. And that trend, over the course of 40 years, basically tracks with the neoliberal consensus.
And so the thing that has come out of it, to the great surprise of people on the left, is not like a renewed trade unionism. And there is a strong push for social democracy, but it is this new international nationalism. We don't yet know what to call it, but generally the rise of right-wing populism as a pushback to austerity, anti-immigration politics, this kind of stuff.
Is that something that you tracked early? Were you seeing this in the subcultures? I mean, and hitting a lot of pushback on it too, because I think this will sound wild and crazy to Gen Z listeners, but like for the period that you and I grew up, the general consensus of like conservative parties was like, free market evangelism. They were all economically libertarian.
So when I started talking about the rise of right-wing populism like eight years ago, and I was like, okay, no one under the age of 25 is a libertarian. That was like, people outright dismissed it because it was completely alien to their experience.
And now I think if you just look at the general alignment of conservative parties, very few of them are economically libertarian or perhaps globalist in their orientation. But that was very new when I started talking about it. I think that that was correct.
So going back to your original research, 2018, and then that must have kick-started a little bit of an obsession. And also, once you've... Once you've paid the price of learning how these subcultures work and sort of the structure of research, I suppose, being able to go down rabbit holes appropriately, I imagine that the rabbit holes go pretty deep.
So just how extreme or bizarre are the depths that you've managed to find online?
Yeah, I'll lay out maybe a few different projects here, but just to talk about how really, I mean, incredibly granular this was, which was, you know, I don't think to my credit, I didn't really plan much going into this. I was just kind of following my curiosity. I started with general, let's say, lefty posters who were
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Chapter 3: What role do memes play in shaping political narratives?
This has meant that People have a question and a fuck ton of answers, and they're now trying to retrofit one of an infinity of answers, plus ones that they can create and mutate from existing answers into the question, which is still as yet non-complete. Is that a fair way to assess it?
That's perfect. Yeah, that's a great synopsis of it. A friend of mine, the artist Daniel Keller, described this as a GAN scenario. a generative adversarial network, that if you look at the mimetic activity of teenagers, they are just brute forcing together combinations like monarcho-syndicalism. Does this work as a political ideology? No, okay, on to the next one.
And just trying to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what can scale to the crises of the 21st century, They're not doing a great job so far, but they have started to form. Like there are now, I would say, young political blocks that are pretty influential, right? There's like a paleo-conservative wing of the internet that has like really shifted the Overton window in the U.S., for example.
How so? How have they come into contact with reality, the paleo-conservatives?
I mean, you watch the rhetoric of a lot of the right-wing pundits. They now track with stuff that Fuentes was saying like six years ago, for example. What makes that paleo? When I think paleo, I think meat and fruit diet.
Oh, so there's paleoconservatism as like a proper political label was something that was used by Pat Buchanan and has been kind of readopted by young conservatives that want to differentiate themselves from neoconservatism, which was generally the consensus way of operating. Okay, okay, okay, okay.
Where paleo is a prefix for... Honestly, dude, it would not have surprised me if you said, this is a wing of conservatism which is based fundamentally around your diet. Like, it's based around what you eat. You should be eating mostly whole grains, meats, fruits, nuts, and some tubers. And if you do that and you're sort of right of center, you're a paleo conservative.
Body populism, I think that's called.
Oh, is it? Okay, that's cool. That's a good one. Good advice, yeah. Um... Holy shit. The context window that you need to keep in your mind to hold all of this shit together. Yeah, yeah, mess. One way to put it. I was going to be more complimentary.
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Chapter 4: How does online radicalization occur in subcultures?
Is that an inaccurate characterization in your opinion?
I would say that is grossly inaccurate. And those are criticisms being lobbed by people in the high tower who have newly been made precarious in their media positions. And they used to have a complete monopoly. They used to hold the gates for who could publish. And now they can't. So the best that they can do is try to slander everyone else who tries to compete with them.
And quantitatively, these things are enormously popular. I think it's not just because they happen to be on a certain accessible website or whatever. I think it's because they're talking about the right topics and they're asking the right questions. And so, yeah, I think getting rid of those gatekeepers is basically a political necessity to open up the conversations that we now need to have.
And I think if you are going to deploy, this was, I mean, the irony of this pipeline metaphor, if you're going to deploy these things, it is left up to where you direct that flow of energy and inquiry. It can lead to alternative places. And so I think there's generally a productive line of questioning that we can introduce. And I think if we can't discuss these things, then...
You know, how are we possibly going to have consensus in a democratic society? Like, I don't think they really have much of a plan right now. I think basically... Who's they? The media, mainstream media narrative producers, blue check journalists, for lack of a better term. I think basically they're trying to claw back as much of their precarious position as they can.
But it's rapidly, rapidly eroding.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the post-left movement?
I knew about the Destiny thing. Destiny's been on the show a bunch. You mentioned the F word, or the N word, I guess, Nick Fuentes. Um... It seems to me, I mean, Tucker Carlson did a breakdown with someone's son. Like, first off, had Nick on, and then had a conversation. With someone's son? Explaining, yes. Fuck, I can't remember who it was. God damn it.
Somebody's son came on, young guy, son of a politician-y type cultural commentator person, to explain why Nick Fuentes...
is popular and has impact among young people or whatever um if i was to think about what is sort of internet first meme adjacent yeah like radical shit posty subculture that appears to be in the ascendancy he would be the first person that i would think of um what have you come to He must be a pretty canonical example, given sort of what you've been tracking over the last few years.
Yeah, I wrote, I think it was in 2020, I measured some metrics of the top two streamers on right and left, which were at the time Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes, on their respective platforms, and how many monthly active users Twitch versus, I forget if he was on Cozy or Odyssey or whatever one of these things he was,
But as per proportionately for the monthly active users of that platform, Fuentes was outperforming even Piker at that point. And so that to me, on such a small platform that was able to get such an enormous number of proportionate views, that demonstrated like, oh, wow, there's a lot of influence in here. I think maybe important to backtrack a little bit of the history is that
His particular rise as like the avatar of like the young far right also has to deal with what was on the right described as the optics debate, which was in the fallout of, we're going way back here, but the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where a lot of people were just plainly put off by the like,
literal NSM national socialist movement of people walking around with swastikas and shields like that is pretty grotesque to an American audience and there's a tolerance for racism and stuff like that but like when you start to invoke pagan iconography and like European like Americans are we're fucking cowboys you know they get turned off by that.
And so the optics debate, this kind of infra-right dispute, was about how do we further the far-right political project but not get trapped in the kind of campy, LARP-y aesthetics of like these guys dressing up as medieval knights with pagan iconography.
It's giving me a little bit of the mirroring that some splinter factions of the less insane left have. seem to be looking at now in the wake of look at how much of an ongoing identity politics was Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you was the most effective ad of the 2024 campaign. We need to create some daylight in between ourselves and that. I think that
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Chapter 6: How do internet communities impact real-world beliefs?
Yeah, the anon, pseudo-anon, like sort of poster scenario. That's interesting that that's broken through.
It was quietly influential for a long time. Yeah. But now you see it like, I mean, mainstream people are talking about seed oils.
That is true. That is true indeed. You've kept on using the word meme. Are you talking about it in the Richard Dawkins sense? Or are you talking about it in the made it on Tumblr sense?
Yeah, so this is like the slippage, right? It's like any academic conversation that you have about memes, it's like, are we talking about square JPEGs? Or are we talking about like a transmittable unit of information or patterns and stories that humans repeat? And I think you kind of have to resort to the Dawkins definition where,
one way of instantiating it is very transmittable, JPEGs and PNGs and what have you. But then there's also vertical videos. It's basically any transmittable narrative. And as silly as that may sound, that is basically the way, after having done many extensive interviews of young people who are politicized, but then also adults, we basically just carry these stories
that either a professor told us or our dad told us, or like we're some amalgamation of all of these little tidbits of narrative that we piece together into an ideological view of the world. So yeah, the study of memes looks really silly because the internet is hilarious and silly, but it is actually this kind of deep investigation into like, how humans piece together a worldview.
We do that through narratives. Because, like, if you're ever crunching, you know, enormous amounts of data to, like, look at the economy or look at these big abstract patterns, it doesn't really make sense until you tell a short story about it, right? Like, that's kind of how we operate.
This is how it's come into contact with reality.
It's almost a layer of abstraction because you need to exclude, this is going to get very silly and granular for a second, but like there's a general arc you can draw through the data, right? Purely quantitative data is going to be spread over this grid. And then there's outliers that to draw a coherent synopsis or executive summary of, you have to exclude certain data points.
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Chapter 7: What are the current trends in right-wing populism?
And that is kind of this, you know, self, you know, restoring mechanism that keeps you coming back.
The one to one relationship of input versus reward. Yeah. is something that is really important. I played a sport for my entire teenage years. I was obsessed with the game of cricket. I played at a very high level. And it took me until I was probably 25 to make the link that if I practice more and more diligently and more frequently... I get better outcomes. I just hadn't made that link.
Practice was just something that I did for fun. And I was like working on stuff or whatever, but I hadn't made the, oh, units of effort in equals units of output out. Like, isn't that great? Like, wouldn't that be lovely? Okay, so shitposting versus being honest. You mentioned that some people test the parentheses of the Overton window and...
that presumably is like, if you're pushing that, is that really where your opinion lies? Or are you just playing with words and images to see what sort of a reaction occurs? So how do you work out whether or not somebody is being earnest and how do you work out what this is going to form itself into over time?
So there's a few different strategies at play here. And I've interviewed some people who are progressive, liberal in every walk of life, in their job, in their marriage, and how they move through the world. And then they run this anonymous repulsive shitposting account that says all sorts of things that they don't even believe, but they know it upsets people. And so that thing exists.
These are not fringe cases. It's kind of common occurrence. And there's some kind of psychological venting mechanism at work there. I think most of those people don't believe these things or they at least keep it quarantined in a certain way that it doesn't impact their political activity.
The other part of this is that in a media environment or in a political environment that is constrained or gatekept in some way, irony is a great way of kind of testing the fences of for changes that kind of need to happen, right? So there's a lot of political growth.
I think this is one of the reasons why comedy has kind of been exempt from a lot of the speech policing that was so prevalent among liberal circles for a while. because it was one of the only safe places, ironically, it's a safe space, in which you could discuss these things, you could transgress, you could break the rules, right?
So that is basically a social function of art, is to break society's rules, to transgress, and then to find out why they were there in the first place and the rules that we should do away with. But I think the kind of final thing to throw in here is that
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Chapter 8: How do aesthetics influence political engagement online?
I don't think it resolves itself overnight because it didn't get that way overnight. But we basically have a lot of intellectual baggage to bring the most popular, in an electoral sense, the most popular policies in the world to meet any electoral coalition that could enact them, right? So how you get from one to the other is a long time of discipline, organization. Yeah.
I think when at least most normal people consider sort of radicalization, they think about far right, uh, people that are armed, uh, Charlottesville almost certainly would come up as one of those examples.
And then there was almost a, um, chicken and egg, like you did X. So we're going to do Y calling out of look at Antifa, look at black block, look at sort of the way that people behave through BLM riots, protests, et cetera. Uh, given that you've done your deep dives, just how sort of dark does the left go?
I think we have a pretty good, it's one of, you know, Jordan Peterson's famous questions, which is we understand when the right has gone too far. Sort of easy for us to define that. We have kind of some canonical examples of that. What have you learned about sort of the darker, more extreme sides of the left, just beyond like boys and girls locker rooms and stuff like that?
Yeah, I mean, I often get a question like this about the right, and I think people think of me as being a researcher for right-wing pipelines and stuff like this, but the most extensive thing that I wrote was about people on the left getting radicalized into what I think are really bad ideas and kind of rejecting general humanist values. And so the eco-extremism, I think, is probably...
the most likely endpoint for people who have not only concluded that there's no possibility for utopia, revolution, reform, basically any chance to improve the world, you're standing in it, all these types of things, but that also we've been on this slow trajectory since the rise of agriculture, since the industrial revolution that we need to like do away with organized society whatsoever.
They bring on these kind of anti-natalist politics, this kind of the supremacy of Earth, the planet, and nature over human beings. There was a kind of dispute in the early era of neoliberalism with Malthus who hypothesized that there would be an overgrowth of the peasantry and the proletariats and all of the underlings who are not the ruling class of society.
And he genuinely argued that we were going to run out of food and people would starve to death. And so there's a kind of rise of neo-Malthusian politics where people see the kind of scarcity and the limited carbon budget and so on and so forth. And they, similar to Malthus in like the 1700s, say, well, the solution is to get rid of a lot of people.
And I find that to be quite disastrous. Yeah. That's interesting. Kind of political nihilism. So at least one of the more extreme sides of this has to do with the environment. It has to do with the future of the world from an environmental perspective.
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