Armchair Generals

Fighting a Parasocial War

By being online it is very easy to get a false sense of your own influence, and how important you are, we see this effect time after time with establishment journalists who assume they have the power to nix anyone they wish out of existence on social media. Suspensions and bans of opponents are celebrated and those of allies booed and decried. It can all feel very meaningful in the moment, within the cycle of “its over” and “we’re back,” but within a span of weeks its hard to remember why certain events felt so life or death or indeed what the drama of the week even was.

This effect is exacerbated by people existing in ever more self-reinforcing bubbles of unreality in which it can feel as if you are guiding events that have no relation to you—and divine away evil. The Q-Anon movement, with periodic pokes from federal agencies, became the biggest example of this. They trusted a plan that didn't exist and saw great meaning in events that had absolutely no bearing on their everyday lives. The online realm became the reality of a group of baby boomers who were unprepared for the effects of the space and it led them into a fantasy existence.

Those in alternative political spaces online suffer from the same effect to varying degrees, no one is immune to the social engineering of the online world and we must all actively guard against it otherwise we will fall into a world of unreality and become uselessly consumed in our own, ever more eccentric, inner culture.

With that said, here are a few things to keep in mind when navigating the online world:

The Internet isn’t Real

Its tempting to believe that the online space really does make the world small enough to an extent that you can have an impact upon it from the comfort of your own home. This causes a parasocial relationship to form between those who are considered friends, and of course enemies, within a given political climate. The hundreds of wine aunts and wannabe media wonks who scrambled to shout into the void at every Donald Trump tweet really did believe he could in some way hear them, and that their performative outrage would have an impact on him personally.

Its very unlikely that someone like Klaus Schwab knows who you are, or knows who your favourite political e-celeb is. He is a functionary of a bureaucratic machine and primarily serves as a mouthpiece for initiatives now decades in the making. You are not going to derail the WEF program by arguing with astroturfed accounts online—many of which are not even real. To borrow a phrase from an older version of the online world, always believing that “The Internet is Serious Business,” especially social media, will only leave you exhausted and frustrated. This is intentional and the burnout from fighting in the online marketplace of ideas has left many a naïve online movement dead in its tracks.

Pissing in the Sea of Piss

Within this parasocial pressure cooker of heroes and villains, offensive and counter offensive things seem to matter more in the moment than they do immediately afterward. Even online posts that have thousands of interactions are mostly forgotten the next day. They become undifferentiated, noise in a sea of noise.

The pre smartphone explosion internet understood this too: “Posting on 4Chan is just pissing in a sea of piss” was a common mantra on the board in 2007. As the volume of online interaction goes up the value of each interaction goes down: the sea of piss is ever growing and you’re only one dick.

You may think what you have to say is, on its own merits, important. It very likely isn’t. You are not going to convince people online through sheer force of posting, and if you do want to get something meaningful done you would be better served expending your energies elsewhere. I wrote all the way back in March 2021 about how the only activism that succeeds is the permissible brand already supported by those in power. Engaging in purely online activism against the regime and expecting that to change anything truly is pissing your time away.

By Any Other Name

Semantics is the stock and trade of meaningless online arguments, as are debates surrounding hypotheticals, or the complete inability to understand them. You will routinely find people talking about how they might organise a country or what they would name their world conquering movement when they are still terrified of engaging with those issues in real world formal organisation. It reminds me of the famous scene in the film Downfall, where imaginary divisions are being moved around on a map. Grand proclamations are made about who is and isn’t in the movement or what the movement should be called when no one has bothered to actually make the movement anything other than a hypothetical online fever dream. It all gets very “Judean people’s front.”

You go into any online right wing space and you will hear a lot of: “We should all be trad! We should all be pagan! No! We should all be Catholic. We should all have children apart from those who definitely shouldn’t have children! We all just need to subscribe to this very specific brand on anarchism!”

For the people seeking out the basic actions they can take to best shield themselves and their family from the onslaught of modernity, this is a less than useful circus. It is actively unhelpful and unserious to promote this kind of armchair-general thinking: to squabble over the spoils of a wholly imaginary victory.

Creating Permanence

I’m not too bothered by the debate of radicalism vs. portraying yourself as the common sense default. To be sensible is radical, and to be radical is sensible. I’m also not interested in making politics counter to regime interests into a religious or lifestyle clubhouse. I’m interested in practical solutions to immediate problems.

There must be permanence built into any organisational efforts, and the short time horizons of the online environment make this impossible without breaching into the real world. The internet is an unserious environment and should be approached with abundant caution, using it even somewhat productively requires a mindset counter to the prevailing pressures of the social engineering engines that are Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc. Ultimately it requires getting offline as much and as soon as possible.

I don’t care what you call it or what your obscure ideology is: just DO something. There are dozens of people I have encountered personally who are without guidance or hope, they are looking for a community who can help them and ideas that can enable them to better navigate the modern world. If you are aware of the problems at hand, and want to do something about them, disappearing into a fantasy world of online esoteric LARP is an act of self indulgent cowardice. Being a respectable representative offline is the first hurdle to any success.