Four years ago or so I worked at a “family entertainment center.” Think Dave and Busters—go-karts, laser tag, arcade games, the works. I mostly hated it. The constant press of the crowd often induced a low-level sense of panic. I white-knuckled it for probably too long. So many faces—and it was my job to make sure they all were smiling. I got canned from there eventually and my pathological insanity returned to its, uh, normal insanity baseline.
Since lockdown started, though, I’m sometimes nostalgic for that mess. I sometimes dream of the crowds. There’s something comforting in absentia about being surrounded with so many breathing, needy bodies. The flipside to my panic & hypervigilance was the almost erotic electric hum of the crowd. The physical space was commercial, alienating, probably nightmarish if seen correctly (try Disneyland on acid). But it sure beats playing Animal Crossing for 10 hours and not seeing a human face for days.
The lockdown prevented public consumer society for a while. It was replaced with its private forms. Distance-living filtered through apps—atomized, algorithm-driven, more depressing and insidious. GrubHub ain’t no replacement for family dinner; OnlyFans ain’t no replacement for intimacy. I think most people felt at least a little despair. Was last year a prelude to a continued hollowing-out of the few things that make us human? I’m not a conspiracist. But I was scared, too. I turned to increasing amounts of alcohol to cope. Many turned to hard-right politics and conspiratorialism. And some of them turned to Twitter.
The old 2016 MAGA-troll brand of conservatism is dying out. Or, rather, as it’s becoming the mainstream form of Republican politics (Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene), online influencers on the right are on the move. It’s not only that the discourse-machine of the internet accelerates and distorts POVs. It’s also that the needs of the average Millennial/ Gen Z-er who is prone to Reaction are changing. The idea of the basement-dwelling online troll supposes some level of stability and privilege. Think of a middle-class family with just enough capital to let Johnny stay home until his mid-20s—mom bringing down chicken tenders as Johnny owns the libs online. Okay. The new right I’m talking likes to style itself as the (bleh) “dissident right.” You don’t get the basement-dwelling vibe from them. You get the sense of 20-somethings who live in their apartment they can barely afford, alone. They’ve navigated the hellscape of 2020 with nothing much to look at except their four walls and the faint glow of their phones.
It’s important to consider, without being consumed by, what’s talked about by the extremely-online. Not that you should mistake it for the daily reality of the average American. I think politics is getting more meme-ified and removed from reality, not less (even in the Biden era). Could Trump have happened in a pre-internet era? There’s still a long road from Now to when Millennials are the ruling force in politics. But trends among Millennial conservatives will one day be the status quo—common sense. The individual accounts (and, hopefully with any luck, platforms) will be lost to time. But what’s confusing now will then in hindsight have been the “history of ideas.” This history will amount (at the very least) to the record of reactionaries thinking through young adulthood. And it’s happening right now. It plays out chiefly on anonymous accounts and obscure Substacks.
The quantity and greatly varying quality of these accounts and the scene as a whole is overwhelming at first. I used to think, when the discourse was more centralized, intellectual Reaction all came down to jaded college grads, peeved that their liberal arts dream weren’t requited by the market. There’s too many of these fuckers nowadays to chalk it all up to that. A little auto-didacticism and a touch more autism goes a long way towards matching the convolutedness and jargon of academia. I’m thinking of accounts with like 40 followers waging holy wars against oat milk, or whatever. Threads with posts in the dozens railing against mass-produced “health products.” They’ll show you charts with proteins and enzymes on why you shouldn’t drink soy milk. Usually, the project is to prove why everyone should return to some ancient, very specific routine such as a raw-beef diet. Grr. I don’t care about weird, hypermasculine foodie autists. Their WTF statements combined with a high level of seeming expertise, though, is instructive. When you shift to more ideological debates (with real-world implications) it gets more serious.
Twitter’s “lack of affect” and context makes it hard to tell if an essay against “woke-ism” is well-thought out or just errant shitposting. Or a third possibility—“think-piece brain,” NRx style. I’m don’t desire discourse gatekeeping or a return to the centralized platforms of old. What I’m describing, though, is a subjective reality. A young online person comes across a thousand shouting randos, and some of them seem smart. Weird, niche concerns, like a return to monarchy, get reified into something you can affirm too. You join hands with the community of deep thinkers and then hububaloo right down the next rabbit hole with them. “Here’s how this 15th century thinker established the modern world, and how the British Empire still actually rules everything.”
Nothing wrong with finding friends online. And community inevitably involves a little falling in line. The flipside is often no better. Sometimes I detect in myself something like a mimetic contrarianism. A few years back I wrote an article about streaming services that’s physically painful to recall. There was a weekly section on the app called “Rising.” So many fresh-faced nobodies—each with their own PR-crafted aesthetic—desperately vying for attention. All of the ambition and hope– squashed into 1”x1” squares on the screen—overwhelmed and depressed me. Most of these careers wouldn’t end in adulation. I experienced this viewing experience as something like a psychotic break. But there was some narcissistic projection in rejecting that all as a hellscape. Through the nobodies, I was also confronting my own mostly squashed dreams. Community that crushes individuality is no reason to reject community outright. So I’m aware of this antisocial tendency. But I find these online conservative crowds significantly worse.
This bunch of virtual nobodies seems like the inverse of the physical crowd in my memories. In real life, a mass of people pressed close is scary. It’s a risk both seeing and being seen by so many eyes and faces. That risk, though, allows for the possibility of connection, of something actually human happening. Online, the dynamic maybe works in reverse. Nothing ever happens, and it’s happening all at once. We’re united as a mob by that lack of contact, context—the impossibility of being taken outside of ourselves. We proceed backwards, hollering and tumbling over invisible others. We hurtle towards a panic-without-payoff. Our views become less compassionate and more irreal. While I rarely leave an actual gathering of people feeling smaller or more misanthropic, after twenty minutes of Twitter I start wondering if hey, maybe democracy really is Fake and Gay? I also often want to kill myself.
This online world is wild and wooly. Certain subsets have wildly divergent positions and goals. But I’ve noticed a few common inroads. They’re seemingly random (but perhaps point to common needs past all the noise). Do you think the Robin DeAngelo’s of the world are doing more harm than good? Do you think Alex Jones, especially in his anti-Big Tech mode, is actually kinda cool? (Ignore the race stuff.) The route I took was through wondering if incels, young people experiencing extended periods of loneliness and lack of intimacy, might be worth thinking about or even sympathizing with. Loneliness and sexlessness were skyrocketing pre-pandemic. It seems to be an objective social problem. The incel’s sin is to experience this and ask “Hey, what about me?” A much better question would be “What about us?” But the topic of loneliness and wasted 20s are taboo. Mainstream responses have mostly been a “pull yourself up by your romantic bootstraps” narrative. Even media supposedly sympathetic to incels get it wrong. TFW NG, directed by Alex Lee Moyer, was supposed to be an insider look at incel life. Instead, it was a confused mess. Its subjects weren’t even incels. They were online edgelord influencers. The movie showed how shitty it is to be shitty online and also be downwardly mobile IRL. That sometimes overlaps with loneliness, but… The film ends with most of the dudes getting girlfriends and saying “Things get better.” The reactionaries often paper over their material discontents with sentiment and obfuscation.
Heads in reactionary circles seem to be some of the uncomplacent few thinking through this problem, albeit from their own odd angle. Take a mid-level reactionary influencer like Yeerk.P. His Twitter handle references Animorphs, a children’s book series. I came across him during a phase where he was tweeting mini-essays on masculinity and loneliness. He was positioning himself against a triumphalist brand of liberal girlboss feminism. In those circles, any suffering or emotional issue men deal with is a personal failing. Male vulnerability is also something to be mocked. It should be said this style of feminism is mostly an online psychosis. (What else is life anymore?) Atop a base of callousness, reality gets straitened and debate is ended by telling men to “Go to therapy.” Therapy is helpful especially for the segment of psychotic violent incels. When nearly everyone, though, needs it and experiences persistent loneliness—maybe something systemic is going on? Yeerk investigated this collapse of the social and romantic. His starting point, and I’m paraphrasing was: “I’ve learned not to hate the female. She too only acts as she does because of complex social pressures and received desires. Misogyny is wrong; we should critique the sin, not the sinner.” And critique it he does. Just mountains and mountains (for Twitter anyway) of text, examining gender roles and mores with almost Augustinian introspection. “Our alienation is caused and stoked by market forces.” I eat that shit up. But over time, a change occurred. Or rather, the true nature of the argument came to light. Market forces were identities sold to us by corporations and laundered through identity politics. Jumping from this, the trans “industry” and Tumblr-esque polyamorism became his pet targets. Doubt he’d own up to that, but he spends more breath on trans kids than anything else nowadays. I guess we’re really still in 2016 debating Kill all Normies.
No, actually we’re in 2021 when puberty blockers are being debated for kids. (More reversible than double mastectomies at age 16?) But there’s also laws being passed that would label “child abusers” any parents who pursues medical options for trans kids. Yeerk is almost solely an anti-trans account at this point (that’s what gets the attention). But if your profound Augustinian insights don’t lead you to consider the bigotry of your allies (and all the harm they do)—I’m out. I may not be with trans defenders who assume puberty blockers should be presented as a default to adolescents, but that’s a fringe position. Haters, though, love to conflate it with the “trans question” as a whole since they can knock it down in one swoop. In fact, Yeerk has said he isolates the most extreme, cringe statements to argue against for the sake of “acceleration” and a clean target. (Even reactionaries have dialectics now.) Any common ground is passed over as a time-waster. Better to build an airtight, theoretical framework for “trans bad” and tradition good. There’s a healthy way to respond to such autodidacts, who are intent on precluding common ground. You look, listen, wait for them to finish talking, then say it plain: “Fuck you.”
Yeerk is not the biggest fish in that pond of Reaction. But I found my growing understanding and disillusionment with him instructive. With these wannabe brainiacs, you don’t get any “movement of mind.” Instead, you’re in for slow disclosure of the ugly truth. Today’s post-right imagines it’s divorced from sins and buffooneries of its forebears. And, indeed, “Endtimes Artaxerxes” or whatever random account is usually smarter than your Charlie Kirks or Ben Shapiros. But it’s old wine in new skins. These young people are just organically thinking themselves into the hardline positions of yore. People in power, too, connected to the historical right, are taking notice. Alex Katschuta runs a podcast interviewing folks from this scene. It’s worth listening to just to hear what these pretentious knobs sound like (some of them wisely distort their voices when they make their pronouncements). Alex is often giddy recounting how unnamed famous persons drop in on the Clubhouse app or leave notes of encouragement. I’m guessing she’s invoking Ross Douthat-types, or bros from Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel (they’re loser-nerds too, just rich). Alex and her guests congratulate themselves on the “cultural explosion” they’re curating on Twitter. But their scene isn’t happening in a vacuum now (if it ever was). They’re laying the intellectual foundations for the next generation of Right politics. I think they mostly support things like universal healthcare (as Millennials, they’ve Been Through It, and are too self-serving to hold the line of their precedents). On every social and economic issue, though, they’re revealing themselves to be not that different from what’s come before. (Except the monarchism, that’s new.) Expect more nationalism and reactionary culture wars.
David Golding has written how these types are obviously well-funded. They also have the merit of a consistent world-view. He sees them “tilting at the windmills of time and gender.” He wishes them a swift defeat in their doomed and foolish quest. I see value in engaging with nascent movements, especially at their most embryonic and confused points of departure. Doing so sometimes creates a liminal mental space that allows you to challenge and reorient your own thinking. But when you try take in the discourse of the sharpest reactionaries, something ugly tends to emerge out of the unformed deep. And then you must consider if this is the sort of ally or comrade you’d like to have.
I’m reminded of a moment of syncro/simpatico from last year. It was the last day you could really feel the summer in the air. I dropped acid; my, uh, trip-sitter was a beautiful schizophrenic. We listened to Astral Weeks and talked about nothing, everything. Time tripped and warbled. The conversation got heated. I sit up and realize I’m being shouted at about Mary. “The Mother of God is real, but beware the false one who comes in her name.” I was at that point where words & thought blurred. It was hard to tell who was speaking, desiring what. “I’m in the, uh, spinny place. It’s all running together. Let’s go outside.”
The spinny place is good, I think. The head needs to get broken apart occasionally to avoid ossification and find freshening depths. But start swimming back up too late and you’re done for. We headed for the daylight. We walked down Main street past the quaint shops and pricey restaurants. Life and bodies were returning, though masked (sometimes doubly so). We climbed down to the riverbank. Lying there, we stared up at the rustling overhead branches. She said “People don’t need much other than food, shelter, and a community that supports and protects them.” We stayed a while. Didn’t check our phones once. We fell out of ourselves in the moment and found something like grace.