Tag Archives: Nils Gilman

Pray for a Good Behemoth

Try for a moment to imagine what the world’s political order will look like in the year 2075. Of course prediction is the pass time of fools, and anything imagined today about something so far in the future will by its nature become a sort of comedy. Then again, our century at the three-quarter-mark- really isn’t that far off when you think about it. 2075 is only as far from today as today is from 1963. As much time separates us from then as it does us from the assassination of JFK, which for those of a certain age, shows it’s not so far off after all.

So indulge me, then, is this flight of fancy- or rather Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s flight of fancy, for what follows immediately comes from their book of political futurology- Climate Leviathan. 

By the end of the 21st century one of four global political orders have come into being, each a product of what will be the most important issue for the foreseeable future- climate change. In a version of the first of these futures the world’s two most powerful countries- the US and China- have entered an alliance that aims to use all the powers of the state to systematically decarbonize the world economy without replacing it’s capitalist basis.

The two countries use every tool available from Henry Farrell’s “weaponized interdependence” to military force to compel even recalcitrant petro-states to abandon fossil fuels, and have embarked on a massive infrastructure program in the developing world to establish renewable energy as the sole source of economic growth, in addition to forcefully preventing the exploitation of resources, such as forests, that contribute to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Along with this, and in conjunction, both countries actively pursue geoengineering- whether to cool the earth or to suck carbon from the atmosphere- and on a scale that mirrors the very fossil fuel economy that drove warming in the first place.

This is just one variant of the scenario Mann and Wainwright call “Climate Leviathan”. It’s a response to climate change that clings to both capitalism and sovereignty, which means that an era of global crisis will require a global sovereign- a world empire, just as Thomas Hobbes believed that civil war required the creation of a national sovereign- a leviathan.

A somewhat more difficult future to imagine from our current juncture would be what Mann and Wainwright call “Climate Mao”. It is a global revolutionary government that has dismantled capitalism and forcefully wrenched at least part of the world economy away from carbon and towards sustainable forms of energy. Climate Mao is not democratic but an extreme form of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” whose rapid transformations would almost certainly require violence to achieve its ends.

Mann and Wainwright freely admit that from our vantage point Climate Mao does not seem very likely given the fact that the world’s two most powerful states – the US and China- are so deeply capitalist, even if the latter falsely wears the mantle of Maoisms, and contains a reservoir of revolutionary Marxists adherents and puritans that given the right circumstances might find themselves at the helm of a Chinese state that has been transformed into a hyper-capitalist global juggernaut.

Following Climate Mao in Mann and Wainwright’s four quadrant scheme there is Climate Behemoth to my mind the most likely of their four future scenarios. In a world ruled by Behemoths, sovereignty, rather than going global, has reasserted itself at the national scale. Behemoths might be petro-states whose national interests prevents them from accepting the implications of climate change, or they may accept climate change as a reality, but nonetheless refuse to surrender their powers to a global political order necessary to prevent its worst impacts.

Instead of coordinating with other powers, Behemoths build walls, hoping to deflect the human costs- the flood of refugees and environmental crises- unto weaker states, thus protecting their own populations and their standard of living at the expense of other peoples deemed to possess the wrong creed or color. Climate change denying Trumpian nationalists are one example of the politics of Behemoth, but such anti-environmentalism on the part of conservatives need not be permanent, and may eventually give way to what Nils Gilman calls “avocado politics” that uses panic over the climate to fuel the cultural, racial and security agenda of the right.

It is the last and most hopeful quadrant of Mann and Wainwright’s imagined future politics that at this juncture seems least likely. What they call “Climate X” would entail a democratic, global mass movement that would combine Marxists and indigenous politics. It would be a revolution that would overthrow capitalism, right global inequality, and establish the basis for a sustainable economy that included the interests of both the human and the non-human would.

From the perspective of a middle class person in the developed world today, none of these futures might seem all that plausible, even if it seems our politics have already gone off the deep end. Yet our lack of imagination likely stems from the fact that we have yet to really absorb just how profoundly climate change will challenge our current political and economic order, not in the far future, but over the next few decades (lasting as far as the eye can see). Indeed, these changes are not something we need to wait for, but occur with ever greater frequency- today.

The best glimpse so far for what climate change will look like should we continue on our current trajectory is provided by David Wallace Wells in his apocalyptically titled book The Uninhabitable Earth. Wells first came to widespread attention after a 2017 article for the New York Review of Books with the same title. He was widely attacked in climate change circles for doom mongering and putting people in the “wrong frame” to tackle the problem of anthropogenic warming where the rhetoric has largely centered around our ability to “fix” things were we only to possess the political will.

The problem with this logic, Wells seems to have recognized, was that this optimism was built purely on faith- the belief that technology would be developed and deployed at the scale to reverse the changes we had already caused (and with it the naive premise that we would ever possess such a precise reset button in the first place), along with the blind faith that human reason and benevolent politics would eventually marshal the resources necessary to stop climate change even though neither reason nor benevolence were two things human history are especially noted for.

All Wells does, then, is to try to lay out what is likely to happen should the world continue to do exactly what it has been doing since climate change was widely acknowledged as a looming threat to the human future- which means next to nothing. The nightmare he thus presents isn’t a fantasy, but a version of our most likely future. And it is nothing short of a nightmare.

In the coming decades climate change will stress to the point of collapse the systems upon which modern civilization and our current historically unprecedented lifestyle depend. Take the food system: by 2050 we could be living in a world with 50 percent more people than today who will need to be fed on 50 percent less food as climate change devastates grain yields. (50) Just to feed ourselves meat and dairy production will need to be cut in half. (54) And the food we will grow will have become much less nutritious as the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere, counter-intuitively, will negatively impact the nutrient profile of the world’s most important crops. (57)

Within the same time frame, water- both too much and too little of it- will transform the world as we know it necessitating that whole cities be moved. In less than two decades much of the world’s internet infrastructure could be inundated by sea level rise. (62) Major cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Kolkata might be permanently flooded. (64) Tens of millions of people globally affected by inland flooding. Much of the world will suffer near permanent states of drought with water scarcity likely to become an increasing source of civil disruption and interstate conflict.

As we exit what has been for humanity a climactic Goldilocks period, the Holocene, and enter the Anthropocene driven by the impact of human built systems, nature will have her revenge like Godzilla appearing from the deep. By 2070 Asian megacities could lose up to $75 trillion from the impact of ever more powerful storms. (82) Forest fires such as the ones that recently ravaged California could be up to 60 times more powerful. Tropical diseases will spread farther and farther north.

Heat waves in certain regions will make it unsafe for human beings to spend any time outside in non-air conditioned environments. The Haj to Mecca might be made impossible. Much of the ocean’s life will have suffocated to death.

It’s not hard to imagine a truly radical politics emerging in such a scenario, most of which are quite terrifying. A racist and Islamophobic right- wing emboldened by the flood of refugees, or a nihilistic left driven to Kaczynskite terrorism in an attempt to disable an industrial society rushing towards ecocide.

Indeed, any politics capable of addressing climate change will need to be radical from the standpoint of today given the sheer scale of the changes would be necessary to decarbonize the world economy. As Wells puts it:

“The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley- in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them- every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes carbon, like a ventilator.”(180)

The problem with the wholesale replacement of our current fossil fuel based economy with a carbon neutral one, thus, has much less to do with technological solutions (which in areas such as transportation and electricity are both abundant and increasingly cheap) as much as it is a political and economic crisis- the need to uproot vast numbers of people from whole sectors of the economy, and with it the basis of material well-being within entire countries.

In a recent interview with Wells the environmental scientist Valcav Smil bluntly described the difficulty of our position this way:

“This is what I’m telling you. It cannot be simply done without wrenchingly, massively centering our economy. It cannot be done on the margin only. It has to be done on a very large scale to have a large-scale global effect. And it has to be done in China, and in India, eventually, not only among the rich countries. It is the scale of the problem which is most important. We have many known solutions, we have many technical means how to fix things, we are pretty inventive, and we can come up with more, and better things yet. But it’s a thing to deploy them in time and on the scale needed. That’s our major problem, scale.

To do a dent [sic] in this global need for water, gas, oil, electricity, carbon emissions, whatever — to make that dent, you are talking about billions and billions of tons of everything. Let’s say if you want to get rid of coal, right? We are mining now more than 7 billion tons of coal. So, you want to lower the coal consumption by half, you have to cut down close to 4 billion tons of coal. More than 4 billion tons of oil. You want to get rid of oil and replace it with natural gas? Fine and dandy, but you have to get rid of more than 2 billion tons of oil.

These are transformations on a billion-ton scale, globally: (A) They cannot be done alone by next Monday; (B) they will be wrenching with huge economic consequences; and (C), what we can do, and the Chinese can do, the Indians can not. The Indians published a new paper a few months ago saying, “Coal will be our No. 1 fuel until 2047.” “

And this pessimism doesn’t even take into account what will happen within the large number of states whose economies are almost completely reliant on fossil fuel extraction- highly fragile states such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Among the richer economies who will exactly will be responsible for plugging the fiscal hole that opens up when the Canadian tar sands are closed, or will take charge of dismantling the fracking industry that has overnight transformed the US into the world’s leading oil exporter?

It’s when you really try to get a grip on the sheer scale of this transformation, a transformation that I very much believe to be necessary, that Mann and Wainwright’s political predictions move from the implausible to the seemingly inevitable. Yet if I were a betting man I’d sadly have to put all of my money on Behemoth.

I say this despite the fact that the climate left is politically in the best position it has ever been, and as the future shadows of what might become Climate X- in the form of massive global protests and an increasingly activist youth- have become visible.

This rising chorus to save the planet has intersected with a very real and justified revolt against inequality, such that the two causes have become confused. It is always easiest to have one villain rather than several and for this reason it is now de rigueur among the left to blame climate change on the 20 or so multinational companies that dominate the global economy and concentrate its wealth. Yet while this analysis is at root true, it skillfully elides the fact that it is only through these entities that the stuff of middle class life is obtained. While socializing or heavily taxing these corporations would certainly move us in the direction of economic justice, and would help pay for a transition away from our carbon based economy, it does nothing to address the fundamental issue driving the environmental crisis and its political constraints in the first place- namely the need to support mass consumption and the entirely understandable instinct of people to not allow that consumption to be taken away, even, and perhaps especially, in places where middle class societies are only now taking root.

It’s this middle class based panic over the loss of current or expected levels of consumption that I think the more likely load-star for right-wing movements than Gilman’s “avocado politics”.  Gilman fears the right will move from outright denial to full scale embrace of the frightening reality of climate change and will use this fear to justify its log held policy agenda of restricting immigration and even further empowering the security state.

Given the fact that much of the right is funded by fossil fuel interests, at least in the United States, it’s hard to see how this could happen. And unlike what Trump did in the 2016 election, which was mobilize a latent xenophobia which had rightfully been previously excluded from American politics there doesn’t seem to be a large population of people waiting to be mobilized if only right-wing cultural policies and green environmental concerns were brought into alignment.

Rather, the right has been able to appear populists to the extent it has presented itself as the defender of the lifestyle of a middle class that fears being crushed in the vice of inequality and the state. This is the lesson to be gleaned by the mass protests such as that of the Yellow Vests in France, which were sparked by moves by the state against middle class consumption for the purpose of environmental protection.

Gilman is certainly correct when he points out that a kind of merger between right-wing and green politics is not without historical precedent in that Nazism exhibited a kind of proto-environmentalism. But what this misses is that Nazism was much more a kind of Malthusian consumerism. Hitler with his re-conceptualization of Lebensraum as both living space and “lifestyle” essentially claimed a right to starve rival peoples if that was the only way German consumers could enjoy the same standard of living as their American counterparts.  

Severing this nearly 50-year-old link between consumption and mass politics the democratic variant of which has been called “the consumer republic” is something likely to be a long process, precisely the kind of patience we can seemingly no longer afford. And while I have no idea how to untangle this Gordian knot, I am almost certain it is our primary problem.

What we are experiencing is a strange reversal of normal time scales where geological forces are running faster than political ones, where human systems appear inert and immovable while the seemingly eternally solid earth melts away at speeds we can see. Thus, we might gain insight by acknowledging our inertia rather than dreaming it away, which means we’re unlikely to face unprecedented challenges by creating hitherto unseen political forms- good or ill- but will likely be confronted by all the horrors Wells describes while still clinging to political institutions and an international system that in more ways than it doesn’t resembles that of today.

On the geopolitical side that means a multipolar world of states rather than some version of global empire whether wicked or benign, meaning a world of Behemoths. It’s a fate whose more benevolent possibilities Mann and Wainwright for some reason elide. We will likely see more Trumpian Behemoths obsessed with defending the indefensible and even seeking to extend the reach of carbon into the economy. And it’s possible that Europe will see Behemoths driven by the kind of avocado politics predicted by Gilman. Yet one can at least hope that we’ll witness the appearance of “good Behemoths” as well.

A good Behemoth would be a state whose politics had become sufficiently green that almost its entire domestic and international agenda would be driven by environmental concerns. It would be a state (and eventually if successful an alliance of like minded states) that used all of its sovereign powers to respond to climate change and its related environmental crises. It would extend its influence globally both in aiding foreign citizens lawfare against climate destroying corporate interest and grassroots indigenous environmental movements. It would fund international research in creating alternatives to carbon, invest in its own, and conditionally in other state’s, resilience in the face of climate events, structure its trade based on carbon footprint. It would above all seek to present the world with a model of what a decarbonized middle class society could look like in the hope of winning over middle classes elsewhere of its feasibility.

In other words, had the state not existed the climate crisis would have forced us to invent it. For it is only through something like a state that collective priorities can be transformed into binding policy and law. A world state may not be on the horizon, but just like in our current geopolitical world, size does matter. Given the realities of geopolitics the bigger and more powerful such a good Behemoth is the more global will be its impact. Absent their arrival we might have little chance of avoiding crisis at a scale that would make them impossible.

 

Our Potemkin Civil War

“The trouble is that this calamity arose not from any lack of civilization, backwardness, or mere tyranny, but, on the contrary, that it could not be repaired, because there was no longer any “uncivilized” spot on earth, because whether we like it or not we have really started to live in One World. Only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether.” Hannah Arendt, Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Right of Man

Something has gone terribly off track when it comes to the nation-state. It has imploded in regions where it had been artificially imposed- the Middle East- is unraveling in some sections of Europe- such as Spain- and perhaps strangest of all, where successfully resurgent against the forces of globalization has done so within the context of an internationally networked, populist right where so-called nationalist align themselves to what are less nation-states than racial and religiously based empires, that is Russia and the United States.

A nation-state exists when there is a near “perfect” correspondence between some ethnic group and the instruments of the state. Reference to the nation has been one way of answering the question: why should I obey the laws? Up until very recently, the state had no way of watching every person all of the time, so short of being absolutely terrifying as was Hobbes’ suggestion, a state had to find a way to encourage people to willingly follow its dictates.

Doing so because it serves the good of the people of which you are part proved to be a particular effective inducement to law following, but as a type of legitimacy and political regime nationalism, isn’t much older than the 19th century. Nationalism emerged in Europe where prior answers to why an individual should follow the laws included because God or the King says so. Being a criminal might lead to hell or the rack, and maybe even both. The nation replaced the myths of God and king with the myth of common origin and shared destiny.

In the strict sense, the United States has never in its history been a nation-state in the European sense of the word, but possessed a hybrid form of legitimacy based in varying degrees on Protestantism, claims of white supremacy, and civic-nationalism. In the latter, the legitimacy of the state is said to flow not from any particular ethnic group but from shared commitments among plural communities to a certain political form and ideal. Civic-nationalism remains the most effective and inclusive form of nationalism to this day. Yet after more than a half a century of having rejected both religion and race as the basis for its political identity, and embraced civic-nationalism as its foundation, the US is now flirting with the revival of atavistic forms of political authority in a way that connects them with strange bedfellows in Moscow and a European right-wing terrified of Islam.

The nation-state often gets a bad rap, but it has played a historical role well beyond inspiring jingoism and ethnic conflict. Nationalism, as in the quest to establish a nation-state, was one of the forces behind the rise of democracy in the 19th century, served as the well-spring for the liberation of colonized peoples in the 20th century, and formed the basis of social democracy and the welfare-state in post-war Europe.

Civic-nationalism has been present in the US since the American Revolution, was fleshed out in times of crisis such as the Civil War, and became by far the dominant form of political legitimacy during the Cold War as first Protestant Anglo-Saxonism and then white supremacy were supplanted by an America’s ideal of a Whig notion of history where society building off of ideas latent in its founding became ever more just and inclusive over time.

It’s not just European-style ethnic-nationalism, which always posed a danger to those who were outside the nation-state’s particular ethnic majority, that’s experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, but civic-nationalism as well. And this decline of civic-nationalism isn’t just happening in the US but also in that other great multi-ethnic democracy India.

Globalization seems to have undermined all of the positive legacies of nationalism and left us only with its shards, spewing forth monstrosities we thought the post-war world had killed. We seem to be in a genuine crisis of legitimacy in which the question of who the state serves, and above all, who is considered inside and outside the community it represents, has been reopened.

This isn’t the first time the nationalism as the source of authority has seemed to be on its deathbed, nor is it the first time that in its unwinding the definition of what constitutes the nation has become confused and taken on strange and blatantly contradictory forms. During the 1940’s when Hannah Arendt was struggling to understand the first period of the nation-state’s decline she too noticed how some of the nation’s most vocal defenders were themselves deeply embedded in international networks promoting nationalist ideologies, how the concept of the nation had been mixed up and supplanted by the idea race, how widespread security, military, and police services (supposedly staffed by the most loyal patriots) so-often coordinated with one another often to the detriment of the national interest.

Right-wing politics today is arguably more international than the right of the 1930’s, or the current left. And just like in the past, the alliance among the parties of the right is a partnership based on destroying the very connectivity that has made their strange international alliance possible. It is an axis driven by the fear of what globalization has enabled, that sees the police state as the solution to a world in flux, and somehow, and perhaps differently than its earlier incarnation, is unable, despite all its bluster, to extract itself from the centripetal force of the global capitalism in which it is embedded.

Here is the point at which the historical analogies with the 1930’s inevitably breakdown. In the 21st century right-wing nationalists aren’t really nationalists in the older sense of the word at all. Instead they are, as Nils Gilman brilliantly points out, the mask worn by a “plutocratic insurgency”. A slow moving counter-revolution whose mission lies less in national greatness than in bending the system to suit its own interests.

Still, we should count ourselves lucky to be living at the beginning of the 21st century rather than the 20th, for the fascists (they should have been called hyper-nationalist) of the last century could gain their mass appeal among the middle classes by positioning themselves as the only alternative to a genuinely revolutionary left. No such revolutionary left exists today except in the right-winger’s mind, his hatred directed not to a real challenge to his way of life, but as a sort of alternatingly villainous and pathetic cartoon.

Not only this, the military aspect of nationalism has changed immeasurably since Hitler and his goons in short-pants dreamed of Lebensraum . Wars over physical territory in the name of empire building no longer make sense, instead what constitutes territory has itself be redefined- (more on that in a moment). Modern day nationalist don’t want to conquer the world, but retreat into their shell, which in the end means turning the state itself into a gargantuan gated community. Thus trying to understand hyper-nationalists today by looking at fascists from the past the last century is a sort of analytical mistake, for the game being played has radically changed.

Perhaps we could get our historical bearings if we extended our view further back into the past and looked at the way systems of political legitimacy have previously sustained themselves only to eventually unravel.

Communication technology has always been at the center of any system of political legitimacy because the state needs to not only communicate what the laws are, but why they should be followed. The Babylonians had their steele, and Emperor Ashoka had his pillars, both like billboards out of The Flintstones. The medieval Church in Europe had its great cathedrals, a cosmic and human social order reified in stone and images blazed in stained glass. All of it a means of communicating to the illiterate masses when reading and writing were confined to an elite- this is the divine and political order in which you exist and to which you must defer.

The modern era of communication, and thus of political legitimacy, began in Europe in the late 1400’s with the widespread adoption of the printing press. We’ve been in an almost uninterrupted period of political instability ever since. Great images and structures were replaced by writing that now appeared and circulated with unprecedented speed. Different forms of arguments regarding what society was, what its borders were, who belonged to it, and what was owed to and from those who belonged to it emerged and fought one another for supremacy, with the border between what constituted religion, what constituted nationality, or what constituted a race often hybridized in ways we now find confusing.

In the late 18th century, European imperialism and African slavery gave rise to what would become the most insidious form of establishing the boundaries of political community- the ideology of white supremacy. Yet in that very same period we saw the emergence of a truly secular and potentially multi-ethnic and democratic form of political legitimacy with the rise of civic-nationalism during the American and French revolutions. (Though it had antecedents in the Italian city-states).

All these forms of political legitimacy, along with antiquarian ones that clung to the authority of church and king, and brand new ones, such as communism, would battle it out over the course of the 19th century with stability only lasting during times of war when the state would be united by a common project whose sacrifices were often justified on the basis of civic-nationalist discourse.

We don’t really see a stabilization of this pattern until after the world wars. In Europe, this was partly because many states had been ethically homogenized due to the conflicts and their aftermath, and in the US because not only had the wars helped fuse a stronger sense of national cohesion along multi-denominational lines, but because the Cold War that followed compelled the US to abandon white supremacy as a basis of national identity out of fear of Soviet incursions in the developing world.

Thus a kind of tamed ethnic-nationalism in Europe and an aspirationally multi-ethnic civic-nationalism in the United States became the dominant forms of political legitimacy in Western countries. Both coincided with what proved to be a temporary embrace of social democracy rather than the laissez-faire capitalism that had been predominant before the Second World War. Again a move inspired by fear of the Soviet Union and the danger of communist revolution.

And all this intersected with the new mass media that was able, for the first time, to center the public around not only a shared form of political legitimacy, but a shared political project in the form of a consumer’s republic and the fight against communism. It was not an interregnum that was destined to last long.

Nevertheless, the liberal consensus and reordering of political legitimacy around civic-nationalism that emerged out of the New Deal and World War II, which saw the last great act of a strong state in forcing an end to racial segregation in the American South, began to unwind in the late 1960’s and has perhaps entered a stage where it could never be rebound.

The feature that has stood at the heart of civic-nationalism since the time of Machiavelli– that of the citizen at arms- died with the debacle of the Vietnam War. Here began the breakdown of trust between technocratic elites and the public, including distrust in the mass media, with the crisis coming to a head with race riots, Watergate, followed by inflation, and the war on drugs. And whereas the left in this period largely abandoned politics for the commune and sexual liberation, the right began the slow process of crawling back into power with the hope of deconstructing the administrative state created in the New Deal. For while the political and economic system had become unstable, the mass of benefits, regulations and protections provided by the state proved exceedingly difficult to kill so long as politics remained democratic.

It was during what proved to be the crescendo of the liberal consensus, after its failure in the Vietnam War and the mobilized alienation of what Nixon called “the silent majority”- the mostly white middle and working who had in the interwar years lost much of their ties to ethnic identity, and who felt alienated from the new cultural currents sweeping the left, drug culture, the anti-war movement, feminism, gay rights, and black power- that the right saw its first major opening since FDR. It could use the gap between the old left and the new left to lever against the entire edifice of the post-war liberal consensus until the structure came crumbling down.

To do this the right would need to bring into being its own majority based consensus. For some astute and wealthy members of the right blamed the country’s persistent liberalism on the whole infrastructure of knowledge, communication and law, which liberals had used since the 1930’s to weave itself almost intractably deep into both society and law. Out of this drive a whole alternative infrastructure of information and knowledge would be created that included not only popular outlets that copied then left-leaning mass media platforms like television and radio, but institutions for policy production such as think tanks.

Thus we get the politicization of reason, not because the broad sweep of academia along with the first think tanks that held to the liberal consensus were a-political, but because the instruments of policy formation no longer proceeded under the kinds of shared assumptions that make reason possible to begin with.

All of these factors of broken consensus have increased rather than diminished in the 21st century as the newly decentralized nature of media production and the disappearance distance as a factor of political alliance meant that any worldview, no matter how niche and bizarre, now had a platform and was able to forge a constituency. Included in these worldviews are all sorts of atavistic ideas regarding race and gender equality many of us mistakenly believed we had evolved beyond.

It seems that retrograde ideas never truly go away, but lie waiting for the right conditions to re-emerge like killer viruses from the melting arctic permafrost. For many racists the conditions of awakening seems to have been the emergence of Trump. As usual, Cory Doctorow said it best:

In a tight race, having a cheap way to reach all the latent Klansmen in a district and quietly inform them that Donald J. Trump is their man is a game-changer.

Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

What can be dizzying is how historically mashed up and so obviously socially constructed many of these groups are, and how easily they can both resemble and even emerge from forms of fandom. (A point I’ve often seen made by Adam Aelkus).

The only step that would truly rid us of the cacophony of crazy would be to ban these groups from the internet altogether. Banning an obscene organization such as InfoWars, as all the major internet platforms, with the exception of Twitter, have now done may be a good thing, but whether such measures actually work, or even ultimately end up being worse than the disease is less certain. Banned groups are already turning to other alternative platforms such as Gab or Hatreon that are more amenable to whatever snake oil they are selling.

Right now I wouldn’t place any bets on either side winning the war between the platforms and those seeking to get their message out there whether it’s crazy or just a narrative those who own the press and the platforms would prefer the public ignore. It isn’t even clear which side a progressive should be rooting for. For while it seems clear that racist language or attempts to deliberately insight violence have no right to their place in the marketplace of ideas, it’s less clear what to do about a controversial figure like Cyprian Nyakundi who, from what I understand, was banned for leaking nude photos of Radio Africa Managing Director Martin Khafafa with young women- a rather attention grabbing way of exposing corruption

The platforms are immensely powerful because they not only control the major  interfaces between users and content producers but the servers on which this content is located. Given the censorship record of the platforms, especially outside the United States, this is nothing we should be comfortable with. To give just one example which I think is informative, FaceBook has essentially banned much of political speech from its platform in South Asia, yet much of this speech, along with all types of unsubstantiated rumors and nonsense continues to circulate through its encrypted WhatsApp, which FaceBook is unable to censor at all.

The platforms thus have an enormous amount of power and yet the structure of the internet itself makes the job of censorship much harder than it might otherwise appear. ISIS- the most reviled and hunted terrorist organization in the world still manages to have an internet presence, the ubiquity of encryption apps makes such censorship increasingly more difficult, not to mention the US commitment to the First Amendment, which makes any complete purge illegal.

And even if we could snap our fingers and make the internet disappear, our former consensus would remain very much in the rearview mirror. For both right and left would still possess a whole media infrastructure based on television, radio and print whose assumptions are so different one might think they originated in different countries.

Indeed, it was tech’s fear of the traditional right in possession of old media and its ability to gin up scandal that played a large part in them giving the alt-right a pass during Trump’s election bid. The platforms’ censorship will thread a careful line so long as Republicans are in control of the government and possess the power to break them up. A frightening prospect is that they will be nudged to turn their censorship towards the “radical left”, so that the Overton Window remains jammed open, but that it leans only in one direction- meaning rightward.

In other words, the internet platforms might find themselves aligned with conservative media to take us back to the world as it existed in the past. Not the long dead liberal consensus but the era of the culture wars that followed them. A phantasmagoria pretending to be a civil war where the masses gnaw virtually at each other over questions of identity and pseudo-scandals while the big shots divvy up the spoils of what really matters in an age dominated by technological infrastructure, namely the design of and access to the domains in and through which we all are now compelled to live, and that now subsume every region of the globe.