When you want to see their philosophy, you must remember to sever yourself from your profile
Lessons from current anthropology, give us insights to how models-for the savages of the older Internet are failing at best, dehumanising at worst.
1) Internet-internet
“Is there a philosophy of right-wing extremism?”
In one way, to open with such a question is already to step on the wrong path. You’ve come too late, you’ve walked into a motorway of speeding cars. You cannot go in with the intention of distance, with an entire description of looking-down (Such as “of dubious quality[1]”.) Toolook and cross this motorway as you would a colonist looking down at “savages” moments before the cars tear out his soul looking for a body. Empiricism, modelling, engineering will not help you here. The current zeitgeist, the diagram of power that shifts through the internet, ripping the very cosmology in order to draw a new empirical layer has only further split the worlds. As such, no matter how much Foucaultian social-discipline one instils in the raw architecture of the lower-case-i internet, you’ll never see the “philosophy” because the philosophy runs anti-thetical to the current socio-philosophical frameworks.
The ”dubious quality” is as vague as it is for anyone outside of the accepted diagrammatic framework.
What, then, is the difference between Reza Negaraestani lighting a Marlboro teaching a parallel academia seminar or Sam Harris having an intellectual dark debate or Curtis Jarvin holding a twitter space to talk about cathedrals?
That is what is at the core of the mistake, the coming too late. You’ve missed the formation of tribes (Read: Worlds), communication and the Internet. The Internet had already died before you arrived. You are imposing a model on a primitive world[2], that you never were a part of.
See, the old Internet, upper-case-I, was already deterritorialized. An assemblage of structures that coupled and decoupled along teleological lines – not transcendent to God however, but underneath a plane of a universal culture (Read: ontology). This utopian culture[3]; free, open ended with connections and little spaces that were powered by small machines that match click to group, from movement to website. These encounters weaved together forums, interests, a humbling of someone’s knowledge. A break from the real world where use and gift value truly reigned over the sign[4]. Where one’s avatar sits, couples, gets pulled up into the assemblage of other users and creates worlds. And so this Internet revolved around an interlinked cosmology. Animate, even down to the grammar used, always holding a degree of separation between the “real” and the Internet. Avatarism which severed a soul from a name and picture, only granted by certain “shamans” to appropriate a term. “The internet is leaking!” one would cry! An so the Internet groups would laugh at the “real” – the enemies – trying to rationalise “all your base”[5] as a political slogan.
Here was a rough perspectivism, multi-worlds united by a culture. A gatekept Other, that required a medium: Links of zines or underhanded books, spoken rumours or simple absurdity drew one into the shared mysticism. Where one man’s “spam” was another man’s “lunch”. Some of these lead to down paths of the turner diaries, some drawing sparkle dogs. You have no soul here, just a body.[6] That’s the thing about the newcomers of the Internet, the social media generation, you tested the Internet avatars to see if they had a “soul”, if they could “metaphor”[7], if they could be “modelled” for the universal “real”.
This multi-naturalism of the Internet, cannot simply be colonised over. Surely, after all the remnants and resistance of the Indigenous people’s culture, we all should be aware that one cannot simply destroy worlds by vertical, modern models. At the philosophy of memes conference, Dr Simon Evans talked of the digital nomads, making memes out of the cultural debris they find on the ground. A bricoleur of memetics, but the truth is these nomads were colonisers. They began to model and engineer over the multinaturalistic Internet with scientific meme studies, sociology, capital and postmodern styles of social capital[8]. Take the CanIHaveCheezeBurger take over of KnowYourMeme, the generators, the further aggrators, the beginning of the pure modelling[9]. They call these digital nomadic memes[10] but they have already been dropped, already passed on by. Whose lands these cat memes were taken from, and now nomads pick through the ruins, allegedly “bricolaging” while following the engineering model.
As Guattari said in regards to this type of 1 person model down:
“In reality, everything I say tends to establish that a true political analysis cannot arise from an individuated enunciation, especially when it is the act of a lecturer, who is unacquainted with the problems of his audience! An individual statement has no bearing except to the extent that it can enter into conjunction with collective set-ups which already function effectively: for example, which are already engaged in real social struggles. If this doesn't happen, then who are you speaking to? To a universal interlocutor? To someone who already knows the codes, the meanings, and all their possible combinations?”[11]
2) Internet
See, now this is the fun split of the internet. The utopia plane, the more imminent-teleological uppercase-I Internet gets sublated by the very forces that sit on the leftist-critical theory side. Not of models and empiricism directly – no that’s the junk underlayer of dead digital remains bloated with spam, where every single attempt to define memes, copyright or moderation policy is also dumped – but of a social layer. A Foucauldian diagram that layers gently across the internet (lowercase) now, by way of various capital enterprises and infrastructure takeover[12]. In what took humans thousands of years to kill God and revolve Gaia around them, we have done to the Internet in a couple of decades[13]. This smaller, less saturated, more centralised internet gave birth to a perfect panopticon of power that can now watch gracefully over their savage “tribes” and impose on them a universal monoculture. Here is where the academics sit, watching and using traffic numbers to talk about deplatforming or drafting any sort of AI-fuelled modelling of hatespeech because someone posted a frog[14].
Nothing speaks on the different socialisation that the academic panopticon poses than Whyte’s 2020[15] article. Which does this by way of other engineered-modelled ways of interaction: to build “frameworks” for digital culture. Whyte argues that these digital subcultures, far from being random outgrowths of disillusionment, are purposefully cultivated breeding grounds, amplifying the chaos by rejecting coherent ideological structures – but what justifies the use of this structure? He takes from one “tribe” a nihilistic collapse of metanarratives, feeding off the fragmentation of reality to weaponize the absurdity of curated online universalisms. When this world is oft mocked by others on the same plane? What emerges is a strategic destabilization—democracy isn't hacked by ideology, but by the undermining of belief in any kind of cohesive order at all. Yet this is the amusing thing, in trying to provide a framework based off one tribe for another universality, or structure; by stating that conspiracies are not simply fringe beliefs but tools, operational frameworks. Creating communities out of the internet’s nihilistic fog they forget that they are part of the same infrastructure. As with the Guattari quote above, what is the use of one man enunciating something such as this? To take one “tribe”, one “world” as the universal for the entire Internet? Does the same reddit “worlds” like /r/The_Donald also not apply to the rest of reddit? Think of the case of the “world’s worst redditor”, a minor from Italy, who had no idea who Trump was but gathered karma and got to be one of the highest rated posters of all time by uncomprehendingly spamming this echo-chambered political propaganda against Trump[16]. Any single-framed universalism like that applies just as much to the left as it does to the right. This modelling simply isn’t sufficient at best, and is dehumanising and insulting at worst.
So to play with Guattari’s words from the same article I ended the last section on; At a subreddit, a user "off the track" is banned, and this continues in servers, in forums, across profiles, in the slacks, and in the art world. You must always stay "on the right track" and "in line." Which is always presented as opposing those with bad-“profiles”.
Those who may have been from the older generation become assaulted intellectual-like. They want their grand internet (and fandoms) to be taken seriously, to uplift these savage peasants on forums or art websites to be with the future, to better think while still upholding the core customs. Let us all destroy the worlds of videogames, art and niche hobbies to raise them all above. Make them less gatekeeping, more accessible. Be it they are never open in the philosophical sense but accessible in the engineering sense. No longer shamans would show cross-worlds mediation with each other, but not representative of the human user themselves – hence the lowercase internet new profile-based-gravity. As the Internet existed in a temporality then now we see that the internet wasn’t a victim of the modern delayed informatisation[17] or delayed industrialisation but the newest confirmation: delayed re-socialisation.
The alt-right, the new-right, the online-right, whatever social-label you want to put on them is created by this re-socialisation, but that is a model of them. It is now different than the concrete that Levi-Strauss emphasises in the colonial attitudes towards the so called lesser-beings. Savages, primitives, Indians, etc.
3) Delayed Re-Socialisation
The panopticon I have mentioned before, which comes from Foucauldian thought, is amusingly held up by many of those who come from a very butchered line of Focault’s work. The philosophy’s remnants of power-by-infrastructure are apparent in creating the notion of re-socialisation. Foucault-Deleuzian diagrams for example are built explicitly from things like the BGP toolkit, SEO or other ways of diagramming out the flow of information beyond hardware. These diagrams create across the plane of organisation a push-down “social” layer that is supposed to “correct” – or at least get “back on track” – the internet[18]. Those who are left behind then, the delayed re-socialisation manifests in the old-worlds that many academics now wish to diagnose.
And thus is born the peer-verified era of what Hans-Georg Moeller calls “profilicity” – in which everyone is to curate a profile and then have it verified by the others gaze; a journalist must sell themselves as a whole on the internet as seriously as possible[19], less their profile be tarnished. No more “shamans” or avatarism in splitting the body and soul on the Internet. Agamben’s nightmare; Hobbesian individualism taken to such an extreme that even the plane of immanence must become a mobius strip around the individual, and all signs and power must be linked to the abstracted self. The Lacanian gaze has its eyeballs ripped out and placed into a mannequin for which people now walk, delicately posting, typing, eyeing their friends – not as “tribes” but as signs. You re-connect everyone’s body and soul and use that to tie it back to the universal “reality”. You re-socialise them into the “serious” modernity.
This is where those in the panopticon sit. Dedicated to re-socialisation of those left behind. This oft is confused with two things however: Conspiratorial dogwhistles, and architecture.
From the very same Deleuze article I have been playing with, Faramelli and Piper’s Everybody Wants to be a Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis and the Digital Architecture of Fascism is a fascinating opposite end of my curation. The paper errs in the same way that I opened this entire article with, to come too late. To look at the lowercase-I internet, sublated into revolving around the profile, you do arrive at a “digital space is an autopoietic system that folds in users as heterogeneous objects, ensuing that desire remains trapped within feedback loops.” They show gaps, however, they show missing parts. In a talk of 4chan’s “bump” algorithm, they neglect the use of sage or auto-sage, and the cultural disciplining of necrobumping. Not mentioned, In one of the famous cases of doxxing -Zoe Quinn of Gamergate fame – in which users deliberately spammed sage, that is non-bumping posts to the 300 limit to make it slide and die – removing the dox and offending content. Instead of the psychoanalytic top down from culture controlling the ritual and play, we see the ritual creating the culture, it is the discipline that the authors at the end of the paper wish for. You cannot get it by “modelling”, you can not socially-engineer it either. This fight for the top level of culture by blaming the base play will allow even less understanding and more scapegoating.
So, you end up with articles like Hateware and the Outsourcing of Responsibility[20], and the scapegoating of Section 230. A scapegoating of fascism and latent Hitler particles in the form of Putnam’s social norms, and social capital. In which now you are held to virtues that are not virtues, but subjectivities of a grand mono culture. As such then the panopticon lifting itself up by its arms diagrammatically to the social plane then turns around and begins to chew its own legs off. Not forgetting that these very own diagramming tools still requires the exact same algorithms, the exact same platforms as those they wish to uplift. A company that will make “articles” for you, to couple and recreate these lines of flight until a new assemblage of “you” is created via the same avenues that both previous articles also point to proliferating fascism. To make your profile look good, other areas must be bought back “in line”; so Wikipedia then references from their own kind, but not representative, but of “possibilities” of the person’s profile. Regardless of temporal history. This plane of organisation sits gently on top, moderating the expression and the content; assemblages disguised as authentic bricolage. Temporality is added back to the non-temporal by way of re-written history and dissolved into abstractions of a new singular “truth”. In such, through social-means, the one-“truth”, many-“cultures” of the real-life western-colonialist thought is reaffirmed but under the guise of bricolage.
4) Sneed
Thus academia shall never understand these “alt right platforms” they wish to exterminate by holding them to a world of which they do not inhabit! Surely in all of the critical theory they allegedly read they would have gathered this? Knowing this weakness, there is a technique targeted groups can pull a philosophy uno-card. Where these sign-value laden “tribes” who get declared all sorts of labels become incomprehensible. In rebuke, these incomprehensible animate grammar are called “dogwhistles” as if these animate grammar is of some animalistic primal nature. “sneed” they’ll say, and the researcher doth recoil[21] and write how they can’t understand and need a model to penetrate. To play with Strauss’s use of Eleanor Smith Bown[22]; they had never been interested in the richness and diversity of the Internet worlds.
So you cannot, just as the European colonialists found, impose a universal for these savage deplorables. One may take their infighting across the groups as a sign of the lack of true fascist syncretism, but it is not that. Multinaturalism, these perspectives that one must encounter with are not on a syncretic network, but connected ontologically in an abstracted way. The discrepancies of the bare essence of living that the wayward BAP junkies find themselves in; stuck between baby-talk and selfhood trying to escape the very modelled engineered-ness of their (perceived) lives; Is found mirrored with the educated neo-reactionaries, attempting to correct the lack of “the vocabulary to easily define the typological options beyond state or corporation, and this itself is stark evidence of the poverty of our political theory.”[23] As Bratton – a leftist – argues. These perspectives are connected by tendrils of these abstracttions, the clawing for temporality which is the clinging on to older philosophies. In looking for mistaken language, in looking for a way out of the neoliberal hellhole, or capitalism or simply the banality of the state, they bricolage what they can. Turncoat philosophers, bookclubs, the very things mentioned in the workshop’s description. Academia itself has not been open to outside voices afterall, with classism, censorship, open-access fees versus Wiley & C’s destruction of libraries and archives. This leads to a struggle to form a 40+ citation analytic academic article that the workshop would deem “philosophy” or as a seminar of their own acceptable quality. These tribes, these worlds, they are bricolaeuring what they can scrounge while those in the panopticion can engineer their models with the latest of data scraping surveillance techniques, that can’t seem to process Pepe the Frog clearly.
That’s why I deem it delayed re-socialisation, rather than delayed industrialisation or informatisation. Delayed in the way that the left-behind deplorables might still look to “Uncle Ted”, and accuse these watchers as advocates of the State, because the effects of the panopticon are feclt but no technical way of accessing the same diagrammatic structure. Those who fell off the bandwagon, those who fell off the social “normie” line ,those who need to be re-socialised back “on the right track”. These people, and they are people, run very much against those who show their face and parade around on side platforms, those who use their face to espouse riots or “real” meanings are then thrown to the panopticion. Knowing full well they exist to socialise them as men covered in shit.
As I said before, in retort to the discipling sign-values, the savage speaks in babble, incoherent “ESL”, understandable only its peers as an animate, use-case version of the outsider’s university-engorged tongues. The abstracted grammar, the memetics, the syncretism all cannot be contained in a nomos. Contagions like the Sonichu curse; shatter and rebuild ontologies as survival. Lol, to lul, to lel, to kek – coming from World of Warcraft’s own parser/translator between races – every time the “real” used “lol” it evolved, protecting name-by-use and exchange across the Internet. Here we see how an off comment from Viveiros de Castro’s work on the arbitrary grammar of the Amerindian tribes is co-opted. There’s too many, too scattered and even in the light of a centralised, algorithmic internet: not even a “goon” can represent one tribe anymore; “those exceptions betray a sort of “impossibility” of presupposing a Whole, the inclusion in a closed set of all tokens of a conceptual “type.””[24]
You cannot by way of models, force a frog in a clown wig to be a unified nomos.
5) Aberrations
This is where one sits now, stuck in an aberration of false-perspectivism, a re-establishing of American imperialism by way of the social science, the very thing that it is supposedly against as part of its blood. One who wishes to examine, understand and interact with the alt-right or new-right must take themselves to their own sword and cut away what binds them to their own world.
In the era Profilicity, the “profile” becomes a war machine – to use a Deleuzian term – recodifying perspectives into the individual into the social plane of organisation; to a point at which any outside of the good-profile-validity cycle are instantly outed into an “other”. To put it more simply and to (ab)use Viveiros de Castro’s talk of the reversal of thinking from the western thought, is then used by those who live inside the diagram to label any such vocalising of the diagram to be ~conspiratorial thinking~. The irony here is that it re-asserts itself, a vampire castle almost but the panopticon lies slightly on the outside, sheltered within Foucauldian-Deleuzian diagram of power. It is amusing how one who has sat on the Internet for far too long, finds in Deleuze and Foucault’s writings on cartographies of power and infrastructure, for they had felt it the first time a moderator abused their power or an developer in a videogame world had abused their power. Those servers, those worlds, have also been colonialised into the panopticon – with extreme vigilance and surveillance on play, so culture can dictate the ritual.
But, oh yes, oh yes! I understand the powerful rational, multi-cultural, world would never lower itself into doing something so inferior as replicating power distribution diagrammatically throughout decentralised infrastructure taken from the very philosophy of which the right wing grifters and the faces accuse them of reading from! The jaguar’s beer is not a conspiracy, so why is Mastercard’s moralising considered one?
Placed on top of this then, straight from the panopticon’s mouth is the nature of the “unification” attempts. Nonsensical notions searching for a “alt-right” nomos or desperately hoping from academic workshops to create a philosophy of the alt-right. State and organisations will say that this is one group, set rallies with informants with those of the tribe to intercept, to record the faces of, suddenly the internet and reality simulate each other in virtualities that only those from the panopticon can explain to the masses. While the sponsors, who never lived through the true multi-naturalism of the Internet, who were outsiders to these tribes then get them exposed, put in jail and any descent is quashed.
That is perhaps the saddest notion of them all. For all the dreams of decentralisation, human modelling and perhaps finding something in the ontological anarchy of Internet (capital-I) that come out of manifestos like The Terraforming or all the great mass-media hopefuls who believed something like the Internet would blow up convention. We have not even seen Baudrillardian pessimism either, we have seen something worse. In the death and rebirth of temporality on the internet we’ve seen the quick execution of entire worlds and perspectives faster than any colonialism effort ever had. We see the hunger of the social, hunger of the socialisation even of abstract planes ground up feed back to us. When you want to look at these online right-wing worlds, when you want to see their philosophy of looking back, you must remember to sever yourself from your profile.
Remember, the Internet is a different world, it doesn’t matter or as Ryan Broderick puts it, in all his too-late glory: “The internet no longer prioritizes mass appeal. What’s popular isn’t viral and what’s viral isn’t popular…Or it’s that streaming platforms don’t — and can’t — reflect real interest…Either way, things are different now. And it has always been, ahem, low key cringe to talk about internet stuff out loud.”[25]
Else you’ll be championing how environmentalism means one cannot exchange money away from the federal banks, giving the state more private economical control away from the lower classes but then still selling stacks of disposable sign-value junk made by the hands of which cannot have their passport, going through multiple countries burning the skies.
It will come to all, as it has even after the great enclosure, as it has come for environmentalists that Latour and Lasch promised would save us; because the growth of these type of model-for vertical mechanisms will always consume.
Perhaps “worlds” are just echo-chambers, leading to radicalisation, but culture grows where people play games and form rituals; from crab-bucket incels on incels.is; to the gossip girls on Kiwifarms or Lipstick Alley, to zero-covid reddits or even fanfiction live journal groups.
This is what the culture wars forgot, we use to play games, not fight for lines of capitalism.
This is what the culture wars forgot, politics was disciplined by tribe not by the hegemon.
[1] Taken from https://www.philosophie.tu-darmstadt.de/misrik/veranstaltungen/ws_philosophie_des_rechtsextremismus/english.de.jsp
[2] Wording taking from Levi-Strauss’s Wild Thought
[3] Utopian as in what was expressed in early zines, not the democratic-political utopias that are formulated in Majid’s The Cultural Imaginary of the Internet: Virtual Utopias and Dystopias (2014)
[4] See Severo and Romele’s The Economy of the Digital Gift: From Socialism to Sociality Online for expansion on this or Nachtwey, O., & Schaupp, S. (2024). The valorization of interactions. Gift exchange, power and value creation on digital platforms. Big Data & Society, 11(2).
[5] Taken from an infamous news clip where news anchors confused photoshop and the meme seriously:
[6] In reference to an example from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics p.52 surrounding Soul vs Body perspectives between colonialists and Amerindian peoples.
[7] In reference to a series of lectures given by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro at Cambridge compiled in Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere
[8] Used Bourdieu’s configuration, not Putnam’s
[9] This is used with EVC’s understanding to western universalism in On Models and Examples: Engineers and Bricoleurs in the Anthropocene
[10] From Simon Evan’s talk on memes from the Philosophy of Meme conference
[11] Trans. Suzanne Fletcher and Catherine Benarnou. Lecture delivered in Milan for Colloquium ‘Psychoanalysis and Politics’ (December 1973). First published in Semiotext(e), ‘Anti-Oedipus’ issue, 2.2 (1977).
[12] For example, Joshua Moon’s write up about institutional connections across the internet: https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/online-censorships-institutional
[13] A re-formulation of Heidegger’s teleological work, and the nature of Ideas -> ideas
[14] The European Handbook of Hate Memes is oft mocked for this reason and as a reason why it was circulated so heavily.
[15] Whyte, C. (2020). Of commissars, cults and conspiratorial communities: The role of countercultural spaces in “democracy hacking” campaigns. First Monday, 25(4).
[16] Regian (2024). How I Obtained 33 Million Reddit Karma. [online] YouTube. Available at:
[17] The Editors, (2019). Ideologies of Delayed Informatization. [online] The American Sun. Available at: https://theamericansun.com/2019/08/27/ideologies-of-delayed-informatization/.
[18] For example, Watkin et al’s Building social capital to counter polarization and extremism? A comparative analysis of tech platforms' official blog posts uses Putnam’s configuration of social-capital as a form of on-the-track discipline of the users of the platform.
[19] Example taken from You and Your Profile Identity After Authenticity
[20] Brown, J.J. and Hennis, G. (2020) ‘Hateware and the Outsourcing of Responsibility’, in Digital Ethics. 1st edn. Routledge, pp. 17–32.
[21] Cardposting (2024). Dogwhistles 101: Sneed. [online] YouTube. Available at:
[22] Wild Thought P.7
[23] The Terrforming: P.32
[24] Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2019. “On Models and Examples. Engineers and Bricoleurs in the Anthropocene.” Current Anthropology 60 (20): 296-308.
[25] Broderick R. (2024). Trump is weird. [online] Garbage Day. Available at: https://www.garbageday.email/p/trump-weird