The Nightmare Forum
Hell isn't a place, it's an architecture
[CW: discussions of the war in Palestine]
They did not learn then, and have not since, that war breeds only war.
C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War
We’re in a new and terrifying era of “just saying shit” online. As the horrific events of the past days have echoed in the decrepit halls of online discourse, there have been a lot of people straightforwardly justifying mass murder. There’s no other way to put it, really. Many Zionists and anti-Zionists alike have united to say with one voice: it’s fine to kill innocent people with guns and bombs. I think that’s cowardly, disgusting bullshit from anyone, and the people suggesting it should be deeply ashamed.
So let me just say this as straightforwardly as possible: if you thinking killing innocent people and dragging their bodies through the street is anything other than a grotesque, monstrous evil from which nothing good can grow, you’re not on the side of liberation. You’re lost to the world of righteousness, and you should apologize and reflect deeply on how you got here. It is vital to say also that Palestine should be, must be, free, and all of this and worse has been inflicted on Palestinians for decades upon decades. Many things are true here at the same time. Above all, we must continue to insist over and over again in all the ways we can that none of this had to happen, and that means it doesn’t have to continue.
A lot of this murder apologia has been happening in online forums. I discuss those communist/socialist pro-Palestine voices here because I find them so disturbing, but Sam Kriss published a piece yesterday that addresses them better and more thoroughly. I found his piece cathartic, and if you’re also chewing on how/why/that people ostensibly invested in liberation could end up endorsing indiscriminate violence against children, I recommend it. I’d also suggest you take a look at this piece by Sharon Astyk, if you’d like a Jewish anti-Zionist perspective, which you should.
In the wake of these events, the media environment has changed overnight. From the pages of the Times to corners of every social media site, there voices pushing for the extermination of Palestinians with rhetoric every bit as bloodthirsty and racist as that of the Israeli defense minister who called Palestinians “human animals.” How does this happen every time? Is two decades really long enough for everyone to forget how fucking insane American discourse was after 9/11? Even now we’re riding a wave of anti-Russian sentiment that considers their lives expendable. I shudder to consider the scale of the violence “western” polities will tolerate against Palestinians in the coming months. And how might others in the region respond? Does anyone think this unchecked bloodlust can do anything but make the situation worse?
It is clear to me from watching so-called socialists downplay or condone the mass murder of festival-goers that regardless of the extent to which these people actually believe the shit they’re saying, there are clear discursive incentives for doing so, at least on social media. They have a “side,” and since their political articulations are already little more than an in-group moral purity test, anything that makes their side look bad must be necessary; good even. This is a classic case of overidentifying with a discursive position instead of speaking from one’s principles, and the dynamics of internet forums only make it worse.
Posting online is, for many people around the world, the sole way they feel they can participate in broader conversations of importance. How many people today have access to an offline public forum that even registers their input? How many offline forums for discussion are there, even, and how many would be open to the kinds of rhetoric and ideas so prevalent among socialists? In lieu of public spheres in which one can have a meaningful impact, people look for validation, confirmation, and discussion online—sometimes compulsively, toxically. That’s to say nothing of the many people who go online just to lurk and have takes and “content” served up algorithmically.
So, posting is a cope. We knew that, but many people, whether they’d admit to it or it not, behave as though what they say online will move the needle on real events; as though speaking into the internet means speaking to a representative sample of the real world.1 We know, too, that this therapeutic pantomime of speaking and being heard only creates more harvestable data and better targeted ads while we willfully expose ourselves to the machinery of manufactured consent, the primary sources of propaganda and disinformation.
Compared to social media, I obviously prefer blogs, newsletters, video essays, and magazine articles; I think there’s a field of real possibility in the kind of ideas that come from high-effort, idiosyncratic long-form media, but these have their limitations as well. There exists no serviceable online analog for having conversations with real people about things that really matter. In the end, we can only speak to people who will listen to us. We must judge ourselves not by our reach or our imagined influence but by the things we say and, more importantly, the things we actually do.
You must feel in your soul that there is very little remaining about the internet that isn’t actively anti-social. And I get it, we’re almost all still here for one reason or another. I’ve been hate-reading the New York Times for many years now, even leaving comments.2 I read Reddit just to see what people are saying and get into vicious arguments to blow off steam. Instagram, Twitter—it’s all the same.3 We want to know what’s going on, to be in discursive communities, and to share jokes and movie references. But the internet isn’t the future, it’s the past.
Perhaps I’ve taken a weird tack in this essay, to go from Palestine to the failures of the internet. I’m still trying to sort all of this out. What I want to communicate here is that we have been sold on a fantasy of participating in the world that is fundamentally harmful to us, one that incentivizes behaviors we should consider unacceptable and rewards those who provoke rage, grief, and abuse. For many if not most of us, the occupation is an emotional-discursive event playing out in our hearts and online. We aren’t close to anyone on the ground and don’t have the power to change what’s happening, so we go online and take solace in the ability to say shit and be heard. We deserve better forums.
For my part, I have some perhaps trite advice. Call your friends. Write them. Have book clubs and discussion groups. Organize a reading or a live music show. Edit a zine. Find out where other socialists in your area are meeting and go join them. Grieve together and talk about what you’re going to do for each other and for Palestine. I’m saying these things to myself as much as anyone else. We are in dark times, and they are only going to get darker. We need to reclaim the real spaces in which we can connect and organize with one another.4
At the risk of being dramatic, your life is a way of happening in and with the world. The way you live your life is your life. And if our collective ways of living make up our society, then we all need to start taking them more seriously.
The internet is only representative of the kind of people who think going online and saying shit is a good idea. Definitionally, these people don't have anything better to do. That should be reason enough ignore what they think and try never to become one of them.
I’m a clown
I didn't include TikTok because I have never used it. I’m certain you can add it to the list though.
While I’m mostly talking about pubic forums here, I do think we need to renew our relationships to local media and physical books, magazines, and journals. The form of the internet is itself a huge problem that can’t be solved with more or different internet. Even the newsletter, which is a form I really like, is a medium given to the destructive self-optimization of the attention economy.