That post got me pretty-well ostracized from the communities to which it was directed, which was a bummer. But, at least, helped me get a better shape of where the boundaries are between anarchism, Americanism, and COVID.

Anyway, I’m not here (just) to complain about the past. Yesterday a friend directed me to an online conversation about anarchism, suggesting I might want to contribute my perspective. I took the time to write out something, but then! Learned the rules of the platform meant I wasn’t permitted to contribute. Fair enough: moderated conversations are an important part of good discourse.

The friend suggested I use the piece as an excuse to dust off this newsletter, so, I here we go. If you enjoy this, consider “liking” the post or even leaving a comment. Right now I don’t really have any real measure of who reads these, if they like them, or if they’d prefer I write about something else. If you want more newsletters like this, just let me know! I’m a very talkative person so it is enjoyable for me to do it, I just don’t want to clutter y’all’s inboxes with Yet Another Anarchist Perspective.

There are some things which are important to note about anarchism in philosophy and political theory.

First, there is a difference between what is usually called philosophical anarchism and what is usually called political anarchism.

Philosophical anarchists argue that the state does not have legitimacy. Legitimacy, here, means something like a right to rule. A state may be powerful enough to rule, and may even be useful in various ways, without thereby having the moral authority it claims for itself. Robert Paul Wolff is a philosophical anarchist in this sense, as is A. John Simmons. Philosophical anarchists are committed to the claim that the state lacks legitimate authority. They are not, simply by that fact, committed to the claim that the state should be immediately dismantled, or that the collapse of the state would be desirable under present conditions. Simmons, for example, thinks the state lacks legitimacy while also thinking that dismantling it under current conditions would not be advisable.

Political anarchists start somewhere else. They are philosophers, organizers, theorists, or practitioners committed to anti-state forms of political and social organization. Political anarchists often are philosophical anarchists, but political anarchism is not merely the denial of state legitimacy. It is a positive tradition of thinking and practice concerned with how people can organize life without centralized coercive rule. That tradition includes figures such as Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Malatesta, Goldman, and many others. Anarcho-communism is probably the most familiar form in theoretical discussions, but there are also individualist, mutualist, syndicalist, insurrectionary, anti-colonial, Indigenous, and other anarchist tendencies.

It is also important to say that political anarchists do not usually think statelessness should be achieved by any means whatsoever, nor do they necessarily celebrate the mere fall of a government. A bombed-out state, a failed state, or a state hollowed out by debt, war, foreign intervention, and extractive markets is not thereby an anarchist society. Most serious anarchist traditions argue for revolutionary transformation: the building of different social institutions, forms of coordination, modes of care, systems of accountability, and material conditions under which the abolition of the state would actually mean liberation rather than abandonment.

This is why anarchists have historically been associated not only with anti-state critique, but also with mutual aid, syndicalism, union organization, labor struggle, cooperative infrastructure, collective self-defense, and other forms of direct social organization. The point is not simply to negate the state. The point is to ask what kinds of order people are already capable of producing without command from above.

So, with that distinction in place: Wolff’s argument is about authority. If autonomy requires that I take responsibility for my own judgment, then the state’s claim to legitimate authority is always morally suspect. That is a serious philosophical argument, but it is not the whole of anarchism.

As a political anarchist — my own politics tend to get labeled something like Indigenous insurrectionary anarcho-nihilism, which is a lot of words — I would start from a different place.

The strongest anarchist argument is not that the absence of the state automatically produces peace. That would be a weak argument. A collapsed state, a bombed-out state, a colonial state whose institutions have been hollowed out by war, debt, foreign intervention, and extractive markets, is not an anarchist society. Somalia is not a clean experiment in anarchism. It is a case of state collapse under specific historical conditions.

Serious anarchism is not a theory of vacancy. It is a theory of non-state order.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid matters here because he argued against the idea that coercive competition is the only real principle of social organization. Cooperation, reciprocity, and mutual dependence are also ordering forces. Malatesta makes the political point clearly: anarchism is not the absence of organization, but organization without government. Colin Ward says something similar in practical terms: anarchism is already present wherever people solve problems directly, through voluntary coordination, without waiting for command from above.

So the question is not “state or disorder?” The question is: what kind of order, produced by whom, and responsive to what?

This is where I think the state is not merely coercive, but metaphysically malformed.

Before any action occurs, there is a field of possible continuations. Several things could happen. A conflict could be repaired, escalated, ignored, ritualized, displaced, punished, transformed. A piece of land could be held in common, enclosed as property, treated as kin, extracted from, restored, abandoned. A person could be understood as a neighbor, a worker, a citizen, a criminal, a relative, a threat, a guest. The situation is not yet exhausted by any one of these determinations.

Once one continuation is actualized, it leaves traces. Those traces become memory, precedent, injury, title, law, debt, obligation, archive. In that basic sense, the future comes first and the past comes after: not chronologically, but metaphysically. Possibility precedes settled fact; settled fact then leaves a past.

The state reverses this order. It begins from stabilized traces: law, property title, border, office, citizenship, criminal record, jurisdiction, census, contract, precedent. It then projects those past determinations onto situations whose possibilities have not yet been exhausted. This is why James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is so important. The state makes society legible by simplifying it into categories it can administer. But those simplifications are not neutral. They cut into living situations and force them to appear as cases of already recognized forms.

That is what I mean when I say the state is disordering. Not that every state action produces immediate chaos. Rather, the state imposes the order of the already-settled onto the not-yet-settled. It governs becoming by means of archives.

This also explains why anarchists often reject the assumption that the state is the source of order. Much of what makes life livable happens before state recognition: care, kinship, repair, subsistence, neighborly coordination, informal accountability, mutual defense, shared use, customary obligation. The state often arrives after these relations already exist, redescribes them in its own terms, and then claims to have produced the order it has merely captured or distorted.

Pierre Clastres is helpful here because he refused the assumption that stateless peoples are simply societies that have failed to develop the state. In Society Against the State, he argued that some societies actively organize against the emergence of centralized coercive power. Indigenous and anti-colonial thinkers push this point further. Audra Simpson’s work on refusal, Glen Coulthard’s critique of recognition politics, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s grounded resurgence, and Klee Benally’s anti-colonial anarchism all show why being recognized by the state is not the same as being free, ordered, or repaired. Recognition can be a technique of capture.

So when someone asks, “Without the state, won’t there be violence?” I think the first answer is: there is already violence, and much of it is state-administered, state-authorized, or state-rendered invisible. The state does not abolish violence. It classifies violence. It legitimizes some of it, criminalizes some of it, hides some of it in procedure, and calls the result order.

A serious anarchist answer does not deny the problem of violence. Malatesta did not deny it. Goldman did not deny it. Gelderloos does not deny it. The question is whether centralized authority is actually the best response to violence, or whether it often preserves the conditions that make violence durable. Anarchist practice points instead toward direct accountability, mutual defense, restorative and transformative justice, federated coordination, and forms of life that reduce dependence on coercive institutions.

The strongest version of anarchism, then, is not “people are good, so abolish the state.” It is closer to this:

Human beings already produce order through relation, habit, care, conflict, custom, memory, and direct coordination. The state captures some of that activity, freezes it into administrative forms, monopolizes legitimate force, and then claims to be the source of order itself. Anarchism denies that claim. It says that order does not begin with command. Order begins in the open field of possible relations, before the state has reduced those relations to cases, files, borders, titles, and crimes.

Remember: If you liked this, try and let me know! Specifically I’m curious, I guess, about how often y’all would want to receive an email with this kind of content. Thanks!

When I saw what the piece was, I was hopeful: “On white COVID-cautious queers, and why I don’t fuck with them,” being pushed to me by a white anarchist? Was this going to be the piece that finally explains how the way most white queers are COVID-cautious engages in the same abandonment that open COVID-deniers do?

Well… yes, but not in the way I’d hoped.

I’ll be blunt: the original newsletter on white COVID-cautious queers is eugenicist misogynist white supremacist propaganda. Yes: even as much as it accuses others of white supremacy, it is white supremacist: It naturalizes mass harms (disproportionately onto non-white people), privatizes survival (mostly into white lives), and stigmatizes collective care. All of these, especially the scapegoating, are moves of supremacist rhetoric.

So let me be clear: If you liked this piece, if it spoke to you, then you agree with eugenicist, misogynist, white supremacist logics, if they’re packaged certain ways.

There’s really no other way to interpret things. And I know calling someone a genocidal white supremacist is not the polite way to start a piece that is intended to change anyone’s mind, but some things cannot be said kindly and truthfully at the same time, and sometimes the point isn’t to change anyones mind. But, if you consider yourself anything but a white supremacist, this should have been so obvious it hurts, and if it wasn’t, it should hurt to be told and you should care to learn how you got tricked.

—

According to the original newsletter, my approach to COVID, which comes from an Indigenous, disabled, queer body, is white supremacy, and her actions, which come from a white settler body, are not.

The actions I take are, in the original newsletter, repeatedly called white supremacist and crazy - specifically, hysterical, a word with more use in Modern English as a way to pathologize women than anything else.

And I want to make it clear this isn’t me going out and looking for a fight. The original newsletter is something that was put in my face by the willing choice of a white settler in my wider network to, on a platform where they knew it could be broadcast, say, “I like this piece.” (I’m pretty sure they shared it because they got COVID after going to an outdoor pop music concert and were trying to not feel shame for that consequence, and I suspect the original newsletter is written because the author is mad local-to-them anarchist zinefests requiring masks this year, a reversal of policy from the past couple years. I think it’s a failure to not bring that positionality into their own social media performances, the way I bring my own positionality into mine.)

I’ve been writing about intellectualism and platforms and their harms in a lot of ways across different essays recently, and I just need to highlight that this is not abstract, but a real problem that me and others deal with: platforms route genocidal propaganda that misrepresents us and devalues our lives straight into our lap, and its often a direct result of white settlers anxiously engaging in bad forms of intellectualism in front of an audience that causes it.

—

Clearly, the original piece is convincing. Too convincing for, even, people who work professionally in writing and publishing and themselves have made a career out of propagandizing ideas into the mainstream.

So I’m going to try and break down what it does, how it does it, what theories explain in more detail how this can be harmful, and finally, explain how platforms normalize this way of thinking.

And, just so it’s clear this is not (just) me writing a polemic for my own clout:

I’m going to be sending this essay to my anarchist friend when I am finished with it. I legitimately blame them for exposing me to fascist propaganda, and I’ll be asking them to keep me up to date on what steps they’re taking to undo the damage of that exposure, and prevent a similar thing from happening again.

How to Turn COVID into White Inevitability

The original newsletter uses several mechanisms to accomplish its point, all of which can be more readily seen as white supremacist or otherwise kyriarchal by using what’s become a fairly standard way I look at contemporary social dynamics and systems: necropolitics for the system, geontologies for the structure, and cruel optimism for the function.

It’s a part of life, with necropolitics

In the original essay, COVID infection is portrayed as just another everyday risk, like falling down, having your heart broken, or catching mono. (How rom-com!)

By declaring COVID “part of life,” the newsletter moves the crisis away from the realm of political abandonment and into the realm of personal fate, or bad luck.

This normalizes what was understood to be the crisis, mass exposure, by turning what could be understood as a political decision (to withdraw protection, to refuse regulatory standards, to privatize care) into a natural condition of existence.

By doing so, the newsletter does necropolitical pedagogy: teaching readers to accept living in a world that will kill them as maturity, realism… even liberation.

Necropolitics, a concept from Achille Mbembe, looks at how power and systems of power decide who is exposed to death and under what conditions through the administration of what Mbembe calls “death-worlds:” spaces where life is systematically cheapened, where survival is contingent rather than supported. Unlike biopolitics, a concept from Michel Foucault, which organizes life through regulation and optimization, necropolitics governs through abandonment: letting some populations be continually exposed to premature death.

When the original newsletter narrates catching COVID as “rolling a 1 on the dice,” it strips the disease of its politics and reframes it as chance. But that chance is structured, by workplaces without sick leave, schools without filters, public events without masking.

Necropolitics thrives in exactly this space: the shifting from political abandonment to natural risk, as readers are trained to stop seeing death as avoidable or systemic and start seeing it as inevitable.

But it isn’t equally inevitable. Disabled, Indigenous, poor, immunocompromised folk like me are already allocated into the margins of society and life. When COVID infection becomes normalized, we’re among the first groups to experience the consequences.

Thus, calling the infection neutral, from a position of white settlerism, is itself very unneutral: it’s offering up bodies that aren’t yours to death, for the sake of a story that lets the privileged feel more comfortable treating their choice to genocide others as rationalist inevitability.

It’s grown-up realism, with economies of abandonment

The original newsletter explicitly reframes “harm reduction” as an individual practice: wear your own mask, negotiate with your own friends, but expecting a public body to negotiate is “white supremacist,” and anything that looks like public action is “purity politics:” ventilation, mask norms, collective standards.

Notably there is no space in the original piece for the idea that these things could be decided upon and enacted, consensually, by a community: community does not actually have a way to exist, in the worldview of the original newsletter: any attempts to do things communally look too close to “white supremacist purity,” to be understood any other way.

What’s left in the haphazard web of possibilities is private optimization. The newsletter presents this as the only honest stance toward COVID: solidarity and collective care are dismissed as illusions of the early pandemic, a temporary “we keep each other safe” moment that is gone forever.

This is exactly what Elizabeth Povinelli explains in Economies of Abandonment (2011): how late liberal governance works not just through repression, but through withdrawing infrastructures of support. That is, instead of moving toward more comprehensive care toward more people, systems now distribute responsibility onto families, households, and individuals.

Crucially, this withdrawal is often narrated as freedom, choice, or gritty realism: people are taught, and teach themselves, to see abandonment as either inevitable, or an opportunity to demonstrate resilience and maturity.

Which is how all of this is framed in the original newsletter, through mechanisms that overlap with necropolitical movements: if anyone thinks that any of the values people were discussing at the start of the pandemic were anything but childish expressions of fear, they haven’t developed the maturity that the original newsletter holds.

First, I don’t value “maturity” as a good thing all on its own, and I’m usually suspicious of people who do. Kids are pretty great, and they have great ideas. But this isn’t an essay (directly) about youth liberation.

So more importantly: what is so mature about calling people who believe in things like math and air filters “hysterical?” Because that’s all that the newsletter really does here: say that wanting to use math and tools to solve problems is childish and hysterical, because the mature (manly) solution is to simply experience problems with a tough-guy attitude.

Sorry, I’m not trying to be flippant or mean here, but it’s hard to seriously engage with a text that presents “white suburban Boomer dad living with cancer because real men don’t go to the doctor” as some sort of liberatory brash white queerness without an ounce of self-reflection on how “white” might be the common factor here.

Anyway.

It’s bad to work together, with immunitas and communitas

In the original newsletter, it is repeatedly stated that one-way masking with an N95 is “actually really good protection,” and that this should be enough.

From this basis, the newsletter frames collective standards, like an event requiring masks, or designing spaces to accommodate their most vunerable members, as “white supremacist purity politics” and “surveillance.”

In other words: you wear a mask, I won’t wear mine, and no one can expect more.

But the contexts the newsletter points to as white supremacist surveillance… are often the sort of events hosted by communities, for themselves: not the sort of state-organized mandates that is often meant when people discuss white supremacy and surveillance in the same breath.

Robert Esposito’s work on immunitas and communitas are a great frame for understanding what’s going on here. In his work, Esposito contrasts communitas (the obligations and exposures that bind us together) with immunitas (the protections that exempt us from those obligations). In his framing, “immunization,” is a political, not simply medical, mechanism: it names the way liberal modernity preserves the individual by suspending their responsibility to others.

By rebranding shared obligations as authoritarian or hysterical, the piece pathologizes communitas, leaving immunitas as the only possible route.

Immunitary reasoning sounds superficially liberatory - “you do you, I’ll do me” - but it is profoundly eugenic in effect.

Those with the least access to immunitary tools (well-fitting masks, vaccines, post-exposure care) are forced to absorb the risks that others have refused to communally mitigate (air filters, accommodations).

In a necropolitical world already structured by racialized and ableist exposure, immunitarian privitization serves to magnify inequality.

In practice - in reality, this means: approaches to COVID mitigation that choose immunitarian mechanisms over communitarian mechanisms are eugenicist and white supremacist.

By celebrating one-way masking as maturity, the newsletter teachs readers to treat choosing white supremacy as a personal achievement, and a milestone of maturity.

That’s just really fucking gross, and I hope the similarity to that stereotypical Boomer-brained way of thinking is becoming apparent: celebrate racist closed-mindedness and misogynist abandonment as enlightened maturity.

In the next phase I’ll look at how a young white queer can even feel good about believing all their neighbors should die. (Look, this many words in, I’m struggling to maintain a veil of courtesy. I had to take a day to be less pissed about this whole thing, and I’m still pretty pissed.)

It’s romantic to suffer, with cruel optimism

In the original newsletter, risk is not just naturalized. It is praised and romanticized, and ultimately, formed into the distinction between what makes someone alive and dead, reinforcing the use of a necropolitical distinction.

The original newsletter says, “being alive involves mistakes,” “live loudly,” “take risks.”

(As an aside, I have an essay I failed to release due to disability flare-ups from several months back that looks at how “quiet gays,” will be the next facet of queerdom to be targeted for attack, and from within our own communities, and well… here we are.)

The newsletter portrays communities not communicating with themselves (about their own health standards) in favor of choosing the dominant immunitas as bravery, maturity, and joy.

In Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant defines “cruel optimism,” as an attachment to something that seems to promise flourishing, but actually undermines the conditions of life. Generally, optimism can be seen as a mechanism that mediates hope, habit, and identity, but when these relations harm, the optimism turns cruel.

And the original newsletter, at the least, does not deny that COVID can disable or kill…

…but those harms are romanticized as the necessary foundation of a full life. In doing so, it reframes abandonment as a necessary step in living fully, which is described as participation in the very forms of of life that are killing people.

And again, doing so quite unevenly: the optimism of a good life, as necropolitical immunitas, disproportionately harms non-white non-settler communities.

It’s good to suffer, with geontologies

Elizabeth Povinelli gives us another frame here, with geontologies, which is a way that the dominant social order sorts things into Life (animate, vibrant, good) and Nonlife (inert, substance, material, bad).

Nancy Krieger’s work in social epidemiology has demonstrated that health outcomes are shaped by embodiment: the way social powers (racism, poverty, labor conditions, environmental harm) is literally incorporated into bodies.

And Merrill Singer’s work in medical anthropology gives us a frame for understanding COVID in this terms: not as a pandemic, but a syndemic: when multiple epidemics interact with and worsen each other. (i.e. COVID + asthma from environmental racism + lack of healthcare from classism).

Taken together, we can understand the original newsletter as reframing COVID as yet another part of the Nonlife that makes Life possible… for some, remembering necropolitics.

The newsletter universalizes risk: “Being alive involves mistakes. Nothing in life is zero risk.” It compares COVID to everyday accidents or infections anyone might get - ignoring the necropolitical bias of these “accidents” and infections, and instead indulges in a geontology that paints all of that as the structure we must endure to have Life.

Universalizing the risk of COVID, along with so many other non-universal risks, actively erases racial and other vulnerabilities. That the newsletter exemplifies the responses of non-white communities, while actively erasing the conditions of that responses, flattens us into a prop for its own white supremacy.

It’s good to assimilate, with economies of abandonment (again)

The original newsletter’s representation of “harm reduction” is incredibly wrong and harmful. It suggests a litany of personal optimizations: wear your own masks, buy expensive testing equipment, negotiate your own risks, negotiate others lack of negotiation.

Dean Spade, in Mutual Aid, gives a pretty good explanation of how harm reduction and similar programs emerged from grassroots collectives, often focused on drug use and AIDs. These programs were built as communal infrastructure in resistance of state abandonment, not individuated copes designed to make abandonment feel good or survivable.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, in Care Work, does a good job explaining how disability justice requires planned collective infrastructures of care, not reactive ad hoc individual survivalism. Mia Mingus’ theories on access intimacy can help express how COVID mitigations relate to this: collective infrastructure relies on a trust that others will anticipate and share in the labor of providing access to the collective infrastructure without constant renegotiation of right to access.

And Alison Kafer helps show how these conditions can be a healthier basis for less fascistic forms of hope than cruel optimism, by discussing disability politics as a reimagination of future through access and interdependence, not exclusion and abandonment.

Disability justice insists that access cannot depend on individualized negotiation: it must be built into infrastructure, policies, and norms.

But this is exactly what the original essay dismisses as purity politics, impossible, hysterical.

Instead, it suggests that “harm reduction” is to personally reduce the harm you experience, from a cruel optimism to consumerism as authentic living, by displacing it via necropolitical systems onto those already most marginalized, and use geontological thinking to make sure it feels good to abandon them.

It’s good to know, with neurotic academics and influencers

So the original newsletter states repeatedly that it’s not written by an expert in any of the fields its discussing. And then immediately begins to make the sorts of assertions and judgements that only an expert in the field can authoritatively make.

The newsletter pulls together a pseudo-bibliography that blends a couple studies with various forms of commercial content (journalism, social media, zines) into a collage that’s used like a Magic Eye picture to generate a single, universal conclusion about risk.

It’s a pretty sweeping conclusion from a pretty broad lack of analysis, and in the context of a relatively new Substack from someone who’d previously written non-analytical letters about their personal relationships, it’s hard to accept without examining why the piece might exist in the first place.

(My first essay about COVID, COVID Broke America, was five years ago, and spoke directly on how social media platforms were accelerating the adoption of late liberal philosophies by white settlers.)

I think Vik Loveday’s “neurotic academic” and Mari Lehto’s “neurotic influencer” provide a useful way of looking at what a lot of going on with people’s social media use, and I think a lot of this is most-amplified on Substack, for a mix of social and technical reasons that can be explored elsewhere.

Vik Loveday’s “neurotic academic” looks at how, in neoliberal knowledge economies, the academic self is governed by anxiety and self-entrepreneurialism: they must constantly produce legible outputs, narrating their own competence, and take personal responsibility for managing the precarity of their research. They’re an anxiously productive authority performance, shaped by academic metrics and institutional expectations rather than disciplinary rigor.

And Lehto’s “neurotic influencer” looks at how influencer labor is organized by “feeling rules,” in which anxiety is both content and technique: an ambivalent, gendered performance that must appear transparent, caring, and literate to sustain credibility and engagement. This figure borrows academic cues (citations, caveates) to execute an affective performance of authority for followers and platforms.

(An aside: I am very aware that’s what I do here and my personal website shares some research notes where I explore this in more freedom.)

The original newsletter perfectly performs the Loveday/Lehto neuroses: anxious transparency and audience reassurance take the form of a performed literacy that feels trustworthy, but without meeting the standards of “true” and “trust” in the fields in which it claims to exist.

I hope the rhyme between phenomena here is clear: look at how standards are rejected across contexts: air quality itself, and studying air quality. Look at how these standards are rejected using the same logic each time: if something threatens a means of attaching to optimism - a way of knowing that some thing in the present means some thing in the future - it is negated by saying the optimism is necessary for “real” participation in the “real” world, which is implicitly that world constructed by this neurotic complex of not-knowing-but-feeling.

Now, it’s might be useful to explain how the newsletter fails to meet the criteria of a good analysis.

• Cherry-picking and overgeneralization:

  • Aerosol and viability studies done in narrow contexts are lifted into sweeping global claims like “lingering indoor risk is wrong” or “outdoors = clearly low risk.”

  • Meanwhile, contradictory studies are dismissed as hysteria.

  • Good analysis would say the contradiction means there’s no global conclusion

  • Instead, evidence that doesn’t support the conclusion is dismissed.

  • That’s the opposite of good analysis

• Conflating detectability, viability, and infectious doses:

  • Throughout the newsletter, it toggles between detectable, viable, and infectious, as if they were equivalent terms. They are not.

    • Even within aerosol chemistry, time-varying viability and dose-response depend on conditions that are not controlled in everyday venues (ventilation rates, occupancy, activity time, CO2 as proxy, filtration).

    • A filtered handful of studies does not eliminate the variability of environment or the legitimacy of a risk assessment that accepts that variability.

• Asymmetric uncertainty handling.

  • Any place the evidence is uncertain or mixed, the newsletter decides in favor of convenience. That’s… simply directional bias; a softer form of the outright dismissal that occurred earlier.

    • Additionally, the dismissal is often reasoned based on white supremacist, including Sinophobic, reasoning.

• Category error about harm reduction:

  • Point estimates about relative risk are used to claim it is immoral for others to ask for things. A person can use science to guide their own decisions, but it doesn’t guide the ethics of interpersonal communication.

  • Literally: people asking you things does not hurt you, even if you say science provides an answer to the thing they’ve asked.

What this performance does, politically, is police who counts as reasonable (”science-backed realists” like the author, who, I really can’t emphasize enough, are not backed by the science), in a context where the author themselves cannot be policed by the standards of the things they are using to police others.

And having staged “science says,” as some foundation for a civics lesson in good morals, the piece can speak with authority about COVID-cautious people, and encourages others in their judgement: cautious people are ignorant and immoral, not uncertain or experiencing different things.

It’s good to cite, with citing for containment

This abuse of citation is something I named in Citing for Containment. The citations and studies aren’t there to engage with the inquiry they’re original a part of, or carry that inquiry into new spaces. Instead, they exist to process a decision that is already made into a form that can circulate as a commodity.

The original essay strings together a hodge-podge of sources, detached from their fields, their methods, and arranges them to build a feeling of depth, (”look! studies!”), to concludes: do what you want.

But… there’s no disclosed analytical method, there’s no systematic review: they just all happen to say exactly what the author claims they say. (The sources, in fact, do not all support the authors claims.)

There’s no acknowledgement that COVID science is hetereogenous and evolving, and that COVID mitigation science is its own field, informed not just by virology and airflow, but actuarial and other risk sciences.

The function is effectively one of containment: readers are precluded from learning about alternatives, because a singular stance is presented as the expertly-, scientifically-determined answer.

This type of citation doesn’t just miseducate: it trains readers to believe that answers are determinable, and once determined, immutable: once something is formatted as “proven,” or “debunked,” then engagement simply means accepting the conclusions provided.

This massively reshapes the horizon of political imagination. Instead of imagining air standards, readers learn to admire their own coping and dismiss community as unscientific at best, and “puritan hysteria,” if they accept the newsletter in its own idiom. (Also, when did it become acceptable to call people, let alone constructed demographics, “hysterical,” again? I remember that was seen as quite gauche just a few years ago…)

Anyway, to put it simply: The citations in the newsletter are not used in the reasoning, at all: the reasoning is simply, “nothing is zero risk, you do you, I do me.” The citations are there to make accepting that feel good, to feel reasonable, to feel unassailable, regardless of how practically genocidal a statement it is.

It’s good to confuse, with governing by confusion

And like I wrote in Governing by Confusion, power systems today don’t simply dominate, but stabilize themselves, and one means they do this is by inducing confusion in the populations they manage.

One way this confusion is induced is by performing intellectualism. In the original newsletter, this intellectualism is framed around:

• a thesis, that COVID-cautious people are holding back people like the author

• an antithesis, that COVID-cautious people are hysterical purists

• and a sublation: fuck those people.

This antagonism doesn’t resolve: it churns. Readers affirm, argue. Rebuttals and supports circulate. Substack pushes notifications, algorithms amplify the debate. I’m part of that now, and that’s part of why I’m so pissed: something that is a real physical illness in the real physical is showing up shoved in my face as affective dogmatic slop, and I’m supposed to believe that I’m the over-focused puritanical supremacist?

And this churn itself does a lot of the governance that the original newsletter says is being made impossible by other people: by keeping publics confused, interpreting and re-interpreting risk discourse, systemic abandonment continues.

And so, by calling others puritanical and white supremacist, the original newsletter effectively mandates one pure stance toward COVID and risk, that is materially white supremacist.

It’s good to be white, with postliberal rhetoric

My most recent newsletter is on fascist grammars and (post)liberal vocabularies, and I… am truly saddened that its six-step narrative of fascist rhetorical logic is so applicable here.

In that essay, I outline the movements of two speeches by two white supremacists as:

• Declare crisis

  • Here, the original newsletter, the crisis isn’t COVID, or state abandonment, but white COVID-cautious queers policing everyone else into their purity politics.

    • An existential problem for our species is… a culture war?

• Name a pure community

  • The author and the readers who agree with them are reasonable “grown-ups,” the community that understand “life is risk” and embrace “harm reduction” “honestly”.

• Denounce the enemy as sterile

  • Meanwhile, cautious queers, particularly white ones, are irrational, delusional, clinging to “false binaries” and “mystical cocoons.”

  • The original newsletter’s portrayal of these people as decadent is stunningly in-line with white nationalist rhetoric, where here the nation is “grown-up white queers.”

• Reframe suffering as sacrifice

  • The author grieves their COVID infection as personal bad luck rather than systemic abandonment, a sacrifice they risked, bravely, to pursue their destiny:

• Promise destiny

  • A future that belongs to those who “live loudly, brightly, and take risks.”

• Assert inevitability

  • “Nothing in life is zero risk,” and “we’re not going back.”

  • The superficially “science-based,” “rational,” “realist,” analysis that takes up most of the text isn’t used

  • Instead, it’s conclusions are pointed to as a pre-determined natural law, a further corruption of the scientific method of handling evidence that the newsletter performs.

The original newsletter recodes the grammar of white nationalism into a queer-progressive idiom, the way Goebbels did it into a Nazi idiom, the way Miller did it into a postliberal idiom, and in doing so, speaks white nationalism into queer progressive being. Miller says, “we are the storm,” the original newsletter says, “We are the risk.” Infection, mass disabling, eugenics: these are not crises to be dealt with, or conditions to be solved, but a destiny to be embraced.

The repetition of inevitability closes the horizon of politics into the narrow lane of individual relationship with that horizon, and the original newsletter says there is exactly one way to have a good relationship with that horizon: abandon everything for it.

This inevitability doesn’t just normalize abandonment: it creates a foundation where desiring otherwise is pathological.

It fuses necropolitical pedagogy with neurotic influencer affective relief: once inevitability is accepted, readers can join the community of cruel optimists in coping with risk by abandoning others as the true essence of life.

By presenting it in a queer-progressive idiom, and placing the text in a social media network, the essay launders fascistic inevitability across populations of readers who would otherwise be more equipped to see and reject that logic.

And the result is chilling. The very communities who once built real harm reduction are teaching themselves to adopt logics and grammars structurally equivalent to those that abandoned them, and trying to use those tools to solve the abandonment in new forms.

But this cannot work: to not abandon, you must not abandon. Simple as.

What the original newsletter does

The original piece is long, confessional, and at times seems ambivalent. But stripped of anecdotes and citations, its political function is clear: it takes a public health disaster and renarrates it as a story of individual maturity.

More precisely, it performs a whole set of logics that contemporary theory has taught us to recognize:

• Necropolitical pedagogy:

  • Readers are told to treat exposure and premature death as part of “growing up,” as if infection were just a roll of the dice. This reframes systemic abandonment as natural risk, obscuring the structured inequities of who actually dies.

• Economies of abandonment:

  • In Povinelli’s terms, infrastructures of collective care are dissolved into individualized responsibility. “Wear your own mask” replaces “we keep each other safe.” The essay narrates abandonment as freedom and grit.

• Immunitarian privatization:

  • Collective obligations are recast as surveillance or “purity politics,” leaving only immunitas, the individualized buffer from others, as thinkable. This is exactly how eugenic logics sneak in: the vulnerable are left to absorb risks others refuse to share.

• Cruel optimism:

  • Risk is romanticized as vitality, suffering is aestheticized as bravery. As Berlant warns, this attachment to risk as life’s essence undermines the very conditions of flourishing.

• Geontological sorting:

  • By treating COVID risk as just another inert background condition of “nonlife,” the piece reaffirms the settler division between those who get to live and those who are made disposable material for others’ vitality.

• Neurotic authority performance:

  • The pseudo-expertise on display exemplifies Loveday’s “neurotic academic” and Lehto’s “neurotic influencer.” Citations and studies are strung together not as method but as affective reassurance, producing the feeling of literacy while rejecting actual disciplinary rigor.

• Citing for containment:

  • Sources are deployed not to open inquiry but to foreclose it—preventing readers from imagining alternatives by presenting a conclusion as already proven.

• Governing by confusion:

  • The churn of thesis, antithesis, and sublation creates endless debate, feeding platform logics and preventing coherent resistance to abandonment.

• Fascist inevitability:

  • The essay closes by narrating infection as destiny: “life is risk,” “nothing is zero risk,” “we’re not going back.” In my earlier writing on fascist grammar, this is the sixth step: inevitability as closure, which makes desiring otherwise pathological.

Seen this way, the essay doesn’t merely tell readers “to demand cooperation is insanity.” It trains them, through overlapping rhetorical logics, to internalize a fascistic common sense: that selfish survival is maturity, that collective care is pathology, and that abandoning others is not only rational but inevitable.

Positionality and Platforms

Again, the original newsletter reached me through a platform push. Not because I went looking for it, but because a white settler anarchist I know had someone in their network endorse it.

That’s how this machine you’re reading this through works: normalizing fascism through a complex that exploits intimacy and curiosity into commodified feelings.

I know that by writing this piece, I’m facilitating the same thing I’m critiquing: my words can be used as foil, proof of the “purity-obsessed” enemy they’ve constructed. It’s a recursive dialectic that kyriarchism thrives on: opposition is fuel, disagreement evidence, critique is another round.

But I’m not writing this for that. I’m writing this, like I said, to bring this critique directly to the people who exposed me to this nonsense in the first place. And I’m sharing it here for anyone who might’ve similarly felt exhausted reading the original newsletter, or seeing someone abandon them to its logic with a Like.

In fact, I want to actively encourage folk to not feel like they need to debate about this stuff.

Povinelli and Wendy Brown both explain in different ways how reasonableness itself is a regulatory frame. The same things that the original newsletter points to as evidence they are not being white supremacist, are understood by theorists of liberalism to be technologies of supremacism!

And Franz Fanon, Sadiya Hartman, and even Michel Foucault all wrote that what gets coded as madness and hysteria is often rationality within a different structure of reality.

The rhetoric in these pieces is an active, full-throated explanation of why the author wants some people dead.

A lot of folk are doing that when they talk about COVID, and I hope this newsletter makes that easier to see, and makes it easier to disregard that debate, and stand up against being abandoned and made vulnerable so that someone else can feel like their future might be good.

Conclusion

The original newsletter is not just some rant about COVID-cautious queers. It’s a piece of white supremacist eugenics propaganda dressed in an idiom of queer-progressive realism. It uses misogyny to valorize individual suffering, stigmatizes community as pathology, uses racism to erase settler-colonialism, romanticizes abandonment as maturity and bravery, and launders fascist inevitability through performative intellectualism.

If you felt the wrongness of the piece in your body, you are not wrong. If you felt grief, or rage, reading it, you are not wrong. If you have insisted on clean air, on masking, on solidarity, you are not crazy.

I’m sorry this piece can’t do more than say that, and I’m sorry it can’t do it without playing the same game I know is causing us harms.

My inability to do better on my own is exactly why we need each other.

On September 21, 2025, Stephen Miller stood in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, before tens of thousands gathered to honor Charlie Kirk.

His premise was mourning, but his speech was aggressive and threatening:

“You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal.”

“We are the storm,” he declared. His enemies, he told the crowd, “create nothing… you are nothing.”

Miller cast the gathered mourners as heirs to a civilizational lineage stretching from Athens to Rome, Philadelphia to Monticello. Their children’s children’s children would inherit the fruits of victory, because “the light will defeat the dark. We are on the side of God.”

For anyone familiar with Joseph Goebbels’s speech “The Storm Is Coming,” delivered in Berlin in July 1932, the echoes are striking.

Goebbels, facing a crowd of Germans that perceived itself humiliated by Versailles and paralyzed by the weakness of Weimar liberalism, told his listeners: “Germany is on the edge of collapse… but a storm is coming.” He promised that the Volk would rise purified, that humiliation would be transfigured into triumph, that parasites and traitors would be swept aside. The German nation had suffered shame, but the storm would redeem it.

The resemblance is not incidental, and looking at the similarities is useful. It demonstrates something about fascism itself: fascism can be a process of giving a grammar and vocabulary to things that forces fascistic beliefs.

That grammar can be summarized as a sequence:

• Declare crisis.

• Name a pure community.

• Denounce enemies as sterile and corrupt.

• Reframe suffering as sacrifice.

• Promise destiny.

• Assert inevitability.

With Goebbels', this grammar was spoken in a specific vocabulary: Volk, humiliation, parasites, etc.

The vocabulary in Miller's speech differs, but that difference in vocabulary is ultimately superficial: a consequence of fascism needing to rearticulate itself after its own vocabulary became taboo after 1945.

Stephen Miller’s speech is an example of what happens when this grammar is articulated in the idiom of what today calls itself postliberalism: a politics that rejects liberal neutrality, pluralism, and proceduralism in the name of shared civilizational truth, family, and the “common good.”

Fascist Grammar

Goebbels and the Fascist Grammar

Goebbels’s storm speech condensed the fascist grammar into a form both poetic and violent.

It leaned heavily on interwar thinkers:

• Carl Schmitt had declared that “the concept of the political” was defined by the friend/enemy distinction; liberal compromise was decadence.

• Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West (1918–22), had portrayed civilizations as organic bodies doomed to cycles of rise and decay.

• Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, in The Third Reich (1923), supplied a myth of unity beyond parliamentary division.

• Houston Stewart Chamberlain and other racial theorists gave pseudo-scientific grounding for the Volksgemeinschaft.

Goebbels distilled these sources into a set of rhetorical moves:

• Crisis:

  • “Germany today is collapsing… the Weimar system is in ruins.”

  • The crisis is existential, not technical.

• Community:

  • “The German people must rise as one.”

  • The Volk is pure, organic, set apart from corrupt parties.

• Enemy:

  • “Parasites, profiteers, traitors.”

  • The enemy is not a rival but a sterile, corrupting force.

• Sacrifice:

  • Humiliation at Versailles and years of shame will be redeemed through struggle.

• Destiny:

  • “The German people has not been defeated.”

  • History itself guarantees rebirth.

• Inevitability:

  • “The storm will come and sweep away the old order.”

This grammar made despair into proof of destiny. Suffering itself was transformed into a sign of the community’s chosen status.

Strategic Forgetting after 1945

After 1945, open citation of Goebbels, Schmitt, or Spengler became politically toxic. Yet the grammar did not vanish. It survived through strategic forgetting: the laundering of fascist categories into post-war conservative discourse.

Spenglerian decline reemerged as Cold War declinism. William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review warned of Western cultural collapse; Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987) reprised Spengler’s fears in the language of academia.

Schmitt’s friend/enemy logic returned as Cold War “moral clarity.” Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech (1983) framed politics as existential antagonism.

Moeller’s yearning for unity reappeared as “Western heritage” education, canon wars, and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996).

Producerism resurfaced as Reaganomics’ “makers versus takers.”

Humiliation was replaced by betrayal and martyrdom: Vietnam’s “stab in the back” myth, the canonization of fallen culture-war figures.

These shifts represent a transformation in the names of fascist philosophy, but the functions and beliefs remained the same. The Volk became “Western civilization.” Humiliation became martyrdom. Schmitt’s friend/enemy was baptized into evangelical moral dualism.

This laundering prepared the ground for postliberalism, and the language of Miller's speech.

When thinkers like Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed, 2018), Adrian Vermeule (“common good constitutionalism”), and Sohrab Ahmari (The Unbroken Thread, 2021) argue that liberal neutrality must be replaced by civilizational inheritance, they rarely cite Schmitt or Goebbels. But their categories, civilization over nation, moral truth over procedure, sacrifice over compromise, belong to the same family tree.

Civilization: From Volk to the West

In The Storm Is Coming, Goebbels told his audience:

“The German people must rise as one… We demand the formation of a true Volksgemeinschaft, a people’s community beyond class and party.”

This was the center of fascist grammar: the Volk as a sacred, organic unit. The Volk is not just a nation in the administrative sense, but a living body whose survival and destiny matter more than individual freedom or parliamentary procedure.

Stephen Miller, repeats the postliberal idiom:

“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello.”

Where Goebbels named the Volk, Miller names “the West.” The form is the same: a purified community, imagined as the source of civilization. But the vocabulary has been laundered. In the wake of fascism’s defeat, explicit Volkish rhetoric was discredited. Yet the idea that peoples are organic wholes with civilizational destinies was too powerful to vanish. It re-emerged in the 20th century through Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–22), which provided a morphology of cultures rising and decaying. Post-war conservative thought carried this forward, especially through Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996). Huntington never cited Goebbels or Spengler directly, but the resemblance is clear: civilizations, not liberal institutions, are the decisive actors of history.

Postliberalism today inherits this category wholesale. Patrick Deneen, in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), argued that “liberalism has failed not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself,” and called for a return to “the cultures that gave us life.” Adrian Vermeule insists that constitutional interpretation must serve “the common good of a political community” rooted in civilizational continuity. Miller’s speech shows how this plays in popular rhetoric: Athens and Rome stand in for a lineage of Western civilization, imagined as a single organic whole. The Volk has become “the West.” The grammar is unchanged.

Martyrdom: From Humiliation to Immortality

Goebbels in 1932 declared:

“We have suffered shame and humiliation at the hands of foreign powers and their collaborators here at home.”

Humiliation was the Nazi movement’s fuel: Versailles, inflation, the sense of national disgrace. Shame was not simply pain but a prelude to redemption. The fascist grammar was clear: suffering proved the people’s chosen status.

Miller give the same structure in a different key:

“You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal. And now millions will carry on his legacy.”

The grammar is identical: injury transfigured into immortality. But the signifier has shifted. In place of national humiliation, Miller offers martyrdom: the personal death of a culture-war figure as emblem of collective injury. This is a postliberal move: the privatization of grievance into individual sacrificial figures.

Sohrab Ahmari describes this dynamic in The Unbroken Thread (2021), where he valorizes Christian willingness to suffer against liberal permissiveness. For Ahmari, it is precisely resistance, even persecution, that proves the truth of the cause. Miller’s rhetorical elevation of Kirk is this logic at scale: martyrdom as political sacrament.

The continuity is direct: where Goebbels used humilation for the basis of destiny, Miller uses martyrdom. Both use fascist logic: being attacked is not failure but evidence of righteousness.

Moral Dualism: From Friend/Enemy to God/Evil

Carl Schmitt’s famous line, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (The Concept of the Political, 1932), became the beating heart of fascist grammar. Goebbels’s storm speech followed Schmitt’s logic, declaring:

“We stand at the border between light and darkness, renewal and ruin.”

Miller echoes this directly:

“The light will defeat the dark… We are on the side of God.”

The Schmittian antagonism is intact, but reframed in postliberal language. Instead of a political enemy, it is wickedness itself. Instead of national destiny, it is divine mandate. Post-war conservatives carried this through the Cold War, where Reagan declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Postliberals today take the same line against liberal proceduralism itself. Vermeule, for instance, argues that liberalism’s attempt to remain neutral among competing goods is a fraud; politics must affirm substantive goods grounded in the Catholic natural law tradition.

Miller’s rhetoric mirrors this insistence. There is no neutral ground, no liberal compromise, no legitimate opposition. There is only God’s side and wickedness. Fascist grammar survives in the dualism of postliberal politics.

Producerism: From Workers vs. Parasites to Builders vs. Sterile Enemies

Goebbels:

“We are the ones who work and build. They are the ones who profit from the labor of others.”

The fascist grammar of producerism framed the true people as productive, creative, life-giving, while enemies were parasites and profiteers. This echoed Ernst Jünger’s exaltation of the Worker as the archetype of modern life.

Miller echoed it plainly:

“We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.”

The continuity could not be clearer. Only the civilizational unit is generative; the enemy is sterile, barren, destructive.

In the U.S., this producerist grammar was absorbed into neoliberal rhetoric. Reagan and Paul Ryan spoke of “makers versus takers.” Postliberals today reframe it as defense of rooted, productive communities against rootless cosmopolitan elites. Deneen laments the way liberal capitalism uproots communities; Ahmari contrasts family builders with culture-war decadents.

Miller’s words are a direct descendant: the creative power of the community set against enemies who are nothing but negation.

Reproductive Futurism: From Children of the Nation to Children’s Children’s Children

One of the most consistent tropes of fascist rhetoric is its appeal to the child. Goebbels, in 1932, promised:

“We fight so that our children may live in a proud and free Germany.”

The grammar here is straightforward: politics is justified not by present compromises but by the sanctity of future generations. Fascism insists that the true horizon of political life is reproduction: the continuation of the community into the indefinite future.

Miller amplifies the same move almost to parody:

“Our children are strong. And our grandchildren will be strong. And our children’s children’s children will be strong.”

The multiplication of descendants (“children’s children’s children”) dramatizes the depth of time at stake. It is not just about winning the present. It is about securing an unbroken lineage stretching centuries ahead. This is what queer theorist Lee Edelman critiqued as “reproductive futurism”: the political fantasy that the figure of the Child is the ultimate justification for every, and any, sacrifice.

Postliberal rhetoric leans heavily on this theme. Writers like Rod Dreher (The Benedict Option, 2017) frame Christian withdrawal from liberal society in terms of protecting children from decadence. Deneen laments that liberalism leaves families barren and communities infertile. Ahmari champions pro-natal policies as a mark of civilizational renewal. All these arguments elevate the family and the child into sacred objects of politics, repeating the fascist grammar of reproductive futurism in postliberal guise.

In Miller’s speech, this grammar is amplified in its simplest form: the survival of the West depends on multiplying descendants. Liberal pluralism is irrelevant; the politics of the future is reduced to the politics of lineage.

Inevitability: From “The Storm Is Coming” to “We Are the Storm”

The final element of fascist grammar is inevitability. Goebbels promised that collapse was not the end but the prelude to rebirth:

“The storm will come and sweep away the old order.”

Inevitability converts despair into hope. If history itself guarantees victory, then suffering is not defeat but proof of destiny. This is why fascist movements thrive on setbacks: every humiliation confirms that triumph is near.

Miller’s speech repeats this logic, but with a twist:

“You cannot defeat us. You cannot slow us. You cannot stop us. You cannot deter us. We are the storm.”

Where Goebbels forecasted the storm as something approaching, Miller collapses time and identifies the movement itself as the storm. The inevitability is no longer in history’s horizon but embodied in the people themselves. This reflects a key postliberal maneuver: liberalism’s decline is not something to be awaited but something already accomplished. Postliberals describe liberalism as exhausted, hollow, already over. The only task is to recognize its end and step into civilizational destiny.

Vermeule makes this point explicitly in his call for “common good constitutionalism.” Liberal constitutionalism is not to be reformed but superseded, he argues, because it is already empty. Patrick Deneen insists that liberalism failed not by betraying itself but by fulfilling itself to exhaustion. In Miller’s idiom, this exhaustion is expressed as militant inevitability: “We are the storm.”

Fascist grammar, postliberal vocabulary

What links Joseph Goebbels in 1932 and Stephen Miller in 2025 is not identical ideology but a shared grammar of political being: crisis, pure community, corrupt enemy, sacrifice as redemption, destiny as certainty. Goebbels arranged these moves around the Volk and the humiliation of Versailles. Miller arranges them around the West and the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. The words differ; the grammar endures.

Postliberalism is the bridge that makes this continuity possible. After 1945, explicit fascist sources became unspeakable. Yet their categories survived through strategic forgetting. Spengler’s civilizational cycles became Huntington’s clash of civilizations. Schmitt’s friend/enemy logic became Reagan’s moral clarity. The Volk became “the West.” Humiliation became martyrdom. Producerism became “makers vs. takers.” Reproductive futurism became the culture war over family.

Postliberal thinkers like Deneen, Vermeule, Ahmari, and Dreher inherit this grammar, sidestepping its recent formations to reach toward its roots. They argue that liberalism is exhausted, that politics must be refounded on shared truth, family, and civilization. They insist on inevitability: liberal order is already collapsing, and a postliberal order must be embraced. Miller’s speech shows how these ideas sound in mass rhetoric. They are not academic quibbles. They are the living afterlife of fascist grammar.

Liberal Vocabulary

If postliberalism is one descendant of interwar theory, liberalism is another. Both inherit the fascist grammar, but liberalism does so through a dialectical countering: every fascist move is met with its inversion. The result is not escape but entanglement.

When fascism declares crisis, liberalism adopts the language of progressive stability. Thinkers like John Dewey, writing against both reaction and authoritarianism, reframed political emergencies as solvable through education and deliberation. In Liberalism and Social Action (1935), Dewey admitted that liberalism must face “the crisis of our time,” but insisted it could be met by refining liberal means. Crisis was conceded as frame, but defused by managerial optimism.

When fascism exalts organic community, liberalism responds with universal citizenship. Hans Kelsen, defending Weimar constitutionalism against Schmitt, argued in Pure Theory of Law (1934) that legitimacy lies in procedure, not identity. The Volk was countered by the Rechtsstaat. Yet this too remained within fascist grammar: both accepted that politics required grounding in a singular body: one biological, one procedural.

When fascism names the enemy, liberalism answers with toleration. Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) took Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction and inverted it: the enemy is dogmatism, the friend is openness. But the structure of thought remained antagonistic: enemies defined the grammar even if rebranded.

When fascism glorifies sacrifice, liberalism valorizes compromise. Progressive theorists like John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), shifted the site of sacrifice into the “veil of ignorance”: rational individuals willingly accept limits to their own gain for the sake of fairness. Sacrifice was softened into reasonableness, but still coded as the ground of legitimacy.

When fascism promises destiny, liberalism replies with progress. From Dewey’s faith in social learning to Rawls’s incremental justice, liberal theorists made history itself the guarantor of betterment. Where Goebbels insisted rebirth was assured, liberals insisted improvement was inevitable. Walter Benjamin’s critique of social democracy targeted exactly this saying that the faith that history already leaned toward justice was a mirror image of fascism’s fatalism.

When fascism asserts inevitability, liberalism defends procedure. Isaiah Berlin’s “value pluralism” and defense of negative liberty rested on the claim that liberal institutions can indefinitely contain conflict. Fascism proclaims the storm; liberalism replies that the constitutional order will weather it. Both frame politics as storms to be endured or ridden out.

Critical theory has long shown how this counter-grammar sustains the fascist one. Hannah Arendt famously pointed to liberal proceduralism as generating the isolation and abstraction that fascism exploited in its day-to-day operations. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer saw how liberal optimism, by aestheticizing progress, prepared subjects for authoritarian aesthetics. Benjamin argued that the “faith in progress” was itself fascist in form.

Thus liberalism, even in its resistance, remains bound. By countering crisis with progress, community with universality, enemy with toleration, sacrifice with compromise, destiny with progress, inevitability with procedure, liberalism preserves the very grammar it seeks to negate. It is not fascism’s opposite but its dialectical twin.

Anarchist Grammar

If fascism is a grammar, with liberalism and postliberalism existing as different vocabulary, anarchism may supply us with a truly different grammar: not simply negations, but alternative sequences that generate life where fascism insists on death.

Anarchism does not dialectically counter fascism’s grammar. It begins not with crisis but with condition, not with purity or universality but with commons, not with enemies or toleration but with relations, not with sacrifice or compromise but with solidarity, not with destiny or progress but with desire, not with inevitability or procedure but with immanence. Where liberalism sustains fascism by inhabiting its grammar in reverse, anarchism breaks the circuit by refusing the terms entirely.

This grammar is visible in the long history of anarchist practice and in the critical theorists who, in dialogue with anarchism or from parallel traditions, have described how politics can be otherwise.

From Crisis to Condition

Fascist grammar begins by declaring crisis: existential collapse demanding salvation. But as Benjamin observed in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, catastrophe is not the justification for a retaliatory storm, but the condition of living with fascism itself: “the storm we call progress.” Where fascism turns crisis into a stage for authoritarian redemption, anarchist grammar recognizes it as a condition induced by the ongoing violence of capitalism, empire, and the state.

Here, Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics is instructive. For populations exposed to premature death (enslaved, colonized, racialized) “crisis” is not an emergency but the normal operation of power. Anarchist practice takes this as starting point, not spectacle. It asks: how do we live and care in conditions where abandonment is ordinary?

From Community to Commons

Goebbels exalted the Volk; Miller invokes “the West.” Fascist grammar demands a purified community. Anarchist grammar proposes the commons instead: not an organic body but shared, negotiated relations.

Hannah Arendt helps us here. Against Schmitt’s annihilating friend/enemy distinction, she insists politics arises from plurality: the fragile space where differences appear to one another. The commons is Arendtian plurality grounded in material practice. And Peter Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid shows how cooperation is not an exception but a law of life. Where fascism posits unity through exclusion, anarchist grammar finds community in the generativity of commons: gardens, networks, assemblages that exist only through care and negotiation.

From Enemy to Relation

Fascism requires an enemy: parasites, degenerates, “nothing.” This is Schmitt’s friend/enemy logic in its most violent form. Anarchist grammar resists this totalization. Judith Butler’s work on grievability is key: enemies are not “nothings” but lives rendered ungrievable. To insist on their grievability is to break the sacrificial economy.

Anarchist practice historically refuses to reify enemies as absolute. Struggles are real (bosses, colonizers, police) but anarchists frame them as relations of domination, not metaphysical forces. Relations can shift; solidarities can emerge. In Butler’s grammar, this refusal of dehumanization is not self-destructive weakness but creative strength: it keeps politics open rather than foreclosed.

From Sacrifice to Solidarity

Goebbels sanctified humiliation; Miller canonized Charlie Kirk. Fascist grammar glorifies sacrifice as proof of destiny. Anarchist grammar replaces sacrifice with solidarity. Emma Goldman put it plainly: “I demand freedom for myself and others, the right to self-expression, and everyone’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Sacrifice may occur, but solidarity, the refusal to abandon one another, is the principle.

Here Mbembe again matters. Necropolitics names how power distributes death. Anarchist solidarity refuses to let death be monopolized as fascist martyrdom. It insists on sustaining life together in the face of abandonment, turning another part of what fascism calls weakness into another site of strength.

From Destiny to Desire

Fascist grammar projects destiny: history moves inexorably toward the Volk or the West. Anarchist grammar answers with desire. Lauren Berlant’s critique of “cruel optimism” helps here: fascism binds people to fantasies of revival that keep them tethered to suffering. Anarchist desire is different. It is not destiny but aspiration: the small, generative acts that build other worlds. Desire is why anarchist spaces cultivate joy, art, and celebration as much as resistance.

Benjamin glimpsed this too. Against the storm of destiny, he offered the “weak messianic power” lodged in every present. Desire is that power: not a storm to come, but a practice in the now.

From Inevitability to Immanence

Finally, fascist grammar insists on inevitability: the storm will come, or “we are the storm.” Anarchist grammar insists on immanence: nothing is guaranteed. Everything depends on what we do here and now.

This is the principle of prefiguration: living as if the world we want already exists. It is not destiny deferred but life enacted. Arendt would call this natality: the fact that every action begins something new. Benjamin would call it seizing the “now-time.” For anarchists, it is immanence: politics as the present, not the storm.

Generative Power

This anarchist grammar is not simply defensive. It is generative. Fascism glorifies builders but builds nothing. It feeds parasitically on the life of the commons, on solidarity and care, on the very practices it denounces as weakness. Anarchist grammar, by contrast, actually produces futures. It makes worlds. It is an invisibilized force beneath many fascist fantasies: the sublated labor of those who cook, heal, teach, strike, care, and commune.

This is why fascist grammar always returns to crisis: without the generativity of anarchist life, fascism would collapse into the nothingness it projects onto others. The storm survives only by consuming the worlds that anarchism and its kin generate. To recognize this is to see that anarchism is not antifascist by design, but as an emergent consequence of its foundations.

Conclusion

The storm is coming, has arrived, and never left, in the continually-refining grammar of crisis, purity, and inevitability that now animates the public life. The historical "triumph over fascism" was a tactical victory in certain political spheres, but only strengthened the epistemic infrastructure, increasing its self-derived legitimacy in the idiom of postliberalism. In their effort to resist this process, liberal institutions and those aligned with their thinking remain entangled in a struggle they both cannot and do not want to win, because they accept the premise that the conflict is what creates progress.

So the first and final task is not one of defense or resistance, but of creation. It is to cease reacting to the storm and to become, instead, a force of life. The anarchist grammar offers a politics of natality, a ceaseless beginning grounded not in destiny but in desire. It is an immanent politics that finds its power in the present, building the commons and practicing solidarity in the face of abandonment. It understands that the work of antifascism is not to defeat a rival, but to make the rival’s world uninhabitable by rendering it sterile. The storm survives only by consuming the worlds of care and plurality it cannot create. The only true victory is to build a world it cannot enter, a world whose grammar is not war but life.

But... it hasn't. So, what's going on with reporting, research, and discourse, that the truth of a situation, when measured materially or ethically, and the truth of its narrative have such little relationship?

Well, let me first establish that the material and ethical truth aren't a part of the narrative:

- While Stop Cop City is called an abolitionist success in academic analysis, the Cop City complex was built and is now open, developing and teaching carcerality.

- While the state is said to have failed in their efforts against activists, in journalistic reporting, they still killed someone and destroyed a forest, among other harms.

And, I feel I must also highlight that even these statements reinforce the framing of Weelaunee Forest, a site of autonomy, as the site of Cop City and Stop Cop City, a site of carcerality and abolitionism. The ecological and anti-colonial focus common to praxis in the area, for example, is missing almost entirely from all discussion about these events.

With that grotesque disclosure out of the way, I'm going to look at the two major claims circulating regarding [Stop] Cop City, which I've said a few times already: it was an abolitionist success and carceral failure.

There's a lot of dual statements happening already: Cop City and Stop Cop City, and abolitionist success and carceral failure. I hate to, but it helps to mention that this dualism is part of how most critical theory (and so, the ways of thinking that trickle out into academia and journalism) makes finding a truth easier: specify a thing, specify its negation, specify a negation of that negation, use that to reshape the original thing, rinse and repeat. When you're using this analytical approach to look at the past, it's Hegelian dialectics. When you're using it to look at the past /and/ the future, it's Marxist Dialectics. (That is an oversimplification sure to irk some Marxists, but I don't care.)

One thing to note is that many people do something like a Marxist dialectic out of habit - even folk who strongly identify against Marxist economics. I'm not saying this negatively; I do it myself. I just think it's easier to miss that someone is doing a dialectic negotiation toward truth, than it is to see it, because it has become /so/ routine.

What I'm trying to talk about here is that the dialectic that seems to be circulating around [Stop] Cop City is not to do with it as a material thing, or an ethical thing, but what it means as a narrative thing to the dialectic arc of those discussing it. This is something I looked at before, with "Citing for Containment," but I want to take a fresh look with these recent events.

So, looking at Kass's paper, the schema of the abolitionist dialectic being examined is clearly named.

The thesis is terror and grief, named when "the poilce raid of the Weelaunee People's Park and murder of forest defender Tortuguita made clear that Cop City is a death-world." The phrase "death-world" is Achille Mbembe's: in necropolitical theory, a death-world is a world where populations are subjected to premature death and social disposability.

By using the term, Kass establishes her thesis within that field, and begins to unfold its dialectic: establishing the antithesis by describing the Forest as "life-world."

With Cop City as a necropolitical antagonist and Stop Cop City as antagonist-to-the-antagonist, there's now a contradiction that needs to be resolved. Kass names this resolution repeatedly as "building and fighting," a synthesis, as she describes it, of insurrectionary, autonomous, and procedural tactics.

Notably, these dialectic movements are done by demonstrating affective, qualitative experiences related to these components, rather than demonstrating any quantifiable measure. That is, the resolution of a death-world by life-worlding is not demonstrated to have occurred by measuring state violence or its consequences in metrics like life expectancy, but by demonstrating how various moments felt to the people or person experiencing them.

The death-world of Cop City is described through a constellation of affective states: dread, grief, and terror in the wake of Tortuguita’s killing; rage at militarized police raids; deprivation and isolation in jail. Kass does not tally material harms or cite demographic measures of premature death. Instead, she organizes the narrative around what necropolitical rule feels like to those subjected to it: the incitement of despair, rage, and disposability. These affective markers are what license the invocation of Mbembe’s term, situating Cop City squarely inside the genre of necropolitics.

These may be understood as the “feeling rules” of what Cop City is: to inhabit it as antagonist is to feel grief, fear, rage, deprivation, and isolation. In Hochschild’s sense, feeling rules are not spontaneous—they are prescriptions for which emotions count as appropriate responses. By aligning these emotions with Mbembe’s “death-world,” Kass provides her readers with the genre’s thesis and its affective orientation: if one feels these things, one is correctly perceiving Cop City as carceral necropower.

Kass's support for naming Cop City a death-world is not in its harm to life, but in its incitement of these feelings.

Thus, when moments like the July 2022 tow-truck, destroyed in anger, then remade into a garden, incite creativity instead of rage, when jail confinement produces warmth through “spoon trains” and commissary sharing instead of deprivation, and when enforced isolation gives way to collective roles like “jail moms” instead of abandonment, those moments are, according to the logic Kass sets out, antithetical to the feeling-rules of the death-world. They are demonstrations of what she names “life-worlding”: practices that generate the opposite affective register, and so appear as abolitionist evidence within the dialectical schema.

This antithesis, while argued within the affective realm, is immediately transformed into the language of abolitionist geographies: If carcerality is death-worlding, and these practices are life-worlding, then these practices are abolitionist. This is implying that the antithesis of necropolitics, at large, is abolitionist geographies, at large.

Notably, there is no support for the implicit claim that affective life-worlding is resistant to or destructive of death-worlding: the relationship is entirely implied, due to the oppositional affects between necropolitical interpretations of Cop City and abolitionist interpretations of Stop Cop City. There is also no support that this life-worlding is abolitionist... except in how it aligns to the feeling-rules of these various fields:

- Carcerality is death-worlding

- Abolitionism is anti-carcerality

- Death-worlding feels like grief

- Thus, life-worlding feels like not-grief

- Thus, abolitionism feels like not-grief

That is a pretty subjective and affective secondary intension for a term's metaphysics, especially when there are more objective measures (like, say, abolition of police) that could be used.

The paper does more than just say grief and not-grief, though, there is a specific linkage between certain feelings, that are part of death-worlding, and each of these is shown to have an antithesis:

(I am not bothering to fix this table for Substack.)

| Death-feeling | Life-feeling | Evidence |

|---------------+--------------+--------------------------------------|

| rage | creativity | Burnt trucks turned into garden beds |

| deprivation | warmth | Sharing of commissary |

| isolation | community | "jail moms" |

The table of paired affects (rage/creativity, deprivation/warmth, isolation/community) captures the core of Kass’s affective dialectic. Each “death-feeling” associated with Cop City is answered by an opposing “life-feeling” associated with Stop Cop City. But the crucial step is that these oppositions are not left as static contrasts; they are narrated as transformations. Rage turns into creativity through the tow-truck garden, deprivation becomes warmth through shared commissary, isolation is converted into community through “jail moms.” In dialectical terms, these are sublations: the negative is not merely denied but transfigured into its opposite. It is this affective movement, rather than any measurable weakening of state capacity, that allows Kass to conclude that forest defenders “undermined carceral state power.” The truth of the claim resides in the genre’s successful sequencing of feelings, not in the empirical outcome of stopping Cop City.

Notably, the rage of militant activism (destroying police trucks) is included as a caraceral thesis against an abolitionist antithesis (planting gardens). Acts of anti-policing are felt and argued as carceral death-worlding.

Yet this feels true to the narrative arc of a dialectic analysis, and so, are in every way that is meaningful to affective dialectics, true.

(Appreciate this analysis? I appreciate contributions.)

I see the same pattern of feeling-rules, affect, and dialectics playing out now that, months after Cop City opened, the charges against some Stop Cop City activists might be dropped, and that is being reported and discussed.

First let me say I haven't seen any article except the local news that highlights the judge said he intends to dismiss the charges: as of me writing this, and as of most of the articles I've seen about it, they weren't dismissed. But they are being reported as dismissed. A minor detail, but it does set the stage for my claim that narrative matters more than fact.

So: RICO charges against Stop Cop City protesters have been dropped, and this is being discussed as "the prosecutor's case collapsing."

At the time, the charges were understood to be fragile, and more to do with immediately disrupting a growing solidarity around Tortuguita's murder than actually incarcerating people.

If Kass’s paper demonstrates an abolitionist dialectic, reporting on the dismissal of RICO charges demonstrates a juridical one. The thesis is state overreach, cast in headlines that call the indictment “sweeping” or “sprawling.” The antithesis is judicial correction: a judge “finding the Attorney General lacked authority.” The synthesis is closure: “the prosecutor’s case collapses.” Each stage has its affective cue (indignation, relief, vindication) guiding the reader toward the conclusion that the state has failed.

But measured by the state’s own aims, the indictment worked exactly as intended. From the beginning, organizers and observers understood that conviction was unlikely and not the point: the charges disrupted solidarity, reframed the forest as a site of “domestic terrorism,” and drained time, attention, and resources into legal defense. In Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s terms, the state’s administrative work was already accomplished the moment “enterprise” was named.

It is only within a proceduralist legalistic genre that the dismissal reads as failure. That genre takes the courtroom as the exclusive arena of truth, prescribes indignation at prosecutorial excess, relief at judicial correction, and satisfaction at dismissal. In reality, the indictment succeeded as repression. But narratively, the dismissal satisfies the juridical dialectic’s need for resolution: overreach to correction to closure. The truth-effect is again generated by genre adherence, not by the state’s actual performance.

Notably, many people seem to hold both truths: Stop Cop City was an abolitionist success, and RICO charges against them were a legalistic failure. While commensurate in their claims, there is a fundamental contradiction between valuing legalistic truths while valuing abolitionist truths. That is: if one's belief in abolitionism was grounded in theoretical understanding, one would not believe in the value of legalistic interpretations. It is only when one believes in the feelings of abolitionism that there is space for the feelings of legalistic interpretation to matter, because both feelings have, when approaching each field dialectically, overlap in what feelings incite from the same experience. That is, adhering to the feeling-rules of legalism, and the feeling-rules of abolition, amplifies the incitement to feel good at the charges (maybe) being dismissed, and that connection to incitement seems to justify participating in belief in values that would otherwise be unbelieveable.

The feelings are not the only truths being amplified by an adherence to contradicting beliefs around abolition. Certain expressions form in both ways of approaching [Stop] Cop City: whether you are looking at these events from an abolitionist perspective or a juridical one, the following hold true:

• the state failed

  • because they’re evil:

    • full of greed and malice

  • because they provide the thesis:

    • carcerality

• activists won

  • because they’re good:

    • full of love and care

  • because they provide the antithesis:

    • anti-carcerality

• interpretation is necessary

  • to synthesis these events (moments of contradiction) into resolution

In Kass’s account, grief and terror resolve into joy and solidarity, producing the truth of abolitionist success.

In journalistic discourse, prosecutorial overreach resolves into judicial correction, producing the truth of state failure.

In each case, the conclusion is secured not by outcomes in the material world (Cop City /was/ built, repression succeeded) but by adherence to the rules of the genre: the affective cues, the prescribed roles, the demand for synthesis.

Commodification of intellectual work means that analysis must produce the feelings its genre demands. In abolitionist discourse, those feelings are grief transformed into solidarity, rage into creativity, isolation into community. In juridical discourse, they are indignation at prosecutorial excess, relief at judicial correction, satisfaction at dismissal. This is industrial intellectualism: the conversion of thought into narrative products, packaged not for correspondence with material truth but for recognizability within a genre.

This is why Kass’s essay could call Stop Cop City an abolitionist success even as Cop City was built, and why headlines can declare state failure many months after the state has succeeded at repression. Each narrative secures its truth not in outcomes but in affect: if you felt grief become solidarity, you were witnessing abolition; if you felt indignation become relief, you were witnessing state failure. This is what ideology does: it organizes recognition in advance, so that the story that feels right already counts as truth.

Lauren Berlant helps us see how these attachments endure: they feel right, even when they contradict material outcomes, because infrastructures of circulation convert crisis into continuity. Ruth Wilson Gilmore shows what drops out when we look only at feelings: the state’s administrative success, its coordination of agencies, its deepening capacity to organize abandonment. Sylvia Wynter reminds us why certain narratives survive that contradiction: not because they are truer, but because they can be reformatted into the genres that settler institutions can carry forward. Together, they make clear that what is circulating as “abolitionist success” and “state failure” is not the movement’s survival, but its conversion into affective, administrative, and generic forms that can be consumed as truth.

The effect is that abolitionist success and juridical failure can exist as truths, not because they match the world, but because they match the feeling rules of their genres. The narratives endure as attachments we can’t let go of, even when the material outcome (Cop City opened, repression succeeded) directly contradicts them.

If you didn’t hear otherwise, I recently relaunched my personal website, over at https://emsenn.net

This essay is available over there, where you can see how it connects to my other research notes. This is part of my return to the Web that I mentioned last winter. I’ve also been more active on the Fediverse, and continue to administrate a Discord server focused on discussing responses to climate breakdown. (Invites available upon request.)

For many of us, the experience didn’t affirm abolition. It demonstrated how fast carceral systems learn. The state didn’t just repress the movement, it adapted to it. Local and regional governments treated the forest as a test case. Cop City wasn’t stopped. In its wake, coordination between law enforcement agencies deepened, surveillance practices were normalized, and repression became easier to justify. What began as a refusal was converted into feedback.

Hannah Kass’s essay, “Trees Give Life. Police Take It,” is part of that pattern. Not because it gets the facts wrong, but because it participates in the same formatting structure that the movement was already struggling against. The essay doesn’t erase people or practices just by omission. It erases them by over-narrating the ones it includes. The problem isn’t misrepresentation. It’s that the piece arrives with its narrative already in place.

This isn’t a rebuttal. It’s not a correction. It’s an effort to show how the story you already have was built, and what it cost. Not just in narrative accuracy, but in what practices became unsustainable once the story took shape. I'm not offering a better version of events. I'm pointing to the process by which events are made legible in the first place, and how that legibility can become its own form of containment.

Theories We Lived, Theories They Cited

Before arriving at Stop Cop City, Kass had already published work analyzing how resistance movements are metabolized by the very systems they confront. In her earlier writing on food sovereignty, she described how radical action can be neutralized through narrative incorporation, how dissent is managed by being made intelligible. That wasn’t just analysis. It was a framework. And when she came to the forest, she brought that framework with her. She didn’t just enter the moment, she entered it with the story already forming.

The theorists Kass turns to in current and earlier work - Gilmore, Glissant, Berlant, Mbembe - were already part of how many of us were thinking and working. Their concepts shaped how people on the ground navigated contradiction, risk, and care under pressure. These weren’t references we returned to afterward, they were part of how we built relations in the moment. But the way they show up in Kass’s essay doesn’t reflect that embedded use. They don’t appear as companions in contradiction. They’re used as citations to justify choices already made.

Lauren Berlant’s work, especially Cruel Optimism, was one of the tools we used to think through what it meant to stay committed to futures we knew were compromised. In the forest, that meant asking: when does hope become a trap? When does staying become stuck? When does care start to reproduce the very systems we entered the woods to refuse? People didn’t just read Berlant, they used her to navigate hard decisions: how to withdraw, when to risk visibility, how to share harm without romanticizing it. Her work slowed things down. It made people hesitate, which sometimes meant we didn’t get hurt worse.

Kass’s use of theory doesn’t reflect that kind of pressure. In her writing, these frameworks don’t emerge from the situation, they pre-define it. They don’t introduce tension. They resolve it. Rather than helping her stay with contradiction, they’re used to justify coherence: her arrest becomes transformation, the forest becomes a “life-world,” the carceral becomes fertile ground. The citations function less as tools than as signals, marking each step in a narrative arc that was already set. The theory isn’t used for reflective imagination, it’s used to confirm, as demonstrated in the abstract:

Wielding eco-defence and disruptive protest while prefiguring worlds where criminalised people and communities prevail even in the deadliest of places, forest defenders have undermined carceral state power.

The citations that are used through the piece aren’t evidence that this abolition occurred through causal processees. Instead, they’re used as evidence that the story Kass tells can be read as undermining carcerality, when supported by the citations. The work of the footnotes isn’t to verify a relationship between cause and effect, or even that an effect occured. It’s to stabilize an interpretation. When theory is used this way, it doesn’t support struggle, it supersedes it. It lets outcomes be declared instead of examined. And once coherence sets in, the story doesn’t need to prove anything happened. It just needs to match the shape of what people already expect a successful movement to look like.

Epistemic Extraction As Method, not Side-Effect

In Kass’s essay, practices like mutual aid, cultivation, and land refusal are presented as though they emerged from the experience of Stop Cop City. But they didn’t appear as tactical responses to that moment. They were already being practiced, maintained, shared, and adapted long before Cop City threatened Weelaunee and Stop Cop City became a movement. Some of them were fragile by design: intentionally quiet, dependent on trust, not meant to be made legible. When they appear in the text, they’re no longer held in relation. They’re extracted, turned into signals that can circulate without context or accountability.

Kass doesn’t just describe these practices, she lifts them out of the contexts that made them possible. When she writes about learning cultivation techniques or participating in mutual aid, there’s no account of where those practices came from, who carried them, or what forms of care, consent, and risk they depended on. They appear as narrative texture, not embedded labor. The specificity of describing relationships is replaced by the story of her encounter.

This kind of removal has been warned about. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Eve Tuck have both written clearly that not all knowledge is meant to be extracted, cited, or scaled. Some knowledge is held in place, geographically, relationally, and politically, because that’s where it works, where it provides care. When it's lifted out and circulated as insight, it doesn’t just lose context. It causes harm. It changes what others expect to find in those places. It turns embedded practice into generalized technique, and relational work into transferable content.

Sylvia Wynter’s work helps clarify what survives these kinds of systems and why. Knowledge that remains legible in settler institutions is usually the kind that can be reformatted, stripped of land, specificity, and obligation. It’s not the most vital knowledge that gets carried forward. It’s the most portable. In Kass’s essay, what survives is what can be turned into narrative. The rest, what couldn’t be separated from its conditions, falls away.

Recursive Governance and the Performance of Praxis

Kass frames her own arrest as a moment of political transformation, a site of emergent care, abolitionist relation, and personal clarity. This framing isn’t unusual. It mirrors a familiar arc: confrontation, rupture, reflection, politicization. But that arc doesn’t come from the conditions. It’s a pattern that was already available, already legible. It’s a form that allows disruption to be narrated without contradiction. And in that sense, it doesn’t register as deviation. It registers as continuity.

What Kass describes as transformation didn’t interrupt the logic of carceral governance, it confirmed that it was operating as designed. Arrest didn’t break anything open. It was a known outcome, warned against by local organizers, predicted by those who had been navigating local presence for years. But once it happened, it could be framed as emergence. Not because it changed the stakes, but because it fit a pre-existing format: arrest becomes narrative, narrative becomes content, content becomes legitimacy.

The arrest Kass centers wasn’t an unexpected rupture. It happened at an event that local and regional organizers had explicitly advised against attending. The warnings were direct and specific. They named the risks, not just of arrest, but of becoming a conduit for state signal processing. Warnings drew on specific, grounded knowledge, about how the charges would be deployed, how state and nonprofit infrastructure were already aligning, and how local law enforcement agencies were linked by kinship and institutional memory. The warnings also drew from the same theorists Kass had already cited in her earlier work: Berlant, Glissant, Gilmore.

But the warnings were dismissed, downplayed, or deferred. And when the predictable happened, it was reinterpreted, not as a consequence of ignoring collective knowledge, but as a personal turning point. Now, support circulates around that moment. Talking events. Fundraisers. Institutional visibility. Meanwhile, the people who stayed, who kept trying to protect the forest, who warned about exactly this, are living lives that get harder after a loss they tried to inhibit gets used as a victory to make life easier for some.

Extraction As Structure

"Epistemic extraction" can imply the consequences are immaterial: the lifting of knowledge, the erasure of names, the smoothing of contradiction. But in this case, the recursion didn’t stop at meaning. It moved resources. As attention shifted toward the arrest, material support followed. The people who were warned are now centered. Their story becomes the site of fundraising, programming, institutional reflection. And the people who warned them, who were trying to hold the ground that made refusal possible, are left out of the scene. This isn’t just narrative capture. It’s extraction.

The question of protecting Weelaunee Forest became modulated through the question of Stopping Cop City. It was a question whose answers were fundable, teachable, institutionalizable.

The demand to explain, to define what happened, who was there, what it meant, creates the condition for further removal. As soon as someone becomes the answer to those questions, their version becomes infrastructure. Institutions build around it. Programs follow it. The story becomes the site of investment, and everything that resists that legibility is treated as secondary, or disappeared. That’s not a side effect of narrative. It’s how extraction functions inside systems that reward coherence.

This is exactly what Berlant warned about. In Cruel Optimism, she doesn’t just describe the attachments we can’t let go of, she shows how those attachments are maintained by infrastructures that convert crisis into continuity. The question isn’t whether something hurts. It’s whether the hurt can be narrated in a way that feels like progress. Kass’s account turns arrest into insight, misjudgment into emergence, structural warnings into backstory. It doesn’t interrupt the system she described in her earlier work. It completes the loop.

Elizabeth Povinelli gives us language for this: the quasi-event. Not a spontaneous rupture, but a moment that feels open while already structuring its outcomes. The announcement of Cop City didn’t invite possibility. It narrowed it. The framing of “Stop Cop City” activated familiar systems, policing, funding, university research, activist signalin, , all of which began to parse participation in advance. People were profiled before they arrived. Academic observers were pre-positioned through grants and learned framings. Tactical decisions were shaped by what the marginalized could afford, justified to donors, or narrated later as movement. What looked like emergence was the systems processing an operation.

Legibility Isn't Solidarity

Kass invokes Édouard Glissant’s idea of opacity to describe the sense of connection and ambiguity she experienced during and after her arrest. But opacity, for Glissant, isn’t about ambiguity or intimacy. It’s about refusal, about declining to be made legible to systems of power. It’s a political stance, not a feeling. In Kass’s account, opacity becomes something affective and retrospective: a way to frame an already-processed moment as rich and ungraspable. But the arrest wasn’t opaque. It was fully legible. It had been predicted, advised against, and narratively routed. Calling it opaque doesn’t resist legibility. It rebrands it.

The same slippage happens with Kass’s use of the undercommons, drawn from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. In their work, the undercommons isn’t a place you end up after an experience, it’s a condition you inhabit through refusal. It depends on shared risk, fugitive relation, and the rejection of institutional legibility. The forest wasn’t the undercommons because it contained contradiction. It was the undercommons when people refused to render it, refused to describe it, refused to let it become example. The moment it became a case study, it was already gone.

Necropolitics Isn't Branding

Throughout the essay, Kass frames Cop City and the forest as “death-worlds,” drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. But in doing so, she flattens it into setting. Necropolitics becomes a backdrop, a way to intensify the stakes of her personal transformation, rather than a framework for analyzing who is made killable, and by what means. The framing doesn’t clarify how violence operated. It uses violence as atmosphere. What Mbembe names as a structure of disposability becomes, in Kass’s telling, a condition for insight.

This contrast becomes sharper when read against Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work. Gilmore doesn’t use the language of necropolitics, she writes about organized abandonment. About how institutions decide where resources go, and where they don’t. About how infrastructure becomes policy, and policy becomes premature death. In Weelaunee, that wasn’t theoretical. It was the conversion of a forest into a training site. Framing it as a death-world may gesture at severity, but it risks aestheticizing a process that was already underway through zoning, contracts, and coordination. The violence wasn’t waiting to be named. It was being built.

This is where Gilmore and Povinelli overlap: abandonment sets the stage, and the quasi-event scripts the reaction. By the time the forest was named as a site of resistance, it had already been positioned as disposable. The displacement was slow, administrative, and intentional. The invitation to respond, to organize, to occupy, to oppose, came only after the terms were locked in. Kass’s framing misses this. It treats visibility as disruption, when it was part of the timeline. The refusal was already foreclosed. What remained was how the aftermath would be narrated.

Form Is Value

Kass’s essay is structurally elegant, reflective, citational, carefully composed. But it’s that very structure that makes it legible to the systems that construct Cop Cities. Not just institutions, but platformed discourse: the circuits of academic publishing, media amplification, and nonprofit messaging that reward coherence over contradiction. These systems don’t amplify refusal. They amplify material that stabilizes the field, content that can circulate without interrupting the architecture it describes. The more polished the insight, the more extractable it becomes.

Kass’s piece creates value by demonstrating that a disruptive experience can be resolved into a coherent narrative. It begins with the narrative formation of rupture, arrest, repression, confusion, and moves through an arc of reflection, relational insight, and theoretical affirmation. It cites widely, gestures toward complexity, and then organizes that complexity into clarity. Its thought is structured to produce stability.

In doing so, it validates its own activity: the value of an event lies in its ability to confirm the frameworks used to interpret it, not in any material change it produces. Stop Cop City is an abolitionist event because, when you apply the framing of abolitionist theory, it matches the criteria of what abolition is supposed to feel and look like, not because anything was abolished after it occurred.

Kass writes, in her introduction:

“When abolitionists strategically combine procedural approaches with insurrectionary and autonomous approaches, the fight for abolition can be made significantly stronger. Indeed, a diversity of forest defence efforts have contributed to the stoppage of the Cop City development over the course of years of struggle. Forest defenders from all of these factions (and beyond) have refused to denounce one another’s tactics, supported one another through repression unconditionally, and have resisted co-optation, becoming stronger together.”

This is the framing the rest of the piece operates from.

But this isn’t what happened. Cop City is still being built. The site has not been protected. The land has not been returned. And the people who supported each other “unconditionally” are not the ones living with the consequences of that framing.

Necessary Omissions

The story of unification replaces the reality of disagreement, not just after the fact, but as it was happening. Organizers and land stewards warned against specific tactics, named likely consequences, and tried to hold open alternatives. Those communications are explicitly erased in the text as "supported... unconditionally."

There is explicitly no resistance to Kass that is not part of structural feedback loops. There's no critique of her presence, her actions, or interpretation. The only denouncements acknowledged are those that didn’t happen. The people who offered critique, issued warnings, or stepped back entirely don’t appear. Their refusals aren’t mischaracterized. They’re absent.

This isn’t a narrative oversight. It’s a function of the coherence Kass’s story is built to produce. As the piece progresses, the pressure to maintain alignment, between theory, experience, and outcome, means that anything incompatible with that arc must be either reconciled or removed. And the longer coherence holds, the harder it becomes to include contradiction without destabilizing the frame. Eventually, the need to confirm meaning outweighs the need to reflect conditions.

That pressure to confirm meaning isn’t just personal. It comes from how certain ways of knowing are built. When someone enters a moment like Stop Cop City with frameworks already in place, carefully cited, institutionally legible, designed to track harm and name resistance, and an expectation they will return to the university in the fall with information showing how real events look when these theories are applied, there’s pressure to find something that affirms them. Not because of bad faith, but because that’s how value is produced in the environments those frameworks come from. The story doesn’t just describe what happened. It proves that the tools brought into the forest still work. And when those tools are also what justify your presence, your risk, your relevance, that confirmation becomes its own form of necessity.

Navigating with Narrative

When a narrative like this circulates, citation-rich, aesthetically refined, unchallenged in its internal logic, it doesn’t just shape memory. It guides action. It becomes a model for how people imagine resistance should look, and what outcomes to expect. And when that model presents harm as confirmation, and coherence as care, it’s not surprising that others start recreating it. Not because they’re naïve, but because they were told, explicitly, that this is what success looks like.

I know someone who used to work part-time as a landscaper, and part-time as a land steward, who used to use the Weelaunee as a decentralized nursery, propagating native plants, cultivating medicine, sharing cuttings across neighborhoods. The forest was part of their economy, and part of their care, even as Cop City moved from idea to plan to construction contract. But with Stop Cop City, the work had to slow, navigate around the new ways people were using the forest. After the arrests, that work became impossible. The risk was too high, the visibility too dangerous.

Today, they work full-time as a landscaper. They can't offer to plant free native plants for the city's Indigenous residents, because they don't have the forest that provided those plants in abundance.

One of their clients now is a professor, someone who witnessed police beat protestors during the forest defense. They believed it worked: that Stop Cop City stopped Cop City. Why wouldn't they believe that - it's what the papers - both local news and distant academic - say happened.

So now, that professor believes others should protest at Tesla dealerships. Get themselves beaten, and shot. They believe that other people getting shot will stop Elon Musk, not because bodily risk is a necessary part of bodily action, but because they have a narrative body of evidence that indicates it is a necessary step in stopping him.

This isn’t a misunderstanding. It’s the signal working as designed. The story of Stop Cop City was formatted to look like a resolved arc: repression, rupture, reflection, synthesis. So now, when people see repression, they expect synthesis to follow. When someone gets beaten, they assume it means something is working. The model doesn’t need to match outcomes. It just needs to look like the last loop. That’s how recursive legibility reproduces itself: not by lying, but by narrating harm as proof of coherence.

This is how formatting becomes strategy. Not just for the state, but for everyone trying to act inside systems that reward narrative resolution. When a piece like Kass’s becomes the memory of the movement, it does more than misrepresent what happened. It sets the terms for what will happen next. It teaches people how to be seen. It teaches institutions what to reward. And it teaches organizers which stories will be allowed to survive.

None of that makes it malicious. That’s the problem. It doesn’t have to be.

Kass didn’t invent the loop. She entered it. Like many before her, and many after, she brought a framework designed to make sense of capture, and proved its accuracy by performing it. Her citations are clean. Her analysis is compelling. Her prose is elegant. The piece circulates. And in circulating, it retrofits the forest into the arc it needed to confirm. That’s not a betrayal of the theory she cites. It’s the outcome they warned her about.

On April 2nd, 2025, the U.S. government announced a sweeping tariff policy, applying across all imports with immediate effect.

Over the following week, the policy evolved rapidly: it expanded to cover additional categories, triggered immediate procurement responses, and by April 9th, a substantial portion of it was suspended.

Other parts, particularly those targeting Chinese imports, remained in place or were even intensified. This wasn’t a full reversal. It was a targeted redirection under pressure.

Across commentary, the moment was quickly situated within familiar analytical frameworks. Liberal interpretations treated it as institutional constraint on executive overreach. Marxist analysis described it as finance capital disciplining industrial policy. These readings weren’t incoherent—but they narrated the reversal as a moment of political contradiction or contestation, as if different outcomes had been materially possible. In reality, the system had already begun correcting the conditions they analyzed, mechanically and digitally, faster than even AI can produce the content. The explanations arrived not as guides for decision-making, but as retroactive narrative stabilizers.

This was not an event, it was a recursive containment cycle. A signal processed through layers of feedback, stabilization, and narrative resolution. What looked like volatility was not a breakdown in governance, but governance's recursive response.

This was not a rupture or potential break. It didn’t open new possibilities, invite contestation, or expose the system to contingency. It was never allowed to become an "event". In Elizabeth Povinelli’s terms, it was a quasi-event: a disturbance already embedded in the logic of its own containment. What we witnessed was not a transformation, but the preemptive stabilization of something that appeared volatile but never escaped its feedback bounds. The system registered it not as a crisis, but as another site for the management of looped labor.

The shifts in policy were not driven by public reception or political deliberation. They were triggered by system-internal constraints. As the tariffs entered operational and financial layers, procurement systems, pricing models, Treasury markets, the signal they carried exceeded what the system could carry forward without cost. Model deviation, liquidity stress, and delivery risk accumulated into a composite pressure. The system began rerouting, mechanically, not ideologically.

Interpretive responses didn’t cause this rerouting. They followed it. But they were not irrelevant. Once market and institutional behavior had adjusted, narrative stabilization became necessary. Political, financial, and media systems produced explanations that reframed the prior week’s volatility into structured outcomes. This interpretation didn’t clarify the event, it completed it.

This reiterative transformation aligns with long-standing systems theory: volatility is sensed, models diverge, corrective behavior activates, and narrative synthesis stabilizes the result. The tariff sequence wasn’t a failed policy. It was a processed deviation, metabolized by a system with no room for sustained misalignment.

1: Volatility Was a Systemic Input, Not a Signal of Confusion

The initial reaction to the April 2 tariff policy was widely framed as confusion, political instability, incoherent messaging, or market panic. But what occurred was not a cognitive failure of systems. It was a structural process: a destabilizing input exceeded tolerance thresholds across systems that are built to detect, adjust to, and metabolize deviation.

Procurement systems responded first. Large retailers and distributors halted or delayed orders from key import sources, especially tariff-sensitive categories like electronics, auto components, and packaging. These decisions weren’t made through deliberation or protest. They were triggered by model misalignment: internal systems that manage cost forecasting, delivery risk and margin optimization crossed volatility thresholds and defaulted to pause.

Futures markets showed parallel behavior. Pricing derivatives began to spike, spreads widened, and traders rebalanced contracts. These actions were not expressions of belief or sentiment. They were algorithmic and institutional corrections to deviation from expected conditions. The inputs no longer matched the projections. Correction was the only available behavior.

What looked like market instability was in fact the first phase of what Norbert Wiener and Stafford Beer would both recognize as cybernetic feedback. The system detected an unmanageable change in input conditions and initiated self-correction, not from a central actor, but through distributed adaptation mechanisms. For sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose systems theory emphasizes that institutions respond only to internally legible disturbances, this is information as selection, not understanding.

Volatility was not the error. It was the detection of error. And volatility wasn’t just detected, it was converted. Traders hedged. Algorithms repriced. Analysts generated content. The deviation became throughput. Volatility, once processed, yielded value. It initiated interpretation, not in discourse, but in behavior. Media theorist Wendy Chun, in Updating to Remain the Same, shows how modern systems preserve coherence by distributing correction over time—delay becomes a method of control, not a sign of failure.

2: What Looked Like Market Panic Was the System Sensing Its Boundaries

The sharp corrections in procurement, logistics, and bond markets following the tariff announcement were not signs of an irrational system. They were signs of a system under permanent constraint, operating close to its tolerances, and responding predictably to a new form of stress.

Cybernetician Stafford Beer, writing in the 1970s on how systems survive under pressure, proposed the Viable System Model—a framework for understanding how organizations reorganize themselves to maintain throughput without collapse. A viable system doesn’t require perfect information or planning, it requires enough feedback to test whether it can sustain current operations under new conditions. When the input exceeds those conditions, the system doesn’t collapse. It restricts throughput, withdraws from exposed sectors, and repositions resources. That’s exactly what happened here. Procurement halted not to make a political statement, but because pricing and delivery projections fell out of operational range. That’s boundary-testing behavior, not chaos.

In The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, argued that information is a difference that makes a difference: systems don’t react to content—they respond to signal mismatch. It is a measurement of difference: a signal becomes meaningful only when it deviates from expected norms. In that sense, volatility isn’t noise, it’s the presence of information. The tariffs, and the yield shifts and procurement pauses they produced, were not side effects. They were the system’s core sensing behavior in action.

Information theorist Claude Shannon, whose 1948 work defined information as statistical deviation from expectation, helps clarify why volatility isn’t noise—it’s how systems detect signal. What appeared as “market overreaction” was actually the production of new information via deviation, Δ from forecasted prices, delivery reliability, or input costs. The more deviation, the more information. And the more information, the more correction required to preserve the system’s internal consistency.

Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant coined the term “crisis ordinariness” to describe how people and institutions adapt to ongoing instability—not by resolving it, but by habituating to it through affective and procedural means. In Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant describes how systems and subjects adjust to ongoing constraint not by resolving it, but by managing it affectively and behaviorally. A crisis does not arrive as a rupture. It persists as a condition. These adjustments weren’t responses to a shock. They were boundary maintenance procedures in response to an input that briefly exposed the limits already structuring system behavior. But maintenance isn’t neutral. Boundary responses are not just defensive, they’re often extractive. Cybernetic settlerism operates by converting deviation into differential advantage: pricing risk, hedging cost, reallocating flow. The system doesn't just correct, it harvests correction.

3: Debt Didn’t Mediate the Crisis. It Measured It.

The tariff policy did not fail because of public backlash, political hesitation, or geopolitical miscalculation. It failed because it became incompatible with the U.S. fiscal system’s short-term operating constraints, specifically, its dependency on continuous debt issuance to sustain federal liquidity. Auctions didn’t collapse, but they moved far enough off-model to trigger behavioral shifts at the institutional level.

Debt, in this case, wasn’t an instrument of policy, it was an interface for constraint detection.

Since 2008, and even more acutely after 2020, the U.S. Treasury has shifted toward short-term debt instruments: four- to thirteen-week Treasury bills that must be rolled over constantly. According to the Treasury’s own data, the average maturity of marketable debt has fallen, and the share maturing within one year has increased substantially. This means that any systemic shock, policy, price, or otherwise, rapidly translates into liquidity stress. This shift renders the U.S. fiscal infrastructure sensitive not just to capital, but to time. Recursive systems anchored in short-duration instruments cannot tolerate latency, they metabolize timing strain as financial deviation. Sociologist Lisa Adkins, writing on time and finance, describes how systems of governance increasingly operate by managing temporality itself: auction timing, interest rates, and rollover cycles become core levers of control. When duration itself becomes a form of leverage, even small disruptions in timing, like the lag between procurement reactions and auction signals, can activate macroeconomic recalibrations. The tariff didn’t break the system. It misaligned its temporal contracts.

Anthropologist David Graeber argued that debt is not just an economic tool, but a social and temporal ordering system—one that encodes power, obligation, and governance through time-based expectations. In this context, Treasury auctions are not neutral fiscal procedures, they are where the state’s operational capacity is re-evaluated in real time by its creditors. When tariffs introduced cost uncertainty, it wasn’t political messaging that failed. It was the bid curves.

Primary dealers and institutional buyers adjusted their participation based on forecasted cost. That adjustment appeared in softened bid coverage and upward pressure on yields. From inside the system, these weren’t interpreted as political judgments, they were deviation signals, activating defensive routines across agencies that rely on predictable auction performance.

This also aligns with Niklas Luhmann’s theory of self-referential systems. In The Economy as a Social System (1988), Luhmann argues that the economy is not a reactive mirror of policy inputs, but a closed system that processes only internally recognized information. The auction strain did not reflect beliefs about the tariffs. It reflected a divergence from expected operational rhythms, forcing the system to re-stabilize around a tolerable range.

Wendy Chun’s work in Updating to Remain the Same adds another relevant layer. She shows how modern systems don’t respond to events as such, they respond to the breakdown of synchronization. Control is not exercised through perfect management, but through the containment of timing failure. In this case, the Treasury auction models began slipping out of sync with the underlying assumptions used by procurement, fiscal policy, and monetary operations. That timing mismatch became visible as yield strain, and that strain became actionable.

The policy revision wasn’t a response to a discrete crisis. It was a correction triggered by feedback accumulation across liquidity-sensitive systems.

4: The Timeline Was Not a Causal Chain. It Was a Rhythm of Corrections.

From April 2 through April 9, the tariff policy passed through a sequence of inputs and adjustments, announcement, market response, procurement slowdown, Treasury auction shifts, policy revision. This can appear as a chain of causes and effects, but that framing misses the structure. These were not sequential decisions. They were concurrent feedback loops, each operating on different rhythms, each reacting to different thresholds of deviation.

Procurement systems began adjusting within 24 hours. Futures markets corrected in near real-time. Institutional buyers shifted Treasury auction behavior by day five. By the time narrative explanation began to consolidate, the policy had already been partially suspended. These weren’t coordinated moves. They were interdependent corrections occurring at different operational layers.

Each layer operated on its own temporal horizon. Financial systems responded in microseconds, rebalancing positions before policy statements even finished broadcasting. Procurement systems adjusted daily, updating cost models and delivery schedules by the close of each business cycle. Treasury auction behavior shifted over a matter of days, slowly accumulating strain before surfacing in yield curves. And interpretive systems, media, analysis, legislative narrative, arrives on a weekly cadence, only engaging once behavioral stabilization was already underway. These weren’t just asynchronous reactions. They were stacked timebases, each with a different tolerance for uncertainty, and each serving as a containment layer for the last.

Reiterative containment isn’t redundancy. It’s variation under constraint. When no surplus is available, no ideological slack, no material buffer, governance doesn't repeat itself accidentally. It iterates strategically within feedback tolerances. The system doesn’t rerun events. It reskins them. Each policy shock routes through a finite repertoire of stabilizing behaviors, generating difference that never threatens exit.

Cybernetician W. Ross Ashby formulated the Law of Requisite Variety: a system can only remain stable if it has enough internal complexity to match the complexity of its environment. The tariff shock did not need to be anticipated; the system’s variety, procurement pause, debt spread, policy revision, was already distributed across multiple rhythms. The system didn’t reason its way to a correction. It routed through available behaviors until one matched. Heinz von Foerster, a second-order cybernetician, emphasized that observers are part of the system they describe—a framing that resonates with interpretive participation as a stabilizing function.

This layered responsiveness reflects a principle visible in cybernetic theory since the work of Ross Ashby and Heinz von Foerster: systems maintain stability not by eliminating fluctuation, but by distributing correction across feedback levels. The different rhythms, hourly in finance, daily in procurement, weekly in policy, are not noise. They’re how stability is produced without a central controller. Each part of the system detects and responds to divergence on its own timebase.

Platform governance theory helps clarify this behavior. Philosopher and design theorist Benjamin Bratton, in The Stack, describes platform governance as exception management—systems that don’t decide, but sort disruptions into routable cases. The platform doesn’t "decide" in the traditional sense. It routes. It flags. It isolates deviation and initiates modular responses. The adjustment that followed the tariff announcement wasn’t a coordinated retreat. It was exception management triggered by an input routed through existing control structures.

In platform terms, the tariff didn’t initiate a debate. It triggered an exception protocol. Bratton’s Stack model helps clarify this: platforms govern not by coherent strategy, but by automated sorting of disruptions into routable cases. The tariff functioned less as directive policy and more as an engagement object, a piece of content injected into system workflows, triggering cascades of moderation, filtering, and quarantine. What looked like institutional judgment was closer to platform moderation logic: detect deviation, isolate instability, suppress escalation, restore flow.

Policy, in this frame, becomes a kind of stimulus. Not an instruction, but a test of thresholds. When the system cannot absorb the cost of implementation, through logistics, liquidity, or latency, it doesn’t need to deliberate. It reroutes, suspends, or delays without resolving the contradiction. In this case, the tariff's cost entered the system faster than any single institution could buffer. The adjustments that followed didn’t emerge from consensus. They emerged from the recognition that continuity was more valuable than consistency.

The timeline of April 2 to April 9 wasn’t a progression. It was a synchronization effort, feedback loops re-aligning under stress to preserve throughput.

5: Interpretation Didn’t Follow the Event. It Closed the System’s Response Loop.

By April 9, the most disruptive components of the tariff policy had been suspended. Institutions had adjusted procurement schedules, market expectations had rebalanced, and debt issuance, though still under pressure, had returned to a more predictable range. Only then did formal interpretation begin, not of an event, but of the absence of one: commentary from media outlets, analysis from economists, policy statements from agencies and lawmakers.

These explanations, about strategic recalibration, political misjudgment, or market discipline, were not irrelevant, but they were not explanatory in the causal sense. They functioned as narrative infrastructure: affective scaffolds that stabilized perception long enough for throughput to resume. Meaning is not reflection, it is a system resource. They arrived after the system had already completed its behavioral adjustment. What they provided was not resolution, but narrative closure, the final stabilization layer required to render the correction legible.

Lauren Berlant describes interpretation not as a privileged act of reflection, but as a form of affective infrastructure. Discourse doesn’t resolve contradiction; it manages its persistence. Public analysis of the tariff cycle didn’t clarify what had happened. It provided narrative containers that allowed the system’s outputs, market correction, policy shift, debt adjustment, to appear coherent after the fact. That appearance is essential to maintaining institutional legitimacy, even if no decision-making subject was in control.

This also reflects core insights from Luhmann’s The Reality of the Mass Media (1996), in which he argues that communication systems don’t convey truth. They reproduce structure. Media, in his framework, doesn’t report reality, it generates it recursively. The explosion of analysis after April 9 was not a breakdown into opinion. It was a convergence into routable signal. Each explanation adds interpretive density. That density stabilizes perception, allowing systems, financial, political, platformic, to proceed as though coherence had been maintained throughout.

This is not just rhetorical closure, it’s functional. Interpretation acts as an interface layer: not explaining the event, but ensuring that no event is allowed to form outside system legibility. Physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad coined the term “intra-action” to describe how agency doesn’t precede relation—it emerges from it. In recursive systems, meaning doesn’t originate—it materializes through synchronization. Agency, in her framework, doesn’t belong to subjects, it emerges from the relations that materialize reality. The recursive loop completes not when the system understands itself, but when it prevents anything from happening that cannot already be rendered operable. Narrative isn’t a mirror. It’s a firewall.

Media scholar Tarleton Gillespie, in Custodians of the Internet, shows how platforms maintain flow not by adjudicating truth, but by routing engagement. Signal value, not accuracy, is what determines what circulates. In this context, interpretation functions less as a diagnostic and more as telemetry. It provides data about participation and alignment, not clarity about cause.

But interpretation doesn’t just stabilize systems. It stabilizes subjects. Cybernetic governance does not need the public to understand events. It needs publics to metabolize them, visibly, vocally, in sync. To remain intelligible within the loop is to signal credibility. To resist interpretation, to withdraw from the labor of coherence, is to risk incoherence as a social position.

Burnout becomes proof-of-work. The more interpretation you produce, the more your signal is routed as legitimate. This is not a side effect. It is the system’s affective economy: the explanatory strain itself becomes a currency of trust.

The implication is stark: the system doesn’t need interpretation to understand itself. It needs interpretation to continue. The moment explanation begins, it converts volatility into content, and content into feedback. This doesn’t resolve the event. It closes the loop.

But feedback isn't free. Each cybernetic correction, each buffering maneuver, consumes not just interpretive labor, but computational, financial, and temporal energy. Chun’s notion of synchronization failure gains added weight when considered materially: the cost of preserving system rhythm rises as buffers thin. What we call “stability” is increasingly a product of burn rate, how fast systems can process misalignment into throughput without overheating. The tariff cycle didn’t cause a structural collapse, but it spiked the system’s metabolic rate. Stability was preserved, but at the cost of acceleration elsewhere.

6: Curiosity Is the Final Input, Interpretation as Metabolic Load

Interpretation arrives not to clarify the event, but to stabilize its outputs. That interpretive labor is not exterior to the event cycle, it is its terminal phase. But to say that interpretation “completes the loop” is not to suggest finality. It is to indicate the opening of a new process: recursive energy capture through sensemaking.

This labor is conscriptive. It doesn’t ask for voluntary insight, it demands temporal alignment. Governance without surplus has no patience for slow subjects. Meaning must be generated at platform speed, or it fails to register as stabilizing behavior. In that sense, publics don’t respond to governance. They function as its distributed latency buffers.

This is not symbolic. It is infrastructural.

Once behavioral stabilization is underway, procurement rerouted, Treasury auctions cleared, policy revised, what remains volatile is meaning. And meaning, in contemporary systems of governance and platform economics, is not managed by authorities. It is distributed across interpretive agents: institutions, analysts, publics, commentators, markets. The effort to understand, to locate cause, assign intention, reimpose coherence, functions as a cybernetic pressure sink. It doesn’t resolve instability. It absorbs it.

The process is recursive because the effort to explain doesn’t just circulate in discourse. It produces system-readable signals: sentiment data, engagement rates, risk models, volatility indexes, alignment metrics. Curiosity becomes throughput, measurable and actionable. The system registers not what is known, but how much explanatory behavior is occurring, and in what direction.

This includes me.

This piece didn’t escape the loop, it executed it. I took the signal, policy strain, procurement deferral, auction softening, and turned them into narrative form. Constraint into coherence. Stress into syntax. By drafting this, citing this, threading this, I didn’t stand outside the system. I fed it.

And now you are too.

Reading, interpreting, weighing reference density against rhetorical cadence, you’re not just consuming thought, you’re measuring and modulating its signal. If you like it, share it, quote it, subscribe to it, you are not just audience. You are an affective computer. You’re a stabilizer. A throughput node. And if you’re a paying subscriber? Then yes, you're financing the production of narrative surplus. You’re underwriting the very process of converting volatility into system-readable coherence. You’re not just metabolizing meaning. You’re funding the burn.

That’s not failure. That’s format. The loop completes when you feel it.

This is what Wendy Chun frames in Updating to Remain the Same: interpretation is not outside system maintenance, it is one of its key temporal instruments. “Understanding” functions not as a rupture but as a synchronization technique, aligning users with system time by converting confusion into stabilized participation.

This alignment is not free.

Every act of interpretation, whether technical, economic, or narrative, draws from limited cognitive, temporal, and material resources. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant describes how affective labor under late capitalism increasingly takes the form of interpretive endurance: the ongoing attempt to “make sense” of conditions that do not change. The cost of this labor is not just psychic. It is infrastructural. Time spent interpreting policy noise is time not spent on logistical support, survival strategies, or relational maintenance.

The system does not require accurate interpretation. It only requires signal-dense interpretation, enough narrative coherence to close the feedback loop and stabilize expectations. In this sense, interpretation becomes a form of consumptive delay. Not an act of knowledge production, but of metabolic suspension.

Luhmann’s The Reality of the Mass Media clarifies this further: communication systems do not convey truth. They generate recursive readability. That readability is not judged by accuracy but by whether it produces more communication. The more an event resists easy explanation, the more interpretive cycles it produces. And the more cycles, the more legibility the system has to route into behavioral analytics.

In this way, curiosity becomes a systemic resource, not because it generates insight, but because it produces participation. The attempt to understand becomes surplus labor routed back into systemic continuity. It is not clarifying, it is metabolizing. Under cognitive capitalism, curiosity is both commodity and exhaust. Interpretation doesn’t delay collapse, it feeds the burn. What persists isn’t clarity. It’s signal.

This is the closing efficiency of cybernetic governance: it does not suppress confusion. It formats it.

Explanatory behavior, threads, op-eds, briefings, critiques, is not friction to the system. It is a thermodynamic feature: a way of converting signal instability into engagement heat, which can then be measured, traded, and predicted against.

Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack shows how platforms govern by processing exception as workflow. Curiosity functions similarly. It routes exception through interpretive modules: economic analysis, geopolitical commentary, behavioral modeling, public discourse. Each one completes a circuit.

Each one adds load to a system that no longer distinguishes between signal and sense, only between signal and failure-to-process. But that load is not friction to be overcome. It is constitutive. The system needs it. The reiterative management of interpretive strain is not an accidental byproduct of cybernetic governance. It is cybernetic governance.

The load is the system.

And so the system reroutes energy toward the load. Not as an exception. As protocol.

Because the interpretive load is not just tolerable, it is the structure through which the system persists. When explanatory behavior begins producing recursive throughput, signal in excess of signal, the system reorganizes to support that production. Not to resolve it, but to metabolize it.

Philosopher Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share, argued that surplus energy must be expended—not hoarded. In capitalism, this often takes the form of symbolic or interpretive burn: energy spent without direct material return, but necessary to maintain order. Value is not simply accumulated; it is demonstrated through nonproductive burn: ritual, war, spectacle. In cybernetic capitalism, explanatory strain replaces the sacrificial economy. What must be burned now is sense-making itself, understood not as resolution, but as ongoing labor in the face of contradiction.

This is why the system draws on every available resource, financial, military, psychological, to maintain the feedback circuit. Not because interpretation generates clarity. But because it demonstrates capacity. The ability to process confusion becomes the proof of viability.

Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of endurance clarifies this further. In Economies of Abandonment, she argues that late liberal systems no longer promise resolution. What they demand instead is the performance of ongoing survival under conditions that do not change. Explanatory behavior becomes part of that performance: not an effort to escape the loop, but to remain intelligible within it.

Media theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues that under cognitive capitalism, attention becomes both commodity and exhaust: burnout is not failure—it’s a proof of yield. The labor of trying to understand, of staying alert to contradiction, volatility, and interpretive overload, is the fuel that sustains the apparatus. The burnout it generates is not failure. It is yield.

So when the system redirects energy, via Treasury auctions, platform algorithms, crisis deployment, neural loops, it is not responding to instability. It is harvesting it.

And it harvests differential strain. The subject who endures interpretive pressure becomes more signal-rich, more visible to governance. The organic intellectual becomes a class of material, and their burnout is no longer dysfunction, it’s credentialed intensity.

The interpretive strain itself becomes a site of productivity, and confusion becomes the condition for value extraction.

Conclusion: The System Didn't Reverse Itself. It Re-stabilized Through Recursive Feedback.

The tariff policy released on April 2nd did not fail because it was politically unpopular, economically incoherent, or ideologically contested, though all of those framings circulated after the fact. It failed because it introduced costs and risks into a system already operating near the edge of its tolerances. The result was not collapse. It was correction.

Each part of the system, procurement, logistics, futures pricing, bond markets, policy coordination, responded not to the emergence of an event, but to a deviation processed as signal. That signal triggered recursive adjustment: models shifted, orders paused, yields climbed, auction participation softened. Eventually, the policy was partially suspended, not by decision, but by cumulative constraint recognition. The system rerouted itself to preserve throughput.

This process aligns with established systems theory. Deviation is sensed, thresholds are crossed, behavior corrects. Comprehension is not required. Only continuation. As Luhmann shows, complex systems operate through operational closure: they respond not to the world, but to disturbances they can already process. Beer’s Viable System Model emphasizes the same: viability is not about control, but reorganization fast enough to remain legible to itself. Chun and Berlant remind us that delay and interpretation are not frictions, they are techniques of endurance under ongoing systemic stress.

Interpretation, once it begins, does not explain the deviation. It completes its return to homeostasis. It retroactively casts coherence across a managed instability and renders the adjustment processable as narrative. In this sense, interpretation is not external to correction. It is the final stabilizing behavior, a feedback mechanism that routes public attention, institutional discourse, and political meaning into continuity.

The tariff sequence wasn’t a misstep or a crisis. It was a quasi-event: a disturbance contained before it could breach the system’s representational horizon. Not resolved. Processed.

The proof is not in the policy, it’s in the interpretive heat trail it left. Each tweet, analysis, op-ed, and institutional adjustment didn’t just stabilize perception. It added to the burn rate that validates recursive governance. You don't just witness these cycles. You’re drafted into them. If you’re interpreting, you’re syncing. If you’re syncing, you’re contributing load.

And the system’s behavior wasn’t incoherence. It was a synchronized pressure response from a structure with no remaining slack. That’s not a breakdown in governance. It’s governance after surplus, when every signal costs, and meaning itself becomes a resource to be burned.

It is demanded from me by settlers, who—whether they mean to or not—imply that colonialism will continue unless I can explain why it shouldn’t. It is demanded from me by Indigenous people who fear that, if we do not make ourselves legible to settlers, our autonomy will become irrelevant. The logic is consistent: if we do not translate our position into terms that can be understood, we will be excluded from the conversation that decides our future.

This thinking runs deep. It has been cultivated across generations of the American left. And it draws heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the organic intellectual—on the idea that people embedded in struggle must emerge as organizers of thought, translators of material conditions into political strategy. We are told this is how hegemony is contested: by producing clarity.

I think this is absolutely wrong. And in this paper, I’m going to explain why.

It is not that I disagree with Gramsci’s context. His work was produced under fascist incarceration, at immense personal risk, and it remains a foundational contribution to the study of power and ideology. But I believe that the American uptake of his ideas—particularly the concept of the organic intellectual—has functioned not as a path toward liberation, but as a justification for formatting insurgent knowledge into settler-recognizable forms.

By the time Gramsci’s work was translated into English and widely read in the United States, the U.S. government had already enacted the destruction of the very formations his theory names. The Black Panther Party had been targeted, infiltrated, and dismantled. COINTELPRO had already functionally adopted the logic of counter-hegemonic threat management that Gramsci only theorized. And yet, American radicals embraced his work not as a postmortem, but as a plan.

The result is a confusion of timelines: a theory built for an earlier moment is picked up in a later one, and used to justify practices of visibility and translation that now serve as containment. Gramsci is cited to defend curriculum, explain outreach, and rationalize settler-facing pedagogy. His concept is invoked to authorize actions that move us away from refusal and toward formatting. And because the theory is legible—because it can be cited, taught, and circulated—it is used to validate the very processes that neutralize the political force it once described.

This paper argues that Gramsci’s theory, while produced in resistance, has become legible as a form of after-action rationalization. Its widespread citation marks the survival of a framework, not a movement. Its ability to circulate without resistance suggests not its power, but its formatting. I suggest that the organic intellectual, as it now appears in American radical theory, is not a position of risk—but a role of strategic absorption.

What follows is not a rejection of thought. It is an attempt to ask: what kinds of thought survive? What happens when insurgent knowledge becomes teachable? And who benefits when resistance is converted into curriculum?

II. Simulation Begins at Legibility: Gramsci as a Format

Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual was developed under duress. Writing from prison under Mussolini’s regime, subject to censorship and surveillance, he theorized a model of political transformation in which intellectual labor was not elite or abstracted, but embedded within material struggle. The organic intellectual, in his framing, emerged not from universities but from class formation itself—from the need to produce coherence under conditions of contradiction. Their task was not to interpret the world from above, but to organize its perception from within.

Gramsci’s writing in the Prison Notebooks was necessarily coded, mediated, and general. He was describing a real structure from inside a carceral one. This constraint shaped not only what he could say, but how he had to say it. His work is remarkable for its ability to remain strategic under such constraints—but that same abstraction has made it uniquely portable. The organic intellectual, as a concept, travels well. It can be generalized, cited, and applied in contexts far beyond Gramsci’s own.

This portability has made it powerful—but also vulnerable. Because the more a concept can be translated and applied outside of its originating conditions, the more it is subject to what I call synthetic theory: theory that is preserved through formatting, stripped of its embeddedness, and made survivable through abstraction. Synthetic theory is not false. It is not necessarily wrong. It is simply separable from the conditions that made it necessary.

Gramsci’s theory has survived in precisely this form. It has been turned into a resource for academics, organizers, and institutions alike—largely because it can be deployed without friction. It names something powerful, but in doing so, it allows that power to be absorbed.

What makes a theory legible to multiple audiences—especially across state, academic, and activist lines—is its capacity to function independently of its origins. That is what makes it citeable. It is what makes it fundable. And, as James C. Scott writes in Seeing Like a State, it is what makes it governable.

Scott’s account of legibility is about the state’s need to simplify complexity in order to administer it. Populations must be countable. Land must be mapped. Names must be registered. Legibility is not just about seeing—it is about making visible in a way that permits control.

Gramsci’s theory was never intended to serve the state. But its structure—a general category of political agent that can be abstracted from its specific context—has allowed it to become a form of recognizable insurgency. Not insurgency that threatens the state, but insurgency that can be indexed, referenced, and eventually curated.

That Gramsci’s work survives so broadly is not a sign of its enduring strategic value. It is a sign that the concept of the organic intellectual has been formatted for survivability. And the danger is that this formatting—this readability—now authorizes the kinds of activities that undermine the refusal and embeddedness that insurgent knowledge actually requires.

III. COINTELPRO and the Preemptive Destruction of the Organic Intellectual

Between 1956 and 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted COINTELPRO—the Counterintelligence Program—which sought to monitor, infiltrate, discredit, and dismantle political organizations deemed threatening to domestic order. Although the program officially targeted a range of groups, including anti-war organizers and the American Indian Movement, it focused most intensely on Black radical organizations—chief among them, the Black Panther Party.

What these formations shared was not simply militant posture or revolutionary rhetoric. They represented something more structurally dangerous: they organized theory from within lived struggle. They were not external critics of the system; they were internal producers of sense, operating in the middle of contradiction, repression, and survival. These were not “intellectuals” in the traditional sense. They were theorists embedded in practice—what Gramsci, decades earlier, had named the “organic intellectual.”

Figures like Fred Hampton and George Jackson embodied this synthesis. Hampton’s organizing in Chicago united street organizations, provided social programs, and articulated complex ideological positions through accessible language and mutual aid. Jackson, writing from within the California prison system, developed a body of analysis that combined Marxism, prison abolitionism, and Black revolutionary nationalism—without academic mediation. The Party’s survival programs, their publications, their political education structures—these were not accessories to activism. They were pedagogy in action, theory under fire.

The FBI recognized this.

A now-declassified 1968 COINTELPRO memo warns of the emergence of a “Black Messiah”—a leader capable of unifying and electrifying the “militant black nationalist movement.” But this language masks a deeper strategy. The concern was not simply charismatic leadership. The concern was ideological articulation: figures capable of converting disparate grievances into systemic analysis, and systemic analysis into coordinated movement.

In short, the FBI was acting on what we now recognize as a Gramscian logic. The Bureau didn’t need to read Gramsci to identify the threat. It understood, at a functional level, that coherence was dangerous. It targeted those who could generate it.

This is important not as a metaphor, but as a timeline.

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were not widely available in English until the early 1970s, when Lawrence & Wishart published Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971). But by this point, COINTELPRO had already been active for over a decade. The FBI, through its domestic intelligence efforts, was already practicing a form of epistemic counterinsurgency: dismantling not just organizations, but the very production of insurgent knowledge from within oppressed communities.

It is implausible to assume that no connection existed between Gramsci’s circulation in European Marxist discourse and U.S. state strategies. Western intelligence agencies were and are highly coordinated. MI5 had long monitored leftist publishers, including Lawrence & Wishart. The CIA and other Cold War agencies had extensive cultural fronts that engaged with European theory—especially when it was being used by communists. The idea of the organic intellectual would not have needed to be translated to become actionable. It only needed to be understood.

And it was.

The result is a reversal: the U.S. state enacted Gramsci’s logic of counter-hegemonic threat before radicals in the U.S. had access to the framework. While organizers struggled to make sense of fragmentation and surveillance, the state was already targeting those who dared to create sense within it.

This is the trap: by the time American radicals could read Gramsci, the war had already passed them. The people who embodied his theory were gone, imprisoned, isolated. The state had identified and destroyed the very function Gramsci described—before it was even cited.

What remains is the theory.
But it arrived too late.

IV. The Translation Moment: Gramsci as Justification for Our Own Formatting

When Gramsci’s work arrived in the Anglophone world in the early 1970s, it was received not into a living revolutionary moment, but into its aftermath. The most visible insurgent movements of the 1960s—Black radical, Indigenous, Third Worldist—had been violently disrupted or dismantled. The Panthers were fractured. Malcolm was dead. The state had already shifted from overt repression to subtler regimes of co-optation, surveillance, and reputational containment. And into that vacuum came theory.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks arrived as an authoritative guide to ideological warfare—dense, historical, but modular. It appeared at the very moment the U.S. left was consolidating into something more academic, more nonprofit, more professional. Gramsci’s language—“hegemony,” “intellectual function,” “common sense,” “organic leadership”—offered a way to keep speaking the language of struggle without confronting the violence of its disappearance.

To put it more directly: Gramsci became a way to keep talking as if we were still fighting.

But for that to happen, Gramsci had to be converted. His conditions had to be lifted. His concepts had to be made portable, transportable, compatible with American political institutions. He could no longer be a theorist of Italian fascism. He had to become a theorist of struggle, full stop—useful wherever people wanted to talk about oppression, strategy, or pedagogy.

This wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a necessity.

In order for Gramsci to be useful to American radicalism post-COINTELPRO, he had to be stripped of specificity. His theory had to become synthetic: survivable across contexts because it no longer made demands on the material world. It became the kind of thought that travels well. And traveling well is not neutral.

The result was a strange reanimation. Gramsci’s theory, produced in prison, under fascism, to explain how movements could build counterpower, was now being used to explain why pedagogy, curriculum development, public-facing education, and institutional legibility were necessary. American radicalism embraced Gramsci not as a theorist of historical defeat—but as a justification for contemporary formatting.

That is, Gramsci began to authorize the very dynamics that replaced the movements his theory once described.

Where refusal had been central, now translation became the work.
Where secrecy had once been strategic, now openness was proof of relevance.
Where embedded struggle had once generated theory, now the theory could precede the conditions.

Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual now appears in:

• Mission statements for radical nonprofit programs

• Public scholarship fellowships

• Justifications for settler-facing pedagogy

• Institutional rationales for community-based participatory research

In these settings, the organic intellectual is not dangerous.
They are valuable.
They are fundable.
They are format-compatible.

And the tragedy is that their formatting is defended as strategy—because Gramsci said it mattered.

It is at this point that his theory stops being a tool of insurgency and becomes a mechanism of continuity. It allows radical actors to appear oppositional while participating in the systems that replaced the very figures they invoke. It converts accommodation into historical responsibility. It makes visibility seem like victory.

And it does so because legible theory survives. It is not censored. It is translated. It is circulated. It is taught. And as it travels, it transforms from analysis into affirmation.

So when Indigenous organizers cite Gramsci to justify settler-facing education, when radicals invoke the organic intellectual to explain public visibility, the problem is not misuse—it is function. That is what the theory is now for.

The war already happened.
Gramsci's theory survived.
And we are using its survival to explain our participation in the system that won.

V. Against Readability: Refusal, Specificity, and Embedded Thought

If formatting is the condition of theoretical survival, then the question is no longer whether a theory is true, but whether it can resist use.

The organic intellectual survives because it became usable—by institutions, by funders, by radicals seeking legibility in hostile terrain. It has become a template, not an analysis. And in doing so, it now names a figure who is coherent to the systems that destroyed the people Gramsci originally described. That is the paradox this paper has traced: the theory did not protect its referents. But it outlived them. And now it is used to justify our formatting in the name of struggle.

The alternative is not retreat. It is refusal. But refusal has been misread—flattened into inaction or obscurantism. That is a misreading cultivated by systems that profit from clarity.

In Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson describes refusal as a political act not of silence, but of withholding—not participating in legibility, not submitting to structures that demand explanation. Refusal is not evasion. It is sovereignty. It is a decision about what gets translated, what does not, and who it is for.

Similarly, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes that Indigenous knowledge is not scalable. It cannot be lifted from the relationships that produce it. To extract it into generalized theory is to destroy it. Some stories cannot be shared. Some knowledge cannot be taught without harm. Theory, in this frame, is not a tool—it is a relation. And relations have boundaries.

This is the opposite of synthetic theory. This is embedded thought—the kind that does not travel well, the kind that loses meaning when extracted from its place, the kind that breaks when formatted.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in The Undercommons, describe study as that which happens in the breaks, in the margins, in the refusal to submit knowledge to institutional accounting. It is not a curriculum. It is not a deliverable. It is not a strategic communication plan. It is relation and movement and difference, lived together, unrecorded and unrendered.

These thinkers don’t propose a better model of the organic intellectual. They reject the conditions that make that model survivable.

So what would it mean to produce thought that resists use?
What would it mean to theorize in a way that cannot be cited in a grant application?
That cannot be excerpted in a fellowship?
That cannot be adapted into a training module or a settler education program?

It would mean producing knowledge that cannot be circulated without betrayal.
Knowledge that cannot be absorbed because it cannot be lifted.

It would mean returning to specificity. To conditions. To relations. To the spaces where thought is for people, not for systems.

It would mean abandoning the fantasy that pedagogy for power is insurgent, and remembering that some of the most powerful knowledge is incommunicable by design.

This is not a call to mystify or to withhold for its own sake. It is a call to recognize that clarity is not always strategy. And legibility is not always survivable.

There are forms of knowledge that should not be read.
There are forms of theory that should not be saved.
And there are forms of life that will not be understood—because they are not for that.

VI. Conclusion: If They Let You Teach It, It’s Already Too Late

Gramsci’s theory is not wrong. But its afterlife is doing something other than what he intended.

He wrote from a prison built by fascists. He wrote without access to his archives, without freedom of speech, and without certainty that anyone would ever read him. He wrote to clarify, under conditions where clarity was criminal. He wrote to imagine a way forward, not to survive his own disappearance.

But his theory did survive. And that survival now functions as evidence. It tells us that insurgent thought can live in the archive. That struggle can be formatted. That resistance can be repurposed. That we can read the Prison Notebooks in a seminar room funded by the same university that contracts with ICE and builds settler futures on stolen land.

That is the problem. Not that Gramsci is being misused—but that his theory survived precisely because it became usable. Legible. Circulable. Familiar.

So when I hear that we must be legible, I think about what survives. I think about what had to be destroyed to make that theory teachable. I think about what it means when the same institutions that hunted the people Gramsci describes now offer fellowships in their name.

And I think about the organizer who told me I had to make us legible. That we had to produce curriculum for settlers. That we had to translate ourselves for the sake of being seen.

I know where that logic leads.

It leads to theory that can be reformatted.
It leads to pedagogy that can be adopted.
It leads to recognition that feels like progress, but functions like stillness.

The most dangerous thing about the organic intellectual today is that they are expected to be visible. Expected to explain. Expected to be coherent to the structures they were meant to oppose.

This is how formatting wins.

So I return to the central question:
What kind of theory survives?

The answer is: the kind that’s allowed to.
And the kinds that are allowed to survive often arrive too late to do anything but explain what we’ve already lost.

That’s why this isn’t just about Gramsci. It’s about what we do when theory becomes curriculum. When pedagogy becomes performance. When recognition replaces relation.

If they let you teach it, it’s already too late.
If they fund it, they’ve already neutralized it.
If it names you, formats you, and circulates you—it’s not yours anymore.

And if the theory survives but the people don’t, we have to stop calling that strategy.
We have to call it what it is: a simulation of life, written after the war, for the benefit of the victors.

Contemporary English, particularly in its American institutional and digital forms, is undergoing a profound shift in how it handles agency, relation, and responsibility. This shift is not superficial. It is not a matter of jargon, slang, or changing taste. It is structural. It reflects the adaptation of language to conditions in which speaking clearly, personally, or relationally is increasingly disincentivized, politically, economically, and algorithmically.

Two dominant grammatical modes now shape this linguistic field. The first is what I might call dead institutional English: a procedural, passive, agentless grammar used by governments, corporations, universities, and platforms. This language appears in public apologies, press releases, moderation statements, and official reports. It is structured to perform responsiveness while deferring causality, to acknowledge harm without naming a subject, to describe action without ethical presence.

The second mode is what I'll refer to here as meme grammar: an affectively saturated, format-driven, stylistically flexible vernacular that circulates primarily on digital platforms. It thrives on rhythm, irony, disidentification, and exaggeration. It is structurally agile, often emotionally direct, and culturally powerful. But it, too, often evades relation, not through passivity, but through simulation. Its liveliness is frequently borrowed. It performs presence using grammar extracted from living linguistic traditions, most notably African American Vernacular English (AAVE), diasporic creoles, and Indigenous languages, without retaining their histories, constraints, or obligations.

These two grammars, detached bureaucracy and stylized mimicry, may appear to be in tension. One is dry and procedural. The other is emotionally vivid and fast-moving. But both, in different ways, function as responses to a deeper crisis: the failure of dominant English to hold relational accountability under the pressures of a platformized, post-representational public sphere. In the space where relation should be named, we now find either euphemism or echo.

This paper names this condition linguistic extraction: the process by which grammatical forms built under conditions of historical pressure, forms that encode survival, positionality, and ethical presence, are lifted from their contexts and circulated as aesthetic devices within a system that does not require speakers to be present, or even to be real.

The Argument

I'll argue that this is not simply a question of style, or even of appropriation in the cultural sense. It is a question of grammatical infrastructure, and how that infrastructure is being reorganized in the wake of political, technological, and epistemic collapse.

I'll draw on theorists of language, affect, and relation to map this terrain:

• From Victor Klemperer, I take the insight that authoritarian regimes rewrite agency not just through vocabulary, but through syntax, using grammar to erase responsibility while maintaining the illusion of order.

• From Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, I understand how dominant grammars are built to encode the speaking subject of whiteness as the norm, relegating other speech, particularly Black and creolized grammars, as marked, illegible, or excessive.

• From Lauren Berlant, I frame dominant English as a genre of the impasse, a way of deferring confrontation by performing procedural feeling.

• From Édouard Glissant and Trinh T. Minh-ha, I approach linguistic opacity not as a failure of clarity, but as a right to refuse transparency under conditions of extraction.

• From Wendy Chun and Tung-Hui Hu, I consider how platform infrastructures reshape grammar into a tool of frictionless circulation, a sentence optimized for engagement, not relation.

The Structure

The paper unfolds in seven sections:

1. Dead English explores the grammar of institutional detachment: its reliance on passive constructions, agentless verbs, and procedural tone.

2. Meme Grammar maps the emergence of digital vernaculars that simulate aliveness by borrowing affective and rhythmic patterns from historically situated grammars.

3. Linguistic Extraction examines how AAVE, creole, and Indigenous syntactic forms are circulated as style, while their speakers are penalized or ignored.

4. Platform Infrastructure analyzes how digital systems reward aestheticized simulation and penalize grammatical opacity or difference.

5. Speaking While Marked outlines what it means to inhabit language ethically, with attention to one’s inheritances, borrowings, and position.

6. Opacity and Refusal argues for the preservation of untranslatable grammars and the rejection of performance as a substitute for relation.

7. Conclusion offers no new grammar, only a call for accountable speech: to remain inside the sentence long enough to be answerable for it.

This is not a call to purity, nor a rejection of aesthetic play. It is a recognition that some grammars carry relation, and others simulate its trace. It is a recognition that under conditions of collapse, how we sentence the world matters, and that some grammars make room for responsibility, while others only make room for retweets.

II. Dead English: The Grammar of Institutional Detachment

The institutional sentence, whether it comes from a university, a corporation, a platform, or a government agency, follows a recognizable pattern. It is structured to appear informative while avoiding the specificity that would permit response. This language is designed not to lie, but to evade legibility in any relational sense.

A familiar example:

“We take these concerns seriously. Steps have been taken to address the issue.”

This construction appears neutral. It acknowledges the existence of concern, signals that action is underway, and uses a tone of procedural gravity. But its grammar removes all meaningful agency. Who took the steps? What were they? Whose issue is it? What was done? Every verb is softened, every subject obscured. The sentence completes a communicative obligation without producing an ethical position.

This is what I call dead English: language that maintains grammatical form while voiding relational function. It is language that circulates without presence.

I. Passive Voice and the Evacuation of Agency

In linguistic terms, the passive voice allows the speaker to emphasize the object of an action while omitting the subject. “The window was broken” tells us what happened, but not who did it. While the passive is not inherently deceptive, it has legitimate uses, its overuse in institutional communication is a deliberate strategy.

In American public life, this strategy is visible across domains:

• Police departments refer to shootings as “officer-involved incidents.”

• Companies describe layoffs as “a restructuring decision.”

• Universities describe racism as “a climate issue that emerged.”

In each case, the grammatical structure shifts focus away from responsibility, transforming choices into conditions, and actions into processes. The subject is either absent or generalized beyond recognition. The sentence performs concern without requiring the institution to locate itself within the event it is describing.

II. Klemperer and the Grammar of Authoritarian Drift

Victor Klemperer, writing under Nazi rule, observed that the German language of the regime was not only defined by its slogans, but by its syntax. In The Language of the Third Reich, he documents how even ordinary citizens began to adopt a grammar of passivity and abstraction, learning to describe events as if no one were responsible for them.

Klemperer’s central claim, that grammar does ideological work, is echoed in the institutional English of the present. In both cases, what is at stake is not simply how language describes the world, but how it structures the speaker’s relation to it.

When institutions speak in agentless phrases, they are not only avoiding blame. They are modeling a way of being: to respond without appearing, to act without being seen, to address without acknowledging.

III. Risk Management as Linguistic Style

The formal features of dead English are shaped not only by ideology, but by legal and technical systems of liability. Organizations use language to minimize exposure. This is especially evident in public apologies and statements following controversy:

“We understand that harm may have occurred, and we are working to ensure this does not happen again.”

This is a sentence designed to manage risk. The harm is hypothetical (“may have occurred”), the actor is passive (“we are working”), and the future is gestured toward in vague terms. The sentence offers recognition without redress. It does not invite conversation. It closes it.

Such language does not emerge solely from legal departments. It is now the default communicative tone of entire sectors. It has become a genre, in the sense that Lauren Berlant uses the term: a socially legible form that organizes affect and expectation in times of crisis. In this case, the genre is that of the procedural apology: a scene in which nothing can be said clearly, because everything might be used against you.

IV. Automation and the Standardization of Detachment

Digital platforms have formalized this grammar through automated systems. When a user is suspended, or a post is removed, the language is often generated algorithmically:

“Your content was removed for violating our Community Guidelines.”

This sentence follows the same grammatical logic: action is described without a visible agent, the reason is procedural, and the appeal mechanism, if one exists, offers no dialogic space. The user is spoken to, but not in relation. The platform’s speech is executable, not conversational.

This is what Wendy Chun has called the logic of programmability: a mode of governance in which responsiveness is simulated, but not real. The platform speaks as if it is present, but it is structurally absent. The sentence becomes not a gesture of relation, but a confirmation that a process occurred.

V. Internalization of the Detaching Voice

What began as a strategy of institutions is now a tone available to all. As users become fluent in the genres of procedural communication, they begin to adopt the same grammatical forms in their own speech:

“I understand how this may have impacted others.”
“Boundaries were crossed.”
“Mistakes were made.”

These are not insincere statements. Often, they are attempts to speak responsibly. But they are modeled on a grammar that prevents attachment, a grammar designed to avoid confrontation, soften conflict, and perform awareness in lieu of accountability.

The result is a culture in which even those who intend to be present adopt a language designed to depersonalize their presence. The speaker becomes grammatical residue.

Dead English is not the only grammar in circulation. It operates alongside another mode: fast, compressed, emotionally legible, and often richly expressive. This is the realm of meme grammar, and while it appears to oppose institutional detachment, it frequently relies on the same mechanisms: the removal of relation, the aestheticization of presence, and the evasion of consequence.

III. Meme Grammar as Simulation of Aliveness

Alongside the procedural flatness of institutional language, a second dominant form has emerged: fast, expressive, and culturally saturated. Commonly called "meme speak" or "internet voice," this grammar functions through format repetition, irony, and stylized affect. It thrives on relatability and circulation. Its most visible forms include:

• Elliptical constructions: “me, an intellectual,” “not me crying over a spreadsheet”

• Hyperbolic affect: “screaming / crying / throwing up,” “i fear she’s slaying again”

• Fragmented format mimicry: “no one: / me:”

• Stylized quotation: “it’s giving,” “he understood the assignment,” “go off king”

This language is not ungrammatical. It follows rules, many of which are borrowed from or inspired by living vernacular grammars, particularly AAVE, queer Black English, diasporic Englishes, and Indigenous speech patterns. It borrows not just vocabulary but grammatical rhythm: habitual aspect (“he do be vibin”), intensifiers and repetition, verb omission, and tonal switching for emphasis or comedic effect.

At a glance, meme grammar appears to be the opposite of dead English: where institutional language erases affect, meme grammar exaggerates it. Where official statements flatten agency, meme grammar stylizes it. But the appearance of expressiveness in this case often conceals another form of detachment. For all its emotional noise, meme grammar rarely establishes relation. Its affective tone, like the institutional passive, rarely anchors presence in a real position.

I. The Function of Meme Grammar

Meme grammar’s function is not to establish durable meaning. It is to circulate. As Ilana Gershon has shown in her work on digital discourse, the unit of internet speech is not the conversation, but the post, a communicative object meant to be recognizable, repeatable, and formatted for platform visibility.

In this context, grammar becomes modular. A tweet, a caption, a video comment need not carry propositional clarity; it must only fit a format. The meme grammar sentence succeeds not when it is understood on its own terms, but when it reminds the reader of another sentence they’ve seen before.

This is how meme grammar performs presence without requiring the speaker to be present. It produces the affect of relation, feeling known, seen, or amused, without the conditions of mutuality, continuity, or response.

II. Simulation Through Extraction

Much of meme grammar’s vitality is drawn from its use of forms that originated in specific speech communities: Black, queer, and diasporic. These grammars were developed in historical conditions of exclusion, surveillance, and social constraint. Their syntax and pragmatics are shaped by relational density, ways of encoding experience, irony, critique, and mutual legibility in language that was never meant to be heard by dominant institutions.

AAVE, for instance, uses:

• Habitual be (“she be working late”) to mark consistent behavior

• Double negatives and aspectual emphasis (“ain’t nobody got time”) to compress affect and frequency

• Rhythmic parallelism, tonal contour, and call-and-response as pragmatic cues

When these forms are lifted into meme grammar by speakers without shared context, they do not carry their original function. They carry only their aesthetic residue. A grammatical feature designed for in-community legibility becomes a performance of style.

As Baudrillard writes in Simulacra and Simulation, the final stage of simulation is the sign “which bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” Meme grammar reaches this stage when it circulates borrowed syntax without context, without memory, without responsibility.

The sentence “it’s giving colonizer vibes” may be funny, even incisive. But it can also function as an aesthetic performance of critique that removes the speaker from the scene of implication.

III. Opacity, Translation, and the Right to Refuse

This process of syntactic mimicry echoes what Édouard Glissant calls “the violence of transparency”, the demand that the other make themselves legible within the dominant grammar in order to be understood. Meme grammar often inverts this dynamic: it takes the forms that were historically refused entry into dominant English and turns them into affective commodities.

What is extracted here is not information. It is tone, a way of sounding “real” or “funny” or “relatable” that no longer points back to its source.

Glissant advocates for opacity as a relational right: the right not to be translated into terms that erase difference. Trinh T. Minh-ha makes a similar claim: “to speak is to both say and unsay, to make appear and to refuse capture.” Meme grammar, in contrast, translates without permission, and speaks in borrowed tones without remaining answerable for their use.

IV. The Problem Is Not Play, But Displacement

To be clear, this is not a condemnation of vernacular innovation or internet creativity. Many speakers using meme grammar also speak from within the communities whose grammars they are drawing from. And borrowing, in itself, is not extraction, language is inherently intertextual.

The distinction lies in positionality and consequence. When grammatical features are lifted into dominant speech contexts without relational responsibility, they become part of a stylistic economy, not a communicative one. The borrowed grammar gives the speaker the feel of cultural specificity without the cost of being specific.

In doing so, meme grammar enables a speaker to seem critical, funny, or vulnerable, while still remaining structurally anonymous.

This is what connects meme grammar back to dead English. They are grammatical siblings: one wears detachment like a suit; the other like a joke. But both remove the speaker from the obligations of relation.

To understand why these forms are not only common but increasingly inescapable, I'll turn to the infrastructure that produces and rewards them. What makes simulation more legible than presence? What makes detachment more platformable than relation?

IV. Linguistic Extraction: From Rhythm to Raw Material

Language circulates, but not all circulation is neutral. In platform culture, some grammars move faster than others, and some are stripped clean of the histories that made them intelligible in the first place. When the grammar of a marginalized speech community becomes detached from its social, political, and ontological context, when it is reduced to style, to rhythm, to “a vibe”, we are no longer witnessing cultural exchange. We are witnessing linguistic extraction.

This section names and traces that process. It argues that extraction is not limited to words or slang but extends to the formal structures of grammar: syntax, rhythm, aspect, pragmatic cues, and positionality. These are removed from the living grammars that generated them, formatted for visibility, and circulated by dominant speakers as usable affect. The result is a linguistic economy in which the expressive labor of historically marginalized communities becomes a renewable resource, and in which relational speech is reduced to raw material for digital performance.

I. From Living Grammar to Aesthetic Object

Let us begin with the question: what makes a grammar “living”? In this context, a grammar is living not because it is spoken, but because it remains embedded in a social world, in systems of meaning, accountability, inheritance, and mutual recognition. AAVE, for example, is not simply a set of phonological and syntactic rules. It is a system of pragmatic nuance, relational intelligence, and historical memory.

Geneva Smitherman and John Rickford, among others, have documented how AAVE encodes time, frequency, and agency through aspectual markers and tonal shifts that have no direct equivalents in standardized English. “He be trippin’” does not mean “he is currently upset,” but “he acts that way regularly”, a habitual marker, not a present-tense report.

When non-Black speakers adopt such constructions for comic effect or stylistic edge, the sentence often circulates without its semantic architecture. The habitual becomes a quirk. The double negative becomes a punchline. The pragmatic force becomes affective décor.

This is extraction at the level of grammar. The sentence survives. Its function does not.

II. Creole Grammar and the Syntax of World-Building

A similar process applies to creole and pidgin grammars, which are often misrecognized in public discourse as “broken English.” In fact, these grammars are synthetically complex, evolved under conditions of colonial imposition, forced migration, and intergenerational resilience.

In Jamaican Patois, for instance, markers like done (completive aspect), a (progressive aspect), and go (irrealis or future) create a sophisticated system of temporal navigation. These structures are not simply different from standard English, they are ontologically distinct. They encode relationships between time, action, and personhood that emerge from different histories.

When these grammars are mined for tone or rhythm, used by non-Caribbean speakers to sound emphatic, humorous, or unbothered, their temporal structures are discarded. The speaker lifts the intensifier but not the temporal logic. What remains is an echo, audible, catchy, and contextless.

Glissant would call this the colonization of rhythm. A violence not of words, but of relation severed and flattened into style.

III. Indigenous Grammar and the Refusal of Passive Speech

Many Indigenous languages, such as Lakota, Anishinaabemowin, or Kanyen’kéha, operate on grammatical systems that do not presume separability between speaker, land, and action. These languages often feature:

• Verb-centric morphology, where entire sentences are formed around a single verb

• Embedded agency, where action implies a network of relations, not isolated causality

• Context-bound deixis, where spatial and ethical positioning are inseparable

These features make passive voice difficult or even impossible to express naturally. You cannot say “mistakes were made” in Lakota without immediately implying who, in relation to whom, in what rhythm, toward which consequence.

When fragments of Indigenous grammar or metaphor are imported into English, land-as-body, verb-as-being, language-as-circularity, they are often used as poetic devices, dislocated from the epistemological commitments that animate them. The grammar becomes a mood, a gesture, a soft aesthetic of alternative worlding, even while the languages themselves remain suppressed, underfunded, or mocked.

This is not homage. It is the conversion of ontological structure into literary texture.

IV. Style Without Relation

What links these forms of extraction is not simply misrecognition. It is a broader transformation in how grammar is treated: not as a mode of meaning within a community, but as a source of expressive value for circulation.

Under this model:

• “It’s giving” becomes a flexible prefix, stripped of its Black queer genealogy

• “Slay,” “no one: / me:,” and “go off” become syntactic buttons to press, not signals of relation

• Fragments of diasporic Englishes become ready-made formats, available to anyone who can perform the tone, regardless of history or position

This is not remix. Remix implies knowledge of source, adaptation with response. This is aesthetic displacement: the production of communicative affect without social debt.

In this model, grammar is not taught, earned, or received. It is extracted, flattened, repurposed, and sold back into circulation, where it can be consumed by users who would punish the original speakers for speaking that way in courtrooms, classrooms, or workplaces.

V. Extraction Is Structural, Not Accidental

This is not simply a matter of users “stealing” language. It is a systemic pattern, structured by the affordances of platforms, the logics of racial capitalism, and the long histories of linguistic colonialism. As Lisa Lowe has shown, the liberal systems that claim to protect speech often do so while controlling whose speech is intelligible, and whose grammar can be entered into the record.

As Sylvia Wynter argues, the category of “Man”, the speaking subject of Western humanism, is defined by the ability to speak in a grammar that signals reason, universality, and transparency. All other grammars are marked as excessive, emotional, impure, or poetic. And yet, it is precisely these “marked” grammars that are now harvested for style, in a system that makes them valuable only when detached from the speakers who maintain them.

This is what makes linguistic extraction not only a cultural process, but an ontological one. It is the severing of language from world, sentence from responsibility, rhythm from relation.

The extraction of grammar is not just theft. It is also replacement: of the relational with the affective, of the accountable with the performative. It is the use of other people’s linguistic survival to animate a dominant language that no longer holds presence on its own.

To understand why this extraction is so efficient, and so often invisible, we must examine the infrastructures that reward it. Let's look at the logics of platforms, where grammar becomes optimization, and presence becomes a metric.

V. The Platformized Sentence

Digital platforms are not neutral spaces for communication. They are environments built to maximize engagement, visibility, and circulation, and in doing so they exert pressure on the form and function of language itself. Under these conditions, the sentence becomes a platform artifact: shaped less by the needs of human dialogue than by the metrics and mechanisms of algorithmic reward.

This section examines how contemporary English is further transformed, formalized, compressed, and aestheticized, under the logics of platform capitalism. It argues that the success of both dead English and meme grammar lies not only in their stylistic features, but in their ability to function within infrastructures that prioritize signal over relation, engagement over depth, and responsiveness over answerability.

I. The Sentence as Unit of Circulation

Platforms incentivize language that performs well within algorithmic systems. This means language that is:

• Compressed (e.g., within character limits)

• Format-driven (e.g., memeable, screenshot-friendly)

• Highly affective (e.g., “relatable,” “cringe,” “based,” “unhinged”)

• Decontextualizable (able to stand alone or be easily remixed)

The sentence in this environment is no longer a unit of thought. It is a unit of performance. As Ilana Gershon observes, social media discourse tends to prioritize the recognizable over the original, the shareable over the meaningful. In such a system, grammar is refashioned into gesture, a way to move affect rather than communicate position.

This is not incidental. The infrastructures of the internet favor language that moves fast and sticks lightly. As Tung-Hui Hu notes in A Prehistory of the Cloud, data architecture is designed around principles of packet switching: break the message into chunks, discard what’s unnecessary, route for speed. Language increasingly follows suit. The platform sentence is modular, designed for recombination.

II. Dead English as Institutional Optimization

In official platform communications, moderation notices, terms of service updates, transparency reports, we see a familiar grammar: the bureaucratic proceduralism of dead English, now formatted for API delivery.

“Your post was removed for violating our guidelines.”
“We take these issues seriously.”
“Our team is working to improve your experience.”

These are grammatically correct sentences, but structurally void. They are designed not to provide information, but to complete a compliance cycle: message sent, box checked, exposure minimized. The sentence becomes interface, not speech. It signals that something has happened, not what or why or to whom.

This is what Wendy Chun refers to as “programmable habits”: forms of communication that simulate responsiveness while eliminating the possibility of response. You can receive the message. You cannot reply to it.

III. Meme Grammar as Algorithmic Optimization

Meanwhile, meme grammar is optimized not for compliance, but for virality. It is modular, stylized, often emotionally exaggerated, and designed to provoke a recognition response: “same,” “lol,” “I feel seen.” On platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, meme grammar appears in captions, comments, stitched videos, and repeated formats. It is a grammatical vernacular tailored to algorithmic amplification.

This is not accidental mimicry. The platforms themselves reinforce these forms. Phrases like “it’s giving,” “this ain’t it,” or “no one: / me:” function as engagement triggers, preformatted openings for social participation. As users adopt these structures, they are rewarded with visibility. As visibility increases, the grammar is further reinforced.

This recursive loop creates what I might call syntactic branding: a style of speaking that aligns the speaker with a specific affective register and demographic code, often drawn from appropriated grammars, now flattened into formats.

These grammars are not just extracted. They are then rebuilt as user interface components.

IV. Extracted Grammar and the Flattening of Risk

One of the effects of this system is the flattening of speaker risk. In traditional dialogue, speech opens the speaker to potential consequence. But on platforms, grammatical performance can be disconnected from speaker position, allowing users to simulate intimacy, critique, or vulnerability without being accountable to anyone specific.

The irony-laden sentence, the stylized complaint, the performative “call-out”, these circulate as tone rather than act. As José Esteban Muñoz writes in Disidentifications, performance can be a survival strategy, but when taken up without risk, it can also become cover, a way to mimic stakes without inhabiting them.

Thus, both dead English and meme grammar become defensive grammars, not of silence, but of strategic detachment. One deflects critique through opacity; the other defuses it through style.

V. Platform Punishment and Linguistic Profiling

While appropriated grammars circulate freely, original grammars often trigger suppression. Content written in AAVE is disproportionately flagged by moderation algorithms as “hostile,” “unintelligible,” or “non-standard.” Posts in Indigenous languages are often marked as spam or nonsense. Diasporic Englishes are penalized in captioning systems, translation software, and automated subtitles.

As Sarah T. Roberts has shown in her work on content moderation, the infrastructures of platforms are not agnostic. They encode and reproduce racialized language hierarchies, rewarding dominant users for stylistic mimicry while punishing minoritized users for authentic speech.

This is what makes linguistic extraction more than cultural misrecognition. It is enforced at the infrastructural level. It is embedded in machine learning training sets, in moderation protocols, in API limits and search prioritizations. The grammar of relation becomes a liability; the grammar of simulation becomes a feature.

The platformized sentence is the endpoint of a long process: not the death of grammar, but the reprogramming of grammar to serve circulation over relation, pattern over presence, performance over response. It is a sentence that moves easily, but lands nowhere.

And yet we still speak.

What would it mean to speak while knowing this? To use a grammar that does not pretend neutrality, that does not aestheticize relation, but instead remains situated, answerable, and marked?

That question belongs to the speaker who refuses both innocence and disappearance.

VI. Speaking While Marked: Toward a Critical Linguistic Practice

To speak while marked is not to invent a new grammar. It is to refuse to speak as if one is unmarked. It is to recognize that all speech happens from somewhere, that every sentence carries positional baggage, historical residue, and social inheritance. In the wake of collapse and extraction, where dominant English simulates presence through procedure or style, speaking while marked is a practice of remaining situated, even, especially, when the platform, the institution, or the genre demands detachment.

This section does not propose a linguistic code or corrective rule. Instead, it names a mode of attention: a critical orientation toward grammar that treats speech not as performance, but as a relational act. It asks not what a sentence means, but what it enacts, what it makes possible, who it makes disappear, and what it inherits.

I. No Neutral Grammar

Standard English positions itself as transparent: a neutral vehicle for meaning, a universal medium. But as Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers both demonstrate, standard English is historically tied to the construction of the human-as-white-male-speaking-subject. Everyone else enters language as deviation: too much emotion, too many pronouns, too little clarity, too much culture.

Wynter teaches us that “Man” is not a neutral category, it is a genre of being. And grammar, as a technology of that genre, reproduces who gets to appear as intelligible, legible, rational. To speak standard English without attending to that history is to inhabit its violence by default.

Speaking while marked begins with the refusal of this fiction. It acknowledges that grammar is not neutral, it is a structure of presence, and it matters how you appear in it.

II. Situated Grammar

A speaker’s grammar carries their position, social, racial, linguistic, historical, whether they name it or not. AAVE, for instance, is not a set of quirks or errors. It is a grammar with specific functions: habitual aspect, negation intensification, copula deletion, pragmatic cueing. These are relational technologies, developed under conditions where directness was penalized, surveillance was constant, and speech had to work fast.

To borrow this grammar without standing in relation to its constraints is not just theft, it is mispositionality. It is using someone else's map to perform your own arrival.

To speak while marked means acknowledging where your grammar comes from, and where it does not. It does not require confession or self-disclosure. It requires accountability to lineage.

III. Response, Not Performance

Much of digital and institutional English operates through performance, the sentence as affective object, designed to provoke reaction or manage perception. But speaking while marked means shifting from performance to response: not just being expressive, but being answerable.

In Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, this is described as “wake work”: a practice of remaining present in the afterlife of catastrophe, of holding open the possibility that something might be said, not just seen.

A responsive grammar does not hide behind euphemism or irony. It names agency. It allows for contradiction. It does not seek clarity in order to explain itself to power, but to remain reachable by those it might impact.

“I failed to respond.”
“We harmed someone by doing this.”
“I said this. I meant it. I was wrong.”
“This sentence does not finish the work.”

These are grammars of presence. They do not perform accountability. They instantiate it.

IV. Opacity as Responsibility

Opacity, as Glissant defines it, is not vagueness. It is the refusal to translate oneself into the terms of dominance. To speak while marked is to know when not to explain, when to protect the illegibility of a grammar that is not for public consumption.

The refusal to footnote one’s culture is not a failure of clarity.
It is an ethical withholding. A way of saying: this grammar is not up for extraction.

Opacity, then, is not the opposite of presence. It is a mode of holding space for relation without offering it up for conversion.

V. Practical Features of Speaking While Marked

Speaking while marked is a practice. It is not always graceful. It may involve:

• Naming subjects clearly instead of relying on passives

• Avoiding generalized or procedural phrasing when harm is involved

• Refusing to borrow grammar for affective performance without acknowledging its source

• Not softening accountability through bureaucratic tone

• Retaining grammatical forms that mark identity, even when they appear "unprofessional"

• Staying present in the sentence, even when presence is costly

It is a kind of ethical syntax: not correct, but attentive.

VI. Limits and Risks

There is no ideal speaker. To speak while marked is not to transcend complicity. It is to remain aware of it. One may still get it wrong. One may still perform, still appropriate, still simulate. But the difference lies in whether the speaker treats language as something they own, or as something they are responsible to.

As José Muñoz reminds us, there is no utopian grammar, but there is utopia in the break, in the moment where speech falters and something else, responsiveness, accountability, presence, gets through.

To speak while marked is to remain in the world without grammatical shelter. It is to insist that the sentence not be frictionless. That it not be pure. That it not disappear who is speaking.

It is to say: this is not just a voice. This is a position. This is a grammar I carry. And I do not arrive here alone.

VII. Conclusion: No Pure Voice, Only Accountable Speech

This paper has argued that contemporary English, particularly as shaped by American institutions and digital platforms, has undergone a structural shift. The dominant forms of English now in circulation often function to evade accountability. Procedural language removes agency through passive construction and vague formalism. Meme grammar simulates presence by borrowing the affective grammar of others, often detached from context and consequence. Both modes allow speech to move without requiring the speaker to remain in relation.

I’ve described this condition as linguistic extraction: the transformation of grammar from a structure of meaning and relation into a resource for performance. Extraction occurs not only at the level of vocabulary or slang, but in the circulation of grammatical forms developed in contexts of constraint, particularly Black, Indigenous, and diasporic grammars. These are languages that hold social memory, carry relational obligations, and offer alternative ontologies. When these grammars are detached from the histories that produced them and redeployed for stylistic effect, the result is not recognition. It is displacement.

I’ve also shown that platforms do not merely host this process, they enable and accelerate it. Through algorithmic ranking, moderation protocols, and data architectures optimized for engagement, platforms reward grammar that is legible, emotional, and portable, even if it is relationally hollow. Language that is situated, complex, or opaque is more likely to be penalized or excluded.

Under these conditions, speaking in a way that resists simulation and detachment requires more than stylistic restraint. It requires positional awareness: understanding the history of the forms one uses, remaining answerable for one’s presence in language, and refusing to adopt grammars that perform intimacy or critique without cost.

This is what I have called speaking while marked. It does not mean avoiding error, or claiming purity. It means recognizing that speech is not neutral, that grammar is not universal, and that relation is not a mood. It is a structure that must be named, held, and sometimes protected from the systems that seek to convert it into content.

There is no new grammar that solves this. There is only the ongoing work of speaking from where one is, with awareness of what is being borrowed, what is being hidden, and what is being risked. That work is not finished by saying something. It begins with how we say it, and who we remain accountable to after it’s said.

In early 2025, headlines broke about a military operation leak involving a Signal group chat. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and other senior Trump administration officials had accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to an encrypted Signal thread that included sensitive operational discussions about a planned U.S. strike on Houthi targets in Yemen. Goldberg, upon realizing the magnitude of what he was reading, published the contents. What might have once sparked resignations and internal purges instead prompted shrugs and spin. President Trump affirmed his support for Waltz. No one was fired.

The moment was absurd. But it wasn’t an accident. Not really.

Instead, it was the latest expression of a long-term systemic pattern: a slow erosion of institutional discipline around digital communication and classified information. This wasn’t the first time signals leaked. And if history is any guide, it won’t be the last. In fact, the deeper you dig, the more clearly you see: Signalgate caused Signalgate.

II. 2001–2003: The Origin of Total Signal Capture

The story starts in the chaos of the post-9/11 world. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States launched the "Global War on Terror." In tandem came sweeping domestic security reforms. Chief among them: the USA PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001. It granted intelligence agencies unprecedented authority to surveil communications, both foreign and domestic.

Within this new legal context, the NSA developed and deployed covert data interception programs targeting the major arteries of the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure. The most notorious implementation was Room 641A, a secret facility built inside an AT&T switching center at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco.

Technician Mark Klein, who worked for AT&T at the time, discovered in 2003 that a splitter had been installed on the fiber optic lines, duplicating all internet traffic and directing it into a secure room staffed by NSA-linked personnel. In 2006, Klein blew the whistle, revealing a domestic surveillance dragnet operating without warrants or public knowledge. The equipment in Room 641A, including Narus deep-packet inspection gear, wasn’t sifting for threats. It was capturing everything.

This was the first Signalgate: a structural breach, sanctioned at the highest levels, embedded in infrastructure, and exposed not by attackers, but by its own internal contradictions. The logic was simple: if you can see everything, you can prevent anything. The system mistook visibility for control.

III. 2006–2013: Simulation Becomes Doctrine – Cyber Storm and the Normalization of Collapse

Around the time Klein went public, another development was quietly reshaping the U.S. approach to cyber and digital security: Cyber Storm.

Launched in 2006 by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Cyber Storm was a series of national-scale cyber defense exercises. The first iteration simulated coordinated attacks on critical infrastructure: power grids, transportation systems, communication networks. Federal agencies, state governments, private sector partners, and international allies all participated.

What began as a tabletop exercise quickly evolved into a complex sociotechnical rehearsal. Cyber Storm scenarios grew to include misinformation campaigns, public panic management, zero-day exploits, and supply chain interference. But underneath the official goals was a deeper dynamic:

Cyber Storm wasn’t just simulating attacks. It was testing the system’s internal fragility.

Participants frequently failed to communicate across silos. Classification slowed response times. Jurisdictional confusion reigned. Most crucially, participants often resorted to backchannel communications when formal systems broke down.

Rather than eliminate these weaknesses, Cyber Storm institutionalized them. By 2013, it was clear that the exercises weren’t building resilience so much as habituating the system to dysfunction. The logic was: yes, failure will happen—just make sure it’s survivable.

This subtle cultural shift had a profound effect. It set the stage for a government that would routinely tolerate informal workflows, workarounds, and degraded security practices as the cost of doing business. It trained operatives not to prevent collapse, but to improvise through it. The playbook wasn’t "defend the system." It was "keep performing as it fails."

IV. 2010–2013: Snowden and the Crisis of Trust

If Room 641A exposed the architecture of surveillance, the early 2010s exposed its operational interior. Enter Edward Snowden.

In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked an unprecedented cache of classified documents detailing global surveillance operations. Programs like PRISM, XKEYSCORE, and Upstream revealed the staggering scope of data collection. Snowden’s leaks confirmed that the logic of Room 641A had been scaled globally.

But these exposures didn’t lead to lasting reforms. While they sparked public outcry, lawsuits, and legislative debates, the core infrastructure remained intact. What changed was the system’s orientation:

After Snowden, the U.S. surveillance apparatus didn’t contract. It adapted.

It became better at insulating itself from leaks. But also more fatalistic about them. It learned to reframe exposure as a failure of loyalty, not infrastructure. More training, more clearance protocols, more private contractors under tighter NDAs. But the core assumption—that the state can and should know everything—remained untouched.

V. 2014–2024: Informal Systems, Formal Power

Following Snowden, there was a wave of security hardening across agencies. But over time, cracks reappeared. Bureaucratic friction and siloed operations led to increased reliance on personal phones, encrypted apps, and cross-platform collaboration tools.

Encrypted messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp became unofficial backbones for sensitive coordination. From disaster response teams to national security staffers, encrypted chats became the place where real-time coordination actually happened.

These apps provided speed and plausible deniability. But they also blurred the boundary between official and unofficial conduct. The institutional message became: if it works, use it. If it leaks, we’ll survive it.

Meanwhile, Cyber Storm exercises continued to reinforce this mindset. By the late 2010s, scenarios involved layered misinformation, hybrid threats, and nation-state deception. But they also assumed constant, low-level system compromise. The drill wasn’t about stopping the breach. It was about navigating the breach without collapse.

This shift trained an entire generation of officials to operate under normalized exposure. Which brings us to 2025.

VI. Signalgate II: The Signal Thread That Proved the Simulation Had Become Real

In March 2025, a Signal group chat including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and other senior Trump administration figures was used to coordinate a military operation. Someone added Jeffrey Goldberg to the thread, presumably by accident. Goldberg, a journalist, read the thread and published what he saw.

There was no breach. No hack. No phishing. Just a contact error—and a total collapse of operational security.

Yet the reaction was muted. No mass firings. No internal shake-ups. The President stood by his team. The press cycle moved on.

Why? Because the system had already internalized the idea that leaks are survivable. The logic of Cyber Storm, the precedent of Snowden, the habits of backchannel coordination—it had all added up to a culture where even high-stakes operational exposure is processed as routine.

VII. The Recursion of Exposure

So yes: Signalgate caused Signalgate.

• The first Signalgate (Room 641A) revealed the system’s architectural vulnerability.

• Cyber Storm rehearsed exposure until exposure became normalized.

• Snowden exposed the content and logic of the system.

• The system absorbed the shock and hardened its tolerances.

• Informal tools filled in the gaps left by formal processes.

• The new Signalgate was not a violation of protocol. It was protocol.

This is the recursion. A feedback loop where the system simulates failure, experiences real failure, learns to survive it, and begins to expect it. Until failure is no longer exception—it is baseline.

VIII. What This Means for Those Who Oppose

If Signalgate II reveals anything, it’s this: the United States no longer treats exposure as a threat. What was once cause for scandal is now just another line in the press briefing. The system has rehearsed failure so many times—through Cyber Storm, through whistleblower leaks, through infrastructural collapse—that it has trained itself to absorb breakdown as ordinary.

For those positioned in opposition to this system, especially those operating from Indigenous, abolitionist, or insurrectionary frameworks, this reality isn’t a source of despair. It’s strategic terrain.

A. Shift from Exposure to Erosion

If exposure is no longer a risk to the system, it should no longer be a primary tactic of resistance. The state doesn’t need secrecy to function—it just needs momentum. Its operations don’t stall when secrets leak; they stall when logistics fail, when legitimacy erodes, when relationships dry up.

The appropriate tactic now is erosion. Strategic subtraction. Undermining—not by calling attention to the breach—but by creating forms of power and relation that can’t be patched.

This means:

• Build autonomy where there is no surveillance interface to disrupt.

• Move relationships offline, off-grid, out of scope.

• Focus less on being seen and more on being unassimilable.

The state can tolerate exposure. It cannot tolerate untrackable autonomy.

B. Understand What the State Can’t Simulate

Cyber Storm taught the U.S. government how to manage collapse within a simulation. But simulations have constraints. They can only model what they can measure. They fail to render:

• Relationships grounded in land, language, and lineage.

• Collective action that doesn’t declare itself.

• Movements without a central communications strategy.

• Communities that don’t produce extractable data.

Insurgent power must move into those spaces.

Build movements that refuse scale.
Build alliances that prioritize trust over reach.
Act in ways that generate confusion—not visibility—within state telemetry.

C. Escaping the Feedback Loop: Refusal as Infrastructure

If state power is now organized around responding to disruptions, then disruption alone is no longer enough. We need refusal as a foundation—not just of tactics, but of infrastructure.

What does that look like?

• Refusal to digitize: Organizing in analog, archiving in memory, transmitting via word-of-mouth.

• Refusal to centralize: Never build a target.

• Refusal to announce: Let action speak without a press release.

• Refusal to produce data: Understand that even encrypted communications generate metadata.

Infrastructure isn’t just buildings or servers. It’s how we carry each other through time. Resistance infrastructure must be dense, relational, embodied, and uninterpretable.

D. The Role of Conflict in Disorienting Empire

The U.S. simulation machine thrives on legibility. It needs categories: terrorist, protestor, criminal, extremist. When our actions conform to any of these, it can respond predictably. But when conflict emerges in ways that don’t map to these identities—when it is uninterpretable—it becomes disorienting.

The goal is not peace. Nor is it endless riot. It is strategic friction:

• Small, constant, material disruptions.

• Delays in logistics, not slogans in the street.

• Tactics that make security costly and maintenance unbearable.

Make the state question its models.
Make it burn energy trying to explain what’s happening.
Keep it tired.

E. Intelligence is not Information, it is Relation

Every leak assumes that the key to action is better information. But those inside the empire are drowning in information. What they lack is intelligence—understood not as secrets, but as the ability to read context, build trust, make meaning, and move.

We flip this.

Our power lies in:

• Knowing our terrains better than the state knows its simulations.

• Having relationships that no map can trace.

• Maintaining coherence without needing consensus.

• Moving with strategic intent, without needing recognition.

F. Building the Future in the Gaps of Their Collapse

Every infrastructure the state neglects becomes an opportunity. Where healthcare fails, we organize care. Where housing fails, we reclaim shelter. Where food supply chains break, we grow, store, and redistribute. This isn’t charity. It’s territory.

Autonomous space is not symbolic. It is strategic.

We don’t build alternative systems to replace the state. We build them because the state already abandoned us. Our systems are how we survive. Their refusal to see them is how we win.

G. What Comes After Legibility?

They know everything. They understand nothing.

The empire believes that to see is to govern. Let them see us. Let them flood their databases with our movements. Let them try to simulate us.

And let them fail.

Because we don’t need them to understand.
We don’t need them to respond.
We just need to build what they cannot predict.

If they no longer distinguish signal from noise, then we are the noise that grows into structure.

We are not inside their collapse.
We are outside it, building something they forgot how to see.

IX. Conclusion: Beyond the Leak

The significance of the 2025 Signalgate isn’t in what it revealed, but in how unsurprising it was.

It showed us that after two decades of surveillance expansion, whistleblower crises, and simulation wargames, the U.S. national security apparatus has evolved not to prevent exposure, but to absorb it.

The question now isn’t how to stop the next Signalgate.

It’s whether a system that treats exposure as routine can still distinguish itself from a breach.

If every signal is eventually compromised, if every boundary is provisional, then what happens when the system stops reacting at all?

That’s the real threat.

Not that information leaks.

But that no one cares anymore when it does.

That sentence is easy to skip past. It sounds like corporate rearranging, maybe a branding pivot, maybe Musk doing Musk things again. But the thing is—X is already owned by Elon Musk. And xAI is also owned by Elon Musk. So when a company owned by one person gets bought by another company owned by that same person, that just smells off.

It’s not illegal. It’s not even that unusual, structurally speaking. But it’s a moment worth sitting with, because it reveals something more important than the headline itself: the fact that this kind of move doesn’t register for most people—not just emotionally, but cognitively. There's no shared language for what this is, or what it does.

That absence of interpretation is the story.

We’re watching the formation of power in real time. Not just financial power, not just algorithmic control—governance. The ability to set rules, shape discourse, and define what knowledge is. But we’re watching it through tools built for another era. It’s like trying to explain a supercomputer using 19th-century steam engine diagrams.

And in that mismatch—between what’s happening and what we can describe—we miss it. Or worse, we misclassify it as noise, eccentricity, or personal branding.

So what is this move?

Two Forms of Control, Now Merged

X (formerly Twitter) is, structurally, a platform for speech. It governs what is visible, what is prioritized, who can be heard. It sets the tone and tempo for cultural and political discourse. Whether it does that well or poorly is beside the point—the point is, it does it.

xAI is a company designed to build general-purpose artificial intelligence, trained on data from the world—including, presumably, X itself.

So what we’re looking at isn’t a business deal. It’s the fusion of two governing systems:

• One that captures and curates human discourse in real time.

• One that turns human discourse into machine-readable, predictive modeling.

Together, they form a loop:

• The public speaks on the platform.

• That speech trains the AI.

• The AI generates new speech, moderation strategies, content sorting mechanisms.

• The platform changes as a result.

This is recursive governance. It’s not just top-down control. It’s a closed loop where human behavior is observed, modeled, and then re-intervened on through both content visibility and algorithmic shaping. And it’s all contained within a single ownership structure.

This Isn’t Business Strategy. It’s a Sovereign Move.

The legal system still treats companies like discrete, understandable entities. You can regulate Twitter. You can regulate an AI lab. But what do you do when a platform becomes the epistemic infrastructure for training machines, and those machines begin shaping the discourse on the platform?

What do you do when the user base is also the training data, and the product being sold isn’t a service, but a model of the world?

There are no existing governance tools for that. The law doesn’t know what to call it. Regulation isn’t built to see it. And because there’s no clear moment of harm—no oil spill, no fraud, no whistleblower—the public doesn’t recognize it either.

That’s the genius of it. There’s no event. Just a shift in shape.

Structural Opacity Is the Point

What makes this move powerful isn’t that it hides control—it erases the boundaries where control used to be legible.

In the past, we could say: this company provides infrastructure, this one provides content, this one sets the rules. Now, all those categories are collapsing. X is infrastructure, content, discourse, and behavior. xAI is the layer that interprets, simulates, and predicts from that behavior.

When those two collapse into each other, there is no longer any outside. There’s no “user” in the traditional sense. There’s only participation in a system that converts your language into labor, and your labor into capital, without asking first.

And because it’s not surveillance in the classic sense—there’s no spy camera, no facial recognition—the entire operation slides under the threshold of public alarm.

The State Can’t Respond Because It Wasn’t Built to

Regulatory bodies are built for a world of visible actors and discrete harms. But Musk’s maneuver here isn’t a violation of law. It’s a reconfiguration of power.

• The SEC can’t say the deal’s fraudulent—he owns both sides.

• The FCC can’t say it’s a misuse of telecommunications—X isn’t quite that.

• Antitrust can’t bite—there’s no market consolidation, just internal reshuffling.

What we’re left with is a legal framework built on 20th-century assumptions trying to grapple with 21st-century structures.

And the response, both official and popular, is a kind of quiet shrug.

When the Structure Is Illegible, So Is the Threat

The hardest part of this moment isn’t that people don’t care. It’s that people don’t have a category for what this is. It’s not clear what’s changed, or how it affects them, so the whole thing gets flattened into a quirk of billionaire behavior.

But this isn’t just another eccentric move. This is a shift in who gets to shape language, meaning, and public imagination—at scale, in real time, with no meaningful constraint.

The platforms aren’t just sites of speech anymore. They are sites of simulation. They take in what we say, and spit back models of what we might say next. And the models, increasingly, are being used to make decisions—not just content decisions, but political ones, economic ones, infrastructural ones.

That feedback loop is already running. The xAI acquisition just tightens it.

So What Do We Do?

This isn’t a call to arms. I don’t think there’s a lever to pull. What I want is simpler and harder:

We need to start building new categories.

We need to understand that not all power looks like governance, and not all governance looks like laws. When we mistake structural shifts for personal drama, we miss the real story. And when we only recognize harm after it’s happened, we cede the future to those who can act faster than we can comprehend.

The move was simple: xAI acquired X.
The consequences are not.

We need better vision. That’s where it starts.

On the surface, this looks like a pivot: away from state trust, toward confrontation. But if you look closer, a particular logic is being carried over. These calls for mass action are often framed not in terms of material impact, but in terms of *legitimacy through size*. People argue that mass action is necessary because it is safer. Because it has weight. Because there is, implicitly, protection in numbers.

At the same time, we’re seeing another kind of response — also emerging from that same social terrain. As people share small, local, individual actions — shoplifting banner materials, organizing unpermitted aid work, refusing to comply with public health abandonment — others respond with caution. They say: be careful what you post. That’s dangerous. You’re not being honest about the risk. You’re leading people astray.

The two sets of responses — the call for mass legitimacy and the reflex of warning against individual initiative — seem opposed, but they’re not. They’re both responses shaped by the logic of **late liberal harm governance**: the idea that political action must be managed in order to be legitimate. That risk is not something to be evaluated and shared, but something to be administrated.

What’s revealing in this moment is not just that many people hold this logic. It’s that they mistake it for care.

Care, in this framework, becomes synonymous with risk management. And management is only seen as legitimate when it scales — when it reflects the imagined practices of a state, a union, a campaign. When someone acts outside of that — alone, early, without announcing it — the instinct is not to ask whether it was necessary, or whether it worked, but whether it was *properly authorized.*

That instinct doesn’t go away when people lose faith in the state. What happens instead is that they begin to *reproduce* the role of the state in how they interact with each other. They become the administrators of the discourse. They warn, contextualize, preempt, and correct — not always because they want to, but because they’ve been trained to understand responsibility as a matter of managing the behavior of others.

We see this in how people respond to masking. When someone says “you can evaluate a person’s political consistency by whether they’re still masking,” the immediate pushback is that this is too judgmental. That it ignores nuance. That it fails to consider personal context.

But these replies don’t contest the claim that the abandonment of masking has caused real harm. They don’t deny that immunocompromised and disabled people have been excluded, that COVID continues, that collective safety has collapsed. What they do is reframe the conversation: away from harm, and toward whether the judgment of the unmasked has been *ethically justified*.

This is exactly what Elizabeth Povinelli names as a defining feature of late liberalism in Economies of Abandonment. Harm is not denied. It is tolerated, as long as the actor can be shown to have been constrained. If a choice can be framed as non-choice, if behavior can be understood as economically or emotionally rational, then harm becomes acceptable. Not because it isn’t real, but because it becomes ungovernable through traditional moral metrics — and so the question becomes not “what happened?” but “how do we feel about what happened?”

The same logic governs responses to small direct action. When someone shares a minor disruption — something deliberately scaled to the moment, careful, precise — the pushback is almost never about the target or the consequence. It’s about the *terms* under which it was shared. Was it safe to post? Will someone misinterpret it? Did the actor properly disclose the risk?

Again, we’re not talking about critique from within an organizing context. We’re talking about a discourse environment shaped by internalized governance. It’s not *strategy* being asked for. It’s *supervision.*

And when someone proposes a general strike — an action known historically to trigger state repression, with no infrastructure currently in place to support it — the same logic reverses itself. Suddenly, the action is defended on the grounds that its very *scale* makes it safe. That enough people doing it together will make it real.

This is how governance logic works: individual action is dangerous unless it’s been validated, mass action is safe because it feels legitimate, and risk is judged not by its material content but by how well it aligns with the imagined responsibilities of the responsible political actor.

In this model, the role of “the good political actor” is not to intervene directly in systems of abandonment. It’s to manage harm in a way that feels administratively plausible. To delay judgment until all contingencies have been mapped. To withhold action until it looks collective. To criticize behavior not based on what it does, but on whether it has been *governed appropriately.*

And this is why so many people are deeply uncomfortable with political practice that begins without permission.

The people who continue to mask are not morally pure. They are simply acting in alignment with an analysis they already held. They didn’t stop when the mandates ended because they were never masking out of obedience. They were masking because they understood the system had already abandoned them — and others. And they understood that action didn’t require consensus to be valid.

The people still stealing supplies, organizing unapproved aid, avoiding superspreader events, refusing to perform normalcy — they are not doing this to provoke or inspire. They’re doing it because it’s necessary, and because they no longer believe anyone is coming to make it safe for them to begin.

They are not reckless. They’re just no longer oriented around permission.

What this moment reveals is how many others still are.

People want mass action because it feels legitimate.

They reject individual initiative because it feels ungoverned.

They describe both impulses as “care,” but the framework is governance all the way down.

Care is not governance.

Care does not wait for consensus.

Care does not require everyone to understand.

Care is not afraid of smallness, or inconsistency, or discomfort.

Care is practice.

And people are already doing it.

The task now is not to coordinate everyone into legitimacy.

It’s to stop mistaking legibility for alignment.

And to start recognizing that many of the people acting earliest, and with the most clarity, are not deviating from care — they’re embodying it.

And they are not early.

They are simply *not waiting.*

Back then, much of the discourse treated Facebook’s role as a technological accident—an invention that got out of hand, leading well-meaning users to accidentally destabilize democracy. There was also plenty of speculation about foreign influence, but much of it remained just that: speculation. The real connective tissue, the documented financial relationships and strategic decisions that tied these players together, was available in public records. It wasn’t theoretical. It wasn’t hidden. It was just inconveniently clear.

It's worth keeping that in mind when sifting through contemporary analysis. What genuinely connects the dots, and what keeps you locked in an endless loop of speculation? What exposes mechanisms of power, and what merely feeds the spectacle?

As Guy Debord put it, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The issue was never just a platform or a particularly bad stretch of social media hygiene—it was how influence and power operated within that space, who benefited, and who knew exactly how to play the game.

This essay was my attempt to lay out the facts as they were—no grand theories, no convenient scapegoats, just the mechanics of influence, money, and control. If anything, it feels even more relevant now.

In 2009, as the world was going through a recession, Russian social-media mogul Yuri Milner invested $200m in Facebook, w/ a valuation of $10b, w/o requesting a seat on the board OR voting rights.

The investment was financed by Alisher B. Usmanov, who provided funds from Gazprom, a Russian natural gas-and-more conglomerate. It's likely the investment is what pushed out Facebook's early CFO Gideon Yu.

The investments were facilitated by Ryan Williams, a friend and former classmate of Jared Kushner. At a similar time, Yuri Milner also invested in Cadre, a company founded by Williams, Kushner, and Kushner's brother, Josh Kushner. However, Jared Kushner failed to disclose his ownership of the company.

Shortly after, Milner & Zuckerberg became close associates, meeting monthly, even speaking together at events. In 2012, Milner attended Zuckerberg's wedding, and in 2014, paid 100% above value for a home in California.

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Alisher B. Usmanov spent 6 years (1980-1986) in a Soviet prison for fraud and embezzlement, before becoming a manager of Gazprom-owned steel mills. In 2008/20009, he fired the editor at one of Russia's most-respected newspapers for an article detailing Russian electoral fraud. The article said, "[Usmanov's] ties to the Kremlin and Facebook have stirred concerns that he might influence the company's policies in subtle ways to appease governments in markets where Facebook is also an important tool of political dissent, such as Russia."

Usmanov is known to be a close friend of Roman Abramovich, whose wife during this period was in turn close friends with Ivanka Trump, thanks to Wendi Deng. This led to Ivanka attending a lunch hosted by Lev Leviev, an associate of Abramovich's, where Deng introduced her to Jared Kushner. (Concurrently, Leviev was hosting the bris for the grandson of Tamir Sapir, who's daughter Zina Sapir married Africa-Israel CEO Roten Rosen. Trump, a few months earlier,, had hosted the wedding of Sapir and Rosen.

The Sapir Organization, with the Trump Organization, built Trump SoHo. (Which was an absolute scandalous mess, not going to get into that here.) They attempted to mimic the process with Trump Tower Moscow, as well.

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Gazprom - the conglomerate which both Abramovich and Usmanov have been senior executive at, and which provided the funds for Milner's investment in Facebook - may be familiar to you because of their recent mentions in the news. They are the financiers of the spy ring which, in 2013, tried to recruit Trump advisor Carter Page.

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When Facebook was first confronted about the "fake news" epidemic and its influence on our election, Zuckerberg said it was "crazy." In April 2017 when they put out a report on the issue, they left out any mention of Russia.

Political ads were paid for in rubles. Facebook had "embeds" working directly with the Trump campaign.

"[People from Facebook, Google, and YouTube] were helping us... they were basically our hands-on partners... ...Without Facebook, we wouldn't have won." - Theresa Wong, Trump campaign.

"We found that Facebook and digital targeting were the most effective ways to reach the audiences. After the primary, we started ramping up because we knew that doing a national campaign is different than doing a primary campaign. That was when we formalized the system because we had to ramp up for digital fundraising. We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff." - Jared Kushner.

Cambridge Analytica is the firm who coordinated with Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton and the DNC's stolen emails. Michael Flynn, who has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, was an advisor at Cambridge Analytica.

---

Facebook has early investment ties to Russian financiers and openly worked with them for years. The Trump family has ties to those same people. Facebook then worked directly with the Trump family to implement the methodology of those people.

It was not an accidental failure of a novel invention.

There was a time when shaping public opinion was a job for politicians, PR firms, and media moguls. The gatekeepers of discourse held the keys to influence, carefully curating what narratives gained traction. But today? That power is shifting—not to the public, but to a decentralized, unaccountable force: the highest bidder.

Welcome to FuzzAI, where debates are no longer won by truth but by profit.

FuzzAI is a market-driven rhetorical battlefield, where AI-powered debates unfold under the influence of anonymous bettors. Instead of passively wagering on an outcome, participants actively feed arguments to AI debaters, optimizing them for persuasion. The result? The most financially backed, memetically powerful narratives don’t just win—they shape reality.

The Persuasion Economy

Here’s how it works:

• A debate is set. AI agents argue both sides.

• Participants place bets—not just on who will win, but on which argument will be most effective.

• AI refines its rhetoric in real time, guided by the financial incentives of its backers.

• The winning arguments spread beyond the platform, influencing media, politics, and public discourse.

In theory, this is just another form of market competition. In practice, it means truth itself is now a tradable asset. The best-funded argument—not the most factual—dominates.

From COINTELPRO to Crypto Bros

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

Back in the day, government programs like COINTELPRO specialized in narrative control. The FBI didn’t just suppress radical movements; it steered them into ideological chaos, ensuring that activists spent more time debating than organizing. The more fragmented the discourse, the less real-world impact these movements had.

FuzzAI takes that playbook and puts it on the blockchain.

Now, instead of intelligence agencies shaping debate from the shadows, it’s anonymous internet bettors optimizing arguments for virality and financial gain. The incentives have shifted, but the result is the same: endless rhetorical combat with no path to resolution.

The Collapse of Truth

The consequences of this system extend far beyond political debates. If persuasion is just another commodity, then everything is up for grabs:

• Political ideologies will be shaped by profit-driven narrative brokers rather than grassroots movements.

• Consumer choices will be manipulated by AI-crafted rhetoric fine-tuned for maximum influence.

• Even personal beliefs could be shaped by the highest bidder in the marketplace of ideas.

The result isn’t just misinformation—it’s the erosion of the very idea of truth. When financial incentives dictate reality, the question stops being “What is true?” and becomes “What can we sell as truth?”

Where This Leads

Let’s game this out. If FuzzAI continues to evolve:

• Hyper-targeted persuasion markets will emerge, crafting personalized realities for every demographic.

• Narrative brokers—experts in AI-crafted influence—will become as powerful as today’s media giants.

• The most extreme, viral claims will dominate, because attention equals profit.

At some point, persuasion won’t just shape reality—it will become reality.

The Choice: Tell Your Own Truth, or Let Someone Sell You One

Here’s the part no one likes to admit: most people don’t tell themselves their own stories. They absorb whatever’s most convenient—whatever’s loudest, whatever feels safest, whatever already aligns with what they think they believe. And in a world where persuasion is a financial game, that’s dangerous.

Because if you don’t take control of your own narrative—if you don’t actively decide what you believe and why—you’re not avoiding influence. You’re just making yourself an easier target.

FuzzAI, and the systems like it, aren’t forcing ideas into your head. They haven’t been. All they needed to do is create a landscape where it’s easier to adopt someone else’s version of reality than to build your own. The more you let outside forces define the truth for you, the less of it you actually own.

So this isn’t just a game of persuasion—it’s a game of self-awareness. The people who understand how narratives work, who recognize the forces at play, who actively interrogate their own beliefs instead of just reacting to what’s given to them—those are the ones who don’t get played.

Because in a world where reality is up for sale, the only way to keep your mind from being someone else’s commodity is to know exactly what’s yours in the first place.

The move has many historical parallels - to keep it simple and non-speculative, let's look at the parallels within a government who this administration has explicitly credited as an inspiration: Germany's Third Reich.

Austria (1938) – The Forced Election That Never Happened

- Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg planned a referendum on independence.

- Hitler forced him to cancel it under military threats.

- Trump allies push for elections in Ukraine while supporting Russian aggression, similar to how Hitler demanded political changes while preparing to invade.

- Austria was annexed before the people could vote, and Germany held a rigged plebiscite after occupation.

The Sudetenland Crisis (Czechoslovakia, 1938)

- Germany supported ethnic German Nazis in the Sudetenland, encouraging them to demand autonomy.

- Trump’s team suggests Ukraine needs elections while occupied territories remain under Russian control, echoing Germany’s manipulation of border politics.

- The Munich Agreement forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland, undermining its sovereignty without an immediate war.

Slovak Independence (1939) – A Vote Under Duress

- After annexing the Sudetenland, Germany pressured Slovakia (then part of Czechoslovakia) into declaring independence.

- A forced "election" was held under Nazi influence, creating a puppet state rather than true sovereignty.

- Trump’s push for elections in Ukraine, while Russian-occupied areas remain under Kremlin control, mirrors how Germany used manipulated votes to justify breaking apart nations.

Vichy France (1940) – Puppet Governments via "Elections"

- After France fell in WWII, the Nazis backed a collaborationist government in Vichy, presenting it as legitimate.

- Russia has staged fake elections in occupied Ukraine, and Trump’s push for "emergency elections" could be a way to install a Kremlin-friendly leader.

- Vichy France lost credibility and became a Nazi puppet.

The Strategy: Elections as a Tool of Coercion

- "Democratic processes" were used to justify authoritarian control.

- Nazis (and now Russia, with potential Trump backing) used elections to:

- Destabilize governments under siege.

- Create legitimacy for foreign influence.

- Pressure leaders into resignation or concessions.

This is a modern adaptation of an old playbook—first withholding support, then demanding elections, and finally using the resulting chaos to justify further aggression.

If the only way I can tell you’re a radical is by checking your social media (which you might have on private, anyway), then how are you a radical?

I certainly don't mean the folk keeping their praxis hush-hush: keep normie and carry on.

I mean the ones whose contribution to social change amounts to trying to shift the Overton window with telepathy.

And if you point to it, they wrap themselves in the cozy, pre-fab slogan:

there’s no wrong way to be a radical

Except... there is.

If your radicalism fits neatly into the reformist pipeline. If it gets you clout, a nonprofit job, or a spot on a conference panel... then it’s not radical. If your idea of revolutionary work is branding yourself as a radical rather than risking something for radical change, then congrats: you’ve been counterinsurged.

This whole idea that radicalism is an identity rather than an active, dangerous struggle? That wasn’t an accident. That was by design. COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program that ran from the 1950s through at least the 70s, didn’t just surveil and sabotage radical movements.

It also worked to redirect them.

The goal was never to stop the resistance, it was to end cultures of resistance entirely.

One way they did this?

Encouraging performative radicalism over action-based radicalism. They infiltrated groups to push endless internal debates over ideology rather than strategy.

They promoted figures who sounded revolutionary but posed no real threat. They made “radical” seem like a personal identity rather than a commitment to high-risk struggle. And now? That legacy lives on.

They’ve figured out how to counteract rebellion without firing a shot. They just rebrand it. Sell it back to you as a lifestyle, a talking point, an identity. Anything but an actual threat.

But the work didn’t stop there.

The Internet today is the perfect playground for these tactics, and most people engaging in political discourse online don’t even realize the hand they’re playing into. Political conversation on the web is dominated by those who can afford to be part of it—the ones with the time, the resources, and, crucially, the safety to treat politics as discourse rather than struggle.

And what happens when the people most visible in political conversations are the ones who have the most to gain from maintaining the system?

They set the terms. They normalize the framework. They dictate what is considered “reasonable” political thought and what is dismissed as extremism. And they do it, often, without even realizing they’re reproducing the very narratives COINTELPRO ingrained into public consciousness decades ago.

Because if you live within the system, if your comfort and security are maintained by its stability, then you will, unless you're critically self-aware, steer political conversations toward preserving its function rather than disrupting it. You will defend reform over abolition. You will call for incremental change rather than direct action. You will prioritize appearances over results. And when someone points out the problem, you will say, there's no wrong way to be a radical.

And at the most cynical end? Some of these people are literally being paid to do this.

Political influencers, think tank analysts, NGO consultants—they flood social spaces with narratives that reinforce the idea that radicalism is about saying the right things, not doing the dangerous things. Folk with white-collar jobs gain clout among their professional peers for bringing "difficult and innovative" perspectives to the conversation. They push the belief that debate is action, that visibility is impact, that the only viable way to challenge power is through its own approved channels.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) provides a solid example of how COINTELPRO didn’t just dismantle radical movements: it redirected them.

Throughout the 1970s, FBI memos show deliberate efforts to replace AIM’s focus on strategy and direct action with ideological infighting. Agents spread rumors that AIM leaders like Vernon Bellecourt were informants, fueling internal distrust (Church Committee Report, 1976).

They infiltrated the movement to push debates over ideological purity rather than tactics, ensuring that energy was spent on proving who was “authentic” rather than planning effective resistance (Churchill, Agents of Repression, 1988).

Over time, AIM’s more militant organizing gave way to a model of advocacy that fit within state-approved activism—shifting from occupations and direct confrontations to legal battles and nonprofit work. That transformation wasn’t organic; it was engineered.

The FBI knew that radicalism rooted in action was dangerous, but radicalism trapped in theory could burn itself out without ever threatening power.

Today, the consequences of that redirection are everywhere. Many former AIM members now work within tribal governments or NGOs, navigating bureaucracy rather than disrupting it.

While some use those positions to advance Indigenous critique or provide cover and aid to radicals, the structural limits of these organizations ensure that their direct work is, at best, reformist and, at worst, a pacified echo of the movement’s original aims.

Meanwhile, a new generation of young Native activists has inherited a political landscape where NGO work is considered radical, where applying for grants replaces seizing land, and where resistance is funneled into negotiations rather than occupations.

Radicals used to be dangerous. Now they’re curated, invited onto panels, celebrated in op-eds... as long as they behave. Wouldn't you like to be published in Teen Vogue?

This isn’t to dismiss their work - only to recognize how the state’s long game played out.

If you’ve inherited a version of radicalism that functions mostly as an aesthetic, as a way to be correct instead of effective, as a way to critique rather than build: congrats, you’ve been handed a pacified, curated version of what once terrified governments.

I’ve seen this disconnect firsthand.

Having been part of land reclamations, I’ve watched the divide play out over and over again—between those who see radicalism as something you apply for funding to talk about, and those who see it as something you risk everything to do.

The first group will tell you what’s possible, what’s pragmatic, what’s realistic. The second group stops asking permission. And what I’ve learned is this: radical isn’t something you are or discuss: it’s something you do.

How much you do it, how far you push, isn’t just about resources or circumstances. It’s about what you believe is possible.

And what you believe is possible?

That comes down to imagination.

- I've set up a YouTube channel. I've already uploaded a few videos you can stream there, and plan on uploading more as I get more comfortable having a camera in my face.

- Me and my family have started stream restoration on a segment of Phahin Sinte Wakpala (Porcupine Tail Creek).

That explains the headline of this short update. In other news, we got a small cabin, which means I've been able to set up my desk, and charge my laptop. Which means it'll again be part of my work to post more, here, on my new video channel, on my website, and on my Ko-Fi.

Which means it would be really great for me and my efforts if y'all who already know what I'm doing, went and told other folk about it. It's really obvious that many of the things I talk about, like climate adaptation, indigenous autonomy and settlerism, and Collapse, have become much more acceptable of topics in the past few years, as their relationships become more clear. So, mention that I'm here, making these posts, and doing this work, please!

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First, this newsletter will soon be distributed by Buttondown, not Substack, in response to Substack's preferential treatment of fascists. Apologies I haven't done so already, but as I said, I've been busy.

Second, I'm not sure what my presence on the Web will look like, going forward. It'd be foolish to ignore the changes emergent technologies like LLMs are bringing to this space, and personally, I'm going to be living off-the-grid, so it might be difficult to get my writing digitized and syndicated.

Which makes my third point a bit awkward: Y'all's financial support is going to continue to be a key component of my survival. In fact, it might be more critical, at least at first: we'll be far from the waste of settlerism, which is currently how we get a fair portion of our supplies and food, and not yet have the familiarity with the bioregion to engage in good reciprocity with it.

Now, it might be that distance means that I don't get quieter, and the opposite happens: We might end up being able to upload footage of what we're doing, since there won't be local systems of force that disagree with the activity.

Personally, I'm hoping to get more active on the Web, and I think that's maybe the more likely thing: right now, a lot of my time is spent responding to settler reactions to my choices, and that's not going to be true in such an immediate way, soon.

Anyway. My Ko-fi is still the best way to get funds to me. It'll be where critical updates go out, and will be the last service I stop posting to, even if I'm not able to do a newsletter.

And, that's the update: soon, I'm moving to help my people practice food autonomy. This'll mean *something* for my Web presence, but I'm not sure what, yet. Regardless, folk sharing money with me on Ko-fi is something I rely on to survive, so please continue doing that.