The Price of Success

Boredom is the new enemy of the online public space, and Exit may be the only solution.

What a difference a decade makes.

In 2016, radical posters on the right assaulted every avenue of the internet. The space assumed to be the controlled cultural domain of the left, fresh from the brilliant Obama Social Media campaign, found themselves on their back foot the entire Hillary campaign. They sat befuddled as their usual tactics of moral shaming and snark faltered and sputtered. For old-guard conservatives, the revolution was even more terrifying, as their reputations as respectable people writing for respectable publications became a meme, a laughingstock in the new reality. A single short-lived parody Twitter account called “Conservative Pundit” dealt the entire apparatus a nuking they still haven’t recovered from. National Review went from a bulwark of right-wing thought to a punchline within the span of a year. It was darkly amusing seeing people from the American Enterprise Institute, CATO, and many others pretty much admit that they were writers for hire when they implied that anyone who supported Trump would be purged from the movement, like they wielded the same hegemonic power of gatekeeping as in the era of Buckley Conservatism.

The online sphere was a perfect storm of mass discontent as young right wingers learned new tactics of information warfare as they stormed the halls of digital spaces. The posters once relegated to the ghettoes of 4-Chan and The Right Stuff were ratioing prominent political figures and journalists. You would regularly see avatars with swastikas savaging TV hosts and green Pepes getting more engagement than multi-billion-dollar enterprises. This savage, unrestrained youthful energy from a cohort of disenfranchised voters brought about the ascent of Trump's first term, the most shocking populist win in recent history.

The humiliation of the entrenched elites consisting of an old-line conservative class, the media, the Democrats, and big tech didn't lead to any soul-searching about where they went wrong, nor a pivot to temper their message. They wanted revenge, and Trump’s stunning victory led to an all-out push to restore this electron space to "proper" politics. The social media purges came soon after the election. Twitter led the charge by eliminating many prominent right-wing accounts, with Facebook doing hard repression on right-wing groups, YouTube banned popular channels, and Reddit severely repressed subreddit The_Donald before finally destroying it entirely years later. Still, it was just accounts at this time, and there were few real-life victims of doxxing or prosecution of online behavior. Then Charlottesville happened.

In the beginnings of the monument destroying spree, brought to a head during the George Floyd Summer of Love, a group of very online right wingers thought that the same terms that applied to the internet during this time applied to physical space. They were overwhelmingly men in their mid-twenties, some with respectable jobs, some misfits, and some outright dirtbags. All of them, regardless of status, got a taste of what power truly was, and how little the letter of the law protects those who embarrass powerful men. Riot police shoved the protestors into a mob of violent counter-protestors and chaos broke out, leading the entire group to run for their lives. In the aftermath, a young man who tried to escape with his life was convicted of first-degree murder in a kangaroo court and at least one protestor committed suicide as he was doxed and fired from his job. Countless others were intimidated into submission with trumped of charges of "intimidation".

All the institutional media, left, right, and center, piled on in perfect sync with big tech, who took the incident as the catalyst for more aggressive purging. There was open talk of prosecuting prominent right-wing accounts, spooking the entire right-wing ecosystem. Many well-known names went dark forever in fear of getting doxxed and losing their livelihood or facing legal prosecution. Entire web sites were targeted, Torba's Gab being the victim of the most relentless de-platforming campaign ever devised. Gab survived, but others like 8-chan did not. As things got too hot, many decided to go dark from Social Media forever.

To be clear, I don't blame them. Everyone has a hierarchy of obligations, and many of them had families to take care of and jobs to work that demanded more of their loyalty than posting online. There was no point in picking a fight with a monolith weilding near infinite capital to destroy anyone who crosses it. Many people got banned, resurrected themselves, and got banned again in a relentless battle of whack-a-mole. For a while they had the upper hand, but as Social Media graphing tools grew in complexity, they found themselves getting banned at a more and more accelerated pace, and the only way to slip past was to leave a footprint far smaller than their original username.

Then there was Coronavirus, Floyd, and Jan. 6, all of them creating an impetus to crush all right-wing spaces. All of Social Media was a dark, suffocating place then, and it was only when The Babylon Bee was banned that a member of the tech elite had enough of their shit.

The Musk saga, the Trump political comeback, and the ever-accelerating vibe shift is too recent to need comment, but even with a far more lenient Social Media atmosphere, with some sites being nearly on par with 2016, the culture has shifted. Nazi glorification and Holocaust jokes, once a mainstay of trolls in 2016, are now not seen as deeply offensive, but passe. The usual transgressions that made people's hair catch on fire a decade ago come across as uncreative and childish. Blaming things on Jews still has its place in pattern notising, but the grand-far reaching theories where Jews are secretly running even the anti-Semite orgs has no audience and is rightfully seen as silly.

More glaring than anything, everyone has simply gotten older. Ten years ages everyone, and many of the posters who started as young men with lots of free time are now saddled with a wife and kids. People who survived mass banning, the ever-looming spectre of doxxing, and the murky legal ground of freedom of speech now have to deal with the most demoralizing new reality of all, boredom.

There's that weariness that begins to set in, the frustration one has when a stupid online debate flares up again with no closure, when there's some drama he's seen a million times, and the annoyance of having to deal with low-IQ and unserious people on a daily basis. The

The Z Man

recently expressed well what every veteran of the Meme Wars likely feels on a daily basis now:

One of the downsides of writing and talking about the current scene is that you often want to kill yourself or kill someone. There are only so many stories about a crazed judge issuing an equally crazed rulings you can read before you want to spit on your hands, raise the black flag and start slitting throats. To paraphrase the late comic George Carlin, there are a lot of people who need to be killed.

It is why it is a good idea to look away from the daily car wreck that is the public square from time to time. It is why I quit Twitter. I will post links to my work there, but otherwise it is on mute. The most popular figures on that platform exist to irritate everyone else, so being active on that site is like inviting people into your home so they can break things and urinate on your carpets.

Even in one's leisure activities, there's this forlorn resignation at seeing the same thing again and again. At a certain point a man finds his youth and energy dissipating and is forced to fight a futile war against entropy. It's the feeling when a weightlifter realized his personal records are behind him, and his sole goal now is to maintain as much of his strength as possible as his body descends into old age. It's the same fatigue felt when you, once again, have to explain the nuances of Starship Troopers. It's a disappointment of seeing yet another young political upstart destroy all his capital because his ego got in the way.

While many made their online exit after getting spooked by the power of the leviathan state, many others found their life circumstances necessitated a realignment, feeling the need to build local community, care for their wife and newborn child, or work up the ladder of a promising career. There are those who came back after exile to find out the old spark isn't there anymore, that they're more grumpy and tired than funny, and the era of posting bangers for hours a day is behind them. Twitter is a graveyard of old posters with open accounts, but no new posts. One can look through the old Substack spaces also, where prolific writers penned a couple long articles a week, then one every two weeks, then monthly, then not at all. There's no doubt this is part of the same malaise, the sense of going around in circles that the only solution is to stop, face the future, and never look back.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Everyone has an exit point unless one's identity is so entwined with the online space that he’s willing to destroy his dignity to maintain it, which almost universally ends with that person becoming a lolcow. There comes a point where everyone feels they are either repeating themselves or see little benefit in a hobby that has lost its luster.

Never go full Bill Mitchell.

A lot of the lethargy stems from an excessively optimistic hope of what controlling the discourse would bring about versus the reality. There was this implicit assumption that when the Social Media came under the control of the right elements, society would organically shift along with it. What’s become clearer is discourse has created few true converts, with maybe ten percent actually amenable to changing their view based on FACTS and LOGIC. There are another thirty of forty percent that will change their views based on vibes, which discourse indirectly facilitates as the same topic is hammered again and again, flooding the zone with rhetoric supporting our side. Still, online discourse has not created a flood of new right-wing adjacent businesses, nor has it brought back freedom of association that has been lost. Young men and women are still lonely as ever and sexual relations, if anything, have been made worse by constant online “discourse”.

Arguments will not solve these problems. They are, at best, step one to solving the crippling issues of modernity. The goal of online debate is to make these topics part of the national consciousness, creating the conditions necessary to build core institutions that can exude true power. The paradox of online debate is that very few people are truly convinced through the discourse, but enough people that matter can be convinced to focus their time and effort to change. The goal is to create cultural living space for these ideas and make them acceptable, not directly converting people. If you’re banging your head trying to get your average Joe on board with your ideas, good luck. Conversions of that sort are the exception rather than the rule.

When a more friendly environment for pro-native businesses is created, more companies like

Dissident Soaps

can thrive. When freedom of association is strengthened, more fraternities like

Old Glory Club

form and support networks like

EXIT Newsletter

proliferate. When the cultural space of acceptable opinion is expanded, creators like Passage Press and Man's World can gain influence.

There’s still plenty to write about. One positive turn are the nuanced versions of history that circumvent the cartoons promulgated in American Education. The subversion of post-war consensus morality has reached a new stage, no longer won by oven jokes, but a deep, resonating analysis of history that speaks to the upcoming generation. Whether it is The Martyr Made Substack on Tucker Carlson giving a more educated view on World War II,

The American Tribune

with their excellent articles on the forgotten history of Rhodesia, or the

Curriculum Project

in the works to formulate a more balanced education, the more prolific among us have plenty to do that has nothing to do with the current media cycle.

Some things you can't walk away from. A Priest can't walk away from his vocation, even in times his prayer life is stale. No parent can ever walk away from his own children, even if they become morally lost or become invalids. Most of all, one can never walk away from living, even as their day-to-day existence becomes perpetual misery. For things like interacting in the online space, however, the only healthy way to interact is to know when to leave for good.

The end game is going to be different for everyone. For many, it's going to be when proper attention is given to their pet project, whether it is bringing manufacturing back to the Midwest, schooling getting overhauled, or local institutions becoming powerful enough to push back against the all-encompassing federal blob. Every exit plan has a cutoff where arguing in the online public square brings fewer returns than putting effort into smaller but vibrant organizations mixing both online and offline that can be continually fostered and expanded.

The time for wildly reacting to every media cycle has hit its twilight. The joy and cathartic emotions of ages past has burned out and little is gained anymore from the exercise. The future of discourse stems with those who have the discipline to find the niche they want to fill and develop a long-term, sustainable strategy of merging the real and the virtual, the abstract and the tangible. It’s not endlessly arguing in a vast public square but being satisfied with influencing a smaller network that won’t give you viral Tweets, but coordinates real action and resources within a vastly more limited domain.

A manager I worked with years ago said she liked to differentiate employees into two categories, pioneers and settlers. The pioneers are the people who would walk out into a wild space, solve problems quickly, and build a stronghold for future development. The settlers would then come in, clean up a lot of the mess the original settlers made, and create an environment conducive to long-term growth and maintenance. With the online space, we are seeing sunset for the pioneers, the same as happened in the Wild West, and now the right is grappling with welcoming settlers. Some people, simply through their temperament, will not be able to make the transition, finding themselves like the old-style cowboys with the land they helped conquer having no need of them anymore. It’s sad, but the nature of things.

Some reading this might come to the conclusion that what I’m proposing sounds just as boring, if not more, than current online discourse, and you would be right. The age of adrenaline rushes from arguing with clueless pundits and media darlings is over. The Jerry Springer-esque online beefs have never done anything but try to establish claims to territory that don’t matter. The new work isn’t going to give immediate rewards. We’re all settlers now.

Twitter is already getting swamped with engagement hacking, and A.I. is soon going to make the public forum useless. A lot of this has already been seen on Facebook, and will soon spread to every platform. Even Substack will soon be full of A.I slop posting. On left-wing Substack I’m convinced it’s already here. God knows Substack is doing everything in its power to turn itself into a slop factory. The only escape is through small, well curated networks of real people, doing real things, as opposed to arguing with a bot farm that never sleeps, never eats, and costs less than a cent a post. The social networks of the future will be more like small Telegram chats than 2015 Twitter, and it’s best to get ahead of the curve.

I have nothing but respect for the meme warriors of the previous age. I salute you, and we wouldn’t be here without your efforts. Yet the boredom is real, the sense of being stuck is real, and maybe that’s the signal we need to realize the next stage in this long, arduous process. Sometimes the only way to keep what important is learning to let go.

Thank you for reading Social Matter. This Substack isn’t going anywhere, as writing my thoughts out has done wonders for cementing what I really believe. I also sincerely hope it’s a positive influence on our ecosystem. Of course, I still appreciate the ego boost that Sharing and Subscribing gives me, so if you enjoyed what you read, give those a click.