One of the reasons fascism is gaining ground is because it is considered a closed case, a phenomenon that belongs to the domain of history and not a dynamic condition of reality, as Walter Benjamin from the previous century had warned in time. The surprise at how things we experience are still possible today is one of fascism’s strongest weapons, especially when this surprise does not lead to a violent awakening but to a blissful blindness; it is better to have a fragmented currentness of dozens of “special cases” and “exceptions” that can easily be justified and overlooked, rather than a universal interpretation of the ominous reality that would require preparation for war.
The least difficult thing in our days is to identify the fields where fascism manifests itself with the greatest intensity, but if there is one that reveals how deeply corroded and ready for totalitarian solutions the so-called “civilized” societies are, it is cyberspace; there, the virus of the gray uniform multiplies to the point of cellular mutations. Being the most massive social phenomenon, cyberspace, with its capabilities for digital mediation in almost all social activities, simultaneously constitutes the most massive, systematic, and blatant manifestation of fascist ideology. Where else, if not there, would the face of the beast be reflected today in the most vivid way?
There is a condition in the way the internet forms digital “communities” that seems to be of decisive importance: it constructs bubbles of virtual reality within which digital citizens enjoy psycho-emotional and intellectual self-sufficiency (or rather, numbness). Inside them, you can be anything: hyper-social, charming, intellectual, edgy, humorous, rebellious, a scientist, an artist, even a racist. You can freely express what you believe about yourself and the world without consequences, without the burden of fundamentally linking your actions with their consequences. Or at least so you think. In the isolated environment of the bubble, it suffices for each member to confirm the other’s inflated ego, and this is enough for the “community” to be convinced that its reality is the reality of the world. You might recognize something here taken from real life: it is the same ideological neurosis of the petty bourgeoisie that identifies its individual condition with the general social condition. The world changes, but the shit remains always the same. The reference to pettiness here is not random, because its paranoia, vindictiveness and bestiality manifested when it considers its expectations to be contradicted, have always constituted the raw material for transforming society into an arena of monsters. Today, this bestial paranoia has found a convenient refuge in the internet and there – in thousands of forums, blogs, websites and channels – it grows gigantic, until the bubble bursts and we find the monsters in front of us with flesh and bones.
The case of Felix Kjellberg is enlightening. A star of the cyberworld and a master of electronically constructed reality, with millions of loyal followers and influence that any politician or advertiser would envy, reaches his peak by riding the trend of online racism, until he crashes anomalously into a “scandal” that places him, amid general outcry, alongside patented internet fascists. All’s well that ends well! Another “monster” has been exposed, another cleansing ritual has supposedly been performed, the “battle” against fascism holds strong… Only that Kjellberg is nothing but a lieutenant, like Spencer and Yiannopoulos1 before him, and behind him stands an army of fifty million trolls, who are not monsters, but creatures from the house next door.
Perhaps the following (translated) texts give a faint picture of what we are trying to describe. The first two are from articles in the Guardian and Independent newspapers and journalistically comment on the facts of the case. The third comes from Screener, a website focused on media, and attempts to delve beneath the surface of the dark and motley world of cyberspace. It is not the analysis we adopt, as it is focused on the psychological and sexist dimension of the issue, but it manages to convey the gloom that lingers online and to identify that particular neurosis—resentment mixed with anger—that possesses those who consider themselves the “center of the universe,” yet see their expectations constantly disappointed everywhere and in everything. We also appreciated the—entirely justified—pessimism it expresses. While it raises the dead-end and purposeless issue of “we must do something, we must mobilize,” it ultimately concludes by acknowledging that what is happening “is the reality of our world,” and that everything will unfold “until the fruits ripen.” Of course! At the pessimistic point we find ourselves in now, Camus’s words from The Plague are confirmed, that “the struggle against illness is a continuous defeat.”
Harry Tuttle
cyborg #09 – 06/2017
PewDiePie believes that “death to all Jews” is a joke. Haven’t you laughed yet?
“It was just a joke!” How many times have you heard it? A racist comment wasn’t actually racist – it was just a joke. The “just a joke” excuse is the favorite excuse of those who try to avoid responsibility for actions they hadn’t imagined the consequences of. The most recent example of “just a joke” was offered to us by PewDiePie, YouTube’s biggest star.
On Tuesday [14/2], YouTube and Maker Studios, Disney’s digital entertainment company, confirmed that they terminated their contracts with 27-year-old Swede Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, due to antisemitic comments in his videos. To be precise, this does not mean that PewDiePie was removed from YouTube or lost any of his 53 million followers. It means that he will no longer have such easy access to advertising opportunities that brought him $15 million in net profits in 2016 alone.
PewDiePie has always provoked reactions – his unfiltered behavior is what helped him gather a massive “bro army”, as he calls his fans. But now he has gone too far. A Wall Street Journal investigation found antisemitic and Nazi references in nine of his videos. A video from January 11th, for example, shows two half-naked Indians dancing while holding a banner that reads “death to all Jews”.
On February 12, with a message on Tumblr, PewDiePie explained that the video did not actually call for the murder of Jews. It was a joke! “I wanted to show how crazy the modern world is, particularly certain services that are available online”. The video was supposed to highlight the absurdity of having “people on Fiverr [ed: a website where services are sold for the price of 5 dollars] who would say anything for five dollars” – including “death to the Jews”.
PewDiePie indeed managed to show how crazy the modern world is – just not in the way he intended. The fuss over PewDiePie is an important lesson on how racism can infiltrate society and gradually evolve into normality. More specifically, it sheds light on how prejudices are portrayed and spread online; on how racism and hatred are nurtured in online communities and spread to the offline world.
Come on now! Seriously, was that joke taken too far? PewDiePie might be a jerk, but he surely didn’t intend for his joke to actually fuel antisemitism, right?
The point is that whatever PewDiePie meant, in reality it doesn’t matter. A joke is never just a joke: it always has consequences. Jokes help to identify and stereotype social divisions. Either you get the joke and you’re one of us, or you don’t get it and you’re one of them.
Jokes also help to smooth out unthinkable ideas. And PewDiePie has already helped make this happen: he helped make racism a bit more mainstream. Ultimately, if such a famous YouTube star says such things, then it must be ok, right?
Indeed, PewDiePie’s work has been praised by known white supremacists, such as Andrew Anglin, editor of the daily stormer, an American Nazi news blog. On January 22, the blog changed its slogan and made it “the number one global site for PewDiePie fans” and Anglin wrote an article congratulating Kjellberg because “he made the masses feel comfortable with our ideas”.
As Anglin emphasized, PewDiePie is “definitely the person most watched on the planet” and “is also the type of person to whom millions of people would easily swear allegiance”. You see, PewDiePie doesn’t look like a monster. He is charming with a boyish style; he is a joker, not a preacher. You don’t realize you’re being influenced, you think you’re being entertained.
Propaganda and prejudices are as old as time, and jokes have always been one of the ways in which they were spread within small groups and subsequently disseminated throughout society. However, as times change, these jokes find new forms to appear. For example, the Nazis had caricatures in newspapers. (…)
Today newspapers are dying, but we have memes and online communities. And these have created their own digital ways to spread hate. Most started with 4chan, a notorious forum that fostered racist troll culture and basically wrote the manual for how white supremacy is encoded and spread online.
Hate is camouflaged behind absurd memes and a bombastic rhetorical style, hidden in cartoonish figures like Pepe the Frog, the alt-right’s mascot. Nothing is serious; everything is a joke.
Hannah Arendt once spoke precisely about the “banality of evil.” About how, that is, the gears of capitalism allow tyrants to impose control and transform evil into unthinkable bureaucratic actions: people are not murderers, they “are simply doing their job.”
We could say that the modern digital economy has incubated a new version of the banality of evil. Racist memes function as jokes that are only understood within a community and reinforce online the bonds between alienated white men. The style of these memes, their exaggerated, insane nature, makes us not take them seriously. We dismiss them as humor. But in this way racism creeps and develops in our lives. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Since when did fascism become cool?
PewDiePie’s jokes are the tip of the spear
Like all young stars before him, it was ultimately inevitable for PewDiePie to try to distance himself from the very image through which he gained fame. For others it was tattoos and drugs, but for the 27-year-old YouTube star, who became known thanks to his involvement with video games, it was a series of antisemitic comments – because you know, laughing at the Holocaust is cool.
In his videos, which are watched by 53 million subscribers, he displayed the swastika, played the Nazi salute song, and even did a Hitler salute. What a clown! In his most recent video, PewDiePie, real name Felix Kjellberg (I mention it because I refuse to write such a stupid nickname again) paid two Indians through a crowdfunding website to hold up a banner that read “death to all Jews.” A white guy worth 124 million dollars getting two dark-skinned poor people to hold up a banner calling for genocide is an unbelievable scumbag, isn’t he? (…)
There’s nothing particularly new in Kjellberg’s jokes – using Nazi slogans and aesthetics for provocative purposes was something young people did long ago. (…) What better way to “piss off” the left-wing and liberal elites, as well as your parents, than by parading around like the old fascist enemy? Today, however, in the digital age, apart from “flipping off” mom and dad only, the reaction results in thousands of clicks online. This is bread and butter for people like Kjellberg.
In the past, drawing swastikas in school toilets might not have been an issue, but today the digital equivalent is, due to the fact that real neo-Nazis, fascists, alternative right-wingers, far-right extremists, or whatever-you-want-to-briefly-call-them racists, have put on new costumes and are trying to make their repulsive politics more palatable.
[A new incarnation of the racist is] those who sport dark suits and expensive shoes combined with a somewhat careless look – something like a cross between an old English mobster and Milo Yiannopoulos. The Southern Poverty Law Center in America summed up this image, commenting on Richard Spencer as a “tailored version of the old white supremacist. A kind of professional racist in modern clothing”.The millennial momentum of Spencer and Yiannopoulos, as well as the “harmless” extreme jokes of Kjellberg, work toward the same goal: to make racism appear normal. The alt-right does not differ much in its practices from the hipsters working in public relations, nor do Kjellberg’s jokes about Jewish people differ stylistically from a child’s fart jokes. What they accomplish is making discrimination against minorities seem socially acceptable, culturally permissible, and normal.
Once it was written how dangerous it is that people think fascism comes with monsters wearing uniforms. No, in 2017 fascism arrives wearing a suit, a tie, and a “subscribe now” button.
Η πτώση του μεγαλύτερου αστέρα του YouTube είναι το σύμπτωμα μιας σοβαρότερης αρρώστιας
(…) For those who dislike them, Kjellberg’s videos, in which he comments on various things while playing video games, are as creepy as nails scratching a blackboard, even when they don’t include references to Nazis. That’s why it’s no surprise that outside the video game player community, his fall caused great satisfaction.
The fact that it was covered as a major story with full journalistic investigation by the WSJ is enough to demonstrate both the excessive earnings of internet “celebrities” (Forbes estimated that Kjellberg’s earnings in 2016 reached $15 million) and the enormous, devoted audience that follows such “stars.” By December 2016, Kjellberg’s channel had 50 million subscribers.
This is one story we can tell. How technology, money, and fame combined in the hottest issue of 2017: the rise of white nationalism and fascism in America. It would be the easiest; but it’s not the whole story.
The real story with PewDiePie is not that someone who you are predisposed to dislike—because of the combination of naivety and relentless activity he displays, or because you reject the industry he represents altogether, or because it seems insane that someone makes so much money essentially doing nothing—finally got what he deserved. The issue is not there, and the matter with PewDiePie himself goes beyond that. PewDiePie is one of 50 million-and-one drops in an ocean, caught in a current that leads to a repulsive shore.
The online alt-right (alternative right) is built on lulz2 and on well-protected privileges enjoyed by people without the personal ability or historical understanding to comprehend the things that these privileges allow them to say. Rewriting the story of Felix Kjellberg in order to portray him as a monster – thus catching the wave of recent high-impact stories, such as those of Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer – would be research laziness and would obscure a much more important element: that “edgelords,” the boys and men who gather in online communities and intensely reproduce messages of hatred and misogyny, will continue to push boundaries until they end up in a truly dark place.
Because the relationship of PewDiePie with his followers, like that of Milo with his fans, is both a system of mutual reinforcement and a culture of machismo, we make the mistake of diagnosing this relationship as normal, albeit extreme, but not unusual. We take it at face value, because “men are men” and they do such things. We may demonize some (those who completely deviate), but we continue to ignore them as a reality and then act surprised when their obsession with attention is finally combined with their ability to be heard.
Here we are not simply dealing with what is wrong and right. Of course racist jokes, trolls and fascist communities on the internet are wrong; of course they have gotten out of control with the support of companies that provide them with platforms to organize and speak. But here we are dealing with what lies behind the dark side of the internet, and whether we can stop it.
Kjellberg is neither the first nor the only video producer of his kind, but his imprint is everywhere. The plethora of “Let’s play” videos and anything related to video games, which constitutes the content with the most subscribers on YouTube, bears his marks, his idioms, his pressured language. Thanks to luck and favorable conditions, his influence on a rapidly emerging mental market of the 21st century is permanent, creating ways, shapes and expression patterns to an extent that surpasses his own fame. If youtubing is art, then he is an accidental Picasso.
But most people who are now discussing Kjellberg are not particularly familiar with his figure. People tend to overestimate how common and widespread their positions and interests actually are, a phenomenon known as the false consensus bias. This bias explains why some of your relatives are constantly shocked by things they see on Facebook; it largely explains why both the right and the left are shocked by reactions to Obama and Trump. It also explains why Felix Kjellberg seems to be such an easy target for essays and explanations: because Felix Kjellberg resonates mainly with young people, whose ideas and obsessions are not taken seriously in discussions about “big issues.”
Between the ages of 13 and 18, the magazine Variety reported in 2014 that PewDiePie is more recognizable than any major movie star. If that seems unbelievable, then you can understand what false consent means. The glued-to-the-screens children – who basically ignore the topics of entertainment, news, and culture that we consider important and the world as the rest of us – can understand – are building their own world: they are building the future. Fifty million of them. And the fans of PewDiePie, whether we like it or not, take something real from him.
“Many people see me as a friend they can relax with for 15 minutes a day” Kjellberg explained in 2014. “The loneliness in front of the computer screen brings us together. But I never wanted to become a role model; I just want to invite them to spend some time with me”.
Despite the casual and almost simulated familiarity these statements exude, there is nothing more disappointing than a YouTube personality who unconsciously slips into a racist comment or repulsive behavior. In the first weeks of ’17, Kjellberg’s reactionary response to social and political dynamics led, as is the case in such instances, to destruction.
First, the British tabloid The Sun uncovered a clip from a video in which Kjellberg uses a racist slur during an especially triumphant moment. A few days later, an increasingly intense trend of references to Nazis, Hitler, and antisemitic themes—Wall Street Journal counted nine—culminated explosively in a video where Kjellberg hired two men from India to hold up a sign that read “death to all Jews” (a request that Kjellberg claims he never believed they would actually carry out).
Kjellberg was never a particularly cultivated person. His fragmented, snarky rants always contained many references to “bitches” and his insistence on referring to his fans as “bros” is an inseparable part of the unrealistic male-centered perspective that gaming culture has formed for its audience. And as a shaper, Kjellberg reinforces this culture by cultivating it. He is both a creation and a guide of a patriarchal industry and culture that is going through a serious identity crisis.
The ironies of reddit, the images with Pepe the frog and all the corresponding internet shock jokes are born from a culture that is isolated from real life. Jokes about Hitler or rape jokes start initially out of naivety, but eventually harden and become beliefs: take for example all those comedians who are caught off guard when they make a bad joke and then, reacting to criticism, they double down even more and end up despicable. Projecting our shadows onto the Other – us, the good people, who seek out and strike down those who are fundamentally evil – prevents us from seeing how these communities begin, grow, and are nourished by rejection.
No, we are not arguing against political correctness, which is a pathetic construct of conservatism, nor are we calling for sympathy for internet trolls. But sunlight offers the best disinfection, and what we don’t see – or refuse to see – we cannot fix. By closing our eyes to the most repugnant aspects of our culture, we put trolls in a position from which they can do the most damage.
We are predisposed to keep away from the riffraff of reddit, the trolls with anime avatars, and (most recently) the fairies with Nazi characteristics, so all these creatures remain invisible – until they cease to be. They become communities that initially seem to have come from nowhere. But they come from somewhere: boredom, loneliness, and the universal feeling (that many of us have fortunately overcome in childhood) that you are the center of the universe, but everyone mistreats you despite all the effort you make.
For these boys, rape and Anne Frank are equally stories with ghosts, just simple paths to extremism. The point is that this generation of deeply disturbed thugs will always shout louder, one over the other, they will shout over the women. The thugs shout because they think they are not heard; that is the only reason anyone shouts.
It takes just a small step for those who see themselves as victim-heroes to relate to edgelords who push each other toward extremism, much like “men’s rights” activists or packs of jerks with their modified, monstrous cars: no one else understands the strain they’re under, their need for recognition, their need for help. In reality, they are constantly mocked for their behavior. So they push each other, and because all humor starts from a seed of discomfort, and those seeds can eventually bloom, hate jokes ultimately lead to raw hatred.
Imagine the acceptable boundaries of hatred in humor, say a few decades ago, with jokes about black people or jokes about domestic violence, and how these could be expanded without serious reaction from society so that a dam could be placed. Imagine now that those who made such so-called jokes exist today in a world that at least as much as they can understand, is full of people who applaud them and pressure them to continue.
Because we overlook these types as they go from A to B, we assume that A is the same as B; they never “changed”, they were just revealed. The reality is that we were looking elsewhere, just until the change was completed outside our peripheral vision. The reality is that the situation required boundaries, but we didn’t set them, because these types are too annoying to deal with. Drawing a convenient line between the “reddit damaged” on one hand and the “monsters” on the other doesn’t help at all in stopping them, let alone helping them. It just suits the rest of us.
We have become so accustomed to invoking “Godwin’s law” (the idea that every internet discussion will eventually reach the point where something is compared to Hitler or the Nazis) that we have internalized it and can no longer hear certain things because they are too crude to let pass. When you say something so crude and take it to such extremes and still aren’t heard, you continue shouting louder and louder, making it even cruder each time. And if you still feel ignored? (…)
Imagine how easy it would be to idolize someone who manages to expand your personal “Overton window”3—the category containing everything you consider unthinkable—so as to include things you wouldn’t have dared say six months ago, every six months. It’s a wonderful feeling of liberation and transgression that never gets old: whatever used to make you shudder now sounds commonplace, everyone says it, everyone has normalized it, and now we must move on to something else. To something worse, or otherwise no one will notice. This rewarding process provides powerful affirmation, teaching that the worst thing someone can think of doesn’t make them a miserable person, but a hero.
This group therapy strategy also involves a kind of mutual enabling: we overlook the extent to which men constantly watch each other, or the “leader” if there is one, to see where the boundary line is – for example, Trump telling Billy Bush “they let you do whatever you want.” When neither side of this discussion has the authority or credibility to impose limits, then it becomes a self-reinforcing system of validation and consensus; each justifies and confirms the other until they reach extremes.
The rise and the fall that follows afterward, follow a predetermined course: it is the hyperactive child at the table who causes laughter and then continues the antics so much that in the end they remove him. Only in Kjellberg’s case, the attention did not come from adults, but from a fan base for which he spent five years cultivating and thanking, and in return, it encouraged him in everything.
Challenging this framework – the collective ideology, the complicit ways in which boys and men use to monitor and control behavior, both their own and others’ – means breaking the rules of this “Men’s Club.” It is impossible to ask questions without encountering masculine insecurities and the arguments of “not all men are the same” in defense of manhood: “how dare you say that I follow the herd and the leader?”
In a story like that of Kjellberg’s, the idea also arises that if being a “fan” is part of your identity, then any questioning of your “hero” is also an offense against you, at least on two levels: both as an exceptional, independent-thinking individual, and as a person with refined tastes that make you like the things you like. A study into the culture of such a person – whatever it may involve: video games, YouTube, or white supremacy – is absolutely an attack against them from an angle they cannot even see, even if they had eyes on the back of their head. Because, as with every issue concerning privilege, the consequences have existential dimensions: the individual thinks the world is one way, but in reality it is different, and the brain is not capable of processing things in such a way.
In the end, everything culminates in a self-protection and self-therapy status quo that spirals toward madness, with everyone in the mass reassuring one another that everything is normal, everything is ok: in reality, it’s the others who don’t understand. Every edgelord and every budding fascist fantasizes about being Neo from The Matrix, opening his eyes to the hidden truth.
The Elect’s delusion is the hardest to break or to interrupt, because it feeds the ego’s greed richly—and because there is no element, argument, or shame to stop it; it devours everything. It is what even some within these loose circles of privileged computer nerds recognize as a “Xanatos Gambit”4: either way, I win. We can detect a version of this condition in an earlier response of PewDiePie to criticism: “I think that playing the politics police in the end will fuck us all over” he had said in a video, “and this year, 2017, I decided to take a step back. From now on, I’ll be my true self.”
Add to this the fact that in our culture men are trained to consider themselves as the only objective and rational factor and then you will see a special form of radicalization for which we don’t even have a name, because it is new. In other countries, if a young man feels so important and right and also so overlooked that he is willing to cross boundaries or harm others in order to be heard, there is a name for this: terrorism. We simply can’t see it in ourselves.
Somewhere in the last 10-20 messages on Facebook – you don’t need to go any further – you will most likely find a message from someone close with jokes about the “Sindler’s List”, or references to how some video game is “complete rape”, or covered-or-not-so-much revelations that some women “are whores”.
Are they “monsters”? No. But you use “monsters” to protect yourself from recognizing monstrous elements in them, to avoid confronting them, so you don’t have to lift the lid and discover what’s happening underneath. You prefer to wait and hope that the end of the story will be somewhat different for your own person. Violence, hatred, organized extremism are for others, not for those we know.
PewDiePie is a symptom of a disease of the majority, but because he happened to become rich, it seems enough to us that reactions against him stop. His fall causes anti-capitalist, anti-conformist feelings, it makes us feel all those things we like when we try to prove that we are better. But the truth is that the ground on which such situations develop is the reality of our world, and we will continue to encourage such behaviors and mindsets until their fruits ripen.
The reason for this is terrible and extremely simple: because the whiny arrogance and self-satisfaction of white, male rage – from gamergate to anonymous, from wikileaks to fappening, all these emerging forms of confusion and anger of the “alt-right” that would be difficult to identify even in the radical right – are so repulsive that it is almost impossible to see them clearly without pretenses and doubts. But we will find no therapy, nor will they find therapy, if we do not try. Their fate is pitiful, but watch as it spreads.
- Yiannopoulos and Spencer are two of the leading—and extremely media-favorite—voices of the far-right in the United States. They are both fanatical supporters of Trump and pioneers of the alt-right (indeed, Spencer coined the term). Yiannopoulos became known for his provocative statements against immigrants, women, and homosexuals, while Spencer is a champion of white supremacy, a Nazi nostalgist, and the inspiration behind the plan to transform the U.S. into a “white race sanctuary” through a “soft ethnic cleansing.” Both lost public support when the former spoke positively about pedophilia and the latter was filmed giving a Nazi salute at a celebratory rally for Trump’s victory. The related “scandal” and their temporary removal from the political frontline served a calming and reassuring function: since these two extremists were exiled amid widespread cries of disapproval, the issue of fascism was considered resolved. Okay… ↩︎
- Lulz: internet slang. Alternative version in the plural of the older lol (abbreviation of laughing out loud or lots of laughs). Lol is the absolutely basic comment of agreement / applause / reward for any content on the internet. In the subcultures that have developed online, lol constitutes the fundamental unit of measurement of success and the standardized argument “I did it for the lulz” in turn constitutes the only and sufficient justification for any internet stupidity. It is a vicious circle: stupidity is rewarded with stupid comments, which push towards even greater stupidities, until all logical control is lost and the spiral of lulz ends in brutality. ↩︎
- Overton window: the spectrum of ideas / opinions that are socially acceptable to tolerated. The concept originates from media economics and was first formulated by Joseph Overton, a staffer at a media research center. The Overton window is an approach to public discourse, according to which what is allowed to be heard does not coincide with the dominant opinion, but moves within a broader framework that is encoded as “marginally acceptable, sensitive, popular, dominant.” ↩︎
- A term taken from board and video games. It refers to a well-designed movement plan whose results, regardless of who wins or loses, favor the organizer of the scheme. ↩︎