Season Two Episode Four: Seattle & Other Gossip

Hi folks,

So for the record A! is mischaracterizing my critique of him as a social capitalist (acting in bad faith to build social connections and popularity within certain milieus or circles rather than sincerely explore ideas). I don’t know where he’s getting this whole thing about “drugs” from. The anarchist milieu as a whole has a bad case of social capitalism (many “communists” privately defining communism as the game of accumulating social capital rather than material capital) and many anarchists in my circles talk a lot about those dynamics and behaviors, which I guess include people who leverage popularity to get drugs so maybe I’ve mentioned that at some point. If A! wants to take general discussion on such matters as a cloaked personal crusade against him personally, I guess whatever, but that’s not the case. Although obviously I am not a fan.

It’s a mistake to frame social capitalist behavior as playing to the largest possible audience. Clearly A! is not some conventional red anarchist, but local power — maneuvering so as to be strongly positioned in a small pond — can sometimes be far worse. Cult leaders for example are one form of social capitalist although their reach rarely stretches beyond their compound. (So it’s not a contradiction to be both “out of touch” and “cool” if folks were using both those terms, since flows of popularity or hipness are often out of touch with the broader population or cultural developments. Indeed it’s particularly cool in many circles to *be* out-of-touch.)

Literally anyone who “does the work” or engages with the world to any degree builds social relationships and status, that alone is not some deplorable act, but there are perverse incentives and feedbacking dynamics that can emerge as a result and prove deeply constraining. Playing cheap laugh-lines that resonate well with an audience’s superficial read of things so as to avoid actually grappling with the content in good faith is an example of pure positioning. A! suggests he’s all about the ideas and that his wafting from position to position or language to language is just openminded inquiry. But it can also be read as largely opportunistic (especially when his positions change based on what is strategic to leverage in a given social context).

A!’s characterization of his wording at that ’13 BASTARD — the response that deeply perturbed me and and persuaded me to treat him as a malicious persona — was clearly and trivially not about “not speaking to other people’s projects in a global way”. A!’s whole talk on anti-organizationalism was about taking his personal experiences in LBC and other projects and extracting more general takeaways. The poor young red kid in the audience (who sadly didn’t dress the right way or use the hippest words to the BASTARD crowd) asked about issues of power and privilege both reflecting systematic power structures AND the more situationally unique (because interpersonal dynamics of power don’t have to line up with Formal Oppression to be objectionable/unethical). The question was both directed at the specific example projects A! was using as a springboard AND to the more general takeaways. A! answered neither. And his specific language to me later was “I don’t care about power and privilege, those aren’t things I’m interested in.”

A! gets broad criticism from around the anarchist milieu for leveraging power and positioning in fucked up ways, leading to a constant exodus of folk from his circles, and did so for many years before that BASTARD. His very cocky response at that conference made me re-evaluate this context and in particular the political ideologies or perspectives he’s struggled to normalize and popularize.

There are a lot of people in the scene who gravitate towards radical milieus and projects as an arena to pursue power — often because they realize they’re too weak to cut it in other arenas like say as Gordon Gekkos in finance. Some do this as ideologues. Some do this as scene patriarchs. Some do this as traveler kid fuckbois. Some do this as organizational bureaucrats. In popular average-folk parlance this is often just referred to as “sociopathy” (don’t try to twist that to being merely just signifying anti-social). Since that particularly astonishingly frank and smirky exchange with me in 2013 it has been my read that A! is more this than not — to the point where it’s not worth engaging under the assumption of good faith — and that many of his political projects like “nihilist anarchism” are mostly about defanging anarchism’s antibodies to such.

PS

A!’s defenses of other scene patriarchs (like Kristian Williams in the Patriarchy In The Movement drama) who have totally different politics but who are likewise in some position of scene power threatened by the rabble of anarchism offer just one more piece of evidence. Thankfully even most PNW “nihilists” correctly understood the context of the “we will not be silent in the face of your violence” (and the calling of the cops on the kids protesting), despite the optics being particularly bad, and sided with the locals. (It’s constantly affirming to watch the bay area nihilists around A! so hostile to me side with the platformists, maoists and other nasty red bureaucrats in Portland for fear of some boogeyman social justice idpol menace that stands up to popular writers and figures perpetrating abusive shit or rushing to shield abusers / vilify or marginalize survivors.)