What Remains
Articles
What Remains
Articles

What Remains

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Taylor Thornburg offers a communist analysis of the internet and explores its different ideological uses.

“What do people get wrong about drawing Pepe?” an interviewer asks at the beginning of Arthur Jones’ documentary Feels Good Man.  “Uh…” cartoonist Matt Furie warbles with uncertainty, “probably when they put Pepe on the internet saying, like, ‘Kill Jews.’”  In an instant, a documentary film, a cartoonist, the cartoon, the internet, and centuries of ideological development collide.  The very deep and real fingerprints of historical fascism crash into the very recent ephemera of the internet.  In a few fearful words, Matt Furie acknowledges centuries of liberal ideology coming screeching to a halt at the feet of a resurgent right-wing illiberalism before his very eyes through a cartoon frog that he created.  The documentary is about this frog and what people on the internet made of it, and it presents this history as a delicate dance between ideas, the freedom to express them, and the increasingly complex technology through which people express their ideas.  Arthur Jones, Matt Furie, and the documentary they created expose a network of ideological contradictions, however, they fail to address the most important issues at play because they misunderstand fundamental features of their subject matter.  Feels Good Man is explicitly about a meme of a cartoon frog named Pepe, but beneath this story is a much more interesting and dire narrative about the naked depravity of liberalism on the internet and its ultimate doom.  

In his documentary, Jones documents Pepe’s decade-long evolution from an innocent comic book character to a near unrecognizable hate symbol brandished by a resurgent fascist movement based in the United States.  This narrative is as unlikely as it is surprising.  Equally unlikely heroes and villains garnish the story as Jones tells it.  Jones’s hero is Matt Furie, the creator of the cartoon frog.  Jones’s villain is the undifferentiated mass of angry young men at the forefront of the resurgent fascist movement viciously trying to appropriate it.  Feels Good Man is more or less about the conflict over control of the cartoon and what the outcomes of this conflict have to do with the confusing coming and going of symbols on the internet.  Given the extreme political stakes of this conflict, this narrative has the makings of a great political thriller.  However, Jones is conspicuously silent about ideology over the course of his film.  His silence on the role of ideology and conflict in meaning making speaks loudly about the documentary’s presuppositions about ideology and the internet, which are themselves ideological. 

The ideology in question is liberalism.  Alan Ryan, a preeminent scholar on liberalism, defines it as a belief in small government, the rule of law, inhibited arbitrary or discretionary power, private property, and self-creating, self-responsible, and self-disciplined individuals.1 In the same stroke, Ryan adds that liberals tend to believe in each other as free and equal with free and equal rights to match2 Liberal ideas can be traced back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century British intelligentsia.  John Locke supposedly discovered one’s freedom and equal right to acquire property privately and use it in any industrious way that one pleases.3 John Stuart Mill supposedly discovered that unbridled freedom of speech was the only way to discover all the possibilities latent in private property.4 All liberals take for granted that anyone’s supposedly inalienable rights are always relative to the inviolable first right to private ownership, even and often especially over the means of production or profit.  This is to say that liberalism assumes capitalism.  As early as 1937, Mao Zedong roundly criticized liberalism as, “a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension,” and, “Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness. It places personal interests first,”.6 Liberalism must ultimately paper over its many internal contradictions and issues.  Jones’s work in Feels Good Man is no exception.

Jones goes out of his way to treat Matt Furie as an innocent.  The documentary begins with Matt Furie’s quavering voice.  Furie is as shy and understated as a child.  When he discusses his young adulthood, Furie explains that he’d almost rather be a child. “I do get, like, waves of nostalgia for the youthful time of my twenties working [at the Community Thrift Store],” he says, “just hanging out with my friends, and just riding a bike around San Francisco. I basically just want to be young again.” He gleefully rummages around the thrift store where he used to work with a film crew in tow. Furie identifies one cramped corner as his former office. “It used to be the toy department,” he says. “I would literally have a mountain of toys every day.” He first formalized Pepe around this time as he sketched whatever interesting toy or other inspiration that held his attention long enough. “It was my ideal job situation,” he grins. 

Jones pits Furie’s innocence against the ugliness of 4chan’s users. In his documentary, Dale Beran, artist and author of 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump speaks on 4chan and the Pepe meme.  He muses that 4chan’s users identify with Pepe because Pepe is a minefield of graphic design mistakes. He has too many folds, looks strung out, and intermingles glee with grotesque.  Beran claims that Pepe validates 4chan users, “steering into that mistake,” much like, “steering into the mistake of staying in your mom’s basement.”  He characterizes 4chan users as maladjusted, expressing themselves through a niche medium for attention and expressing their discontent. He describes their culture as “NEET,” an acronym that stands for “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.”

Through Jones’s gaze, Furie is a pure childlike figure mired in a fracas he could neither predict nor prevent when 4chan’s impure collective appropriates his intellectual property for nefarious ends.  As compelling a story as it is, it is pure ideology.  Jones frames the conflict between Furie and 4chan as an issue of pure and impure intentions, nothing else.   In Postmodernity and its Discontents, Zygmunt Bauman writes in no uncertain terms that issues of purity like these are particular ideological preoccupations of Western liberalism.  Bauman writes that in such societies, impurity describes the condition of being out of place – of standing out and in so doing making ideologically determined social orders painfully apparent.7 This distinction as Jones utilizes it obscures the fact that Furie and 4chan’s users as represented in this documentary would be essentially indistinguishable but for one key quality.

The only quality that distinguishes Furie from 4chan’s users is ownership. Other than ownership, they have everything in common.  Neither seem to conceive of a future in which they want to live. Both seem to disdain the world and their role in it.  Both recoil from it and retreat into juvenile fantasies.  The only actual difference between them is that one owns intellectual property and the other does not. Rather than an issue of purity, the issue of property distinguishes these people from each other. Furie embodies a class of people who own, and even when these people evidently hate the world in which they live as Furie does, they can enjoy their living in it on the basis of the social position their ownership provides without any significant motivation to change it. 4chan’s users represent a class of people who do not own, have no position, so have nothing but their hateful fantasies to enjoy in a world they have every motivation to change. Feels Bad Man totally misses this distinction. Its ideology obscures it, for it is an ideology organized around the place and privilege of private ownership. Ideology is itself at the heart of the internet and of issues like Pepe the frog and the users of 4chan who appropriated the meme. 

The language with which popular news media refers to 4chan aligns with Jones’s treatment of its users as impure, and again not in any sense that questions the ideological presuppositions of the internet or its users, but in a sense that pathologizes the user.  The Guardian8, The New York Times9, The New Statesman10, The Atlantic11, and countless other news media have in some way referred to 4chan as the internet’s id.  Internet scholars Angela Nagle12 and Gabriella Coleman13 likewise refer to the site and its users as in and of the id.  The term “id” comes from the nineteenth century psychologist Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.  Freud famously described the id as the basest unconscious part of a person’s psyche made up of mostly pre-conscious drives, animalistic instincts.  Against the id is what Freud called the super ego.  Freud refers to the super ego as an “ego ideal,” and an element of the psyche “less firmly connected with consciousness” than the id.14  Where the id is inherited, the super ego is learned.  According to Freud, the super ego is the part of a person’s psyche shaped by internalized authority and most often associated with moral decision making.15 When these authors refer to 4chan and its users as an “id,” they allege that they lack the mental acumen to inhibit the id’s animalistic and sometimes anti-social compulsions normally prohibited by the super ego.  To be fair, 4chan has its considerable share of animalistic and anti-social behavior.  However, referring to 4chan as the id of the internet attributes this behavior to individual unconscious and pathological drives when the problem of the behavior of its users is more widespread and social.   

4chan’s founder once described his website as totally anonymous, without memory, without barriers to entry, and free from any need to register any identifying information.16  Protected by a shroud of anonymity and conversing at such a distance, users do not surrender to their id when they post online. The id cannot be blamed because neither the technology nor the user is to blame when people behave badly online. Rather the super ego and its social proxy, ideology, are at fault for what most people think of as bad behavior online.  How can this be?

The notion that media technology manipulates psychological fixtures and ideological predispositions is not new.  In 1973, Laura Mulvey wrote “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” an essay in which she describes film as a technology that appropriates ideological phallocentrism and psychological drives for its own ends and in so doing unwittingly reproduces the ideological and psychological forms that it appropriates.  Specifically, Mulvey writes that film appropriates scopophilia, an aesthetic pleasure derived from looking at something or someone, described by Freud in Three Essays on Sexuality, as a sexual instinct associated with taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.17  Mulvey writes that it is the illusion of voyeurism engendered by the separation of screen and audience that elicits their scopophilia.18  In this state, audiences temporarily cease self-identification with their individual egos and instead engage the film and its characters through the super ego or ego ideal, absorbing and identifying with the authority of the idealized cultural forms presented through film.19  In this very short work, Mulvey shows that anonymity is a gateway to extreme ideological identification rather than the reverse.

In Being and Nothingness, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre explains that even in private, the gaze of “the Other” persists.  Sartre writes that this Other is, “the one who looks at me and at whom I am not yet looking, the one who delivers me to myself as unrevealed but without revealing himself, the one who is present to me as directing at me but never the object of my direction,”.20  In Sartrean terms, the look of the Other is a precondition of existence itself.  He writes that the look precedes the world in which it occurs, constitutes it, shapes what one and the Other believes about it, and through it both one and the Other derive their objectives, their limits, and their respective understandings of how they ought to be as human beings.21  

The Sartrean “Other” parallels the “big Other” of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.  In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek defines this Other as a crucial element in ideological interpellation.  He defines this Other as the very form of the world as individuals imagine it to be and the authority to which individuals refer when they think about humankind.22 This Other is the ego ideal to which one aspires, the fantasy through which one comes to terms with their struggles, and the ideology with which one understands their world.  In private, it is this gaze of this Other which one assumes.  When a voyeur peers at someone in private, it is this Other for which the observed performs.  In her brief history of the internet Lurking: How a Person Became a User, Joanne McNeil discusses a new kind of intimacy compromised by anonymity discovered by live-streamers in the late 1990s.  She describes this intimacy as being alone without feeling like it through the new one-way, anonymous intimacy enabled by webcams, chatrooms, and social media.23 In this moment people discovered each other in their most ideologically determined conditions but misrecognized these conditions as a natural state, an impulsive and unreflective id state, just as the anonymous voyeur misrecognizes the object of their gaze.

The more anonymity someone has online, the more nakedly ideological they behave.  Therefore, when the anonymous users of 4chan act out their most hateful fantasies with no regard for the lives – let alone property rights as in Matt Furie’s case – of others, their cruelty and their reaction is the cruelty and the reaction of the ideology to which they subscribe: Western liberalism.  In McNeil’s history of the internet, she addresses the language with which anonymous users described their own anonymity.  Although she does not identify it as such, the terms in these users’ vernacular are extraordinarily ideological.  Citing an anonymous user known only as “Shii,” McNeil analyzes a manifesto of internet anonymity which proclaims that, “under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/ information is criticized, you don’t know with whom you’re upset.  Also, with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to criticize them… All information is treated equally,”.24 4chan’s founder likewise extols the unique value of anonymity for free association.25 

 Under cover of free speech, free association, and equality, 4chan’s users harassed the families of suicide victims, art students, women, and ethnic minorities, and as McNeil recognizes in her history of the internet, online communities organized around racism or misogyny existed in their own forums even from the earliest eras of the internet. There is a reason grander platforms like 4chan, Reddit, Facebook, or YouTube did not immediately expel them.26 These anonymous communities existed for so long and thrived because they not only genuinely believed in the ideological language used to justify their actions but their actions genuinely aligned with the cruel and hateful ideology of a large segment of developers and fellow users on the internet reacting to real changes in the world that challenged their ideological presuppositions.

The movement to distinguish these anonymous ideologically motivated actors as different, impure, or id is an equally ideologically motivated movement.  In order to function, ideology cannot be recognized as in contradiction.  When an ideology that professes freedom and equality turns out to be cruel and exclusionary, those with privilege of position within the ideological framework retreat further into their ideology and exclude whatever contradictory evidence they have to with appeals to purity and difference.  This is a psychological observation as much as it is an ideological observation.  Before conducting a series of experiments on what he calls the “perseverance effect,” psychologist Craig Anderson observed that the tendency to cling to beliefs regardless of empirical observations about them is a widely acknowledged psychological fact.27  After conducting his experiments, Anderson concludes that this tendency can in fact occur across a wide range of people using wide ranges of data to make observations about their world, and he observes these processes as having more to do with easily imagined explanations than the explanations that others provide through hard fought data and research.28 

 As Zizek observes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, contradictions are far from absent in the ideologically interpellated subject for whom data and research often matter very little.  He observes that ideology often generates its own explanatory theories for contradictions, theories which try to excise them without undoing the phantasmal mess which generated them in the first place.29 The experience of finding one’s self thrown into this dysfunctional network as opposed to being a necessary and important part of a coherent network of well-defined and equitable processes is also a fundamentally negative experience, as Sartre explains in Being and Nothingness. He specifically describes the experience as being, “degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Other,” and having, “‘fallen’ into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am,”.30  As Marx wrote in Critique of Hegel’s Right, liberalism is riven with contradictions.31  Ideology compels good liberals to excise the evidence of contradiction and reinterpret it as a problem which is their responsibility and sincere pleasure to solve.  So too will online users either profess their freedom to speak with unbridled cruelty and act in the name of ideologically sanctioned abuse or chastise those who do for being too naked, too publicly indecent, too dirty, and ultimately too honest about their ideological motivations.

These aspects of the internet have always been and will always be so, as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the people whom this ideology services best, that is to say the owning class with whom Arthur Jones sides in his documentary.  Jones’ infatuation with ownership mirrors the tendencies of the earliest tech-utopians.  Among them was John Perry Barlow, a technology expert who founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 to protect the internet and the people who used it from what he perceived to be an oppressive government.32 However, his movement did not so much protect the general public as insulate a rising subset of the owning class threatening to upset the existing balance of power from within. “One side-effect of current government practices,” he wrote in 1990, “might be the elimination of the next generation of computer entrepreneurs and digital designers,”.33

Barlow and others endeavored on a total flight of fantasy that set the stage for the persistent ideological misrecognition that would persist about the internet from the 1990s onwards.  Fascination with the internet ballooned with its use.  In 1994, there were only 2,738 websites.  By 1996 that number increased to 257,601. By 1997, there were more than one million websites. By the time Google launched in 1998, that number doubled.  In 1995, there were 9,297 users for every website.  By 2010, that number dropped to 10.34  In the 1990s, web browsers like Yahoo and Lycos organized websites by category.  They were organized with “portals” to topics like news, art, or sports, keeping users engaged by convincing them that the browsers encircled the entire internet and users needed the neatly divided categories of the internet provided by browsers to find their destination.35 Users referred to the internet and its neatly divided territories as “cyberspace,” a term originally coined by the science fiction author William Gibson in the early 1980s.36 If not a “cyberspace,” many early internet users referred to the internet as an “information superhighway.”  As a concept, the “information superhighway” appropriated the idealistic American romance of road trips as well as the ambition and adventurism they represented.37  The internet seemed like an idealized place nowhere in particular that could transport anyone anywhere.  There was a thrill, and this thrill was that of being both in a real and ideal place, a new and improved space, a cyberspace, through which anyone could reach anything and be better, more interesting, or better connected for it.

Barlow made much out of this space.  In his “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” he referred to cyberspace as the “new home of the mind,” and he beseeched the governments of the world to leave its minds alone, writing, “you have no sovereignty where we gather,”.38 Despite offering no rules or structure to replace the governments from which he declared independence, Barlow asserted, “we are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth,” and, “we are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” as well as, “Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.  We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge,”.39  In his documentary, Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis identifies this techno-optimism as a resurgence of counter cultural optimism that first appeared in the United States with LSD, saying, “Like with acid, cyberspace could be a place where you would be liberated from the old, corrupt hierarchies of politics and power and explore new ways of being,”.40  Much like the acid heads of the 1960s, the tech-utopians of the 1990’s had no idea what was in store for them.

Tech-utopians’ fantasies did not go unchallenged in the 1990s.  In an article published online in the late 1990s called “Pandora’s Vox,” Carmen Hermasillo wrote about cyberspace as a confused place caught between fantasy and reality where users paid for the illusion of control by trading away actual control over aspects of their identities that ideological apparatuses could not reach before the internet closed the distance between them.  “I have seen many people spill their guts online,” she wrote, “and I did so myself until, at last, I began to see that I had commodified myself.”  Hermasillo goes on to compare websites to factories and users to workers. Like a factory owner owns the means of production in their factory and exploits workers there by depriving them of all but their labor and forcing them to commodify their labor for the immediate benefit of the factory owner, so too do users commodify thoughts, feelings, and ideas on online platforms.  Also like a factory, when a user threatens the smooth operation of the factory, the factory owner censors or banishes the worker from their premises.41  At the time, Hermasillo’s warnings went unheeded.  Those who feared the internet by and large feared it for the wrong reasons. Films like 1992’s The Lawnmower Man, 1993’s Ghost in the Machine, and 1995’s Hologram Man all in some way prefigured the perception of 4chan’s users as the internet’s id.  They are all about the internet making people mad geniuses or providing a genius means for indiscriminate and violent madness.42 Its powers seemed perfect. Its users did not.  This is an ideological deflection people have been perpetuating since the early 1990s.

On the other side of the millenium, as mobile technology and technology companies made the internet more accessible, the sense of the internet as cyberspace dissipated. Users no longer traveled to another place.  The internet spread out everywhere, and as it spread, it made users anonymous in public, subjecting them to the gaze of the “big Other” for whom they were most ideologically determined.  Through the internet, the world seems cartoonish at best, the ultimate ideological image of a very material and often contradictory reality.  As the internet became more ubiquitous, people became cartoonish to match.  Rather than immediately falling apart, the internet and ideology adapted.  Adam Curtis observes in Hypernormalisation that as online systems gathered more data from real users, they got more complex.  As these systems got more complex, they became increasingly capable of cornering users into convincing but unreal bubbles of information organized by the systems to mirror the user’s preferences, whether or not these preferences matched their material circumstances.  The “cartoons” became more convincing without ever becoming more real.  Organizers organized the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring as networks, not unlike chatrooms or social media sites, forgoing centralized power and authoritative ideals. Both movements failed.  Wall Street withstood and Libya’s political condition worsened.  These revolutions failed and tyranny intensified, unchallenged by the models of organizing modeled after the ideologically determined identities and behaviors of the internet.43  As Wendy Brown observes in her study of twenty-first century liberalism, the devolution of authority into self-responsible networks of relatively powerless individuals is no strategy for building power – it is itself a feature of twenty-first century liberals efforts to disempower the people who oppose them.44  While the internet spread and nourished liberalism, it cannot maintain liberalism.  In fact, the internet will be the end of it.  As it encourages dysfunctional ideologically determined behavior, the data it collects from this behavior mirrors its dysfunction.  Sooner than later, the dysfunction will be apparent to all.

The fascism for which 4chan’s most virulent users clamor does not necessarily need to succeed liberalism.  The choice is as it has always been: socialism or barbarism.  Just as there is a liberal way to use the internet that leans into fascism, there is a conscientious communist way that resists it.  However, in its current state, communists cannot use the internet constructively.  Communists cannot use the internet but to shape an image of unity, subvert liberal expectations and opposition, and network information and experiences.  The constructive work of communism must be done as it always has been: for the people, by the people, among the people.

Communists can counter caustic liberal individualism with the strength of a united community, and the internet can be used to amplify the image of strength through unity.  Communist leaders from Huey P. Newton to Mao Zedong universally recognized the value of unity.  In his communiques from the late 1960s, communist intellectual and leader of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton, observed that most of the people who did not benefit from liberalism instinctually rejected liberalism, but the unity of its beneficiaries alone afforded them the power to curtail their opposition.45  Fortunately for communists, the internet is inherently divisive in the service of liberalism.  As liberal users brandish their presence on social media sites to maximize the individuality that liberalism compels, they push each other further away from each other.  This is a fundamentally corrosive experience to which communists can offer an alternative.  Communists can present communism online as a network of united organizations, united functions, and united principles.  The appearance of unity can and will demolish the disintegrating base of alienated individuals falling further from liberalism’s ideological thrall. Communists cannot and should not use the internet to enhance the profile of any individual communist.  Likewise, communists should not use the internet to air grievances or settle scores borne out of contradictions among each other.  This is not to say that communists should avoid solving their problems, but as Mao writes, contradictions between communists tend to be non-antagonistic.46 To resolve these contradictions, the Communist Party of China devised the “unity-struggle-unity” formulation, which is a method to arrive at unity through serious but peaceable criticism and just as sternly and just as peaceably criticizing this unity when it encounters contradictions to attain a new unity.47  “The essential thing,” Mao writes, “is to start with a desire for unity,” and through unity, communists can overcome and survive the onerous but collapsing powers of liberalism.48  When these contradictions inevitably arise, neither the liberal vanguard nor the fascist insurgency behind them needs to know.  They will not guess it if communists avoid conflict online for the sake of the appearance of strength and unity.

Fortunately, the internet affords communists control over their own appearances and a platform with which they can present the contradictions of their enemies on their own terms.  The internet is adept at image making.  As Adam Curtis points out in Hypernormalisation, the mass upload of images and videos from the real world makes cyberspace look and feel more like the real world with every passing day, despite being further from it.  The distance between how things appear on the internet and how they really are emboldens and enables people to present themselves as they’d like to be seen in increasingly unreal but equally convincing ways.  In so many words, the internet, “is a place where someone can explore and get lost in any way [they want],”.49  As social media expert Ashe Dryden affirms, social networks reward the worlds that users make online.  She writes that social networks need this use, for they live by it.  They are predatory enterprises which extract data from users and exploit it for profit.50  Designed to collect data and make up a facsimile of the world without any obligation to actually resemble it, communists can appropriate this use in two ways.  Conscientious communists must reinforce communism as an alternative to liberalism through images of unity and strength without regard to what the gaze of the big Other or personal others anticipate.  Communists should also be able to maneuver the opposition into making tactical errors by manipulating communism’s image online so that it appears as the perfect but unreal enemy for the opposition’s desire which will elicit calamitous missteps as it fumbles to subterfuge a movement it hardly understands.  Alternatively, communists should indulge what these gazes anticipate when they use social media to make an image out of the opposition that aligns with what they desire for an enemy.  When Mao addresses the character of contradiction, he takes care to address that contradictions between communists and their enemies do not need to be addressed as peaceably or charitably as contradictions among communists.51  Communists can and should carefully curate and present an antagonistic facsimile of their enemies, or in the words of Huey Newton, “oppose everything the oppressor supports and support everything he opposes… the oppressor must be harassed until his doom,”.52

Finally, communists should use the internet to network and collect information with the caveat that neither is synonymous with actual organizing or building power.  As Joanne McNeil points out, Wikipedia is a viable example of a large-scale online knowledge and skill sharing site.  As early as 2003, the founder transferred all Wikipedia assets to a nonprofit organization called the Wikipedia Foundation, leaving it totally financed and operated by its users.53  Through conversation, consensus, and occasional conflict, Wikipedia editors decide what information stays on the site on the basis of whether or not each page is definitive, necessary, and meets a recognizable need.54  What’s more, the basic rules for Wikipedia are clear – Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a site for experimental, unverifiable, and indiscriminate information.55  It is clear that the internet can be used to share information, tactics, and skills at little to no individual cost, and communists should take advantage of that.  As the failed uprisings in Libya, the Middle East, and Wall Street, New York have shown, the method of sharing all of this is not an actionable model for putting it to use.  That work must be done and led by an organized group of leaders with authority and a connection with real networks of real people.  Mao writes that struggle, dialogue with masses of working people, common experiences, and collective ideas are the foundation for unity, economic security, and well-being and that real change happens when people have the opportunity to work and struggle side by side with their communities.56  If the people of liberal societies want to save their communities from what the internet is doing to them, they must log off and join them.This is the way that liberalism ends, not with a bang, but with a click of a mouse and the whir of an airflow fan.  It cannot bear the reflection that the internet mirrors back at it.  The internet was never supposed to mirror it in the first place.  It promised an escape.  This promise was false.  It wasn’t even original.  It was a digital remix of the hippies’ false promise to change the world with psychedelic drugs.  Even this was an unoriginal promise.  It was an acid drenched rewrite of the first liberals’ false promise to solve the world’s problems with peace, prosperity, and capitalism.  The internet mirrors and amplifies the emptiness at the heart of these promises.  The unique situation in which people find themselves online makes them truly alone in a crowd.  They can be as anonymous and intimate as they wish all at once.  In this condition, ideology takes over, and they freely reveal the cruelty, the disappointment, and the rage particular to the subjectivity that it constructs.  In the case of 4chan, the result is a cohort of ideologically naked subjects who revel in their own wickedness, the selfsame wickedness of liberalism edging towards fascism.  In the case of the well-intentioned but ideologically enamored libertines in the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring, the result is abject failure to seize power and make change in any meaningful way – in so many words, the disappointing perpetuation of liberalism no more cruel than usual.  Even Arthur Jones’s documentary Feels Bad Man, ends without anything changing.  The creator of Pepe the cartoon frog kills his creation in the fiction of the comic book and litigates to control the production of the image in real life.  The owner owns, the workers work, and both are more bitter at the order of things for the trouble that it put them through.  The internet mirrors and amplifies even this rage and disappointment.  If this persists, liberalism will collapse, but what remains?  The choice is as it always has been: socialism or barbarism.

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