Beyond the Fanatic Domain : cyber-hooliganism
This is a long brainwormy one that feels like my substack's effortpoasts of old. This is going to be comprehensible up to the point where it's not so just vibe with it. Don't think too much.
Kisses.
There was a lot of talk last year about the whole r/wallstreetbets thing, do you remember it ?
The talk around the thing was alternatively : "this is nonsense", "this is the little guy getting back at wall street", "this is terrible" or "this is an exit scam/ponzi scheme", all broad statements that had a grain of truth but all focalised on the most uninteresting parts of the story rather that the fact this was one more example of large-scale distributed peer coordination over the web.
Here I use the term peer coordination not to mean "peer-to-peer" which is a term in computing, rather what I mean by peer coordination is that in the swarm of actions that constituted the events of r/wallstreetbets there was no central decisional committee or Head that could dictate specific guidelines for what "the community of investors" was going to do : there were some informal authorities and reputational credentials and you had discourses and discussions but because there was no other forms of coercion than ostracisation as attached to a (user)name, people really had permisionlessness to do what they wanted.
The question of whether certain actions ended up being associated with "the community" users hailed from or repped up had to do with media coverage and "the community" itself reacting to those actions : condemning, supporting, ignoring, hyping up etc. (it's never a simple either/or obviously, more a question of numbers and who can be convincing.)
The thing closest to what I'm describing here is Benkler's CBPP but applied to action rather than software development.
This is why r/wallstreetbets was peer coordination : a lot of people who were pretty far from knowing one another or knowing about one another besides a vague shared context were able to coordinate action across a number of platforms (reddit, discord, robinhood, twitter, etc) and cause a ruckus.
The question of the extent to which it was all a scam on "last ones in" suckers from the get go or if it only became one as certain dynamics set-in is up for speculation, what's for sure is that there was no single guiding hand for it all and "big money" as a presumed enactor or facilitator can't account for all the events in the story.
"Story" because it's what was actually feeding into the original push of the project : people agreed on a set of narratives about being the masses of impoverished entreprecarious investors trying to get back at Big Money for not inviting them to the table, to such an extent that they were able to keep accruing more people to their project and that's the power of hype : the redditors either had enough faith in the project or faith in people being gullible enough to have faith in the project, that they were willing on bet on it.
What I'm writing about right now is some instances of online peer coordination that take basis in a common understanding of identity as derived from being part of a Fandom, whether that's a political, celebrity-based or story-based fandom. (To get a sense of what I mean when I say fandom I refer you to my pieces on the Object of fandom--maybe i'll rewrite them later ; looking back, they feel a bit messy.)
This is something that's found everywhere, everywhen : people bond through shared projects, experiences and events, but online people are able to bond and share through experiences that can be analogised or even related across local contexts and long distances, and when the bonds become strong enough you find moments of true engagement, solidarity even.
Adversarial fandoms :
As in the different varieties of fandoms who're all about opposition : either in their claims to community ("we're the haters of X, hating X is what we do") or as an extension of their pre-existing reverence to an Object ("this thing has hurt our [Object], we need to act against this thing").
reminder : an Object is the focal point of a fandom's activity and practices. It's a book, a persona, an image, a sport, a country, etc, it's the thing the fandom revolves around and the nature of the object is dictated by the dogma and the social practices of the fandom : not just X book but the version of the X book most people of the fandom have read, a revised version of X could be blasphemous if it's not agreed upon by the fandom as a community of practices and discourses.
These adversarial fandoms can produce some of the most fantastic and terrifying examples of peer coordination, most notably cyber-bullying on a ratio of many-to-one. If you like to read up on weird stuff you might have heard about any number of events best summarized as "a lot of people suddenly harassing, doxxing, bullying, threatening, swatting certain persons in a swarm-like behavior", that's not the only type of online peer coordination obviously.
With that in mind : K-pop fans are a global phenomenon and because their favored genres have neatly been spread through the internet they've always had the ability to communicate interest/fan-status to one another in tractable ways : having the face of an idol as your profile picture, quoting lyrics in your bio, joining forums, making fancams, all the usual stuff.
What's less usual were some of the collective actions advertised and promoted by some of those fans, I zero-in on k-pop fans here not because it's quirky to see a k-pop fan advocating for social change (like you could argue this article is doing quirky-sensationalism about a taylor swift stan account holder who refused to do military service in the IDF) but because the tactics being deployed necessarily include an appeal to certain subsets of the kpop fandom as fans of kpop : it's a call to participation through an appeal to identity.
One example is the #OpFanCam which is a tactic that consists in tweeting fancams with hashtags related to a specific subject to prevent the people who use the hashtags from finding one another : for example tweeting #Whitelivesmatters #fuckjoebiden along with a fancam of LOOΠΔ to prevent the people interested in those hashtags from finding the content they're interested in.
It might sound trivial but if enough people do it this tactic effectively disables the use of specific hashtags (it has the side effect of pushing up the very hashtags it clogs up which may lead to action from the platform's moderation sometimes, who knows), instead of information linked to the subject you were looking into you'll be confronted with a barrage of choreography, dramatic camera turns and twenty-ish korean idols winking at you.
The way those tactics are deployed is through talking with others through private DM groups, either on twitter or on Instagram, before communicating the visible part of the strategy on the social media that's meant to be clogged : making a minimal post explaining to unknown followers what you're doing with the hope that the point of the tactic will be made clear through success.
Now, the main issue with "the k-pop fandom" 's activism is the nebulosity of "k-pop fandom" as a term (even "BTSarmy" is designating a wide demographic) you can just assume k-pop fans are young and likely to be a type of boysband fan but that's no census (in fact there are censuses but they have definitional problems because they're self-reported), that nebulosity is paired to the fact that it might just be that k-pop is the most visible part of the coordinated actions and that it's what's remembered most about people clogging a snitching app, after all there's no telling it was "mostly k-pop fans" 's doing. It can be attributed to them insofar as they make a good swarm-shaped agent : if there's a recurring pattern of unexpected protests happening in a city over the course of a year, the media attention tends to be focused on the goofiest members of the protest or the most violent ones.
That said making headlines because you're weird is a good way of advertising for your project so maybe if they're not the sole enactors of those projects they're at least good publicity for them ?
In the case of #OpFancam it's not a collective and instinctual reaction from the sum total of the "k-pop fandom", it's specific people leveraging their belonging to a fandom to argue in favor of an action that's not hard to do (posting on social media) and is actually socially rewarding : it feels good to shut down covid misinformation or racist tweets and this is also a pretty unwieldy form of counter-posting but it works from time to time, depending on momentum, visibility, communication, etc.
My writing about this specific example is less about the efficacy of this particular tactic and more about the fact that what you have here is insider politics : a moment when the belonging to a fandom can be leveraged to the rest of the community one belongs to in order to motivate action : "what would our idols think about the anti-asian racism we find in these covid times in america ? Shouldn't we be acting against this kind of behavior ? ". This isn't to say people have no political opinion besides their belonging to a fandom or are completely ignorant of the world outside of their bubbles until a member of their fandom reminds it to them ; rather that the belonging to a community indicates lower costs of communication inside the community and therefore easier collaboration or at least more opportunities for exchanges and aggreements.
An almost-nationalism where the nation is not a genetically or ethnically defined category but a communication community : these are your people because they speak your language, in all the senses of that word.
Onto weirder people :
The K-hive is a Kamala Harris fandom, which is just as bad as it sounds. The vast majority of their actions amount to posting "pro-kamala" or downstream pro-Democratic Party (of the USA) content, that's to say partisan stuff that doesn't have much depths besides being partisan, the most marginal parts of that fandom have participated in some forms of harassment, while the majority have only been an ordinary fandom (centered around a piece of shit).
Hard to figure out the extent of their taunts and more concerning behavior, at most they show us an instance of fans as unpaid cronies ready to "serve" the Object of their fandom. This is behavior that's hard to distinguish from paid sabotage or bot swarms because the means of identifying such swarms are always deployed after the fact. At the user level, there's no way of properly figuring out if you're being attacked by people or if this is an instance of automated harassment and social media astroturfing. (Interestingly enough, those practices are emulated out of anglophonic spaces in a way that's less freeflowing with people trying to harness and reproduce the logic of raiding in more formalized settings, attempting desperately to get traction by funneling money-fuel where people-fuel is not present.)
This digression into bots, NPCs and swarms might let you in on my next example ; after all to people who have a passing knowledge of online harassment campaigns and raids, 4chan (all the chans and kuns really) is the first site to come to mind but I'd argue 4chan is not the most worrying platform in terms of actionable content. You will find calls for raids, harassment campaigns, doxxing, etc on chan boards (most left unheard or mocked) but the wide majority of those imageboards websites aren't dedicated to that, they're mostly entertainment spaces for the anglophonic NEET diaspora that are fine with a degree of "free speech" that skews towards certain political ideologies and a certain sense of humor revolving around offensive nonsense.
The real headache is not 4chan, it's kiwifarms : a forum whose general culture involves talking about a variety of subjects but whose most impactful social output is the gathering and production of information (false or not but always biased) about people and groups online.
The use of that information is generally the justification and the fueling of harassment and doxxing.
Just look up the name or pseudonym of a person who has something of a presence online and you may find a thread dedicated to "documenting" the person's "sins" and other such qualifiers used to put queer people and pedophiles in the same bag.
The term used to designate the people being investigated is "lolcows" because "[they] can be milked for amusement and laughs", what is meant by that is that the members of the forum document extensively the online presence of those "lolcows" and generally frame this or that behavior as repugnant and deserving of some form of punishment in a small to medium scale circlejerk where they get to feel powerful and righteous for having uncovered the sinners. It's probably worse than 4chan in some aspects though I think child pornography is not authorized on kiwifarms.
Obviously those people are as mediocre as their social practices : obsessive, focused, biased, ethically rotten to the core, incentivized and dedicated to fulfilling the mandate of their space: "milking lolcows", where the enjoyment and amusement they speak of largely revolves around witnessing or producing the pain and misery of others. These are fucked up people who bring nothing of value to the world besides the possibility of special kinds of pain, their spectacle should be a lesson in realizing how lucky you are for not being engaged in the same mediocre routine of pseudo journalistic endeavor, collecting, orienting and bullshitting your way to recognition from other sociopathic strangers of the web.
All those instances of doing and anticipating violence for the pleasure and satisfaction of belonging : I want to name those acts of online peer-coordination "cyber-hooliganism".
A brief historical interlude.
This is all very fucked up stuff and I know you might ask yourself why folks do things that are unhinged, there are a lot of reasons for a lot of things to happen but the truth is that people do things because they can and want to. Nothing too fussy or complicated about it : people do what they can get away with. Whether it's towards themselves or others.
This is as true in real life as it is online. Anyways :
Hooligans are a specific cultural type of football fans that emerged in different countries across the nineteenth and twentieth century(in name if not in practice), their respective regional and national histories are very long and interesting (and have a lot of nuances between all the types of ultras, casuals, boys, etc) but I'm not interested in doing an exposé here, I'll focus on some specific bits that relate to what I'm talking about when I talk about "hooliganism". One of them is that hooligans are super-fans of their respective teams who organise brawls and clashes with rival teams' fanclubs. There's often disbelief at the action of stans on social-media ready to send death threats to random people but this is another ballpark altogether : these are grown men and women going in the streets to beat the shit out of one another in rows of 10s to 50s to 100s because they belong to separate football fan clubs. Moving across country lines to see a match and fight the enemy on their own turf, etc.
The national character of a lot of sportmanship and supportership means that they cross over to political militancy from context to context, one of the most notable example being the role played by the italian Ultra scene in the 60s/70s/80s, also known as the Years of Lead. Ultra in itself is not the "italian name for hooligan", it simply points to the ultra-devoted fans of football teams, it just so happen that hooligans take a lot from these cultural milieux' norms and trends which feeds into how they see themselves : as thick skinned brawlers ready to fight to the death for their chosen team, like knights for their lord's honor, etc.
Those are not just freewheeling bands of thugs either, depending on their local context or history they may have extensive organisational norms and procedures, passed down from the days of old, that spell out the space of potential action : what is allowed and what is forbidden.
Now I call the recurring adversarial peer-coordination you may find online "Cyber-hooliganism" because it's online delinquancy as enacted within the bounds of fandom activity, in the same way hooligans battle each others because of their belonging to different tribunes who defend their territory and recognize themselves as supporting different clubs : their idea of being fans implies disobeying the law.
In the same way acts of aggression from one group onto another subsume the identity of the aggressors into "X fans" or "the Y firm", the pseudonymity afforded by the web means acts of cyber-harassment can't be properly identified as the actions of individuals but always come off as strikes from "the A fandom" or "another B harassment campaign". Within the fandom, like any other, there's a degree of actual attribution though : if a member of a hooligan firm acts recklessly or in a way that's not in line with the norms and code of that firm and the wider context, chances are that member will be left out of actions or expelled from the firm (there are always politics internal to a subculture, negociation between the traditions of old and norms to come).
And in online peer-coordination, in a way that mirrors real life Hooligans' history, there's an understanding of tactics of delinquancy through trial and error best-effort iteration : you try something, you fail, you tell others, they try something else, they fail, they tell everyone, eventually a path is found which opens up new paths where once again : you try, you fail, you tell, etc.
The differences with online delinquancy comes from the fact that on the internet the speed of iteration relative to action is much faster because the number of actors is higher and communication bandwidth is wider : more people, more information, faster means more action, more results, more need for open ended structures and loose associative identity. There are no official chiefs or capo in online peer-coordination, there's just information hubs : the places where you talk about results and hypotheses, if leaders emerge they're created by the design of the platform you're using to communicate or they're created by reputation and admiration.
Speed of iteration trumps quality of iteration when you've got a high number of experimenters : many people trying many different things and sharing the information related to those attempts will increase the general population's understanding of the problem that's being tackled. And once an efficient method is found, what you have is a number of participants who will be able to seize it, deploy it and improve on it at a rate commensurate to their number : you don't have one inventor trying to design a machine on their own, you don't have a thousand people in different rooms all trying to solve their own problem, you have a thousand minds all working on the same problem and if they communicate efficiently they won't bug themselves with stupid distractions like everybody making the same mistakes again and again one after the other : everyone learns from everyone's mistakes under the right regime of communication.
Ants have a similar mode of organisation in their hunt for food : there's no central command and control mechanism, all they have is a hive or anthill that they go out of and then they communicate their search for food through the emission of chemical signals that allow each ant to signal to the rest if they've found food. Their trail is stronger if they find food and therefore when they go back to the hill, the other ants can smell that one of them has found a potential source from the trail that it left behind, as more ants go through the path and bring back food to the hive, their combined emission of smell and "olfactory cues" means ants only have to follow the strongest smell to get to food : indirect coordination.
(also, did you know an ant is not an individual but an anthill is ?)
The commoning infrastructure + permissionlessness + compounded actions combo leads to what is called stigmergy. This is when things get interesting :
We don't yet know what a social platform is capable of : commons based peer coordination
r/anti-work is a venting subreddit about the fact that most people are being wasted away on work and that every single person on this planet needs and deserve freedom from being coerced into waking up at stupid time to go work at shit job and be paid fuck me money. Read any number of posts on it and you'll find people talking about what they would do if they didn't have to work 50 hours a week, about their shit-head manager, their awful working conditions,
The people on that subreddit have in common dissatisfaction or despair at the fact that they live under coercion and they have diferent ideas of what's specifically wrong with the general awfulness of work ; the question of "what comes after" is open ended but answers to it within the subreddits's conversations tilt generally towards "most of our time is wasted or stolen so let's start with reducing or disappearing that theft, once we're rested we can think up something better".
Now, the venting part of it is not what it's most famous for. It's been an information hub for doing a tiny bit of cyberhooliganism itself. Although maybe cyberhooliganism is too hyperbolic for those actions : no one was hurt or harassed, and no law was broken as far as I can tell. The hotline clogging being closer to a sit-in tactic than destruction of infrastructure. At most they've efficiently annoyed some people and foiled some strike breaking tactics before fueling a boycott campaign. There's been a bit more activity afterwards as people from the subreddit chatted and connected through shared actions and testimonies. For now, it's a hub for communicating about this kind of activities but it's just one specific entrypoint into the "online activism enabler and communication hub". (I don't want to call it "movement" but do you know of a term for leaderless, bottoms up coordinated, non-subsidized action at the level of thousands ?)
Let me circle back to the word "commons" I used above to explain what I mean, it's a contentious word and not just because I'm twisting notions ; i'm not using the term commons to refer to the Ostromite notion of a common-pool resource (read her though she's very interesting), what I mean by commons is a shared enabling-structure whose costs of engagement are greatly lessened for actors engaging with it and the existence of a permissionless mandate of action and appropriation of that structure : what that means is that no one needs to ask others if it's ok to do things in the subreddit or with the subreddit or "in the name of antiwork", if they end up actually doing something that can help, it'll get traction through conversation and communication to others through that node, if what they do goes against people's sentiment, needs, desires, etc. They can have a conversation about it and communicate about their problems.
The information hub that is the r/antiwork subreddit operates in a way that's close to a commons but it's not one. The designed structure of the platform prevents it from being one, after all a subreddit comes with assigned roles and privileges : a moderator has the power to shut down posts and comments, highlight their own, add other mods, ban users, etc. And there's no way for the general userbase of the subreddit to effectively pick moderators, the structure doesn't enable proper democratic elections or even the design of alternative structures : there's an already existing design for the platform and what it enables the ordinary user to do is participation in the activity of the subreddit, the voicing of opinions or information and exit into other spaces.
This is not permissionlessness : there are rules to do with the engagement with the space and the rules are bound to the capacity of moderators to act and restrict action. The people who have real permissionlessness are moderators, they're super-users and have an outweighed influence on how the space operates.
Now If someone with the position of moderator were to do something that goes against the general sentiment or against a subset of the userbase of r/antiwork, (like a moderator going on fox news to ridicule herself despite everyone on the moderating team and in the userbase telling her not to) it could lead to a splitting up and the creation of new subreddits that are more in line with this subset's ideas, or maybe the banning of the person, depending on the sympathies between that person and the rest of the moderators.
Now even if moderators act in a way that engages the name of the subreddit and the perception of it outside the bounds of the platform, in the public eye for example, most ordinary users will not simply exit to form new subreddits : they have a stake in that specific space under that specific name, through repeated engagement, through the connections they've made, through the fact that they've sunk costs (time and energy) into doing things as "antiwork activism", they'll perceive r/antiwork as something that belongs to them.
I don't qualify this r/antiwork subreddit as a fandom space but here you find the old reflexes that look and smell like fandom : the claims to legitimacy, the claims to community, the claims to rights over a name or identifier, when the only thing that ties the people present in the space together is their presence in the space and a dissatisfaction with work as a wage relation or work as a coercive activity. Whether they see laziness as a virtue or think that their regular personal job is demeaning to them and long for "honest work" they find themselves there.
The problem is when the variety of opinions, experiences and orientations is forced into homogeneity through speech or actions that call to a "community" or a "unity" as if all people in the space agreed on any definite program or set of demands, as if all the people in the space had the same needs that are self-evident, as if the structure of the space allowed for this kind of rigid self-coherence. In a sense this splitting up into different subreddits would be fine if it was the opportunity for many different people going their own way to try their hand at different things in accord with their personal vision, but it's more likely to turn into a bitter rivalry from different visions of what being "against work" even means.
There's a price attached to exiting the main space and creating a new one and that price depends on the momentum of the exit itself : if the splitters are able to communicate effectively to a large demographic of dissatisfied ordinary users that they're an alternative, they can gather large enough numbers to kick in network effects, if they can't they'll simply have a space ready for when people will end up disappointed with the previous space, in that case the price is the reputation they've acquired in that previous space, everything needs to be built and grown again.
I write this as new subreddits named any variations of "anti_work", "against-work", etc are florishing with user numbers going from 1 to hundreds of thousands ; in the previous draft for this piece I ranted about the problems of platforms like reddit which have definite hierarchical structuring in their design (with a mandate of permissionless exit which makes them seem like moldbug's patchwork dream model actually lmao), what I said in this previous draft was :
To say all of this is nothing is a lie, to get overly focused on one success or even on "r/antiwork" right now is a distraction, after all the real question is : will the spirit or idea behind r/antiwork be transported to other platforms ? There's no way in hell reddit, which closed down r/thedonald (thereby funneling countless more reactionaries to 4chan) won't crack down on a subreddit that facilitates this kind of stuff. When it does, it'll funnel people to more obscure platforms if they can be given the knowledge that there are alternatives that are waiting to be picked up and ran with.
The 5 Big Names platform give you stuff to work with in the area of large scale peer coordination because they benefit from network effects : a lot of people getting in on the action means you have people-power up to the point where the change is no longer quantitative but qualitative ; more people doesn't just mean "more clicks" it means very different dynamics at play, in the same way trying to have a conversation with 3 people at the same time is very different in dynamics from trying to have conversations with 30 people at the same time : it's not just more chit chat, it's a different way of communicating altogether.
I didn't anticipate the fox news interview drama and other moderators failing to maintain composure, making the subreddit private then opening it up again. I didn't anticipate that having a small group of super-users at the top of a space's userbase would mean higher transaction costs and therefore a breakdown of coordination and a split in identity claims within that space.
This sounds like a lot of big words for "a moderator fucked up" but there are economic notions and concepts that can be used to describe these kind of dynamics : smaller groups have more ease in communicating from within and have a harder time communicating to wider groups, therefore information ends up skewed when it's between a person and a large audience or a small group and a larger audience, pair that with power differential and the already present friction increases tenfold while the capacity for agreement, transaction and cooperation is drastically reduced : "communication is only possible between equals."