I’m really not looking forward to the anti intersection with the narcisphere, but I’m also genuinely surprised they haven’t gotten there yet already

I think it has something to do with the paradox they face regarding how much power/agency they can stand to imagine enemies with https://twitter.com/cephiedvariable/status/1199423287832563714

People come in assuming that’s a calculated deception—that they’re faking all their emotions on a conscious level and can tell how far they can blow the threat of a random usually-marginalized person out of proportion—and, you know, I’ll refer them back to Dombek too

I tend to assume people mean to say the things that they say, which may net me shiny new trauma at the interpersonal/peer level but also pays off with truly awful suspicions when it comes to the online ethnography

Wait, sorry, was there supposed to be an upside

Anyway

People who escalate to “obviously you can tell this isn’t really that big a threat” are trying to get the enemy interlocutor to back down and that doesn’t actually... work that way; I’m surprised, as a result, that we haven’t hit full *organized* conspiracy theory yet re: purity

I’m also deeply dreading the point when that changes

As we move into industry-versus-the-harassment-movement clashes—as opposed to always going for indie/self-pub when original IP—I am *glad* targets generally seem to be experiencing support from their infrastructure and peers

That does, however, also mean you can watch the anti takeaway turn to “Not only are there these individual horrible people, an unknown number of people in their orbit are just willing to close ranks and accept that”

So I am worried about when their thinking ~has to go systemic

(I hit cmd+enter too early in the thread and now you’re all paying for my word crimes, is why this isn’t being posted as a full thought.)

Currently they’re not conspiracy theorists; they believe in lone wolves with limited impact. They have, *in this specific way*, a relatively grounded understanding of their targets’ actual ability to impact the world; as with fiction, the value framework’s what’s truly different.

“Lone wolves that happen more or less randomly and it is very sad and awful and also does not reflect on a wider culture to which I belong” is, you may recognize, the default way people seem to reconcile ‘belief a horrible thing exists’ with ‘near and akin to me’.

I’m surprised they haven’t made it all the way to the narcisphere because that’s functionally what its radicalizing language is for: telling a story about how you and your friends are uniquely human and stranded amidst meaningless chaff and superpowered-but-subhuman predators.

TE/RFs got there. “The incursion of a trans person on my sensory sphere is intrusive narcissistic abuse!” TE/RFs got there *hard*.

It is, specifically, a set of languages for being a beleaguered and pure minority, with an enemy that manifests at apparent random within one’s own general cultural/demographic group without clear causation or a way to cut them off/out beyond identifying individuals.

So you can see why I expect it. But the dissemination of that sort of thing by way of a) forums (wrong medium) and b) discussions about relationships (parents, partners) tips toward a higher minimum age of entry than makes it a slam dunk for inclusion in anti cultures.

But does the escalation in terms of what kind of network they have to imagine make sense? It’s part of what flanking maneuver the preemptive reclamation of “normal people” tries to perform—2014–16 believes the target is secretive and isolated, and changing that will bring victory

(I’m not getting into it here, but I’m profoundly disdainful of our current use of normality on all sides. I literally cannot get my jaw around everything wrong with the deployment of “Just be normal for once” long enough to tear into you and yours about it. Any of you. So.)

At any rate, people don’t just shrivel up and die immediately, despite their supposed small-to-medium level of threat making one hope, as one radicalizes, that that enemy target is an appropriate size to take down. (Hopelessness, desperation, increasing sense of danger.)

It turns out some of the targets have friends and communities; and then, it turns out, families and loved ones, therapists, and employers, who simple doxing, warnings-free callout threads, or other acts of faith in the merits of purification don’t necessarily dissuade or remove.

Even if not by name we can presume the current model of their ‘freaks’, ‘nasties’, and ‘d*gener*tes’ still work a lot like Dombek’s narcissists: you can explain away the existence of a support network by reiterating that the enemy lies, manipulates, and threatens.

But purity culture is actually very invested in media infrastructure. One of the cornerstones of their belief framework around fiction is (not that far from what’s likely your own) the idea that mass dissemination filters out the edges and publishes the center of a bell curve.

Crucially, one of the things they map on that bell curve is perceived *intensity and extremity* of content, in a time- and space- and context-neutral way. Which helps undergird the belief that that filter is good, as a thing that exists, but needs the bigots adjusted out.

It’s part of why they’re generally more permissive toward published original works; a sense of faith that surely someone along the way would have caught it if it was that bad, that—again—the worst is only possible at the hands of skulking self-publishing lone wolves.

(This model of media production is recursive: if that’s what something being published means, that it made it past all those crucial gatekeepers and in front of your eyeballs, then of course it’s adequately extremely normal and within/defining the bounds of acceptable fiction.)

(That, frankly, is a big part of why I don’t play with “it’s different because my broadcast medium is smaller, if I had a larger one I would qualify as normalizing it, but I am small and have no money and that’s the only reason you shouldn’t hit me.” No half measures.)

All this to say that the stage after “people appear to have friends, loved ones, and professional networks, but they must be deceiving them somehow”, at critical mass of those would-be normal infrastructure people standing by their friends/loved ones/colleagues, is conspiracy.

In 2020 I’m waiting for anti p*zzagate.

[CSA] I have seen people creep toward it and then flinch, that level of assumed organization or intent; notable examples include responding to the forced trauma disclosure with “The cycle of abuse means you’d groom kids”, and “Lolita is literally pedophilia, we know better now”.

We might get there in publishing by the simple understanding of the extent to which mass media is— insular, based in many ways on luck and charisma, based in other ways on privilege; I don’t yet know.

I don’t know what the tip-over from the kind of thing I’m currently recording as outliers into being mainline and propelled by the belief there’s an *organization* with *intentions* that they need to attack looks like.

[CSA] I’ve seen a(n unrelated) conspiracy theorist go for “artists known or suspected to be survivors would create dark or suspect art in order to curry favor with their abusers, drag everyone else down to their level, and maybe level up and get to victimize kids”, before.

(Mr. Spider did not like that one. A lot of these things don’t get to me very often any more. The three examples I’ve given in the thread did.)

I do want to underline one thing: I don’t think they consciously choose targets based on accessibility as in without the belief that they’re doing something internally consistent. That isn’t how rationalization works.

“If you thought I was a real problem you’d be doing something else, because there are larger problems” isn’t an argument you want to shore up, long term; it is not a humane or useful shape. It is also what people generally recur to, when they don’t go straight to “you are lying”.

(The point I have been trying to make about the propensity to assume that the only way an anti or other interlocutor could be operating so far outside what you see as a reasonable context is conscious, nefarious lies, just for you, is, by the way, “yeah sounds narcisphere too”.)

I think a lot of what we see is cognitive dissonance from the extent to which everyone involved does, in fact, identify as part of the same (interest/affinity-based) community; one which suffers an endemic lack of skills for handling conflict, incompatible persons, and fracture.

These subcultures break eventually, but I don’t know how or into what. An actual move into conspiracy theory might have the tiny, tiny silver lining of forcing that nebulous subgroup to be identifiable as their own thing.

(That still leaves everything that produced every step of the way—up until that last leap—as far as radicalization goes here, and then we’re right back to wondering where all these malevolent, alien, perplexing individuals whose only saving grace is operating alone came from.)

Multipurpose bump tweet: I did a very large and potentially useful thread, scroll up! Then pretend I said something clever about how much of what I’m mooning over is so I have more to cite on these matters: https://twitter.com/chrysopoetics/status/1198231121063923712

Related, with the note that Alexandra is (as usual) much nicer than I am: https://twitter.com/alexandraerin/status/1199842537789411328