I've been reading a bit of Manuel DeLanda and, you know, a bit reluctant to mention it because I suspect people take a dim view of his "tendency", but there are definitely some useful ideas about the way social events happen in his writing.

There's a line of thought in there that for me demystifies the ambiguous interpretation of social phenomena as "structure" or "conspiracy"—macro and micro thinking—quite a bit and also offers a tool for discriminating between which of the two frames to use.

DeLanda starts with the premise of "redundant causation" of social events—an inclusive view of what makes them happen, both "structure" and "conspiracy". When an organisation, group or institution does something, so do its component parts, including officials, employees etc.

(The sense of "component" implied here is pretty complicated and doesn't foreclose the idea of people, things and their organisations or "assemblages" overlapping, being in constant motion and change, etc.)

The key though is one that is very commonly missed in our politics even though it has vast tactical significance: substitutability.

Once you have redundantly caused social events and you want to "do politics" about them you need to know what level to work on, macro or micro.

The question to ask in that situation is: would removing, or defeating, or resisting this component, or person, or technology of an organisation, or institution (or "assemblage") substantially alter its function, or would the component just be readily replaced?

The appearances of Pauline Hanson on The Today Show offer up a pretty good example of this.

Pauline Hanson is a notorious career white supremacist whose political life has apparently been ended many times, through public fury, temporary irrelevance, failed alliances and so on.

But whenever she's not around, there's always Prue MacSween or Kerri-Anne Kennerley or Sam Newman on hand to move into the space she leaves, reproducing the same ideologies and aesthetic for roughly the same audience.

When she's not on the Today Show, or Sunrise, Hanson does function differently from those others since she is also a "component" of the Australian Senate. So she's got a significant dual social function like her One Nation colleague Mark Latham on the NSW Legislative Council.

But out of today's news, the question is really what to do about The Today Show and the toxic racism of accessible mainstream talk media in Australia in general? Because getting rid of Hanson and Latham from these contexts demonstrably doesn't address the macro problem we have.

Australian media companies offer one angle for consideration. They are shrinking and diversifying organisations in revenue terms, with varying profitability—eg Nine posted a profit of $234m on $2.3bn last year after merging with Fairfax, Seven West Media a $444m loss on $1.6bn.

Historically these companies make money from advertising, which might lead you to think ad boycotts were a viable strategy to damage them as has happened with Tucker Carlson on Fox News as his corporate sponsors leave one by one—strong campaigning by @slpng_giants on this ...

However, Tucker Carlson segments, which are generally articulate, horrible, "folksy" chauvinist and racist screeds addressed to a mainstream US audience, continue to regularly be among the most shared posts on US Facebook, day after day.

Just as Hanson's racist commentary on the Melbourne public housing lockdown will be very widely shared on Australian social media today, and will probably be re-hosted and shared further on YouTube and other platforms.

The tendency of the media is already to deemphasise advertising markets, which are waning badly for multiple reasons that will be exacerbated by collapsing demand during a recession, but there's a place for right wing demagogues even when they're not directly profitable.

There's been a historical tendency for diverse media businesses to seek rents or benefits from the state in exchange for political influence, Murdoch's famous for this and that offers one simple theory of why a figure like Carlson can operate unprofitably

As this murkier question of the state's lateral involvement in, and benefit from sustaining the reproduction of ethnonationalist ideology comes up, it's worth looking at what the Australian state has done historically to manage platforms of political speech.

Some part of the historical "progressive answer" to media issues in Australia has been:

• fund a competing public broadcaster
• media codes of conduct
• laws on diversity of media ownership (Broadcasting Services Act 1992, rules altered in 2006)
• hate speech law (the RDA)

... all of which have been under an intense and coordinated attack through both the media and our parliaments for a long time. This country also does have a high concentration of media ownership by global standards.

The appetite of the Australian public for consuming the ideology of White Australia embedded in Hanson's rhetoric certainly goes all the way back to the white identity constructed before the time of Federation, and implemented in the country's first laws immediately afterward.

To stack it up, we're looking at the work of a white supremacist media figure and politician, working for a declining media agency that produces ideology aligned with the collaborative class interests of a declining settler colony constituted in white supremacy.

In this arrangement, the media figure, the media agency, the platform of transmission, the circuit of profit, the members of Parliament and bureaucrats, and their parties are all to a great extent replaceable or substitutable.

In fact at each level of the structure there are explicit, well established alternatives that are already operating and whose introduction can largely negate efforts to transform the behaviour of the structure as a whole by focusing on Hanson, Nine, television, the LNP, etc.

The parts that aren't readily replaceable are the public audience—the settlers—and the national structure itself, which seems to have entered a long historical decline as pronounced as that of these media businesses for similar reasons, it can no longer enclose value as reliably.

My political feeling when I see Hanson on the television vilifying migrants subject to state violence is basically anti-nationalist and anti-Australian—I want to see the assemblage that was Federated in 1901 dissolved, and hasten its decline in favour of something else.

But I don't feel that way because I hate everyone here, or hate television as a medium, or hate politicians across the board, I just think it's likely to be, in the long run, the meaningful way forward still subject to the different agencies of people on this continent.

On the left and in terms of arguments and ideas currently being put forward, the distinction between anti-nationalist politics and the nostalgic, reactionary politics of national restoration is extremely important.

As a lesser example, this is why I don't see the point in emphasising refunding the ABC.

Vital, but nationally delimited political causes like a Green New Deal, variations of a UBI, a job guarantee—or keeping the dole at 550 pw—also need to be thought through this lens.

Pretty much all left of centre organisations that are coterminous with "Australia", certainly including the ALP and the ACTU, are set up by that coextension in a way that has tremendous negative consequences for political action attempted through them.

I totally understand why individuals say "but they are there, they're what we have to work with, they are doing vital work" and I agree in a lot of cases, but once that conversation has been had, I still don't think these issues are taken as seriously as they need to be taken.

Looking ahead to the 2030s and the 2040s, do people really believe that an "Australian job guarantee" or a "green and gold economy" is going to sort things out and contribute to an urgent, unserved international project of justice and security? I definitely don't believe that.

Anyway, it's been a long thread, but in short: if you're Australian, be an anti-nationalist, question the necessity and habit of structuring political action nationally, and yes, put Hanson in the bin but be aware there's a huge well-supplied reserve army of Hansons out there.