It would be interesting to make a graph of how many people could parlay being an anarchist into a career over time. I'm not unsympathetic, but the sheer inability to find individual standing or financial security through our movement was historically one of its major defenses.

Again, I think it's a complex issue. But I keep thinking back to the indymedia versus bloggosphere tension. The idea of publishing under your own name or even a consistent pseudonym was seen by many as anathema to building a healthy movement.

Let's be clear, Proudhon was the first anarchist celebrity journalist. But I think there were two big impediments to this for decades: 1) the default anonymous collective ethos of the movement, 2) the opposition to *mass* building, focusing instead on exploits/attacks/etc.

The first was so strong in the anti-globalization movement. Like the indymedia model was really deeply hostile to journalist celebrity. It breaking down and getting replaced by twitter (amusingly *also* an anarchist invention, thanks for nothing Rabble) was a sea change.

The second, the shift towards open mass politics, seems like a slow burn between occupy and '16 Bernie. Say what you will about prominent voices *within* anarchism, but there's a difference between that and folks prominent more widely because anarchism itself is prominent.

I think of how Zerzan and Chumbawamba blew up in the late 90s, both courting this kind of notoriety in the wider media sphere riding the coattails of anarchy, but both were more focused on maintaining ties internally and so basically renounced their external celebrity.

Then I guess the next wave of examples are Crow and Graeber, who didn't end up running away from wider celebrity, but also tried to keep at least a foot in the movement. And like the sheer level of *hate* many olds have for them is almost impossible to describe.

Some of that gets written off to jealousy, but there are legitimate critiques of things Crow and Graeber have done, choices they've made, and I think their sharpest critics would say there's a feedbacking relationship between those actions and their celebrity outside anarchism.

I want to be clear: I personally think it's fine or just whatever that Graeber and Crow would go on national tv (although lordy Scott I do hope you realize by now that going on Tucker Carlson was fucking terrible). I turned down some of the same invites, but don't feel strongly.

Now we're in a clearly different era with clearly different dynamics and a lot of folks have bootstrapped themselves as celebrity figures that get national media platforms and/or book deals, patreon money, fancy bylines etc. None of this is, imo, necessarily bad in and of itself.

And there are exceptions. Like there's the grouchy *only speaking to fellow anarchists* figures of some prominence like myself, Gelderloos, K Tucker, etc, and there's journalists who have climbed journalist celeb hierarchies but kept their deep anarchist shit *secret.*

I remember how many people across ideological lines joined ranks against ARR when he exposed a "national anarchist" at the core of platformism and I remember and resent those defenders of a fash entryist to this day. But one valid critique was about how he serialized the expose.

Ultimately we've seen ARR is more interested in a stable academic career than in sticking by the expectations of the anarchist movement. It's frustrating to hear folks put this on "antifa" when like the SPLC careerist path and antifa tensions with it have always been a thing.

However a lot of folks want to put this on "new lib twitter celebs" and that's both valid to some degree and papers over a lot of complexities and differences between individuals, trajectories, even social circles.

I have varying degrees of friendship or respect for folks within this broad category, and I think a few of them will likely break in all the right directions and be evaluated, looking back years later as consistently ethical. But. The tensions are quite real.

There are absolutely, plainly, trivially, a lot of libs who have latched onto something they think has legs for popularity on twitter and who share no real deep commitment to anarchist ethics or the AFK movement itself. Exactly who this describes is still a tad up in the air, but

it's clearly gonna blow the fuck up harder before things shake out.

And while I am (in contrast to my brand on twitter) often a behind the scenes peacemaker between camps, there is absolutely some cleaning of house that needs to happen.

Anyway, the hunger by which AFG pursued power and celebrity, the awful defense of him by Goad, the unethical attack on a critic by Talia, these are indeed symptomatic of an astonishing disconnect brought on by folks rooted in standing w/ libs, disconnected from anarchist spaces.

If someone is saying "who cares what Torch and IGD think we'll make our own antifa movement, with abusers and grifters" because a twitter follower count has given them confidence, it is simply impossible to describe how astonishing the historically notable disconnect going on is.

This is *completely different* from the era of celebs like Zerzan and Chumbawumba. It's such a social phase shift.

Granted, this seemingly brewing split between some post 17 twitter celebs and the vast actual base of antifascist and anarchist movement *everything* isn't certain