Revision as of 18:40, 21 November 2017

"The most powerful influence was exerted neither by individual speeches nor by articles or flyers, posters or flags; it was not achieved by things which one had to absorb by conscious thought or conscious emotions. Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously."

– Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 (1957)), 11, 15.

Project Proposal

(this is a shortened version. The original (extended) text can be found here.)

Online Culture Wars

Contemporary fascism, misogyny, and extreme right ideologies are cultivated in online forums collaboratively. Alt-Right and Leftists ideology is framed with terminology found in nihilist meta-memes and jargon which are rapidly evolving and duplicating. The online enthusiasts are creating an impassable forest where normies (translation: "normal", mainstream people) will easily get lost. Right conservatism and left-wing socialism are reformed with new styles of media-usage, propaganda, and focus of ideology. The Alt-Right is reappropriating everything from entire subcultures to usage of transgression formerly done so by the socialist left, is bullying their way to domination en is coining term after term to shape their moral bible.

Three main groups can be distinguished in these online culture wars. On the right: (1) The Alt-Right and (2) the Manosphere (who could be described as a part of the Alt-Right), and on the left with less specific terminology: (3) The Social Justice Warriors / Tumblr Feminists / Gender Politics Activists. The right-wing side is currently determining the discourse in both online and offline politics.

It is of importance to look at why they do and how they shape their ideology. I believe the jargon created by the Alt-Right is not only the center of their ideology but also deliberately used to form an inclusive group that mystifies outsiders. I want to give a few examples of this jargon to show you what kind of terms are used and how vastly it is interwoven with their vocabulary.

Jargon

Every key point in their ideology is mirrored in their vocabulary. These words they coin frame their reality and convince and pull in new members. The way they view their enemies, themselves and society could be traced by looking at this jargon. They even have a term for people who believe in their version of reality and the people who don't (see example 2). I wanted to demonstrate this by giving you two examples of jargon, and one example of a paragraph written on a popular forum that I will translate into normie-English (mainstream English) as an example of the amount of jargon.

Example 1, term: "cuck"
One term is well described below by Nina Power (Nina Power is a cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher and translator. She is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University). She describes the word "cuck" used by the Alt-Right and Manosphere to refer to men who are not only not right-wing, but also not "masculine" (in jargon: not Alpha) enough. She calls the language of the Alt-Right "The New Brutality" and is next to Angela Nagle (Angela Nagle is a writer and researcher, studying for a PhD in internet cultures as a government of Ireland IRCHSS scholar in the Department of Communications at Dublin City University.) one of the most relevant sources I've found when reading critical theory on the Alt-Right.

"To focus on a particular word from this lexicon, perhaps an overly obvious one, that sums up the racist, sexist, vicious tendency of the language and imagery of the New Brutality, one need look no further than the word “cuck.” From the old French word for “cuckoo” (“cucu”), this go-to insult captures a whole host of overwhelmingly male anxieties. In porn, a cuck is someone who stands by while his female partner has sex with another man (often black). In its current usage (sometimes expanded to “cuckservative”), the original meaning is preserved and politicized: cucks are effeminate conservatives who concede to liberal values, “emasculated” by their own cowardice and enjoying their own degradation. To be a “cuck” is to be screwed over, a victim of women and other men, sexually and economically."

The Language of the New Brutality, Nina Power, e-flux http://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/141286/the-language-of-the-new-brutality/

In this description of the word cuck, the context of the word is of less importance than the usage itself. In whichever context it is used, it is meant as a specific insult that contains a specific ideal about men. The popularity (frequency) is of importance as it tells us how widespread this ideal is.

Example 2, term: "The Red Pill, Red-Pilled, TRP"
The second example is a piece of jargon not only used to describe "enlightened" people, mostly males, within the Alt-Right spectrum, but is also the name of one of its key forums, subreddit: "The Red Pill". Born from a scene from the 1999 movie The Matrix, it has been used as a metaphor...

"This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

–Morpheus, The Matrix, 1999

This example differs from the first as this one contains dictionary words, which makes it a lot harder to catch.

Example 3, a paragraph from a subreddit

"Even spinning plates its hard to get away from scarcity mentality when you land a high SMV"

"23 years old, new to TRP, rAFC maybe a month into reading the subreddit and books. Just recently got out of a 3.5y LTR about a month and a half ago, and I've started spinning some plates. Been with 4 girls in the last two weeks, so pretty content with the volume I've been getting. I got with a new plate Friday night, but earlier in the night I gamed an older woman (really just being friendly) at the bar I was at. Long story short, she told me she had a daughter my age that wasn't out and gave me her daughter's number. Saturday night this girl (HB9) was at my house! Absolutely crazy story, but the point of it is that I can't get this girl out of my head. Friday night plate even just hit me up to come over tonight and I turned her down. All I want to do is text HB9 to come over again and do her dirty, but I'm afraid that if I text her I am just giving in to scarcity mentality, seeming needy and pandering to my old AFC ways. I already texted her Sunday night to hang out again and it didn't work out logistically.

I'm going to hold out and wait until she texts me -- I already know its what you guys would recommend, and I'm sure she will text me by the end of the week or weekend. I think my issue is I don't have other plates that have as high of a SMV as her."

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/78k1s9/even_spinning_plates_its_hard_to_get_away_from/

Proposal

I think there is only one effective way left which would have any effect on the growth and influence of this group. We need to demand constant demystification and clarification. The ironic and nihilistic memes and jargon function as a smokescreen not only between those who affiliate themselves with this group but also between them and outsiders. It is hard to distinguish those sincere and those only trolling and there for the "lulz".

"Journalists should be saying, ‘I don’t want to talk about Pepe memes and hand signs. Tell me what are the limits of what you’re prepared to do’. We should force them to talk about what they really stand for."

– Angela Nagle, quoted in Wilson, “Hiding in Plain Sight.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/23/alt-right-online-humor-as-a-weapon-facism

I would like to help this demystification and clarification of the words used by the Alt-Right by translating them from jargon to general language. To build a door in the walls of the echo chamber. The "echo chambers" I will include in my project will be a few of the Alt-Rights most influential forums on the internet where this jargon is created and evolves into parts of ideology. With a script that scrapes the web, I will gather text written by Alt-Rightists and filter out jargon in the hopes of translating it with the help of Urban Dictionary. I'm proposing to build this metaphorical door with the help of Natural Language Processing and Pattern, a Python library, which would help me not only filter out jargon (with the least amount of noise I can manage), but also look at the tone of the text, the popularity of the specific jargon, and the difference between Alt-Right and Leftist texts.

My goals are:

to demystify.
to stimulate communication and discussion about this subject in order to inform and reform people around me.
to "Observe, study and memorize what is going on". Described well by somebody else when talking about the importance of looking at the language of Nazism shortly after the second world war:

“Observe, study and memorize what is going on—by tomorrow everything will already look different, by tomorrow everything will already feel different; keep hold of how things reveal themselves at this very moment and what the effects are.”

– Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 (1957)), 10.

"We need to think much more carefully about the word-images that surround us, to make distinctions between the way violence is described and presented, and not think that all images are equally interchangeable. We need to remember all the words and ways of speaking we have forgotten, and note the way in which certain words, such as “cuck,” come to dominate our ways of speaking and thinking."

– The Language of the New Brutality, Nina Power, e-flux http://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/141286/the-language-of-the-new-brutality/

Main interests and questions

Framing of reality in online echo chambers
Collective creation of an ideology online

from online echo chambers to actual political power
possible physicality of online spaces

How is offline politics influenced by the online culture war?
Can I break an online echo chamber by taking its ideology offline, leaving a physical trace?
How can I stimulate discussion (poke a few holes in the online echo chamber) between sides?
How are language and image used in online culture to shape ideology?

"The emergence of the Alt-right should warn us of a now imminent nightmare vision of what the coming years might hold—a public arena emptied of any civility, universalist ideas or openly competing political visions beyond a zero-sum tribal antagonism of identity groups, in which the boundaries of acceptable thought will shrink further while the purged will amass in the fetid forums of the Alt-right."

–Angela Nagle, “What the Alt-Right is all about,” Irish Times, Jan 6, 2017

Research Method

I want to create a dynamic dictionary of the language of the right side of the online culture wars, namely of the Alt Right and the Manosphere. For now focussing on two key forums, one Right-wing forum on 8chan and one key manosphere forum on Reddit: 8chan /pol/ and reddit/theredpill. When I achieve this dynamic dictionary I want to look for ways to open up discussion, maybe by leaving physical/public traces, that would function to create some friction or different sounds in the online echo chambers.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

STEP 1

I first want to research the broad scope of the culture wars, which will be the basis of my knowledge and thesis.
I will do this by:

reading theory, about the current situation, past uprisings of nationalism, extremism, subculture and media theory
taking notes (short descriptions of ideology, bios of actors, links between actors, online habitats)
gathering media (Alt-Right websites, social networks, forums, yt channels)
creating a map (visualizing for my own understanding)

Online Culture Wars – STEP 1: mapping

STEP 2

The implementation and part-creation of a tool that will gather jargon on (a) main right-wing forum(s), through Pattern (a Natural Language Processing library in Python), because of my believe this jargon captures the core of their ideology. I will focus on Reddits subforum The Red Pill first, and then on 4chans subforum /pol/ second. I believe those are two of the most highly influential subforums in the Manosphere and the Alt-Right media-bubble.

I plan to use text scraping to scrape the forum and then start to filter out content so I would be left with non-dictionary words. I could use a text minus text method, where you, for instance, extract all the words used in a New York Times article, from the words used in a forum thread. Then I also want to look at which words, nouns/adjectives are used most, maybe if they are used in a positive or negative way. Next, I can also look at sentiment. Is a text negative or positive and to which standards? The difficulty of a text could be tested with the Flesch/Kincaid Readability Test, where word-length, syllables and sentence length are taken into account.

Online Culture Wars – STEP 2: tool, lexicon

STEP 3

Publishing the research in a manner that aids general understanding and triggers discussion.

"The neoliberal project to destroy the public sphere meets the hate networks of the internet, and it is these “identity groups” who will, unless things change radically, take to the streets: these spaces now also made to be places of ambiguity—privatized, unevenly securitized and surveilled—where IRL is increasingly constructed by virtual belongings."

–http://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/141286/the-language-of-the-new-brutality/

Online Culture Wars – STEP 3: publish

Timeline

I would still like to look at the possibility to graduate early. If you don't think this is in any way possible because of projects current state, I will have to look at my financial (and mental) situation to see if a later graduation is possible.

Step 1: Mapping of the Alt-Right that will form the basis of the research/my knowledge/my thesis: 06 NOV – 26 NOV

Step 2: The Tool: 13 NOV – 18 DEC

Step 3: Publishing: DEC & JANUARY

Relation to practice

I was researching the online subculture of Vaporwave for a while when the culture got reappropriated and was involved in an online culture war, by the alt-right. Since the campaign of Donald Trump, I've been interested and appalled by the growth of this group. With my last project I've attempted to explore the escapist feeling I – and people around me – had after the election.