Targeted influence can help to shape more positive communities that yield better ends. These communities form the reserves from which a portion will later become politically activated. Memetic influence is about shaping politi-fandoms: online subcultures of tacit support. Nudging users to take political action or to become members of a specific organization is likely beyond the scope of this project.
Perhaps that last part was a bit too ambitious lol At the end of this project I hoped that some of them might become interested in conventional forms of political organization or possibly even engage in electoral politics. Over the course of several months, I would attempt to guide their interests from Ted Kazcynski, to Nick Land, to Gilles Deleuze, to the CCRU, to Sadie Plant and finally to Mark Fisher. Adjacent ideas should interact and reinforce one another, but when taken as a whole, the starting and end points may be radically different. Each link must feel causal and intuitive. Each successive link should build on the ideas of the last. It may take two weeks to familiarize the community with one reference, the next might take days, while others could take months. This process will require new links, nodes and stepping stones that join to form a reference chain. You are entering through the bottom of the funnel to build a pipeline out. The strategy was to plant a series of connected references that nudge and guide their interests over time. My hope was that they would embrace this new way of thinking and ultimately amplify that message on their own. The goal of this project was to plant a progressive and politically rehabilitative idea within these at-risk communities. In the case of climate change, their concerns are not totally unwarranted but radical ideas like eco-extremism and anti-natalism are not politically helpful.
These teens had embraced an extreme form of pessimism verging on self-destruction. An essential part of today’s info-echo chambers is building up resistance to counter-narratives. The group profiled in Politigram & the Post-left was a uniquely at-risk demographic that had fallen through the cracks of conventional counter-messaging. When I speak with radical young people, I always try to affirm their political anxieties but redirect their interests and activities toward more productive ends. I will do my best to tell this story in a way that does not identify anyone. So I started several anonymous meme accounts across various social media platforms.
Through these conversations, I realized that little (if any) positive messaging would be able to penetrate unless that signal came from inside their trusted communities. After publishing Politigram and the Post-left, I spoke with many of the users profiled. In late 2018, I began a secret 18 month long project to infiltrate and positively influence radical online Gen Z communities.
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