Winning the Online Culture War
Let’s use the internet as a model for applying the above system and predicting who will win the online culture war.
- The Internet’s Economic Elite: These are the individuals who own sites like Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc.
- The Internet’s Social Elite: These are the moderators on those sites (and other types of people who control content on them, like low-level employees at the above companies).
- The Internet’s Military: Online, these are government agencies that can directly enforce content and shut down sites.
- The Urban Dispossessed: These are people who live online within contexts that rely on the infrastructure set up by the internet’s economic elite and moderated by the internet’s social elite: Redditors, Facebookers, Instagramers, etc.
- The Internet’s Rural Dispossessed: These are people who live in online contexts that do not rely on infrastructure set up by the internet’s economic elite and that is not heavily moderated: 4chan-ers, 8kun-ers, booru-ers.
Just as in the real world it is very hard to “occupy” the territory of the rural dispossessed, as soon as one site belonging to the internet’s rural dispossessed is shut down, another springs up. Whereas the traditional social elite of the internet have no influence within these decentralized online communities, they effectively have almost total control of the narrative within the communities of the internet’s urban dispossessed.
Within the online world, one philosophical faction—the social elite—has almost total control of everything but the rural dispossessed, and yet that control has given them so little power over the online space more broadly. Be it Bronies, memes, or GamerGate, almost every popular aspect of online culture seems to originate in spaces controlled by the rural dispossessed. Moreover, the community acts in ways that have a massive effect on the “real world.” It would be difficult, for example, to argue that the 4chan community’s early boost to Donald Trump’s campaign did not play a significant role in his early victories when the rest of the world largely saw him as a joke.
Recent (at the time of this book’s publication) missteps made by the progressive branch of online politics exemplify why sound knowledge of who really holds power in revolutions matters. Specifically, progressive groups acting through the internet’s social elite have actively sought to deplatform communities that were either largely or totally the internet’s urban dispossessed, either by banning them from the economic elite’s platforms or by pressuring hosting and cybersecurity providers to not provide service to them (TumblrInAction being banned from reddit and Kiwi Farms being spurned by many service providers are two recent examples). In so doing, the social elite converted these urban dispossessed groups into the internet’s rural dispossessed, making them far more powerful (as next time they offend the social elite, the social elite won’t have tools to suppress them).
The online world exemplifies why support from the rural dispossessed is so powerful. If the faction predominating the internet’s rural dispossessed gains control of just one other faction of the online world (likely the military or economic elite pillar), it is game over for those who oppose them in the online culture wars. This is neither good nor bad; it’s just a truism of revolutions.