“Introduction:”
“There is no term more ubiquitous, obnoxious, and self-serving in our current lexicon as “woke.””
“Woke is safety-pin politics, masturbatory symbolism, and virtue signaling of a deflated Left insulated by algorithms, filter bubbles, and browser extensions that replace pictures of Donald Trump with Pinterest recipes.”
“Woke is a misnomer — it’s actually asleep and myopic.”
“Woke is a safe space for the easily distracted and defensive pop culture inbred.”
“Woke is the Left curled up in a fetal ball scribbling think pieces about Broad City while its rights get trampled by ascendant fascism, domestically and globally.”
“Woke is the easy button: it combats injustice by sharing videos of police brutality to an echo of outrage.”
“Woke is bereft of irony: it shares HuffPo articles about gentrification from condos in Flatbush and Oakland.”
“Woke is alchemy: it transmutes oppressed identities into advertising campaigns, trend reports, and new demographics to market towards.”
“Woke is poptimstic: it believes Jaden Smith becoming the face of Louis Vuitton is enough to qualify as a win for progress.”
“Woke is content with the status quo: it would be perfectly content if another economic collapse happened tomorrow, just as long as those who rigged it were sufficiently intersectional.”
“Woke is a sanctimonious grammar-nazi who critiques the bully’s phrasing of “stop hitting yourself,” through toothless gums. Woke is too ethical for its own good.”
“Woke is the gospel truth of the new evangelical Leftist. Woke is the Left’s consolidated failures distilled into a monosyllabic buzzword. A whimper into the digital landscape prefixed with a hashtag, arriving at the same point each time: #Woke is the literal antithesis of progress.”
“CATALOGUE OF THE WOKE LEFT’S FAILURES”
“1. Moderate Liberal”
“The moderate Left misappropriated theoretical terms and concepts, divorced from any actual theory. Identity politics, despite its origins in academia, flourishes best on social media — it’s the most accessible concept for moderate liberals to grasp.”
““Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity,’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule.” — Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (1984)”
“Identity politics became an albatross, however.”
“Call outs, clap backs, and other reality tv patois replaced dialectics.”
“Everyone within their algorithmic ghetto shares their sentiments about society. The algorithm makes their small corner seem far more vast than it actually is, and as a result, the moderate extends this myopia to society at large.”
“Liberalism provided an incubator for the alt right to form by mollifying actual demands for change.”
““If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feeling of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.” — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)”
“2. Radical Left”
“If the liberal is the evangelical, pearl clutching apostle of the woke Left, the radical, then, is St. Augustine — the hierophant, the pedagogue. The radical is the vanguard inhabiting academia & activism, creating the language and atmosphere of critique.”
“Its ideologies trickle down from intellectuals at universities to moderate liberals on social media, and more recently, the Alt-Right (e.g. culture jamming by way of “meme magic” or the synthesis of identity politics and white nationalism by way of identitarianism).”
“Radicals scapegoated liberals to absolve themselves of any responsibility by being all critique with no tangible answers.”
“The radical is too comfortable inhabiting only the periphery of academia & activism. Radical academics and activists are insulated not only by algorithms but also their obsolescence. The radical academic has failed to bridge the gap between intellectuals & larger society.”
“That is, intellectuals failed to subvert hegemony and normativity.”
“Academics did not do enough to reach beyond universities and make positive reforms to public education. Intellectuals failed to politicize the natural sciences early enough. Intellectuals lost programming and hacker culture to neoliberalism & libertarians. Computer science transitioned from cyberpunk to Silicon Valley venture capitalism.”
“What we have now is a new Scholasticism of students & professors as clergy dominated by an agitated, anti-intellectual populist bloc.”
““Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry.” Nick Land, “Meltdown” (1994)”
““The idea that one organisation, tactic or strategy applies equally well to any sort of struggle is one of the most pervasive and damaging beliefs among today’s left. Strategic reflection – on means and ends, enemies and allies – is necessary before approaching any political project. Given the nature of global capitalism, any postcapitalist project will require an ambitious, abstract, mediated, complex and global approach – one that folk-political approaches are incapable of providing.” — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)”
“WHAT IS #ALTWOKE:”
“1. Theoria”
“AltWoke is a new awakening for the post-modern Left to navigate the protean digital era.”
“Altwoke can be categorized as the new New Left.”
“Or Second Wave Neo-Marxism.”
“The Post- Truth Left.”
“Anti-liberal postcapitalist left.”
“AltWoke is antithetical to Silicon Valley techno-neoliberalism.”
“AltWoke is not the cult of Kurzweil.”
“AltWoke is not merely analogous to the Alt-Right.”
“AltWoke injects planning back into left-wing politics.”
“AltWoke supports universal basic income, biotechnology and radical energy reforms to combat climate change, open borders, new forms of urban planning and the liquidation of Western hegemony.”
“AltWoke sees opportunity in disaster.”
“AltWoke is the Left taking futurism away from fascism.”
“David Harvey is #altwoke.”
“Situationist International is #altwoke.”
“Lil B is #altwoke.”
“Jean Baudrillard is #altwoke.”
“Kodwo Eshun is #altwoke, Mark Fisher is #altwoke, Roberto Mangabeira Unger is #altwoke.”
“Edward Snowden is #altwoke.”
“Daniel Keller is #altwoke.”
“Chelsea Manning is #altwoke.”
“Theo Parrish is #altwoke.”
“William Gibson is #altwoke.”
“Holly Herndon is #altwoke.”
“Frantz Fanon is #altwoke.”
“Alvin Toffler is #altwoke.”
“2. Poiesis”
“Anti-liberal, Left-accelerationism. Revolution is slow & gradual. Technology, media, the global market, and culture accelerate the process.”
“Alt-Woke embraces the post-fact information economy as a pedagogical tool.”
“Culture is more important than policy.”
“Trickle-down ideology; AltWoke embraces normalization & hyperreality.”
“Memetic counter-insurrection: culture-jamming is the weapon of choice to tilt normalization in the direction we’d like it to go.”
“Xenofeminism. Technology is the missing component of intersectional politics. Eurocentrism and phallocentrism are obsolete, despite the Right’s best efforts. Queer is a verb, not a noun. If nature’s oppressive, change nature. Normalize “deviance.””
“Reappropriation of globalism as a personal lifestyle.”
“AltWoke is duplicitous, amoral, & problematic. But also conscientious. The ends always justify the means. The Right hits low, so we hit lower, harder, and without mercy.”
“AltWoke is cautiously optimistic about the future.”
“PREFACE TO PRAXIS”
“Why support Left-Accelerationism?”
“Accelerationism is a contested and obtuse term among the Left, so in order to understand what accelerationism is, it’s crucial to understand what it isn’t.”
“In its neutral alignment, accelerationism is the idea that neoliberalism facilitates so much growth — economically, technologically, and globally — that its social contradictions continue to expand to such a degree that its “collapse” is not only inevitable, but creates a vacuum for new integrated social platforms.”
“That is, like feudalism before it, late capitalism is transitory and incubates other socioeconomic ideologies that will ultimately replace it, since it’s now reaching its limits.”
“In its Right alignment, accelerationism is a schism:”
“Neoreaction (NRx) is a radical libertarianism accelerating toward neoliberalism’s ultimate conclusion: plutocratic corporate monarchism (e.g., man as nation).”
“The second is the Alt-Right, which is white identity politics accelerating toward capitalism’s ultimate conclusion: techno-fascism.”
“Left Accelerationism insists the only way out of capitalism is through it.”
“It’s become apparent that capitalism is reaching its limits, and it can’t sustain itself any longer.”
“The marriage of capitalism and democracy has been a powerful roadblock in the Left’s struggle to combat structural power. In its late phase, this divorce of capitalism and democracy is imminent.”
““But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.” —Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade” (1884)”
““The paradox of free-market communism is even more dramatic: the terms are strongly charged, ideological polar opposites, designating a kind of Mexican standoff between capitalism, on the one hand, and its archenemy and would-be grave digger, on the other. But the point of combining the terms free market and communism in this way is to deploy selected features of the concept of communism to transform capitalist markets to render them truly free and, at the same time, to deploy selected features of the free market to transform communism and free it from a fatal entanglement with the State.” —Eugene W. Holland, “Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike” (2011)”
“Left Accelerationism in an alternative to traditional avenues like reform or revolution and attempts to reorganize power from within power.”
“Left-Accelerationism is a synthesis of Marxism with vertical-scale tektology. It’s Gramsci by way of Debord and David Harvey by way of Deleuze.”
“Why embrace a post-facts/post-truth information economy?”
“As it stands, narrative is more important than facts.”
“Media and communications are so accelerated that both sides of the political spectrum are locked in a battle over consensus.”
“Traditional pedagogy will not work in this instance. The Left hurts itself by not using this to its advantage.”
““Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit with the core belief.” —Franz Fannon, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952)”
“Why is culture more important than policy? Why weaponize memetics? What is “trickle down ideology”? Why support hyperreality and normalization?”
“Culture is society’s barometer.”
“From the meme unleashed by Marshall McLuhan’s too-oft repeated phrase “the medium is the message,” author Joshua Meyrowitz seems to have taken it most seriously.”
““No Sense of Place” is an analysis into how television changed society by altering society’s access to information.”
“Meyrowitz forms a clear theory on information-power systems and discusses ways in which television breaks those down.”
“Meyrowitz fundamentally believes that many social groupings and hostilities exist due to access to and restrictions of information and space.”
“When information and space are separated, then the boundaries between social groups relax.”
“Memes are ideologies distilled, repackaged, and ready for viral distribution.”
“Ideology is a memetic virus.”
“Memes are an insurgent medium.”
“The internet is an insurgent technology.”
““The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” —Guy Debord, “Society of the Spectacle”, (1967)”
“What is xenofeminism?”
“Xenofeminism is a form of Left-Accelerationism and, by extension, can be read as AltWoke’s answer to identity politics.”
“Or, more accurately, it critiques liberal “privilege”-based identity politics and re-situates Left “critical theory”-based identity politics into a technological framework.”
“AltWoke isn’t opposed to identity politics so much as it’s opposed to reductionist, two-dimensional, representation as the crux of liberal identity politics.”
“This mode of thinking lacks nuance and oftentimes devolves into inconsequential arguments over single phrases and who gets to participate.”
“Bad politics comes in all forms of representation.”
“The chauvinism of Western exceptionalism, essentialism, and the central cornerstone, “whiteness” are sociopoitical dead ends.”
“The old guard justifies oppression and inequality as immutable and “natural.””
“The deviant Other threatens this “natural” hierarchy.”
“The normalization of deviance is the ultimate culture-jam.”
“Why embrace and reappropriate globalism?”
“AltWoke perceives the “nation” as an information network and citizen –> user.”
“The governance structure of the internet creates the subjectivity of power, the user, in the same fashion as the invention of the state created the subjectivity of citizens.”
“Global scale computation has built a new governing rhizomatic architecture.”
“All systems have integrated into platform stacks, and by extension, nations and governments are but another component in the Internet of Things (IoT).”
“People should be allowed in all physical spaces as a fundamental right. Politics has nothing to do with physical territory.”
“AltWoke accelerationism fully separated land from politics once it realized that political groupings are aspatial networks: informational, cybernetic.”
“The old paradigm was political grouping by blood, land, and then language. These were all networks.”
“Cyberspace is an artificial network same as blood, land, and language.”
“It’s better, too, as it is instantaneous.”
“Those who hold politics to be the defense of land, nation, ethnicity, or linguistics are the old-guard; they are demonstrably incorrect and stand between people and their liberty.”
““Geology is sensible of itself in so much as it has an ordering logic, if it is articulate in its stratifications, reading pebbles, rocks, various kinds of matter, sorting, organizing (Roger Caillois calls this agency ‘computational’), folding, compacting the biological slime of the earth into its various layers.” Kathryn Yusoff, “Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene” (2015)”
“The separation of the information network from place thus reduces the determination of place upon network, of place upon user, of place upon that user’s conception of themselves interacting with others, to the point that in a globalized world the user will interact with their physical neighbor in the same network as they will interact with someone in a different (city/state/nation/region), such that planetary consciousness necessarily forms.”
“Why is #AltWoke amoral?”
“Short answer: Politics is amoral.”
“Long answer: As it stands, the political infrastructures of Western governments are collapsing. The Right solidified its stranglehold on structural power. Right Accelerationism is several steps ahead of its Leftist counterpart.”
“The Left has no structural power, and the stakes are far too high. We truly stand to lose everything.”
“Traditional means of Left praxis are ineffectual against this ascendant superstructure.”
“Alt-Woke praxis is, if anything, a reappropriation of Vladislav Surkov’s idea of ‘nonlinear warfare.’ We don’t fight fair. We won’t be civil. We don’t resist power, we seize it.”
“3. Praxis”
“The question of AltWoke Praxis is also the question of Left-Accelerationist Praxis: How does one organize politically?”
“AltWoke Praxis has two modal structures: Right Hand Praxis & Left Hand Praxis. Or, The Hand That Strikes & The Hand That Repurposes.”
“RHP takes advantage of the cracks within the Alt-Right, disrupting any roadblocks to clear a path so LHP can shift the Overton Window. LHP repurposes existing technologies, networks, and power structures to initiate a counter-hegemony.”
“LHP advances AltWoke’s core tenets without ever explicitly espousing as such.”
“Privacy is crucial to Left Hand Praxis, so it won’t be listed, but appropriating multinational corporate identity is a crucial first step.”
“Right Hand Praxis”
“Alt-Right countersurveillance.”
“Exploit the right’s paranoia and affinity towards pseudoscience.”
“Direct action hacktivism.”
“Appropriate post-fact culture.”
“Exploit their contradictions”
“Agitate Leftist demonstrations.”
“#Alt-Woke Manifesto is the work of ANON.”
“We are a collective of “Other.””
“Some of us are sex workers, some immigrants, many of us queer.”
“There are even a few privileged white cucks amongst us.”
“Nevertheless, ANON is largely the work and brainchild of People of Color (PoC).”
“Our social disciplines are as varied as our identities, from journalists to dominatrixes.”
“ANON are the intellectual cousins of #BlackLivesMatter divorced from liberalism.”
“All inquires should be directed to: xenochan@protonmail.com”