The Case of the Missing Pedagogy

Or: Online Goldfish Brain

Author’s Note: Pardon me for the absence here on Substack. Plenty of things have changed since the last time I wrote; particularly being in between jobs and getting engaged and all the planning that comes with that. I intend to write more on here on a bi-weekly basis, one being an essay on a particular subject, and the other piece being more on current events and affairs. To my paid subscribers, thank you so much for your ongoing support.

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I’ve been “The Prudentialist” for five years now. What started out as a “well if he can do it, why can’t I?” sort of project has led to all sorts of things, most of which I’m grateful for especially those whom I’ve met offline and in the real world. I’ve been a consumer of this sort of content for much longer, and my college days of driving from work to my evening classes consisted of three main primary news sources that I would listen to in my old 2006 Ford Taurus. It would NPR’s All Things Considered, Rush Limbaugh, and in particular This Week in Stupid. Ten years ago was a simpler time for me, but most things seem simple when you’re young and stupid. I worked for my local Republican Party, was civically minded, and was seen in polite liberal company as someone they could go to for a differing political opinion (this was of course before Trump and the psychopolitical changes that would follow.)

I had always sought to surround myself with hardworking, intelligent people whom I could have a discussion with, even with those who would fervently disagree or get apoplectic that someone held a position so wildly different to their own. I am somewhat nostalgic for those days, but I think it’s the innocence I miss more than anything else. Such dialogue is impossible these days, partially because I do not seek it out, but our media environment as “content creators” inhibits those kinds of discussions because there’s more take selling and less conversation. There are a few notable exceptions I can name off the top of my head, whether it’s Katherine Dee’s online case studies or Benjamin Boyce’s calmversations. Dave Greene (The Distritbutist) does this as well, but it leads to more combative engagements than the previous two.

There is a distinct lack of mentorship in online political spaces that still exists primarily if not mostly offline, where meeting and building with others actually takes place. The parasocial relationship between influencers/writers/fans/etc., has led to many abandoning their relationships with family and friends irl and trying to replace it for the simulacra of what’s behind the screen. This can be seen in streamer/video game content quite often, and was seen quite prevalently on left wing influencer spaces, with those like Hasan Piker, or Destiny offering instructions to cut off Trump supporting or Covid vax skeptical family.

Quite perniciously and with predatory intent can this best be found in online transgender spaces as well, with places like r/eggirl or prominent activists cheering that they can illegally distribute hormones to minors across the country. Some of this cult of personality or belief system can be seen on the political right across various generations, from Plan Trusters to those who claim that they are willing to die for their leader as if they’ve made him out to be their new messiah. Identity has been thoroughly watered down (more on that in a future essay) that we’ve witnessed the shitposting, doxxing, flame war kind of content to be a watered down version of taking names and asserting influence in an already tiny pond as violence (however bloodless or gamified it might be) becomes a new quest for identity and power in these digital ecosystems.

We’ve seen it come in waves, a cycle of sort with each new administration, each new personality who comes on board to raise their profile, funds, and to make a very narrow and difficult way to make money (in this instance, being a conservative or right wing influencer on the internet) viable as a full time job that could be their career into more mainstream conservative institutions. I’ve seen it happen effectively twice, out of the hundreds if not thousands of people I tangentially know about trying to do this for fun, a side hustle, or going all in on making this their career. There are few internet historians to perhaps cover the rise and fall of many movements, niche personalities and followings, and these kinds of volumes would perhaps make for good reading but they wouldn’t become New York Times best-sellers, although I hold out hope that a few people who have been in the game for a while will eventually write their tell-all stories. So far Lauren Southern is one such character, regardless of what you think of her or how true her book may be, it is one of few such stories that will be on record (at least on paper) of what the last decade of online politics looked like.

It’s very easy for major stories to drop like flies as soon as something else comes up on the timeline, whether it’s deliberately engineered as might be the case with DNI Gabbard dropping the Russiagate story and the administration calling former president Barack Obama a traitor to the United States in the midst of the Jeffery Epstein story. What feels like a dead cat strategy has somewhat worked, just as at the same the Twitter/X timeline can jump to something new at a moment’s notice. The ubiquity of flowing information (and disinfo) can create a very drivable discursive feedback loop through the online political consciousness of how people want to engage on certain topics or the need to jump in on something in order to capitalize your own takes and not get left behind in the proverbial “discourse.”

If you’re trying to game the system to get eyes on you, one must also be aware that they are being played at the same time, all while being on a platform where the psyops never end and the devil never sleeps. This makes it relatively easy for newcomers or even “oldheads” to forget the very things they were here to experience or to be so deracinated from events that have long since passed that individuals or even whole teams of self-proclaimed pundits and influencers to try things that have long been tried before that were met with disastrous consequences. A long memory, even for the lovers of history on the online right (myself included) can have bizarre moments of déjà vu in suggesting a strategy, policy, or idea to garner legitimacy only to realize it’s been tried or talked about before under better political conditions or demographics.

The striking thing about this political goldfish memory or trying to hold onto events in an organized timeline in your own memory is that there is no effective cohesion or even real learning in these environments that isn’t autodidactic or comes from former academics. Certain individuals like Athenian Stranger, Michael Millerman, Neema Parvini and others have tried and still produce educational content, and I am sure that there are many others who do so. Even then what you’re purchasing or consuming is an educational product and not necessarily a method of learning.

The Online Right, due to its decentralized and tribal nature of various groups, personalities and ideologies makes it difficult to map both amateurs and professionals have tried to some and terrible degrees of success.

Nevertheless what makes the space even more difficult to navigate and to manage is that it is often groups of individuals who got involved either through their own political development or became radicalized themselves through a previous personality or iteration of online groups. They come in waves, or had their moments in the sun before either being cordoned off or self-segregated into an online ghetto or alt-tech platform. In the age of Elon Musk and the purchase of Twitter, many accounts and groups have come back to the mainstream so to speak, with some acting like Brendan Fraser from Blast from the Past. It’s not 2017 anymore, hell it’s not even 2021 anymore, and the internecine conflicts over meta-politics and the rest feel relatively settled onto comfortable borders and fault lines that most of us can readily identify down to the personality in question.

This comes back to the matter of pedagogy, the methods and theories of teaching. I cannot say that it doesn’t exist writ large in online political spaces, but most of us with a degree of influence or those who are actively trying to influence policy (or just trying to amass paypiggies) most likely do not have the best frame of reference for teaching. This can lead to individuals saying one thing one week, only to do a complete 180 in a matter of days. On one hand, most individuals do not have the capability of handling a news cycle or discursive environment changes our understanding of how to approach sell a take or wait and have some kind of patience on the subject matter. A marshmallow test of sorts for take-sellers/pundits/writers, which can best be seen by terms like “Panican” or “Plan Truster” or of course, the doomscroller.

Learning requires above all things, the desire to inquire and to learn. So many frameworks, or schools of thought are often reinforced and are taken for granted without question, brought on by post-war conservatism in the United States. The same can be said for the methods and frameworks of historical revisionism, whether it’s World War Two or the evils of FDR. As Sam Francis had detailed in famous essay Beautiful Losers: The Failure of American Conservatism:

“In any case, the Old Right intellectuals for the most part had few links with the 'grass roots," the popular, middle-class, and WASP nucleus of traditional American culture. National Review itself was not only Manhattanite but also Ivy League and Roman Catholic in its orientation, as well as ex-communist and ethnic in its editorial composition, and not a few of its brightest stars in the 1950s were personally eccentric, if not outright neurotic. Moreover, few of them reflected the "Protestant Establishment" that, by the end of World War II, had largely made its peace with the new regime and was scurrying to secure its own future within the managerial state, economy, and culture. Of the twenty-five conservative intellectuals whose photographs appeared on the dust jacket of George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, published in 1976, four are Roman Catholic, seven are Jewish, another seven (including three Jews) are foreign-born, two are southern or western in origin, and only five are in any respect representative of the historically dominant Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Celtic) Protestant strain in American history and culture (three of the five later converted to Roman Catholicism). Theological meditation competed with free-market economic theory as the main interest of many Old Right intellectuals to a far larger degree than had been the case with such pre-World War II skeptics of progressivism as Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, or the "America First" opponents of foreign intervention.”

The De-Anglicization of American conservatism deserves a more thorough investigation, but I use this to note the shift in the way we’ve been taught, and the methods and character of the biases of conservatism and right wing belief that we take for granted may not have been the most historically accurate or came with baggage that we now carry water for without even knowing it. If we want to learn, then we better get on it. Those we like, or those who push our neuron activation buttons like the good little monkeys we can be sometimes we accept that this influence or personality may just have the information we need not realizing that it may come from the worst of places or worse have facts that are straight up not accurate. If anything our current pedagogical method that we seen online across many different factions online, at least based on how I can see it is a socially integrative strategy with some room for upward mobility if one produces interesting content or is an aggregator for rallying the troops to ratio and attack their perceived outgroup foes.

This obviously comes at a cost of outsourcing your intellectual or moral mores to someone else, often a stranger who may not be who they say they are or worse, an infiltrator for a different group or an actual federal informant. Having a long memory becomes difficult, and those who “post the receipts” are doing good work even if most of the time it’s for the purposes of drama- having a record helps when discerning who has better political instincts or is at the very least consistent in their thought process. But because we tend to exist in an environment where mentorship is a rare find, the older writers and thinkers are disparaged or resigned, the younger generations can sometimes walk into the same traps that those who came before them had walked into such as dealing with a hostile media environment or engaging in the same kind of anti-social sperg behavior that even William Luther Pierce of all people had talked about decades ago in his own interactions with those who had followed George Lincoln Rockwell.

Yes lessons have been learned, but not on a large enough scale to particularly make any sort of “online activism” as effective as it potentially could be, although those who do things in the real world, whether that’s starting a business or a fraternal organization definitely have to learn these lessons because there comes severe consequences (no real anonymity in real life.) Our online goldfish brains makes it difficult to discern what to trust or what to do, and because social integrative movements and recruiting strategies such as the timeline being the audition for the group chat for your work to be agreed and amplified by others with similar or larger followings puts one in a mood to be quick on the trigger finger and to accept engagements that will hurt them in the long run. I’ve witnessed to many people get doxxed and had the worst people go after them, only for said individuals who had amplified such material feign ignorance or claim to be friendly with all people as if they didn’t just participate in a targeted harassment campaign weeks prior.

I cannot say that any effective pedagogical framework for teaching others how to learn and live online as a political actor can exist, but you can turn to the examples of those who had come around and have lived through previous online eras and are still standing, both in terms of popularity and infamy. Facilitating these kinds of relationships will go a long way, and if you’re lucky I guess you might be one of the few who make it on to something bigger than just a Substack and a YouTube channel. Nevertheless our foes do learn, even if it is merely reinventing the 2015 era of Conservatives debating young liberal college freshman, like Ben Shapiro or Steven Crowder. After all, it takes just one good showing to have the left making a Jubliee out of a poor performance.