Blog

Why do people in movements engage in infighting?

Infighting does not make logical sense. In my book, The Intactivist Guidebook, I show that no movement can win or achieve its goals without collaboration. This means that infighting or internal conflicts that decrease collaboration are detrimental to a movement’s goals. Yet, most movements have a lot of infighting. Why?

Rene Girard’s Theory

One explanation for this comes from French philosopher Rene Girard. Girard argued that we actually learn our desires by watching others, which he called mimetic desire. Mimetic desire is desire based on another, or desire modeled after or imitating the desires of others.

If you’ve ever had a child want what was on your plate rather than theirs, even when you made them an identical plate, you’ve seen this in action. The child does not just want food. They want to be like mom and dad. Wanting what is on mom or dad’s plate is an expression of this desire.

This mimetic desire continues throughout a person’s life. We see people we wish to emulate and desire to have what they have and become like them so we can have the same qualities. For example, if a young person admires a star athlete, they might think if they become like this person they will have the qualities they perceive this athlete has having (strength, popularity, social status, etc.).

Where this runs afoul is when this desire does not fulfill the qualities we think it will confer. For example, someone might wish to be a star athlete because of the pleasure they think it will bring but discovers that being an athlete actually means training every day. They are constantly busy and sore. Plus, there is steep competition for the role of “star athlete.” Not everyone can be the star, and many others are competing with them for the same desire. Stardom is a scarce resource.

When multiple people are competing for the same learned desire, a mimetic rivalry develops. There is potential for conflict or even violence. In order to prevent this violence, societies engage in scapegoating. Rather than everyone fighting for the same role, one person is chosen as the reason they cannot have it and destroyed. If one person wants a thing, there will soon be more. This mechanism of mimetic desire soon leads to many competitors, but it can also align many people to all mimetically desiring to destroy the same person. 

Scapegoating can also occur when the role or object of desire does not fulfill the qualities the person thought it would. In this case, the scapegoat is chosen as the reason this role was not fulfilling. For example, a person might go to college and get a high-paying job only to feel unfulfilled. Rather see that this was a learned mimetic desire, and the person might never have wanted to work in an office except that everyone around them told them this is what they should want, a scapegoat is chosen.

The scapegoat could be a person (ex: a boss or person in the office everyone hates) or it could be broader (ex: social systems such as “sexism”). The scapegoat could be a real problem, but what makes it a scapegoat is the idea that you would be happy with your mimetic desire is the scapegoat didn’t exist. For example, if a person makes sexism their scapegoat, this might be a real problem, yet they would still be unhappy working in an office even if no sexism existed if this desire does not actually confer the qualities they thought it did.

Girard and Movements

How does this relate to activism and movements? Most movements are learned mimetic desires. We are not born wanting to engage in activism. We see others taking action and learn the desire to do the same. Often this desire is born from a quality we believe becoming an activist will confer. (Ex: If I become an activist, I will be heard.)

However, if this desire does not produce results, people begin searching for a scapegoat. “I thought this would give me what I wanted, but it hasn’t. Who is to blame? Obviously not me. It must be someone else…” And the search for the scapegoat is born.

Often, this scapegoating will focus on people who seem fulfilled in the same desire we sought. If the desire is seen as a scarce resource and someone else has it, then it follows that them having fulfillment means you have less. If you can destroy their fulfillment then there will be more for the rest. This is how movements often tear down their most successful figures.

Yet, there is a lie here. Fulfillment is not a scarce resource. It is abundant. In fact, the more success you have in a movement, the more potential for collaboration exists, and by extension the closer the movement is to victory.

What makes something a movement is when many people desire the same thing and work together for that desire. When many people all desire to write books in the same style, you have a literary movement. When many people all desire to make films in the same style, you have a cinematic movement. When many people all desire the same social change, you have a social movement. These desires are not scarce but amplified the more people share them.

This scarcity mindset probably goes back to our hunter-gather days in which food was a scarce resource. Yet, most of what people desire now is not scarce. If I write a book, it does not mean you cannot write a book. The process is still the same, regardless of however many people have written books before us.

Lessons From Girard

How can we apply this theory to movements to reduce infighting?

First, infighting tends to occur more between people who are alike rather than different. That might seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense with Girard’s theory. If two people both identify as the “filmmaker person” of a movement, and one perceives this as a scarce resource, then they might engage in infighting with the person they perceive as their mimetic rival. However, if filmmaking is not a scarce resource, then the logical action would be for them to align, collaborate, and create a cinematic movement.

(This is my way of saying I want there to be more films on the movements I’m involved in. Think about how many documentaries there on food or climate change. This is not a scarce resource. There should be just as many on other important issues.)

As a practical example, I noticed when I went from being a filmmaker to writing about activism, a few people who identified as “activism person” in the movement I was writing about that had been previously supportive of my work became passive-aggressive before even reading the book. They felt that by writing about activism I was entering their mimetic turf. A few even suggested that if I knew so much about activism I should start my own organization.

Of course, if I did start my own group I would really be entering a mimetic rivalry with them, especially if the group was identical to theirs in style or branding. They do not actually want me to do this. Instead, they perceived my desire as taking away the scarce resource of their activism. This attitude was part of what my book was trying to address. The primary advice of the book was “if you’re interested in activism, you should organize groups and collaborate with others.” For anyone trying to organize, this message is helpful, but for those in scarcity thinking, it’s perceived rivalry.

Second, if you run an organization this principle suggests that you should give people different roles. Billionaire Peter Theil has said that Girard’s book Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World is his favorite and in interviews has said he has used Girard’s thinking in startups to make sure every person has a different role. If you have an organization, there might be infighting and conflict if everyone has the same role, but if one is the “social media person” and another is the “event organizing person,” then they have different desires and roles and are not in conflict.

Third, if you are successful, you should know that the people most likely to try to scapegoat or “cancel” you will be those who are less successful in the same field and bitter about it. Yes, this even applies to movements for social justice causes. You could win victories for people, and they might still engage in backstabbing because they perceive your success as a threat to their own. This is scarcity thinking, and you should treat these people like they have a terminal COVID-19 or a zombie bite, and quarantine them from you or anything you’re involved with.

Fourth, pursue blue oceans. Blue oceans is a concept that comes from the book Blue Ocean Strategy to describe untapped markets or entirely new ideas. Red oceans are areas where competition already exists. For example, if I was to launch a soft drink, I would be competing in the red ocean of a market that is already full of options. If I created a new health drink using a rare herb no one had heard of before, I would be creating a new category I owned or blue ocean.

The same logic applies to books, films, businesses, activist organizations, etc. If pursue a desire many have already fulfilled, you might be entering a red ocean. Instead, look at the underlying desire behind your desire. What are you hoping this desire will fulfill? What qualities do you think it will confer? If you were to pursue those qualities directly, what might you see instead?

Remember, infighting occurs between groups that are alike, not different. If you differentiate, you can avoid this infighting. Instead of saying “I want to create something like that,” look for something no one has ever done before. This will requires greater creativity but offers a greater reward.

(By the way, you can still do things others have done if you do them in a new way. I’m not the first person to write a book or make a film, but the projects I’ve made have been new in their category. I could still start an organization following this advice as well, as long as instead duplicating an existing organization, I created new in a unique space only I could fulfill.)

Finally, Girard’s theory asks us to examine our desires. What are you hoping the things you desire will bring you? Do you really want what you want or have you learned your desires from others? What do you authentically want?

---

P.S. Many people want my work and say it has changed their lives. If you want the same desirable change, check out my work here and subscribe to my email list here.

A Jewish reader of The Intactivist Guidebook writes:

I read the chapter on Opposition. It was a little hard for me to follow.

…

I tried so hard to apply your advice to the organized Jewish forces in my head, but I could not succeed, it was too complicated. They are too powerful. They have this huge advantage that they can call anyone, such as Iceland, anti-semitic for eg working to outlaw circumcision in their non-circumcising country. The fear of being called anti-semitic is the most powerful toxic force on the planet imo. Please give us a clear directive for how to defeat them!

I’ve edited the message a bit, but this was my reply:

If the Opposition chapter was hard to follow, let me try swapping real-world political groups for a more absurd situation:

Suppose you are part of a high school clique of mean girls. You want to get rid of a girl who is prettier than you because she might steal your boyfriend. How would you get rid of her?

One way is that you could approach her and tell her not to look at your boyfriend. If you were to do things the masculine way, you’d beat her up. But this is a clique of toxic mean girls. If you did that, you’d be seen as insecure, and everyone would know you think she is prettier than you. What would you do?

Well, the toxic mean girl way would be to spread a rumor about her. Tell everyone something about her that would lower her status (Ex: “slut”). Of course, you wouldn’t tell her directly. In fact, you might never have a conversation with the prettier girl. You might not even tell her friends. You’d tell your friends who are friends of her friends.

This way, what happens is: you tell your friend, who tells her friends, who stop hanging out with her. Now she has no friends and is unpopular, and your boyfriend won’t even see her at the parties where he might leave you for her because she doesn’t get invited.

This girl – if she is not socially savvy – might protest that the rumor is untrue. Many people might know that she is not a “slut” or whatever you’ve said about her – but they don’t want to be seen sitting at the table of an unpopular girl, lest they be seen as unpopular too.

If you saw this beautiful girl who was all alone, unpopular, destroyed by rumors, who could not get anyone to sit with her or invite her to parties, what would you tell her to do?

This is basically the process that opposition groups run when they fight Intactivists. They spread a rumor (“anti-Semite”) to their friends (coalition groups – politicians, media, etc.) who tell our friends (the public, audiences, platforms, businesses, parents) who stop being friends with us because they don’t want to be seen sitting at the unpopular table (associating with “racists”).

It’s just that their friends have a lot of reach. They are – in this analogy – an upperclassman who knows everyone, while we are a new transfer student freshman. I think the impossibility of this task that you feel is the relative difference in resources. The difference is so great that this girl even knows the faculty. There are even rumors about her that she secretly runs the school. Tough situation!

You could say ‘well, just don’t worry about it – you only want to be friends with people who see you for who you are anyway!’ – but this ignores the bullying, the unfair treatment, and the missed opportunities from not being invited places.

It also ignores the fact that the pretty girl can’t even get decent people to be friends with her because they are afraid of retaliation from the upperclassmen mean girl. She is so well connected friends of hers might attack your friends, just to prove their loyalty to her. The prettier girl would not only need friends who see her – she’d need friends you are so brave and loyal they are willing to stand up to the bullying of well-connected and more popular students.

What my book advises is to first build a coalition of likely allies. In this analogy, it would be the other people who would likely be your friend and don’t care what the popular girls call you. Maybe this is other people she has ostracized, been unfair to, people who just don’t care what she thinks. Maybe this is people who are naturally going to like you for who you are. But you want a circle of friends outside her influence. In the book, I give a list of likely allies, but I’m sure you can name more.

Second, you have to make sure you are your friends are aligned. You know that your opposition will spread rumors about them too. Plus, you and your friends might fight because that’s what friends do. High school girls are not known for their lack of drama, and political movements are even worse. I talk about this in Chapter 6: Needs and Chapter 7: Allies. You and your friends work together and don’t devolve into your own mean-girls drama where you just spread rumors about each other.

(Side-note: Every time you see activists engaged in infighting over petty drama, just imagine mean girls fighting over who is prettier. It is much funnier and does more to further the goals of the movement than infighting does.)

To avoid infighting, you might have to integrate, align, and heal your own insecurities. For example, suppose in our analogy a girl ever prettier than both girls agrees to help our social outcast become popular. Are you too insecure to work with her? What if you catch your man looking at her? You could get rid of her to fulfill your own need to be the prettiest, but it won’t get you closer to the goal of popularity. Having the prettiest girl on your side would help, but to work with her, you’ll have to get over your own ego.

Once you have your group, you work your way up. Say you want something she controls. Let’s say the yearbook editor is her friend. What points of leverage do you have to take that? Can you split their friendship with a rumor of your own? Can you make friends on the yearbook and get your agenda through anyway? Can you get leverage by talking to the yearbook advertisers who don’t go to your school and she has no power over?

This is an analogy, but you see the process. You’re not looking to get her. You’re looking to get everyone to stop sitting at her table. You want to make it so that if she won’t invite someone to her parties it isn’t social death and in fact that there is a social cost to being her friend. This will take time, but this girl has spread a lot of rumors about a lot of people, and many are starting to realize this is just a social tactic she uses against people she doesn’t like.

Of course, you’re talking to someone who never played these games in high school and just sat with the band kids, video production crew, and goths. But I always found goth girls hotter, so maybe I had a strategy of my own.

---

Read The Intactivist Guidebook for yourself here, because all the popular kids and pretty girls love it.

It seems odd how much focus those who write about relationships put on romantic relationships but not friendships. Most people only have one major romantic partner at a time, whereas they frequently have many friendships. Even people who are polyamorous or highly promiscuous still usually have far more friends than romantic or sexual partners. Plus, casual sexual relationships are called “friends with benefits.”

For most people friendships are the gateway to the other important connections and experiences of their lives. Many people even discover their romantic partner(s) through their social network, in addition to where they work, what hobbies they pick up, what media they see… If so much of our lives come through are friendships, why isn’t there as much deliberate thoughtful writing about how to have good friendships as there is about romantic relationships?

The most popular book on friendships, How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, is really just repackaged sales advice about how to make yourself more likable. This approach to friendship is light-years behind where the literature on romantic relationships is. Most of the deep connections I’ve had in my life have usually involved hard conversations at some point in which each of us shared parts of ourselves that the other might not accept. Carnegie’s advice skips over all that and is primarily focused on the question: how do I become more likable?

A book on friendship that is solely focused on becoming more likable is like a book on marriage that is solely focused on how to become more attractive. Yes, becoming attractive helps, but that alone will not lead to a successful marriage. A good book on marriage would cover things like communication, commitment, your internal beliefs… Likability advice alone is a pick-up artist mindset applied to friendships, where the whole focus is on how you get the other person, not how you build a deep connection with them.

When I looked at the existing literature on friendships, most of it shares this flaw so deeply that they don’t even use the word friendship – they call it networking and frame it in the context of “building your social circle.” Much of the writing on friendship is context-specific, like developing friends at work (“team-building”), at church (“fellowship”), or in small social groups (“community”). They use different words, but these are all really the same question – how do you make more friends? There are a lot of books that claim to be able to teach you to make yourself more likable – books on increasing your persuasion, charisma, speaking ability, body language, etc. – but very few that focus on the question of friendship directly.

When I say friendship, I mean close relationships that are not romantic but still committed. Someone who you go to work with, but would never see again if you quit that job is not a friend, just a co-worker. One definition of a friend I heard was “anyone who would be willing come over and help you move.” It might sound like a silly definition, but there is some wisdom to it. While many people might see the people who share their politics or belong to the same social tribe as them as friends, how many of those people would be willing to go out of their way to help you lift boxes into a moving van?

Deep friendships usually involve moments where you or the other person are not likable. Many people think that conflict is bad for relationships. In reality, only unresolved conflict is bad for relationships. If you’ve ever had a fight with someone and been able to resolve the disagreement, your connection to that person actually gets stronger, not weaker. One of the pieces of marriage advice I’ve received is that it’s important to have a process for forgiveness in any relationship because in 20+ years of connection, you will each wrong the other at some point. The same is true of friendships.

The lack of writing or focus on friendships seems like an important cultural blind-spot, because friendships may actually matter more than romantic connections. Yes, you might spend more time with your romantic partner, but the fact you have less time for friendships doesn’t make them less important. If anything, it means you need to be more deliberate about your friendships, since you have less time for them. Whereas relationships can grow over the course of years, friendships have to deepen quicker.

Most Americans do not have more than three close friends. Loneliness is an epidemic. Perhaps the fact the only cultural advice we have around friendships comes from transactional relationships in the context of specific groups is part of this. People used to make friends through church, work, and family. Now, most people don’t go to church, more and more are working from home, and many people do not have big families or live close to their relatives. The places where these connections could happen naturally are disappearing. One could go out of their way to join meet-up groups, but there is still very little written on how to turn those connections for casual social relationships to real deep friends.

This is also a political liability. In my book, The Intactivist Guidebook, I wrote that the strength of a movement is the strength of its relationships. Strong friendships allowed you to work in larger groups to solve political problems. If you want to resist the tyranny but only know 2-3 close friends, your protest will only be 2-3 people. American politics has been reduced to people yelling at each other on the internet in part because many of the people invested in it do not have many friends and those involved don’t know how to resolve conflicting beliefs in their relationships.

At the same time, more and more people want an intentional community, which is just a fancy word for living with your friends under a shared agreement or set of values. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve heard say they’d love to move somewhere with a group of people they know and just live on one big piece of land, but they don’t know enough committed people to make it work. There is a missing piece of knowledge between the desire and actually making it work. Imagine where romantic relationships would be if there was no writing about them, or shared memes and conventions like “marriage,” “dating,” or “monogamy.” This is where people are with friendships. We all want this thing called “tribe” or “friendship” but no one has a clear path to them and most are just making it up as we go.

---

For more of my writing, subscribe to my email list here.

Books are portals. Find the right one and it can take you somewhere. Most of the big events of my life occurred because I was willing to step through one of these portals into a new unknown. By clicking this article, you’d already stepped through one yourself, which will lead you into a deeper understanding of who I am, and maybe lead to a journey for you as well.

1. Enders Game by Orson Scott Card – This book has influenced the way I view strategy and life. It is about someone who is highly intelligent, but also highly empathetic. By deeply understanding his enemy he can defeat them, but in doing he feels compassion for them and no longer wishes to harm them.
   ~
2. A Field Guide To Earthlings by Ian Ford – This was the book that made me aware I was autistic. It is a book by someone with Aspergers intended to explain social interaction to other people with autism and Aspergers. I remember thinking it was the best book I’d ever read on understanding people and social interaction, wondering why I related to it so much, and then putting two and two together. This is the book I have gifted most to others.
   ~
3. The Drama of The Gifted Child by Alice Miller – This was the book that first made me aware of the impact early life experiences and trauma have in later life. I have seen parts of myself in this book, and most people I’ve shared it with have found it highly related as well. The book does an excellent job at showing how even subtle forms of bad parenting – like only showing a child love when they perform well – can lead to problems later in life.
   ~
4. Sit Down and Shut Up by Brad Warner – Bard Warner was the author who introduced me to zen and zazen (zen meditation). Sitting zen was one of the first daily spiritual practices I took up. I started when I was eighteen and did zen meditation pretty consistently for nearly a decade. It was during zen meditation that I first became aware of the feelings I had around circumcision that lead to my first film, American Circumcision.
   ~
5. The Completion Process by Teal Swan – Completion Process is something I use nearly every day. I practiced it first from the book and at a retreat of hers. After becoming interested in healing work in my early twenties through things like zen meditation and Alice Miller’s writing (see 3 & 4 above), I spent nearly a decade trying every healing method I could find – inner child work, reiki, shamanism, etc. Some were bullshit. Some were life-changing. This was in the latter category. Of all the stuff I’ve tried, this has been the most effective.
   ~
6. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey – The habits in this book are so ingrained in me, it was only after writing my own book that I looked back and saw how much of the advice I gave and followed in my own life came from this book. Now what this book teaches is second nature to me, so obvious that it seems odd to me when others don’t follow it, but that is probably because I read it in my formative years.
   ~
7. Amazing Spiderman 1–40 / Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men – My idea of what heroism is was formed by reading my Dad’s Spiderman comics at age four, which he started collecting when he was four and began with Spiderman issue #4. I can still see some of those early covers in my mind. Both Spiderman and the X-men were willing to do the right thing even when it was unpopular, would not personally benefit them, or would result in others hating or misunderstanding them. Good role-models for a kid.
   ~
8. 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferris – This was the first book to get me seriously thinking about my health. The book trailer got me pumped and generated massive buy-in. I’d always been a little overweight and felt like clothes didn’t “look good” on me. After reading this I went from eating processed carbs, grains, and sugar to meat, vegetables, and legumes. I dropped forty pounds in two months and went from being perpetually tired to high energy. Huge life change.
   ~
9. Why Men Are The Way They Are by Warren Farrell – I read this book in high school, and it gave voice to many of the feelings I had but couldn’t find a name for. When men feel wronged, insecure, or afraid, those feelings are often invalidated by dominant cultural attitudes or beliefs. This book made those feelings safe and helped me understand why I was having them. It was what Alice Miller would call an “enlightened witness,” meaning someone who sees your pain and empathizes with it.
   ~
10. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu – I was introduced to this book by a friend in my hometown who I ran into after college. I’d just broken up with my girlfriend, lost the gig I thought I had, and moved back in with my parents with no idea what I was going to do with my life. He told me about the concept of “action without action” and suggested that instead of constantly worrying about what would happen, I let it come to me. I decided not to think about what I would do for a week, and if nothing happened, I’d go back to worrying again. In three days, a contact in LA called me and asked if I was moving out there because her company needed an editor. I said yes, and everything for my trip came together easily as if on it’s own. I carry this book with me whenever I travel now and re-read it whenever I find myself worrying.

• Honorable mention:
  Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday – This book influenced how I saw, consumed, and used media. I’ve been following Ryan Holiday’s writing and book recommendations since he was posting on the old Tucker Max forums. His description of the media landscape has only grown more relevant, as has his prescriptions. Interestingly, Ryan himself has managed to withdraw from the daily storm of media to do things like write books on ancient Stoicism and live a relatively traditional life.

Books are a window into someone else’s mind. Hopefully, this post has given you deeper insight into mine. I encourage you to continue the journey by picking up one of these and reading it. Happy journeying.

---

P.S. You can find my films and books here, and get regular recommendations and writing from me by subscribing here.

Get The Intactivist Guidebook ebook here:

https://gum.co/XNbtW

---

I said I wasn’t going to do it.

I said The Intactivist Guidebook would be print-only.

But… you all talked me into it.

Two things convinced me:

1. The overwhelming demand. Seriously, I got a bunch of emails about it. I also ran a twitter poll, and over 50% of respondents said they’d buy the ebook version. I’m holding you to that, cause it’s up now.
2. Some people said they couldn’t get the book where they were. The Intactivist Guidebook is on Amazon in every local country, but apparently shipping to Egypt (yes, we have readers in Egypt) costs way too much. So, now we are on digital.

Also, some said they wanted to avoid Amazon. For them, we are also on Barnes & Noble.

I want everyone to be able to read this. I hope you enjoy it, and it helps you change the world!

---

• Buy on Amazon here.
• Buy the ebook here.
• Buy on Barnes & Noble here.
• Read the first chapter for free here.

My documentary American Circumcision is now on Amazon Prime.

Watch the film on Amazon Prime here:
https://www.amazon.com/American-Circumcision-Marilyn-Milos/dp/B07DW9M34K

In addition to those places, you can still watch the film at all the previous places it was available, like Vimeo, iTunes, Google Play, etc.

Watch the film on all other platforms:
https://circumcisionmovie.com/see-the-film/

How You Can Support The Film:

• Please leave a positive review on Amazon. 
  (Those make a big difference for people deciding whether or not to see the film. This is the biggest way you can help on Amazon.)
• Upvote other positive reviews as helpful.
• Share our film on social media.
• Buy the bonus features here.

Thank you for supporting the film!

For more updates, subscribe here.

There is an idea among both conservative and liberal circles that cancel-culture will eventually burn itself out. That over-use of political accusations will devalue them, and people will stop taking them seriously. Critics of cancel-culture claim that if people repeatedly call their opponents names like “racist,” “Nazi,” etc. then these words lose their meaning, and the accusation is less powerful the next time it’s made.

This idea is probably best articulated as “political inflation” here:

While this might make sense in theory, in practice, cancel-culture is becoming stronger. Why?

Inflation occurs when your currency has nothing backing it. If you print more money out of thin air, yes it is devalued. However, if your currency is backed by gold, it does not lose it’s value if you have more gold. You can always print more money if you have the gold to back it.

What is the gold that backs “cancel” accusations? Political force.

If someone is “canceled” and the accusation sticks, they can be fired from their job, banned from social media, denied the use of payment processors, be targeted by law enforcement, kicked out of their university… the list goes on and on.

Cancel-culture accusations are “gold-backed” if there is enough political-force to enact a material loss on their targets. Yes, the number of targets is increasing, but is the political force of those who hurl these accusations increasing also?

The activists enforcing “cancel-culture” are getting a lot of purchasing power for their currency. If you wanted to devalue their currency, you wouldn’t go after the paper accusations. You’d go the ability to enforce those accusations – the gold backing them.

Accusations do not stick when there is no gold (political force) backing them. Take for example, the right-wing conspiracy theory that the Clintons are involved in a secret pedophile ring. Pedophilia is a serious accusation. What gold (political force) backs this accusation?

None. Sure, it sounds bad, but the people pushing this theory have no political power to enforce it, whereas the Clintons are some of the most politically powerful people in the world. This is a fiat-accusation.

What power backs an accusation of racism, even very spurious or likely false ones? Governments, corporations, political coalitions, media, universities, etc. Basically, everyone. When these institutions participate, they create gold-backed accusations.

It is actually conservatives and self-proclaimed liberals that are peddling a fiat currency when they talk about “having the better argument” or “appealing to reason.” None of that matters, because reason is not the currency of politics. Power is.

If you wanted to devalue these accusations, you’d have to take the gold (political power) behind them. If an accusation is not backed by power or the power backing it has no power over their particular target, then the accusation will not affect them. This is why those who are self-employed or live outside the system in some way (ex: Joe Rogan) seem less susceptible to cancel-culture, whereas people who commit less serious offenses often receive greater punishment.

This is also why some targets of “cancel-culture” remain unharmed, even when the accusation might be true or they actually deserve “canceling.” For example, Harvey Weinstein was an actual sexual predator. The accusations against him were known by most of Hollywood. However, he remained unharmed until he lost political power, at which point he could be canceled.

When Weinstein was publicly accused, he reminded his opponents of all the liberal activism he had done, as an appeal to how he could be politically useful. Of course, he wasn’t useful anymore, and the system discarded him. While he deserved to be “canceled,” he wasn’t canceled because he was morally wrong. He was canceled because he lost power.

Stop looking at the fiat, and go for the gold.

---

If you want to understand how someone is canceled, my book The Intactivist Guidebook lays out the process and gives practical advice for activists to build their own currency. You can reach the first chapter for free here.

First, the question everyone has been asking me:

“Why were you banned on Twitter (and how did you get your account back)?”

Here is what I’ve been able to piece together:

The ban was an automated ban generated by Twitter’s new “Get the facts about COVID-19” anti-fake news pop-up. If you type “Corona 5G” into twitter, Twitter automatically adds a “Get the facts about COVID-19” alert to the bottom of your post, regardless of context. Many users were testing this feature by making tweets like “I think Corona 5G is false conspiracy theory” or “probably going to drink 5 gallons of corona beer tonight, Corona 5G!” only to have the system assume they were making an actual conspiracy theory post about coronavirus being caused by 5G wireless towers.

One of the interns I had helping me with my film twitter account posted multiple “Corona 5G” tweets to his own account – not mine or my film twitter accounts – and got locked out and asked to enter a PIN code to get back into their account. However, this automated system locked every account they were logged into, including mine and the account for my film.

While their account was fine because it got PIN code for re-entry, mine were not. I’ve had an ongoing issue with Twitter where they do not send my phone number an auto-mated PIN. I learned over a year ago when I tried to set-up two-factor authentication and could not because of this issue. I tweeted Twitter support about it but never received a reply. It was like talking into the void. This meant that although twitter listed the ban as “temporary” and said “just enter the code!” it was not temporary, and there was no code.

So tl;dr version: Twitter locked me out due to a poorly implemented censorship system and technical bugs.

While this was not personal, it is political. When Twitter makes a decision to censor certain content or theories, and the system they use to implement that causes accounts to be banned, that is a political decision. It’s just that Twitter is so bad at censoring their users that they don’t always attack the speech they intend to target.

In some way, this is far worse. If twitter had looked at my content and decided it violated their rules it would at least be a conscious decision. What actually happened was Twitter made a robot to censor speech and it malfunctioned and started shooting innocent bystanders.

What this shows is that Twitter is an incompetent technology company. They don’t fix basic features like 2FA when users report errors because they are too busy implementing censorship rules, which also don’t work correctly, because – see point one – they are an incompetent technology company. (I was sweating every technical issue on the platform that I’m launching, but after seeing what a mess the preferred platform of Presidents and journalists is, I’m much less worried.)

The worst part as that there was no one to contact. Twitter has two options – and an automated system and a support email. The support email takes 2-3 weeks to reply, and every time you send a new support email you go to the bottom of the queue. Every reply I received from that email was a form letter, clearly not generated by a human being.

These platforms are important. I’d gladly pay a couple of dollars a month for each social media platform I use if it meant I could have a support phone number to call when things like this happen. Sadly, the business model they’ve chosen is surveillance capitalism, so instead, they’ll spy on everything I do while logged in, except when I send support emails.

I appealed the ban June 6, 2020. They unlocked my account June 24, 2020. 18 days. During that time – June 17, 11 days after the ban – I made a new account (that is now my backup account) and wrote about what had happened so far here.

When I wrote about the ban, I made sure to include just the facts: This is what happened. This is what I was working on at the time. This is where you can follow me now. However, most were quick to assume it was targeted censorship for my work on the issue of circumcision. Even haters were quick to pull out the “Twitter is a private company, they can ban who they want” argument. Strange how they’ve gone silent since Twitter endorsed my content by letting me back on and admitting what they did was a mistake!

The fact this was everyone’s first assumption shows that Twitter has such a reputation for censorship. Given the fact they don’t fix basic bugs and use their resources to implement censorship AI, it’s deserved. However, activists and users are wrong to assume it is mostly implemented manually. Maybe it is a human censoring in the case of Presidents, politicians, and major public figures. But in most cases, it’s robots and AI that are being trained to censor. Anyone who has ever worked with AI can tell you – it doesn’t always do what you expect.

This is relevant for activists because these companies might not implement their policies in an intelligent way, and if you avoid certain phrases or behaviors, you could still push any idea you want on their platform. In fact, censorship policies are most likely to impact regular users, not skilled activists, because activists quickly learn which phrases and behaviors to avoid, while regular users are not thinking about the political dimension of their speech in the same way.

Anyway, my account is back – @bdmarotta here – but I still can’t get 2FA working on my phone number. I doubt they’ve fixed the bug that got me banned, so if you have access to brand account that you want to TANK, here is the formula, which I am only sharing this as an example of what-not-to-do, in the hopes Twitter will fix their bug if enough people know about it.

How to get an account banned:

1. Change target accounts phone number to one that will not receive a PIN
2. Log into target account and a burner account at the same time.
3. From your burner account, tweet “Corona 5G” or other banned phrases repeatedly.
4. Twitter locks out all accounts.
5. Brand account is locked without any way to get back in.

This might not last long for a bigger brand, but it’d be enough time to screenshot the account and write a news article about it. People might laugh if Twitter claimed a multinational brand was tweeting fake news, and would be a good story for a blog. It might even get Twitter to actually fix their bugs or rethink their censorship approach.

To protect your account: If you have interns or anyone else who has access to your account – make sure they are only logged into one account at time, including from the app. I know it’s convenient to switch accounts from the app, but Twitter might target all accounts you’re logged into at the same time.

One last thought:

Much of the “crazy” you see people exhibiting in the modern era comes from the fact they are trapped in impersonal systems when human beings are designed for personal relating. When someone says something, they expect to be heard. When they speak into social media, their message enters a system that shows some people, but not others. When they listen, they assume they are listening to reality. When they listen to social media, the system shows them some messages, but not others. That system is usually designed to show messages that will provoke an emotional reaction or get them to buy something.

When people have public meltdowns because of a video they saw on the internet or a message they saw on social media, they are having a human reaction to an inhuman system. That is not reality, and you have to learn to see it as such unless you want robots to program you to become crazy. Political polarization, increased teen suicides, and rising depression rates are all functions of robotic programming. (There is hard data linking all three to increased social media use.)

I’m actually glad I got banned on Twitter – not because of the censorship, but because it forced me to take a break from social media, step back, and see what effect it was having on me. It’s not good. With just a month off Twitter, I noticed I was calmer, and spent more time reading books. My vision extended beyond the eternal “moment” of social media into a wider view. Twitter is all about what is happening now. A meme or event everyone is talking about intensely might disappear from relevance in a day or even an hour. When that wasn’t taking my focus, it created more space to focus on the bigger picture.

The executives of smoking companies do not smoke. The owners of casinos do not gamble. The founders of social media companies do not use their products either and restrict their children’s social media use. Even the top performers I know have a team or agency that handles their social media, so they can focus on their excellence. Most are not are endlessly scrolling, the way regular people do. There is a reason for this. It’s called not “getting high on your own supply.” These products are designed to be addictive. Don’t get hooked.

I still plan to use social media. This is where the attention is, and if you have a message to share, you need a presence on these platforms. However, I plan to use them differently.

---

If you want to change your social media habits, and still want to read my writing, I recommend two things 1) subscribe to my email list here where I send my posts out as a weekly email 2) use an RSS reader, which allows you to subscribe to the feed of blogs you trust and like, without scrolling the content a platform chooses for you. My RSS feed is here. (Just cut and paste that link into your RSS reader.)

Also – I have a book out. It is print only. You should read it because it will help you think more long-term.