My Talk at the European Parliament (Patreon)

Last week, I spoke on a panel at the European Parliament in Brussels; “The Internet Left: Progressive Politics in the Digital Age”. Our panel explored the topic of online political subcultures and how the left might compete with the vast influence of the online right. Below, I’ve shared my opening remarks with some additional materials and sources:

I’ve researched and written about “left internet cultures” for over a decade. While the scope of this conversation may seem deceptively small, narrowly focused on the topic of social media, to understand these phenomena we must necessarily branch out to include political economy, history, and the complex fields of aesthetics and memetics that drive human attention across these networks.

First, I should say that I’m speaking to you from the United States and my work has focused mostly on American culture, but hopefully some of these broad insights might be applied here. A macro political trend, the rise of the nationalist right, is taking place across the advanced world. In nearly all countries which saw the peak of a social democratic state in the mid-1970s, we can observe a similar and predictable drift of the electoral constituencies that used to vote in the interests of labor now moving towards right-wing populism. Importantly, these trends precede social media but are now accelerated by it.

Peter Hall, Georgina Evans and Sung In Kim: “Political Change and Electoral Coalitions in Western Democracies”, Cambridge University Press, 2023

My background is in the world of contemporary art. I’m a participating artist in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, I’ve served as a professor of photography and media theory at the Rhode Island School of Design as well as other prestigious universities. I’ve lectured at the Museum of Modern Art and many other institutions across the US and Europe. If a humanities education is useful for anything, it should be to decode and make sense of the powerful online aesthetics that are now shaping political outcomes in the real world.

I began to publish on these topics in 2018 with “Politigram & the Post-left”, a cyber-ethnography of Gen Z memetic subcultures (ages 12 -17). The text explores extremely online politics such as: neoreaction, right and left accelerationism, primitivism, transhumanism, anarcho-capitalism, the alt-right, the post-left, egoism and more. All of these incredibly niche topics have since rapidly moved into the mainstream. As I wrote, some eight years ago, “my interest in exploring this space is to find an online Left that can compete with the social media impact of the Alt-right” (as we called it at that time).

In 2019, I was commissioned by Rhizome, a digital arts organization, to conduct research for “20 Interviews”, featuring in-depth conversations with Gen Z meme posters from across the political spectrum. In 2020-21, I published an audio interview series titled “My Political Journey”, speaking with participants of online political subcultures.

Additionally, I have conducted multiple interviews with Caleb Cain who has been the subject of numerous case studies. Most famously, in 2019, Cain was profiled by journalist Kevin Roose in The New York Times, for “The Making of a YouTube Radical”, and was later a subject of The New York Time’s “Rabbit Hole” podcast. I have also met with and/or interviewed major platform founders, CEOs, as well as Trust & Safety teams to better understand their expert experiences in the field.

During these formative years, a generalized school of thought emerged around the phenomena of online radicalization. Chiefly, among the literature on these topics is the “Alternative Influence” paper published by Becca Lewis at Data & Society (2018) that helped to popularize terms like “pipeline” and “funnel”.

Becca Lewis: p11, “Alternative Influence”, Data & Society Research Institute, 2018

The first response to the phenomena of online radicalization was “de-platforming”. Liberal institutions and platforms would ban or de-prioritize users who published offensive speech. In the most egregious overreach of this strategy, Twitter banned the sitting president of the United States – only for him to return and win the popular vote four years later.

For many years, I have vigorously argued against deplatforming for a myriad of reasons, among them; its second order effects have often resulted in far worse outcomes. In a study published by Jeremy Blackburn and others at Cornell University: “Do Platform Migrations Compromise Content Moderation?” (2020), researchers found that banning problematic message boards led to the founding of third party sites. These new sites concentrated the most dedicated users and resulted in an increase of textual markers for radicalization. As I wrote back in 2018; “Every platform migration thins the herd but those that remain grow more radicalized than ever.”

Importantly, thedonald.win, a third party site founded after the original community was banned from Reddit, became the genesis of the fraudulent 2020 “stolen election” narrative in the US. Despite an unprecedented defamation lawsuit against Fox News, totaling some $787 million dollars, the meme continues to circulate to this day. Through deplatforming, big social media sites offload their negative externalities onto the public. All of us are forced to bear the social costs of the communities they profited from incubating.

Jeremy Blackburn et al.: “Do Platform Migrations Compromise Content Moderation?”, Cornell University, 2020

The second response to the phenomena of online radicalization was “counter-messaging”. In writing and lectures, myself and others have advocated for the left to use recommendation algorithms, funnels and pipelines toward more productive ends. Through the skillful use of content, we can direct viewers toward political action and education.

So what might viewers be directed towards? As was prominently demonstrated by Hasan Piker and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in November of 2020, online creators can amplify and positively impact fundraising. In 2021, Destiny, a popular live-streamer, mobilized his followers to canvas during the Georgia Senate runoffs in the US. On certain days, the streamer turned out more volunteers than the official Democratic Party. Fundraising and door knocking are two clear calls-to-action with proven test cases.

One thing we know for sure is that large online audiences do not translate to the ballot box. In 2016, the civil rights activist and Twitter influencer DeRay Mckesson finished a Baltimore mayoral run with only 2.6% of the vote. In 2019, the right-wing YouTubers Carl Benjamin (AKA Sarkon of Akkad) and Mark Meechan (AKA Count Dankula), both ran for MEP, winning just 3.2% in England’s south-west and 1.9% in Scotland, respectively. In 2020, the Gen Z trucker turned TikTok star Joshua Collins earned less than 1% of the vote in Washington’s 10th district. If election outcomes were purely a product of follower counts then political parties would just recruit major celebrities. But while their audiences may be quantitatively large, their conversion rates are extremely low. In this new media paradigm, we must evaluate the potency of media not on its quantitative reach but on it’s real influence and conversion rates.

Today, there is a growing convergence between media entities and proper political organizations. Under the current design of our communication networks, these groups have already become structurally indistinguishable. We now see the emergence of right-wing para-institutions and pseudo-organizations, such as TPUSA & AFPAC. We should assume that this trend will continue and only grow more influential in the coming years. A third, but yet unproven, implication for the left is to explore new possibilities for para-institutional structures.

However, despite these somewhat optimistic possibilities, earlier this month, I conducted a four hour interview with Natalie Wynn, popularly known as Contrapoints, a YouTube video essayist who is broadly understood to be the most influential creator in the counter-messaging space. Wynn argued that, at scale, the deradicalization project was not successful.

As a strategy, counter-messaging, left-wing funnels and pipelines, inevitably hit “Brandolini’s Law”; an online meme that argues ‘the amount of energy needed to refute disinformation is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it.’ In other words, for every one progressive that we might recruit, the implicit design of social media will produce ten more socially atomized, economically suffering, media addicted subjects who fall prey to the worst possible tendencies. Counter-messaging remains our best line of defense but it is not enough.

Today, I am the host of Doomscroll, a talk show that explores online culture and politics in the 21st century. My guests include the most influential voices in today’s online landscape, such as; Hasan Piker, Ezra Klein, Ro Khanna and many others. I am no longer a researcher on the sidelines of an unfolding cultural phenomena but actively attempting to shape its outcome.

After the failed experiments of the past decade, I believe that we must now move toward the strategy of a “public utility”. These communication networks have long since become an infrastructural necessity for our societies to function. Platforms must be made accountable to their citizens and the public(s) that they serve.

If we hope to use the current design of social media for political education or deliberative democracy, we will once again fall into “Brandolini’s Law”. We cannot get better at marching up impossibly steep terrain. At best, our efforts will wield an order of magnitude less influence than our opposition. At worst, conversations about online left strategy runs the risk of legitimizing a media system that arrived broken.

A 2025 Media Matters study found that 90% of online media was conservative leaning. We are not conversing within a Habermasian digital public square. Privately owned platforms are not a mirror that reflects the political sentiments of the demos. If we do not change the medium through which this speech flows, meaning a wholesale redesign of social media, any temporary solutions will continue to be ineffective.

We also cannot delude ourselves about building private alternatives. The key experiment for this strategy, Bluesky, has a meager 8% of the monthly active users currently on X. The conversation we are having today is precisely what I had hoped to push forward some eight years ago. However, in that time, I have learned that our efforts to better utilize social media, may expend a vital energy that should be harnessed toward the stringent regulation or outright nationalization of these platforms.

Social media should be treated as a public utility or as a digital extension of the postal service. Platforms must be held accountable to citizens. In the short term, it is a meritable effort for the left to utilize these online tools but it remains insufficient in the long term. If we do not seek to get further upstream of this crisis, we may sleepwalk into a disastrous 21st century.