Politigram & the Post-left documents the emergence ca. 2016-2018 of niche online communities that coalesced around anarcho-primitivist, Stirnerite, anti-civ, and eco-nihilist ideologies. This is (somewhat regrettably) salient for me as around the same era I was browsing ideologically adjacent parts of Twitter and reading some of the associated theorists.

First, the good: I think that this kind of internet ethnography is valuable, and Citarella is (or was) one of the only people doing it in an accessible way (it's cool that you can read this online for free). Seeing these memes and discord conversations compiled in one place demystifies them and exposes the degree to which online fringe politics is often just a role-playing/brand-building exercise. Moreover, the semi-chronological organization helps trace the 'media ecology' in which these communities propagated and competed.

The book's thesis is that obscure and poorly-documented online networks are displacing legacy media's role in shaping political identities, and as the Overton window of the latter has contracted that of the former has widened in bizarre directions. Online politics are inherently obscure and have to be traced via diligent analysis of social networks. It's not a mind-blowing insight but it's illuminating to see it documented this way. Compiling these posts must have required tons of legwork in brain-melting group chats and discord servers.

With that said, Citarella is an unimpressive writer. Politigram can't find a sweet spot between being a quasi-academic research article and a chatty blog post. There are enough typos to be annoying and on more than one occasion he ends a sentence with 'lmao'. Since I read it for free on Substack it was fine but the fact that he's selling physical copies of this is embarrassing.

Beyond the editing issues, Citarella's engagement with the ideologies being discussed is disappointingly superficial. Maybe I'm just salty because I wasted time Doing the Reading, but many 'post-left' theorists are worth taking seriously even if the political communities devoted to them are fringe, cringe and/or dangerous. I've come around to roughly the same moderate social-democratic orientation as Citarella but I don't see this book as something that could reliably de-radicalize anyone or grant an outsider genuine insight into the 'post-left'.

So while I appreciate the effort devoted to curating memes and am glad someone is thinking about this, the insights are limited to online media ecology and stop short of meaningful engagement with the observed ideologies. Citarella is a better speaker than writer, so if you're interested in some of these topics but unsure about the book I suggest looking up his talks, podcasts, and interviews instead.

Politigram and the Post-Left

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