<nettime> Internet Writing: How to Win the Midterms and Check US Autocracy

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Campaign season never ends in the US, but for 2026 it's really getting into full stride.

The Drumpf agenda, having steamrolled every guardrail, is now barreling toward a third term, giant triumphal arcs, and ongoing military extremes sans oversight.  If it ain't fascism, it sure looks a lot like fascism-lite, and on every legitimate ranking of democracy the nation has reverted to pre-civil-rights-era levels.  Call it back to the fifties.

So everyone is sad, the good people anyway, but we lack the levers of power to oppose the Regressive Movement.

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But wait: what about Internet Writing?  Yes the internet carries music, pictures, videos, and surveillance, plus gambling, but it carries writing too and has since early times.  Hopes were once very high for internet writing, to build on all the good writing that had gone before and even add new value, but today AI-GPT, swiping left and right, and scrolling have ruined those hopes and left them in tatters.

Still, people do continue to write on the internet, or type, a fair amount despite the scrolling and swiping and AI-GPT.  Does this mean "the pen," as it often has been called even since printing presses displaced the quill and nib, retains a role to play?  The magic one of Don Quixote, or the underground jottings of Kafka?  Tokarczuk's "Ognosia"?

Henry James said, “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.”

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Being a sponge, AI-GPT (written entirely in zeroes and ones) has now incorporated the sword unto itself.  None who fail to wield it can do battle with those who succeed.  So, like any good gat or club it shall proliferate like unto bullion literally if not figuratively.  The sword has become AI-GPT, and AI-GPT has become the sword.

Yet arguably the lowly pen is still mightier.  Nay more than arguably: the machine is a blunt instrument always, redolent of oil and lubricity, pretentious and lumbering, having an acrid smell of chemical waste that passes no honest test.  Plus even pragmatically pens are much cheaper than swords, as they have always been, and there are many more of them.  Pens can have truth on their side if they choose.  And no sword no matter how smart, despite being able to copy itself infinitely and destroy at will, can ever rein in all the pens or do what they do.

Pens are voices, and voice is always mightier in its strengths than the destroyer of voice.  The Dalai Lama said, "There must be a way of promoting human values without involving religion, based on common sense, experience and recent scientific findings."

But can this sway the midterms?

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No one can predict.  The US conservative party, having collapsed at demographic scale (not due to immigration, not hardly, but rather intellectual mildew and staleness beyond salvage), has wed its future to a demagogue.  This has resulted in a regime of almost pure sleaze, as every demagogue since ancient Greece has done.

The key factor is accountability (incidentally a written phenomenon in literate societies) and the internet's former potential to support that process has been dismantled or demolished.  The demagogue has always risen to power when a traditional normal political party implodes, having to resort to rule changes and/or burning the room.  The demagogue's essence is impunity, whereby the failed party hopes to reset and reconstitute.

Demagogues can be temporary or terminal.  Since ancient times they have typically been generals or celebrities backed by an oligarch or a group of them.  They are not fun and games, and the US regime of '26 is textbook.  Sleaze is its monarchy, which is to say, it is a hypocrite or as Joyce kindly wrote "a sow that eats her farrow."  Little wonder that "'machines' is their cry."

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So what?  If the SCOTUS wants to throw a midterm election to the Regressive Party it has a hundred easy ways to do so, a thousand in wartime.  They could rubber-stamp martial law and a permanent emergency junta tomorrow if they wished.  There is no higher tribunal.  Yet even their decisions are just words.  They too fear the degradation of their voice to irredeemable levels of servitude.  How far will they go to protect the present demagogue of sleaze?  It depends.

Therefore writers of the internet today, as well as regular paper and print, still have to write or choose not to.  (Some will have that choice made for them, but many will not.)  What to write about?  The sleazy demagogue factor is fundamental, because true, even though it will be thrown back at any messenger and must be parried with determination.  Nicknames of poetic satire are another time-honored vernacular option.  These can just switch a letter or two, or add a well-deserved pejorative:

Dogmire Donny
D-minus Demagogue
Sleazo Drumpf
Elno Mush
Peter the Heel
Dork Schmuckerberg
Jeb Fezos
Tic Mook
Alt Mansam
Misty Krone
Todd Skagbreath
Miffy Schiller

And so on.  Or draw cartoons.

No gadfly ever made its presence felt without a bit of a sting.

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But wait, you say, what about when Drumpf sends troops to your town?  And not for the first time, but again, all summer, and definitely all fall and on Election Day (because being chickenhearted, how could he not)?  Like every beer-cellar belligerent, sending goons is his personal fantasy, dearest wish, and last redoubt.  It's how he has always gotten daddy's bailout, and his allowance: by threatening to wreck up the store and ruin the family name.  It's the demagogue as such ultimately, from time immemorial a scorched earth approach, to tear down every norm and law until you get your way or your walking papers.

Well, let the royal dunderhead do what he thinks is right and best for his reputation and bank account, and let papa SCOTUS take the stain of bailing him out with political hackery to their hearts' content.  They are Joe McCarthy and his HUAC, courtesy of the same Roy Cohn, and they can forsake all democratic and constitutional decency should they see fit.  They will anyway.  I mean, they already pretty much have.

Now it's just like the sixties again: all we can do is call them on it, protest peacefully (especially when provoked), and let the chips of public opinion fall where they may.  The odds favor the pen, which includes phones and whistles.

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How did it go in the sixties?  Well, the people with right on their side marched and spoke out.  They had no power in terms of the sword, none at all, but they had the pen.  They called attention to the severe moral taint of segregation and the human cost of war.  By acting "in times of hope" they stood strong and prevailed, and through the integrity of their actions helped win the First Cold War to boot.

You can argue they didn't prevail, but if their wins hadn't mattered the results wouldn't have been targeted by such a methodical, half-century-long strategy of rollback.  Now it's back to square one again, thankfully probably not zero at least not yet.

For concrete guides forward one can reference Martin Jay's "Trump, Scorsese, and the Frankfurt School’s Theory of Racket Society" (2020) and "Building New Rafts" (2025).  Also of great relevance is Leo XIV's recent "Magnifica Humanitas," with its implicit critique of might makes right, e.g. section 99 which centrally addresses experience as such vis-a-vis AI-GPT (informed by direct collaboration with Anthropic mind you), and section 176 which apologizes for slavery and Dum Diversas (a closely related precedent ironically dated June 18, 1452).  Maybe add in George Grosz's Weimar masterpiece "Pillars of Society," 1926, currently on loan to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, as a visual.

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Whether any story can be told that changes the sleaze-cost calculus for the Regressive Movement's many supporters, be they donors, voters, judges, preachers, or thinkers, remains to be seen.  It's never just a cry of anger that re-weaves the social fabric away from horror and the abyss of war.  Prospero in The Tempest is an interesting example; he was as much a stage director as anything.  Demagogues can be helped to embarrass themselves out of power but much of the work remains their own, so good stagecraft is never amiss.

When asked why they can do better, the demagogue's opponents should also evaluate what they might improve in their own past performance, again like the island wizard had to in the wilderness.  Condemning all faith traditions is preachy and self-defeating; 20th c. theory was riddled with mistakes no longer worth the squeeze; and every complex system (be it economic, cultural, or political) is hybrid.  "Who cares let it all burn" is the demagogue's brand and you will never be able to dislodge it, but it's not worth having anyway.

Where the demagogue's regime has a valid point or a good policy, admit it and offer to partner with conservatives of conscience without the sleaze and demagoguery they too find costly and unsustainable.  In the final analysis the demagogue is an instrument of war and if you want the peace dividend of his retirement from public life you need to help write the peace into reality.

That means considering the 1978 post-Mao reform debate as well, and whether experience is in fact the best criterion of truth.

Yes it's a miracle story but it has to be written, and since it has to it can and will.


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