what made me askeered?
Category: General
at last, a white perspective on Black Hammer
You may or may not be familiar with the American anti-imperialist org “Black Hammer,” a political group that’s become an enduring object of obsession to a number of loud so-called leftists online.
In their own words, Black Hammer is “a revolutionary mass organization dedicated toward building a sustainable future for all colonized people worldwide.” While I’m no authority on them or anything else, I would lazily characterize them as a Black autonomist group with an anticolonial focus.
The reason I am writing about Black Hammer, and the reason a lot of people have heard of them, is because they’re a grassroots revolutionary organization that embraces and exploits online viral notoriety and the concept of themselves as a brand. They’ve built awareness of their organization in large part via cultivating pious outrage among whites.
Their most visible member calls himself “Commander in Chief,” but I suspect the “Commander in Chief” title is largely a troll meant to trigger outsiders, including anti-authoritarians like myself.
There is plenty I admire about Black Hammer, including their viciousness and the way they seem to feed off normie disapproval. To whatever degree they are in practice an authoritarian cult, I suppose I myself disapprove, but I also don’t think it’s useful or productive for members of the oppressor class– a white guy born in the USA– to tell the historically marginalized how they should be fighting for their liberation.
Thus I can comfortably set aside my own reservations about the market-competition/scarcity model that seems to drive Black Hammer’s attempts to elevate their own profile and instead say their lateral strikes against what they see as their brand competitors (e.g. “antifa”) remind me of the parable of the situationist text bound in sandpaper to obliterate the books shelved on either side.
Society, to the degree such an entity exists, is defined via violent enforcement of social and ideological norms. Society cannot exist without boundaries, and those boundaries are set and defended by members who police the social borders. Take the witch out into the woods and burn her! Punish the freak to prove you’re not a freak. The defining drive of any “society” is to exile and/or discipline the nonconformist.
Because the world is an irredeemable catastrophe, there can be said to exist online societies, including various first-world “left” social constituencies patrolled by podcasters, twitterers, redditors, video-makers and other vile nonentities who build their clout by dunking on or mocking those with whom they disagree. It’s basic middle-school playground stuff.
It was within that particular pseudopolitical abattoir I first saw Black Hammer using social media to elevate their profile, back when “jules bentley” was on twitter. Black Hammer put out a video where their Commander in Chief was complaining about Antifa while wearing joker facepaint, a spectacle which titillated a lot of bored online commentators:
@blackhammer_org show up with those reparations ???????? #fyp #spiritual #wee #foryoupage #viral #xyzbca
Despite my primal urge to side with anyone wearing joker facepaint and screaming, I wasn’t moved by their defense of “small business.” I was however intrigued by the vehemence with which Black Hammer was castigated: the mockery from whites especially had a frantic, almost superstitiously frightened urgency I hadn’t often seen outside places like kiwi farms or the whatever-chan message boards.
When Black Hammer successfully located a patron saint of “western” society to shit on, the controversy around them exploded. To spare myself speaking for them, here’s their take on Anne Frank.
Outcries over Black Hammer’s insufficient obeisance– some might say their gleeful disrespect– towards an icon of wronged innocence dwarfed anything that had come before. It blazed up, seemed to dwindle to embers, and then a few months later would rekindle as another wave of *~decent people~* took the bait and responded or quote-tweeted outrage over Black Hammer’s iconoclasm.
We’ve seen the far-right fringes successfully weaponize rejection of respectability politics, using mockery of mainstream pieties to attract adherents and build momentum. Could a leftist org do the same? These stunts certainly gained Black Hammer online attention, though a lot of it was narrowly sectarian: white socialists and the softer shades of communist kept the Black Hammer name in circulation by striving (via vilifiation and ridicule) to distinguish themselves from this disreputable cadre of nonwhites.
Wow, can you believe what Black Hammer said about Karl Marx? Look at this outrageous meme they made criticizing him! What I noticed, over and over, was that these virtuous white leftists seemed strangely manic in their eagerness to “dunk” on Black Hammer. If one didn’t know better, one might suspect these deliriously happy honkies were actually longing to attack self-organization efforts by marginalized people, and felt, with Black Hammer’s edgy dismissal of a famous holocaust victim, that permission had finally been granted. The floodgates had opened.
As the latest flare-up intensified, Black Hammer “leaked” a purported internal document indicating that the controversy was a calculated component of a long game:
I tend to think the fact we’re seeing this strategy guide at all is part of a larger psych-out, which is fine. Whether or not I buy that everything was part of some master plan from the very beginning, I’m curious whether the confluence of brand-building with revolutionary movement building will work. Can outrage-attention gained within the online attention economy be used for anything other than further entrenching the primacy of the online? Can that currency be converted?
In a reductive analysis, what Black Hammer’s attempting is not unlike when someone’s tweet goes viral and they post a link to their earnest little etsy shop as a reply, trying to capitalize on the fleeting notoriety.
If one is seeking followers, one must meet the potential recruits where they’re at, so it makes sense for any membership org to be tweeting, reeling, tik-toking and so on. The question is to what degree, if any, this investment of energy online pays off.
While I don’t want to set up a strawman of online-only political organizing, we do know the platforms themselves benefit disproportionately from the content we feed them. For every 300 spotify plays, the musician gets a dollar. For every 1000 youtube ads watched, the creator gets five bucks. For every 100 RTs of a stultified liberal going “OMG can u believe they said fuck anne frank” is there a jaded zoomer who might find “bleach demon” a funny phrase and donate a dollar to the Black Hammer gofundme?
The arguable biggest test of the White Tears tactic arrived this week, a year-plus since the original Anne Frank tweets. Fox News, a media empire built on stoking reactionary outrage among (senile) white idiots, saw fit to elevate Black Hammer and their fundraising efforts: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/anne-frank-diary-burned-black-hammer-bleach-demon
It’s been 72 hours since Fox News posted a direct link to the Black Hammer gofundme, and in that time only $750 has rolled in. Maybe I’m too materialist; maybe my cynicism about organizations’ fixations on finances reflects something about me. The Black Hammer strategy guide doesn’t emphasize making money, only people “engaging with [their] brand.”
Still, even if one accepts the noetic dominance of “branding” terminology and framework, the language of brands is money; making money is how brands succeed or fail. Black Hammer speaks of controlling the narrative, but my fear would be that the online/branding realm is an artificial environment, as tightly controlled as a casino: when the chips are down, the house owns the chips.
In conclusion, technology bad.
eating ten extremely expired lara bars
will give you gas
a change of scenery
do you like rock climbing? i love it. it’s exceptionally easy for me since i am actually only eyes and hands and nothing else. i’m like some spooky VR visitor– a floating perception point isometrically flanked by clumsy reality-manipulators. that’s all! it would be rude to contradict me; only a churl would point out the sagging mass of of meat and pain– undifferentiated, amoebic meat and pain– that dangles unflatteringly below and between.
anyhow my latest achievement as a climber is summiting (as we in the ascensionist lifestyle call it) a bottomless pit of paralyzing despair. now i am basking, positively marinating, wallowing like a pig in shit in the refreshingly distinct paralyzing self-disgust that saturates the immediate epiabyssal environment.
what a refreshing vacation from paralytic despair– to taste again the mighty and tireless honed pendulum that reigns here above. its every swipe nonfatally bisects me; my capacity for this repetitive savagery is positively promethean! yes, now that i can think a little, and see a little, i can at last think and see what a worthless piece of shit i am. the howling fourth-dimensional winds of the inner void have quieted for the mo’, and i am permitted to contemplate the blasted moonscape they’ve carved out of that material from which is more typically formed, in the cases of less excitingly broken people, a life.
dragging myself painstakingly out of the hell western medicine might deem “depression” is itself quite hellish i find… because down in the pit, where (when) it’s bad enough that i am unable to do anything, including think or understand, i am at least semi-unaware of myself. now alas, like a drunkard after a binge, i must confront the wreckage i have wrought in my self-indulgent rampage… i am exiled from the eden of paralytic despair.
back when i had the attention span for it, i used to watch anime. yes, debased and pathetic a pasttime as it is, anime falls into the category of things i used to enjoy but have lost capacity for. among the things i enjoyed about anime was the nanobot-like way in which it could apparently consume anything: any story, any legend, any cosmology, ideology, or historical event, any religion, any activity, and make anime out of it. anime is like some primitive engine that can run on gasoline, or alcohol, or fryer grease, interchangeably… it’s omnivorous. the entire world is grist for its mill, and whatever it consumes simply becomes anime.
similarly to how anime as a medium absorbs everything, i find that psychologically, any perception or truth or experience only feeds my despair and revulsion.
trying to bootstrap myself out of hell reminds me of going through a twisted version of the lacanian theory of infant psychological development, with this ascent into self-hatred being the “mirror phase” — which i understand to be, in lacanian theory, the point at which the infant begins to conceive of itself as a discrete entity, a being among beings.
disclaimer: i don’t pretend to understand lacan or rly care about his ideas or their significance. they’re just fragments for me to toy with and recombine.
something lacan did seem to get more right than some others is his rejection of linear time, in the sense that he posits “retroaction,” meaning a sort of hindsighted comprehension: an overlaying of contemporary understanding onto past events.
in my own depressive re-infancy, at the point at which i am finally capable of, say, shaving or making food, i am treated then to the merciless clarity that i have just spent X days lying in bed doing nothing, for no good reason other than that i’m fucking stupid.
this epistemological apperception (if you will) is the pendulum sweeping ceaselessly over the pit.
the fertile grave
i experienced what i would call radical liberation– the wild exponential flowering of possibility– when i accepted that there was nothing in this world for me. no happiness, no affinity, no satisfaction.
this liberation was not epiphanic. it’s a practice, a process. it is that most holy act, refusal: rather than a single positive assertion of will, a cultivated assertion of unwillingness.
the refusal manifests as stopping pretending, ceasing to lie to myself about my prospects and (most importantly) turning my back on the infinite vanishing promise of some happier future, that grand bet against which i’ve already hedged a lifetime of present moments.
a hard habit, the habit of stabbing each moment in turn on the gruesome altar of future joy: tricky to kick.
Continue reading “the fertile grave”
a disquisition on R’s ass
when we study R’s ass– when we speak of R’s ass– the ass is of course intrinsically of R– literally, mechanically constituent to R– but nevertheless, due to its legendary magnetism and conceptual power, also an almost ontologically externalized aspect of R, a phenomenon unto itself, this extreme… scenario they’re toting around.
of course the immediacy of R’s ass that confronts us is the cheeks, oxymoronically plush and steel, as expressive as eyebrows; each cheek faceted and yet perfectly, improbably round, like a video-game boulder. the cheeks tho “hot” in the colloquial sense are often cool to the touch, unless they’ve recently been slapped or squeezed– unless they’ve been roughly treated, perhaps because that bad lil ass has been spanked, in which case they blush coyly– in which case a fever-warmth rises from them, the ivory marble blossoming into a sunrise of streaky cerise.
Continue reading “a disquisition on R’s ass”
about the author
I see the crystal vision / I keep my visions to myself