7. Murmurations in the swarm: Trolling in the Age of rhizomatic reproduction

Abstract

As identitarian abuse escalates into swarms of online rhetoric, fuelled by sadistic play that is erupting into real-world violence, Pygmalion democracies—fragile systems captivated by their own idealized images—are struggling to manage the cascading internal and environmental crises that they themselves have caused. Contemporary geopolitical powers are increasingly sustaining coherence through the provocation of stochastic terrorism, normalizing swarm behaviours that are intensifying our political atmospheres. These eruptions of violence retrench historic global economic and material hierarchies, dismantling our capacity for vibrant praxis through slow and fast forms of systemic violence. This chapter explores abuse as a metapolitical system, arguing that the symbolic, literal, and interpersonal dimensions of violence reveals both latent and emergent authoritarian superstructures. Through microfascism, intimate supremacist beliefs embed themselves into local power conditions, tightening the grip of state violence. Recognizing abuse as a geopolitical force, I propose revitalizing political engagement by resisting intimate violence, developing strategies to avoid punitive systems altogether. Centring grassroots somatic resistance, I argue for emergent publics rooted in mutual care and alternative practices of relational security. By confronting authoritarianism in both global systems and intimate dynamics, this approach reframes vulnerability as a site of collective power. Pygmalion democracies must move beyond self-mythologizing to embrace praxis grounded in mutuality, enabling strategies of care able to resist authoritarian dominance.

Keywords: microfascism, trolling, murmuration, intersectionality, anarcho-feminism, anti-fascism, praxis, DARVO.

Résumé

Alors que les abus identitaires se transforment en essaims de rhétorique en ligne, alimentés par un jeu sadique qui se change en violence dans le monde réel, les démocraties Pygmalion – des systèmes fragiles captivés par leurs propres images idéalisées – luttent pour gérer les crises internes et environnementales en cascade qu’elles ont elles-mêmes provoquées. Les puissances géopolitiques contemporaines maintiennent de plus en plus leur cohérence par la provocation d’un terrorisme stochastique, normalisant les comportements en essaim qui intensifient nos atmosphères politiques. Ces éruptions de violence rétractent les hiérarchies économiques et matérielles mondiales historiques, démantelant notre capacité de praxis dynamique par des formes lentes et rapides de violence systémique. Ce chapitre explore la violence en tant que système métapolitique, en soutenant que les dimensions symboliques, littérales et interpersonnelles de la violence révèlent à la fois des superstructures autoritaires latentes et émergentes. Par le biais du microfascisme, les croyances suprémacistes intimes s’intègrent dans les conditions de pouvoir locales, resserrant l’étau de la violence étatique. Reconnaissant les abus comme une force géopolitique, je propose de revitaliser l’engagement politique en résistant à la violence intime, en développant des stratégies pour éviter les systèmes punitifs. En centrant la résistance somatique sur la base, je plaide pour des publics émergents enracinés dans le soin mutuel et des pratiques alternatives de sécurité relationnelle. En affrontant l’autoritarisme dans les systèmes globaux et les dynamiques intimes, cette approche recadre la vulnérabilité comme un site de pouvoir collectif. Les démocraties Pygmalion doivent aller au-delà de l’auto-mythologisation pour adopter une praxis fondée sur la mutualité, permettant des stratégies de soins capables de résister à la domination autoritaire.

Mots-clés : microfascisme, trolling, murmuration, intersectionnalité, anarcho-féminisme, antifascisme, praxis, DARVO.

Resumen

A medida que el abuso identitario escala hacia enjambres de retórica en línea, alimentados por un juego sádico que está estallando en violencia en el mundo real, las democracias pigmaliónicas—sistemas frágiles cautivados por sus propias imágenes idealizadas—luchan por gestionar las crisis internas y ambientales en cascada que ellas mismas han causado. Las potencias geopolíticas contemporáneas están cada vez más sosteniendo la coherencia a través de la provocación del terrorismo estocástico, normalizando comportamientos de enjambre que están intensificando nuestras atmósferas políticas. Estas erupciones de violencia refuerzan las jerarquías económicas y materiales globales históricas, desmantelando nuestra capacidad para una praxis vibrante mediante formas lentas y rápidas de violencia sistémica. Este capítulo explora el abuso como un sistema metapolítico, argumentando que las dimensiones simbólicas, literales e interpersonales de la violencia revelan superestructuras autoritarias latentes y emergentes. A través del microfascismo, creencias íntimas supremacistas se incrustan en las condiciones locales de poder, apretando el control de la violencia estatal. Reconociendo el abuso como una fuerza geopolítica, propongo revitalizar el compromiso político resistiendo la violencia íntima, desarrollando estrategias para evitar los sistemas punitivos por completo. Centrándome en la resistencia somática de base, argumento a favor de públicos emergentes basados en el cuidado mutuo y prácticas alternativas de seguridad relacional. Al enfrentar el autoritarismo tanto en los sistemas globales como en las dinámicas íntimas, este enfoque reframa la vulnerabilidad como un sitio de poder colectivo. Las democracias pigmaliónicas deben ir más allá de la auto-mitologización para abrazar una praxis basada en la mutualidad, habilitando estrategias de cuidado capaces de resistir la dominancia autoritaria.

Palabras clave: microfascismo, trolleo, murmuración, interseccionalidad, anarcofeminismo, antifascismo, praxis, DARVO.

The swarm: resisting emergent, reproductive, transformative hate

Increasing interpersonal connectivity in a technologically interpenetrated world is enabling what Han (2017) describes as the merging of public and private into a parasocial spectacular flow. As individualised algorithmic media flows seamlessly interpenetrate our trains of thought, cyborg intra-actions are enacting everyday spectacular content in ways increasingly connected with our own lives. Seemingly pervaded by a sense of unreality—that for many includes a sense of alienation, desperation, and loneliness, the space of a faltering pygmalion democracy has given way to identitarian battles exporting a charged political terrain into our lives and our beds, where polarising swarms of cascading vitriol are erupting into real-world violence. Considering the ominous rumblings of sectarian violence in Orlando (Gleason, 2017), Christchurch (Ibrahim, 2020), Charlottesville (Bigea, 2018), Hanau (Jasser et al., 2020), Oslo and Utoya (Berntzen & Ravndal, 2021), even these incidents are droplets in an ocean of violent mobilisation, where the aesthetics, values, and rhetorics of hate are being displayed in spectacles of targeted geo-political destruction.

In this way, abuse can be understood through an intersectional animist anarcho-feminist approach to power that suffuses the everyday with political life by valuing what we do every day as powerful, vital, and potentially transformative. As a performance artist, meditator, animist, peer listener, and community facilitator, my understanding of abusive dynamics is drawn from the resiliency of grassroots peers and community support approaches to mental health and recovery, and I am able to read intensity in nuanced and creative ways. In addition, in researching online radicalisation and conspiracism as part of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global Citizenship, and Transformative Education media observatory, I have also engaged in a close, detailed, and long-term observation of online radicalisation, including those perspectives on the far-right that are working to radicalise and fragment our social spaces in intentional ways. Along these lines, I am drawing together these reflections into an understanding of the intimate politics of abuse, interpreting this as a dispersed geo-political system.

As multitudes are being starved, mutilated, displaced, and killed as the world watches global accounts of horror emerging from places like Palestine and the Sudan, among many others, the loss of life and the scale of devastation—human and ecological suffering—are almost too immense to comprehend. In the Swarm, Han (2017) suggests that the terror provoked by being isolated in such a world draws people to identify with emergent mimetic behaviours. The desire to be carried away from our troubles enables the masses to become guided by algorithms and bots (Woolley, 2016), who are themselves guided by other invisible and visible hands (Bradshaw & Howard, 2018). Hemmingby & Bjørgo (2018) suggest that pre-existing tensions are being catalysed when meeting with the right internal and environmental conditions. When these conditions can be manufactured, Hamm & Spaaij (2017) say that media communications generate stochastic terrorism by seeding hatred amongst populations who are provoked into identitarian mobilisation against specific groups, thereby causing spontaneous but reasonably predictable eruptions of hate-based interpersonal violent acts. Angrove (2024) suggests that when we shift this term from terrorism to violence, stochastic violence enables us to understand how this can and is being summoned by an authoritarian state apparatus to act out in intimate ways.

When able to be provoked without orders of established hierarchy, the swarm enables forms of radicalisation that can be summoned like forces of nature. In Klein’s (2007) The Shock Doctrine, she explains how those willing and able to seize on the intensity of a disaster are able to ground our shock into new forms of capitalisation. In the case of disaster capitalism, this means manipulating the global public towards destructive political and economic ends for the purposes of profit and power. In this way, moments of grief and disorientation become vulnerabilities to be politically and economically exploited, as we are merely supplied with sufficiently conductive targets for the projection of our misery. The affective mechanics of blame, Marcel (2024) notes, make it easier for us to walk away from the pain we cause others, than the pain that is caused to us. As eruptions of productively channeled violent affects become organised along historic global economic and material matrices of power, artifacts like Project 2025 (The Heritage Foundation, 2024) represent sustained publics (Montgomery, 2024), engaged in the long-term strategic enactment of a nightmare. How can we remain vibrant and connected against a system like that, one that is seeking to undermine our bodily and group autonomy, while we are also pressed to continually resist and repair ourselves from systemised interpersonal symbolic and real, slow and fast violence? In exploring metapolitical approaches to nanopolitics, I argue that our intimacies enable a politics able to recognise oppressive events as representing emergent living patterns, enabling us to tangibly connect with the ways techno-geo-political superstructures pervade our intimacies with abusive values.

When human politics becomes described along the lines of murmuration and swarms, it is perhaps because we are encountering our biological life in the experience of human flows, where our tech-nicised bodies are being channeled in a time of crisis through cultural and communicative affordances in transformative but also destructive and regressive forms of collective action. In attempting to understand the immensity of what must be resisted, we might detect the seeds of supremacist logic in our intimacies and in our bodies. To this end, a grounded ethos of praxis might be one able to balance care and equity with resistance to coercive control.

In a politics of the Anthropocene, authors like Thomas (2016) are exploring the potential of murmuration and swarms as political metaphors describing the complex, mimetic, intra-personal cyborg entanglements of a contemporary technologically infused present. Their frame suggests that it is through “acceptance, rejection or apathy” (p. 155) where political murmuration and swarms are potentiated. The swarm describes interconnected dynamic forms of digital and interpersonal identitarian abuse mobilised through symbolic and real violence. The ability to bravely disrupt such forms of interconnected dominating hate is potentiated as we permeate space itself with those qualities antithetical to violence. Learning how to describe the nano-political real-world touchy-feely intersections of real and symbolic violence is what potentiates the development of practices resistant to distributed forms of reproductive hate, enabling the detection and persistent understanding of even implicit and veiled supremacist interpersonal values and ideals. In maintaining an open awareness to what Bourdieu (2001) calls “symbolic violence” we might begin to listen for the cues of distributed authoritarian values that wield cultural, social, and symbolic systems to obscure, confront, invalidate, dispute, or otherwise destabilise the realities of the vulnerable, who are being targeted for ideological reasons.

Symbolic violence inevitably impacts the nanopolitical in our “our everyday politics, organising and activism, friendships and relationships, collective processes, professionalised lives and workplaces” (The Nanopolitics Group, 2012) in the ways our everyday lives make up who and what we are, including what we mean to one another. Potentiating other forms of environments able to respond to freedom in ways other than Fromm’s (xii) “escape from freedom” or what Oesterreich (2005) calls the “flight into security” (p. 282), we might potentiate intra-active responses to what Cicuta (2023) calls intimate authoritarianism by understanding the ways interpersonal abuse reflects broader systems of interpersonal oppressive devaluation. Grounding practices of sharing and processing actual somatic embodied experiential discomforts and forms of gaslighting and disorientation, I argue that our communities are already engaged in interrupting our separation from one another, directly potentiating resistance to transformative forms of reproductive hate. In other words, by learning about and teaching each other how to recognise and unlearn the inheritances of supremacist ideologies, we are healing by turning away from exclusionary values and practices, centring instead those of the communities and worlds we want to share with one another.

It is more important than ever to systematise the de-radicalization of our spaces by protecting and furthering the project of justice for all. In this way, our collective madness and debility might ground our spaces by centering the bodies of occupied, unsettled, migratory, unhoused, and terrorised, of women, racialized, queer, and trans people, as potential archives and imprints of systems of abuse, happening in regularised and predictable ways.

Weaponizing chaos: microfascist trolling and the norming of hate

Glorying in the heart of this chaos is an entangled flow of both real and algorithmic internet trolls who feed and grow from our uncertainty and confusion, leveraging the breakdown of a shared truth to destabilize progressive discourses and assert the regressive illiberal ideals of an inflexible and self-centred minority. As the global political landscape continues to swing to the right—and perhaps straight off a cliff into an unknown abyss—renewed nationalisms are becoming enmeshed with the gendered, religious, and political practices pervading our norms with a set of supremacist ideologies, codifying a new and growing set of scapegoats.

Supremacist trolls are becoming drawn into a stochastic field, where violence tends to emerge by interfering with ideological values that conflict with the superstructure, especially if these interrupt the establishment of collective safety and agency. Attempting to maintain a sense of sanity and friendship as media flows creep into the slow and fast absorption of our attention, multiplying neoliberal sites of retreat and insulation—as well as objectification, instrumentalization, commodification, resulting in the toxic ironisation and normalisation of hate—media tech giants are battling nation-states for market share over our dreams and political futures. In this climate, trolling has evolved from an online nuisance into a sophisticated tool of ideological disruption. While traditionally understood as the purview of lonely basement dwellers engaged in impulsive and disruptive forms of sadistic linguistic and symbolic play, contemporary forms of trolling align with more deliberative strategies seeking to destabilize progressive power structures, using a malleable new class of scapegoats (Stella et al., 2018; Uyheng et al., 2022; Uyheng & Carley, 2020; Virtosu & Goian, 2023) to consolidate meaning and power amongst a growing totalitarian collective.

Such collectives are especially aggrieved by those symbolic cultural tokens that holonically interrupt those publics, movements, practices, or identities that trigger the insecurity of a system needing to reliably reproduce its own supremacy. The symbols and values that distribute power amongst the masses are what most threaten the project of securing the world order. As the reproductive seeds of holonic superstructures are interrupted by destabilized media infrastructures, out-of-control technological innovation and changing unstable geo-political power relations, mean that local cultural practices, symbols, and methods of communication can and do return in emergent ways that fail to reproduce the power of authoritative hierarchy. These murmurations are resistant to the interruption of our lives. Yet as interruptions become geo-politically systematised and weaponized through techno-somatic intersections designed to exhaust and debilitate us—by undermining our ability to connect—swarms of hate can seed our lives with momentary instances of hateful touch that zap our will to live, indicating real sites of symbolic violence that are able to become geo-politically mobilised.

Seemingly inexhaustible forms of emergent, reproductive, and transformative hate have literal and real material proportions that are already known to us in the ways human beliefs and values enable a select few to remain unalienated from rigid identitarian hierarchies, established and maintained through networks of fearful, anxious, and angry “denial, projection, repression, and affect displacement” (Jost, 2019, p. 710). In the chaos of social and cultural fragmentation, humans and algorithmic intersections are merely part of an ongoing relational flux where every iterative meeting causes subtle shifts of frame that occur so slowly or so quickly that they often escape notice. Shifts to the global Overton window are being influenced by informational warfare (Lopez Jr. et al., 2021), rooted in material flows systematizing the erosion of direct democratic possibilities. In forgetting how to reproduce feelings of belonging and a sense of common purpose amongst one another, many of us are left to face an illiberal public sphere (Bennett & Kneuer, 2024) alone, not able to progress discourses of justice while facing both symbolic and real violence in systematic and repeated ways that impede our stability.

In other words, our abusers are regularly escaping accountability on both interpersonal and geopolitical scales (Hersh, 2013). Through our practices and beliefs, illiberal authoritative abusive interpersonal dynamics represent broader identitarian power struggles (both home-grown and manufactured) that are increasingly operating through “public–private authoritarian partnerships” (Glasius, 2018, p. 517). With our attention absorbed in such an interconnected flow of spectacularly violent interpersonal content, even seemingly benign normative values can serve ideological goals when they enforce constructed norms that practice the devaluing of deviance (Davis, 1995). In this way, Bratich (2022) describes how microfascism puts into practice a broader set of identitarian constructs, such as gender, sexuality, race, and nationality, to perform dominance as a method of seeking security and belonging during a time when so many of us are feeling vulnerable and afraid. As social media platforms increasingly fracture our communications into “echo-systems” these can intensify the discourses of alienation by rebounding us through iterative interpersonal depth, in ways that permeate alternate facts with individually tailored details drawn from our real interactions (Cohen, 2018). In this way, new forms of supremacy are also swarming us in our everyday lives, engaging and surrounding us with increasingly normalised forms of interpersonal abuse that are being increasingly mobilised into swarms (Wu & Ye, 2023), where guerrilla style emergent far-right tactics (Cesarino & Nardelli, 2021) are able to exploit the breakdown of discourse to further the agendas of power, seeking to dominate not just our conversations but the cultural zeitgeist itself.

Abuse is the germ of an identitarian system of violence

Abuse provokes the formation of power through domination. When able to band together to systematize abuse through identitarian beliefs, swarms can diffuse an ideological environment rife with mimetic forms of symbolic violence, where implicit relational positions of inferiority are constructed and reproduced through harmful slogans like “your body my choice” (Tolentino, 2024), able to trigger waves of mimetic hate and interpersonal harm. When considering the practices of abuse as a form of mimetic identitarian politics, microfascism considers relations in a metapolitical way, connecting our experiences of intimate partner abuse with other similarly abusive forms that consolidate social power for a totalitarian collective. These roots emerge material power structures like techno-feudalism (Varoufakis, 2024) in new environments where states and corporations are collaborating to escalate their productivity towards accelerationist ecocidal ends. When we consider the ubiquity and normalcy of abuse, we might also consider how disrupting abusive and carceral dynamics remains strategically important in the face of unjust processes of authority and control.

When marginalization is considered a system of cumulative alienation, produced by abuse formed out of the interruption of life, a control society (Deleuze, 1992) pervades space itself with a flow of dehumanising and violent spectacular content serving to consolidate supremacist interpersonal dynamics by solidifying social control against a common enemy (Eisenman, 1965). Operating through both traditional and emergent forms of power and authority, the base of power for a supremacist social order is provided by emergent social alliances. These instrumentalize a fluid set of tools, repurposing mythic identity constructs by crystallising them into a new set of interpersonal prejudices whose practices form the lattices of a system of hierarchical authoritarian control. This is established and regulated through regular soft and fast, hard and slow, real and symbolic, technological and interpersonal violence. In this way, we might understand that aggression is not microscopic when encountered in our interpersonal spaces. Thus, the threat of stochastic violence remains environmentally potent. In this way, I would like to highlight how symbolically violent values become fully realised in our embodied experience of aggression, as abuse becomes somatically ground into the bodies of the aggrieved.

Moving between Deleuze and Guattari’s (1989) A Thousand Plateaus and Bratich’s (2022) On Microfascism, this can be defined as a specific molecular mimetic social germ of domination, a germinal seed able to reproduce hierarchy in a vast array of environments and conditions. When applied through coercive force, supremacist hierarchical authoritative beliefs employ the mythic structures of their contexts. Thus, national, military, and identitarian values present matrices of power that can be inhabited and repurposed, where cultural capital and material infrastructures can become exploited for nefarious ends. We experience this fascism by interacting during supremacist moments in our ordinary spaces. Often, we know exactly when these moments are happening and may even already be engaged in resisting oppression in direct ways, even when we may or may not have words for it.

As practices of sadistic domination are often pleasurable for those in power, the image of this pleasure also offers a lure for those who might be tempted to flee towards security by forming a common positionality with power. In becoming a fascist, the slavish, inflexible loyalty to the authority of an ideal power (in whatever form this takes) is what adheres identities to the fascistic meme. This adherence is strengthened, as regularised sadistic joy becomes systemic and thus reproductive. In happening again and again, the payoffs of systemic domination become a supremacist way of life. If we can form the words to describe these practices, our collective forms of life might benefit, as we share this knowledge with one another. Being present for the practical realisation of abuse, the authoritarian ideal becomes resisted in our specific spaces by resisting harm. By failing to locate or create superiors and inferiors, we also fail to symbolically inscribe this display of value through our own bodies, thereby refusing to mimetically reproduce those same values that have most maimed us. As particular in-groups support and expand the domination of a fluid, unproductive out-group, trolling forms of microaggression define the margins by enabling a limited collective to substantiate its power, disrupting those with the power to overcome it from forming safety and agency.

In this way, the vulnerable become materials to be enacted upon to reestablish feelings of safety and agency for the supremacist collective. In this same way, the practice of systematic disruption echoes the practices of colonialist settlement by continually expanding the territory of the ideal collective, valorising the colony and with it an exclusionary authoritarian superstructure that appeals to those who might become one with its value. By practicing symbolic and actual violence on a set of identified scapegoats, this common purpose adheres a supremacist collective into a shared identity that is nonetheless unstable and prone to failure. In our current geopolitical climate, the escalation of supremacist values interlaces emergent forms of rhizomatic identitarian politics, where abuse is hardening under collective forms of oppression as part of the competitive devaluation process of capitalist materialism. As this adheres to hyper-local white-supremacist, patriarchal, and ableist norms, the seeds of hatred can be subtle, seemingly born from moments when the coldness of our hearts is unable to respond to the misery of those close-by. Thus, supremacy dynamics form into crystallizations through interpersonal abuse, reflecting the regularised dynamics of violence stochastically produced by an engulfing culture of spectacular hate. The specific form that this abuse takes on therefore becomes defined by whatever interpersonal hegemony is the most uniquely powerful here.

How Microfascism Norms Abuse

Considering the negative impressions left by a system of power with such profound agency to intervene in our own lives and bodies, we might recognise that our successful disruptions of coercive dynamics provide a potential archive of anti-abusive, anti-supremacist, and anti-authoritarian logics and strategies. Work like Freyd’s (1997) that explores strategies for resisting abuse can thus help us to understand how these dynamics become holographically reproduced in the systemic repetitive disruption of our feelings of safety and agency, practiced in familiar ways on a massive geo-political scale. This systemisation reveals how our personal experiences of abuse are being replicated through symbolic and then real violence that both supports and originates that abuse, co-constituting this harm through the creation and replication of symbolic powers rooted in materiality through abusive interpersonal dynamics of identitarian domination and submission.

Using this as a framework for understanding how abuse and fascism intersect, I turn to explore Bataille and Lovitt’s (1979) fascist psychology that ascribes fascism to the obsession with a tight order of productive social homogeneity that enables fascist norms to maintain exclusive identitarian power by violently disciplining or erasing elements falling outside of the dominant productive social order. Fascism, therefore, first proposes the symbolic violence of an identitarian order and then turns towards physically interrupting the processes of safety and agency of identified scapegoats, where the value of this interruption is in how it becomes rooted in our bodies through the trauma of witnessing and experiencing supremacist violence. These same strategies then enable the suppression of any social response to the interruption of our safety and agency. By interpreting and vilifying any reaction to our disruption, abusive tactics wield privilege to reinforce self-referential authoritarian structures while also dispelling and mystifying any accountability for past transgressions. Thus, the matrix of an abusive authority thrives on an ever-expanding saturation of capitulation to this proposed inversion of power.

Yet, when we give over self-agency to an increasingly centralising and chaotic form of authority, bids of loyalty to this proposed order must buy-into this alliance by mimicking sadistic power-play in creative ways, where the mobilisations of grassroots fascistic or authoritarian power become iteratively sifted and consolidated into political orders, where high-control groups can then astroturf their own rigid cultural values that form into an emergent collective of coercive dis-inclusion. Colonial systems are similarly designed from cultural logics that enable systems of cultural coercion to become systemised through interpersonal intimate forms of abuse, creating a foundation of dehumanisation meant to destroy communal life (Woolford & Gacek, 2016). Deep forms of cultural erasure are then able to pass the lessons of domination through the trauma remembered between generations (Bombay et al., 2014) and that, when considered as a whole, a system of abuse is also a form of cultural genocide (Kingston, 2015).

Bratich (2022) argues that the reproduction of marginalization through symbolic violence is rooted in our everyday practices, which become microfascist when reinforcing hierarchically exclusionary systems of violent carceral power. At the site of our bodies and through our identities, when trolling becomes aligned with authoritarian values, an unnamed mimesis of somatic strategies enables supremacy to operate across multiple domains—social, economic, and psychological—to enforce heterogeneity. At the core of this meme is the belief that natural hierarchies entitle those in positions of power to exploit and dominate those unable to defend themselves from that power, where being exploitable becomes a marker of exploitability and thus inferiority.

Authoritarian systems construct power from this circuitry by forming a nostalgic past that never existed, where abusers are freed from accountability, able to contradictorily deny the existence of even the very recent past to those who have just actively experienced it. Stealth authoritarianism (Varol, 2014) is unmasking how the powerful can co-opt the mechanisms of the state to achieve illiberal ends, where an aggrieved politic is attempting to take back historic sites of power, through public-private partnerships of coercive exploitation and sadistic interpersonal abuse. In the escalation of these dynamics, those who have already been marked as unworthy of dignity or protection, who were already carbon for the furnace of capitalist industry, are now being slated to burn. The strategies of abuse engage systematically in disabling the rebalancing of power after the scale has already been tipped, interrupting the ability to return to a state of safety and agency.

After experiencing the intensity of violation, weaponizing a victim’s emotional responses to this state enables abusers to systematise their destabilisation, thereby enshrining their access to coercive labour. Through simple systems, abusers can prevent their ‘inferiors’ from regaining their balance, destroying the potential for a mutual discursive space of reality-validation ever to form. Feminist responses to abuse can thus provide important memes of resistance, where Freyd’s (1997) concept of DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) is shared widely in online recovery spaces, presenting a dynamic of abuse that can be responded to. This recognisable tactic is commonly employed by abusers to deflect accountability when their victims react to their abuse or attempt to redress violations and ruptures in the relationship. Engaging in deflection enables the navigation of systemized mechanisms like DARVO to reveal how defensive reactions can become entangled with forms of microfascist trolling. When a perceived inferior seeks equity, the vulnerable party reacts to being harmfully impacted. DARVO harms again and again by denying the experience of harm as disorderly. As the victim struggles with this denial of disorder, the aggrieved are kept on the defensive. As the abuser claims victimhood for themselves, they use the reactions of their victims as tautological evidence of their disorder. Yet, in perceiving the enactment of domination as correct, DARVO maintains power relations by denying the harm of their social “inferiors.” To play the troll game, we centre and amplify the game. The trick is to disrupt the power play strategically, by remaining undisrupted, continually making bids to return to a state of equanimity, if only we might resist harming one another. In refusing to normalize the harm of marginalized people, our soft persistence can resist this norm.

By quashing the seeds of supremacy and empowering the oppressed in their/our resistance, we might consider how abuse is interdependent with systems of power. Through the lens of microfascism, our confrontations with abusive power also disrupt the perpetuity of supremacist dynamics by continually reasserting the authority of the dominated, starting with the space of our bodies. When applied to online trolling, microaggressions reveal how networked systems are able to systematically disrupt the peace and stability of targeted identity groups by reinforcing recognizable systems of oppression in recognisable and simple to mimic ways. Microaggressions describe the tactics of inferiorization that represent systems of supremacist belonging, engaged in the inscription of symbolic and real violence, both symbolically and actually deployed through cultural and interpersonal means to install and elevate authoritarian ideals through the systematic infliction of regularised trauma. This enables a supremacist interpersonal mimetic superstructure to protect and practice symbolic and real violence in ways that provide feelings of belonging for a so-called ‘elect’, where selective discrimination is what potentiates feelings of selective safety and agency. A form of supremacist group membership engages in power for the collective by undermining other sources of power, operating outside the established limits of group authority.

Abuse works in similar ways by harmfully perpetuating asymmetrical power dynamics, where networked forms of supremacy can culturally reinforce asymmetrical power as both an individual and systemic process. Trolling becomes merely one form of abuse, similar in the ways they derive pleasure from doing harm, disrupting their victim’s power, connection, and agency and reasserting control in the hands of an abuser. In this way, microfascism links the interpersonal dimensions of abusive power with larger social orders operating on national, transnational, and global scales. Those with alternative moral or epistemological frameworks, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, are becoming targeted due to the vulnerabilities produced by supremacist logics that must enable a constant flow of scapegoats to be dominated. It is these vulnerabilities that enable the insecure and out-of-control to wedge their power into the world through supremacist practices provided by authoritarian allegiance. Thus, when the vulnerable are sacrificed for the greater good, this provides a convenient supply of fuel for the insecurely dominant through this global reproduction of necessary scapegoats.

Those aligned with the purposes of supremacist collectives must remain in the fraught position of seeking dominance while also needing to remain obeisant to the whims of hierarchical authority, unable to acknowledge the humanity of their chosen scapegoats. Questioning group meaning threatens to unravel the mythic security woven by unjust authority. The power to dominate is what affords this security, to a hierarchy of power staged against those powers displayed by alterity. When a supremacist norm takes hold, the practices of localised domination are hung on a belief of innate inequality (where authority structures become tethered to grounded identitarian constructs). Authoritarianism is thus established through hyper-local practices that police and punish deviations from a fluid but inflexible limit of acceptability. In the addiction to the joys of carceral praxis, sadistic pleasure is derived from the assertion of coercive control when the act of domination is somatically rooted in proof of a supposedly orderly power, comfortable with its own regular use of violent coercion.

Critiques of the apparent obliviousness of so-called ‘meritocratic’ valuations, Anand (2023) merely highlight that competence is still being measured according to an exclusionary able-bodied norm that automatically excludes an expanding limit from merit, often including entire classes like children and the elderly. These systems sort people into categories of perpetual vulnerability that is tautological in proving itself, where the tendency to be declared unproductive and expendable clusters around certain historical and contextual bodies. When meritocratic frameworks are not based on merit, they are instead built from systems of exclusion and capitalist ideals of value, which, when combined with the absence of social safety, means that meritocracy and other social orders are engaged in necropolitical systems of exclusion (Mbembe, 2003). In this way, Pygmalion democracy operates on a basis of designed abusive austerity, the cause of regularised slow and fast violence, resulting in debility and its consequence, death for a predictable margin of those regularly subjected to dehumanising symbolic and real violence, which when considered together, forms into a system of interpersonal abuse.

The power of softness: murmuration as partner to the swarm

Potentiating a response to this techno-geo-political frontline mobilisation of symbolic and real violence, subtle micro-political gestures ground themselves into the dynamic disruptions of abuse, in ways that bodies in recovery archive interpersonal strategies resistant to persistent domination. In this way, the vulnerable must either quickly learn how to describe and disrupt abusive strategies, or else be dominated by them and potentially excluded from life itself. Looking up from the hardness of such a ground, the ability to confront and question the authority producing this misery appears to be what enables persistent vital methods of response. To acknowledge the ways these responses, form justly in relation to material states of oppression, we must first acknowledge and work to neutralize the regular injurious impacts of what is considered ‘normal’. This means that we must learn how to radically enable access to a profound and persistent state of rest and reflection potentiated by the safety nurtured amongst one another. It is this vital tender heart that enables respect, dignity, and empathy to prevail by centering strategies ferocious and deep enough to remain soft at our limits.

Yet, both on and off-line supremacy disrupts the necessary activities required for us to organise alternatives to capitalism, where the ‘unlucky’ are increasingly engaged in a fight to preserve space for our differences to thrive. This struggle represents an emergent frontline of both care and resistance, where our most intimate terrains are taking the strain of higher levels, pressing us into productive conformity. Thus, in the space of our meetings, microaggressions are frontline practices of sadistic domination that further the purposes of the powerful. Thus, frontline interventions are what resist the formation of these cruel minorities that are reinforcing ideological shifts to the right by infiltrating the ways we organise and speak amongst ourselves, subtly normalizing the dynamics of hate and division.

The swarm is overwhelmingly confronting us with continual disruptions, as trolls who are prepared to be confronted in return. To fight back amuses and excites trolls, for whom the fight is their praxis. Thus, the tools of power are being ground into the bodies of the marginalized through the cultural values of hegemony practiced in transformative rhizomatic relations permeating both our online and offline spaces. In our traditions, joys, and disgust when formed through the resistance of a collective, we can form cultural understandings of the practices of supremacy as forming from the practices of interpersonal systems of abusive domination, where when we consider these disconnected dynamics as systems formed from common practices and strategies, abusive encounters can be seen to operate in familiar ways, propagating the seeds of disconnection by spreading the interpersonal devaluation of our beliefs, practice, and ways of life through harmful words and deeds, in ways that embed hateful meaning in the hearts and minds of those touched by this real symbolic violence. Thus, the need to describe and defend against these dynamics means that we need to understand how to respond to abuse in ways that can also prevent it from occurring. Drawing experiential knowledge from our multifaceted experiential and phenomenological conditions, linked through intersecting disciplines both respected and overlooked by traditional academic discourses, our communities provide us with grounded political engagements informed by horizontal praxis.

In doing this work, there is a sense of seeking to understand how our resistance to coercive domination draws from our lived experiences of interpersonal gendered domestic violence and from this position, I am wondering how an abject reading of the technologies of disruption might seek to understand how we can draw on the chaos formed under the informational and somatic conditions of late-stage capitalism, to understand how its disruptions are operating against a global majority who is being systematically and purposefully exploited, poisoned, divested of their homes, and in some cases utterly destroyed. For those identities engaged in alienated strategies of disruption, when these strategies are appropriated by those more proximate to power—specifically those aligned with identitarian standards and values of exclusionary richness, whiteness, maleness, able-bodiedness, and other forms of social privilege and objective distance—the seductive allure of identitarian politics provides certain positions an easy outlet for feelings of frustrated agency by injecting a self-referential identitarian superstructure with the vibratory affective power of the permission to commit supremacist abuse. When a set of beliefs and practices are formed around and through traditional mechanisms of power and value, these are then combined with new technological and cultural sites of contact (Wong, 2012; Reuter & Robertson, 2015; Astapova et al., 2022), where all of this and more is intersecting to reproduce and maintain a devalued and devitalising productive inferiority-superiority matrix that will never be known by those who practice it according to the words we use here. It will instead call itself by many other names, where most obscure the fact that any devaluation is happening at all.

Instead, the margins always seem to form from positive evaluations in which we are found lacking. Considering this against a global move to authoritarianism indicates that the tide is turning against collective forms of governance (V-Dem Institute, 2023), where an effective progressive praxis of resistance needs to become strong and resilient enough to resist the mechanical reproduction of hate. This means being able to easily establish and defend our collectives against distributed forms of interpersonal violence. Enabling the practices of justice and solidarity to grow and deepen in profundity, our small interactions can be seen as the most powerful in advancing the agenda of solidarity. In learning how to find contentment and connection with one another, the disruptions of localised outpourings of violence can also become opportunities to communicate and overcome our oppression by engaging in emergent profound inhabitations of space that give way to emergent vibrant collaborations.

In forming resistance to the swarm, we must first understand ourselves in a metapolitical way, to reconsider where our politics are actually occurring and how they are occurring. When considering our lives as political flows full of points of reference for power, we might consider how the intersections of abuse create predictable effects. Sue (2010) argues that microaggressions already demonstrate clear everyday symbolic and real pathways to violence that are debilitating our bodies along the intersections of race, sex, and gender. Learning to recognise the ways our bodies are engulfed in environments suffused with subtle cultural devaluing propaganda, our own implied ugliness and inferiority is something we are learning and teaching one another to resist, by forming strategies for achieving safety or agency both amongst and as ourselves. In recognising how strategic intimate disruptions to our safety and agency can be politically motivated, our worlds become full of literal and affective political content. When considered in a metapolitical way, our everyday lives are also full of affecting events, especially those that touch upon us violently. Understanding when this violence occurs due to a lack of agency, potentiates emergent sites of coordinated mediation, revealing our private-intimate encounters with power where symbolic and real forms of violence occupy the meaning of our bodies in destructive ways. In response to this coordinated network of geopolitical violence, perhaps embodying our values and practices in political ways will enable us to engage proactively with a ‘post-truth’ environment, seizing upon the opportunities provided by the chaos to produce collective meaning from the crises we are experiencing together.

Marginalization is a system with edges

As we appear to be experiencing a real-time political speed-run through a neo-fascist end-times project, this change is also only merely the tightening of an ongoing process of slow death, simply accelerating the deletion of those deemed unproductive and unworthy (including our global ecologies). Thus, the metrics of merit have only escalated into mobilisation once their logics were fully established, unable to be questioned or resisted. As marginalized groups struggle for inclusion in life, a process that is often depicted as bloodless is known by our bodies. The erasure of our somatic lives continues to render impossible the resistance of the margins, being carried out under the guise of normalcy. In validating such a norm, we participate in a system that ultimately sacrifices the unproductive to death. Thus, cultures of connected, emergent, joyful, participatory responses might enable us to resist our own destruction by constructing alternative norms, ones able to engage in the collective work of repair needed to respond to the crisis of the present.

In this light, resisting microaggressions might also represent the normalised seeds of ordinary resistance to supremacist violence, where our symbolic values become mobilised in creating spaces free from abuse, as powerful tools for resisting the normalization of exclusionary hierarchies and thus oppressive ideologies. Learning how to recognise and respond to microaggressions like devaluation and dehumanisation for what they are can enable another set of symbolic values to interrupt what is interrupting the safety and agency of the marginalised. This edge remains distinct by forming like a scab, as bodies on the margins are antagonised and subjected to both soft and hard violence. In this way, Puar (2017) suggests that our bodies exist both inside and outside of recognition, both inside and outside of our systems. Many of these bodies are held in states of perpetual crisis, leading to both slow and fast deaths. Proposing an ethics of care able to respond to the systematic interruptions of our safety and communication, spontaneous outpourings of connectivity and recognition enable the preservation of our connections through creative means. As we become able to respond to the horrors of the present moment, we are actively preserving our softness by strategically enabling mutually empowering forms of agency to grow and flourish towards productive ends.

Brown’s (2017) murmuration describes an entangled politics where sharing soft, playful, and deep imaginaries enables us to deflect and redirect the strategies of domination in real time, and in this way support the emergence and preservation of our individual and collective vitality through our practices and ways of life. In this way, embracing our ability to form meaning through chaos, we are made sane through our connections. Praxis that continually re-affirms just authority through microaffirmations (Rowe, 2008) can enable us to affirm the rights we have to the space of our bodies, to be able to rest, reflect, eat, sleep, and have shelter, form connections, and engage in creativity. The mechanisms of settler-colonial and capitalist states are built from racist, sexist, classist, and ableist places. In moving from a disciplinary to a control society (Deleuze, 1992), new forms of supremacy have come to rely on networked forms of subtle rhizomatically distributed coercion. As more disciplinary institutions such as hospitals, universities, and prisons fail to contain the chaos being produced in our political economies, we are becoming vulnerable to the ways fascist holons are spreading specific forms of supremacist beliefs and practices. Yet, as Gramsci (1999) suggests, we should remain conscious of the fact that during the breakdown of authority, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”(p. 556). At such a time, he says, the social world is full of “morbid symptoms” and so a ‘post-truth’ symptom might be a social maladaptation to the stressors of climate catastrophe, microplastics, and growing social and political disruptions and escalations.

At such a time, we would do well to consider other responses to disruption, considering if some forms of disruption to authority are both necessary and welcome, while still others are oppressive. With this in mind, theory can enable embodied reflections that can become engaged through real-world practice. In this way, we can offer one another strategic method for navigating disruption in real-time, aiming to develop and share means of resisting the swarm by softly surrounding and enshrining the inclusion of the excluded, continually reorienting toward both personal and collective feelings of softness, rest, and reflection that enable effective forms of action and reaction.

Defensive tactics like DARVO are strategically simple. Sophisticated trolling chatbots can easily deny accountability, recentering discussions onto predetermined points meant to frustrate, discredit, and upset perceived ideological opponents (Paavola et al., 2016). This becomes abusive when it provokes those unable to defend themselves, turning us against our own senses and interests. This undermines our identities by asserting external standards of authority, forcing us to argue from a position of assumed wrongness that requires extraordinary evidence to challenge—evidence demanded from us but that cannot be demanded from the troll. Coincidentally, this is also how hegemonic norms operate, where all actions are embedded in an implicit set of normative values that do not need to be openly stated; they are merely felt.

Instead of directly confronting hate, we might employ a line of questioning to allow a person’s logic to unravel itself, exposing contradictions and making space for alternative ways of thinking without needing to directly attack anyone. Additionally, mirroring back an aggressor’s statements with a sense of calm and curiosity can reveal the emptiness of their arguments while keeping the conversation focused on truth rather than emotion. By continuously redirecting attempts at symbolic violence back to a source of immediate sensory truth, the confrontation shifts from a battle of wills to a practice of strategic intervention. In this way, redirection can become a systemised method of disrupting coercive power without falling into its traps.

The goal is not to dominate or defeat anyone because a troll is a person engaging with a strategy. By reorienting the intensity of this strategy back towards collective wellbeing, we can make room for systemic responses by forming solidarity and healing through alliances of care. An ethos of response cares when someone says or does something that makes our space unsafe, where the practices of exclusion demean the dignity of our social and ecological collectives. Developing the ability to detect and softly disrupt such moves ensures that our spaces stay safe, which includes noticing and responding to things like microaggressions. Developing the cultural practices needed to shelter the vulnerable in our collectives, we enable progressive values to move forward in real ways by enabling all to remain welcome and at home. In this way, our coordinated, easy-to-replicate defensive responses to exclusionary norm-ing enable us to deflect and diffuse the practices and beliefs of supremacist discrimination.

However, this praxis of successfully disrupting unjust authority requires literacy of the moment, including the ability to engage contextual discourse analysis able to produce immediate results through the pathways of wit, levity, rhetorical play, re-imaginings, absurdity, and all the skills that may navigate and play with the structures and dynamics of power. The community adoption of playful power dynamics indicates a dedication to praxis, where we learn the plays of power by engaging with/as it creatively, while also learning how to detect how we are while confronted, imperilled, or harmed. The true power and benefit of systemic praxis, means forming cultures of disruption able to interrupt unjust systems of authority. This ability to participate in collective life with the vulnerable means potentiating a diverse ecological community of immense power, strength, and resilience.

I argue that the maintenance of collective safety requires us to allow diversity to take root within our institutional structures, which are themselves the legacy of supremacist logics. As such, if we do not learn the skills to confront the casual assertion of discriminatory authority, we cannot ensure that our spaces remain equitable, open, caring, or kind. Thus, I argue that the real treasure we seek to cultivate and preserve in our politics is our kindness, and so in resisting the temptation to engage in aggression where it may be easily warranted, the more difficult path is to protect what needs to be protected, holding a fluid pattern of response at the boundary. To train the body itself to respond to the dynamics of abuse, I argue, we might enable ourselves a cultural immunity to supremacist domination that both enables the preservation of our kindness and the dignity of our collectives while also standing strong against the growth and spread of sadistic power games that do nothing but destroy us.

In effect, by continually deflecting, defusing, questioning, confronting and frustrating coercive authority in ways that subvert the expectations of fascistic trolls, we might destabilise the spectre of bigotry for just long enough to look around and recognize ourselves as a collective. During such moments, we may find our way to a more effortless form of defence once we have recognized the state of restful authenticity that emerges from an acceptance of one another. This is what must be protected from harm, from values that would leave us continually uneasy, unable to enter into a space of easy connection, moving between words and silence in quiet acquiescence to the flows of how we are.

Conclusion

The dynamic struggle against supremacist networks of domination is a deep practice of soft, persistent confrontation, attuned to coercive power plays in ways keen to disrupt domination in ways that are fun, easy, edgy, and ultimately connecting and healthy for all involved. This praxis hinges on our engagement with underlying social and somatic forms of connection that enable communications beyond our immediate strategies and beliefs. The practices of anti-fascism during the everyday microaggressions of swarms of hate that seem to come from everywhere at once reveal our countercultural actions as not merely reactions but also essential to the cultivation of ongoing feelings of solidarity. By strategically engaging with and disarming the tactics of domination in our spaces, we can potentiate the deepening of practices of care and mutual support by facing up to the oppressive normative values of Pygmalion democracies that seek to fragment our communities and justice movements in the pursuit of ecocidal growth, beyond all measures of sense.

In becoming more resilient by fostering solidarities able to transcend the reach of dominant authorities, as power is learning how to employ identitarian politics to assert control— leveraging our memes and cultural symbols to spread symbolic violence against marginalized groups—this is being done as a means of proving the superiority (or perhaps insecurity) for a restricted in-group, seeking power and control through their capitulation to supremacist logics as they become engaged in traditional material networks of power. Understanding that symbolic violence is a tool for seeding supremacist ideologies, we might strategically counter the symbols of hate by creating environments where power dynamics are continually described, shifted, and challenged. In this way, our vital symbolic communications are describing, referencing, and communicating those things that make us most powerful, unified, and authentically ourselves.

Central to a fluid approach to the contemporary authoritarianism of the swarm is recognising the circuitry that links our fear and insecurity with the pleasure and material benefit of coercive domination. Coincidentally (or not), this recognition may also connect us with what provokes dominating, unsettling, and exploitative dynamics to occur. By embracing the qualities of openness, truth, and mercy associated with a state of grounded and perceptive openness, we may also uncover the roots of security in our ability to connect through the ways our oppressions feel similar, where the talent and brilliance of our connectivity enable us to undermine attempts to assert authoritative control over our collectives, resisting dynamics known to be boring, uncreative, and inflexible. In this way, by acting with integrity, we can ensure that our resistance does not mirror the very violence and inflexibility we oppose. Perhaps the trick to remaining soft when being swarmed means engaging with the world in ways that remain open to being affected, able to respond to the pain and disorientation of our kin, as a praxis with collective orienting value. By resisting coercive tactics while nurturing our collective resilience in ways that deepen our individual authenticity, we are not only defending our spaces but are also building more robust and equitable futures. Our ability to remain resilient against oppression hinges on recognising that our fight is not just against our individual oppressors but also the oppressive systems that uphold their power. In developing methods for resisting the values and practices of those who despise us, perhaps we might respond by rooting more deeply in the celebration of solidarity, inclusivity, and dignity for all. By remaining grounded in these principles, we might safeguard our humanity and pave the way for genuine, lasting liberation with and through one another.

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