The hidden hierarchy of far-right digital guerrilla warfare

Abstract

The polarizing tendency of politically leaned social media is usually claimed to be spontaneous, or a by-product of underlying platform algorithms. This contribution revisits both claims by articulating the digital world of social media and rules derived from capitalist accumulation in the post-Fordist age, from a transdisciplinary perspective articulating the human and exact sciences. Behind claims of individual freedom, there is a rigid pyramidal hierarchy of power heavily using military techniques developed in the late years of the cold war, namely Russia Reflexive Control and the Boyd’s decision cycle in the USA. This hierarchy is not the old-style “command-and-control” from Fordist times, but an “emergent” one, whereby individual agents respond to informational stimuli, coordinated to move as a swarm. Such a post-Fordist organizational structure resembles guerrilla warfare. In this new world, it is the far right who plays the revolutionaries by deploying avant-garde guerrilla methods, while the so-called left paradoxically appears as conservatives defending the existing structure of exploitation. Although the tactical goal is unclear, the strategic objective of far-right guerrillas is to hold on to power and benefit particular groups to accumulate more capital. We draw examples from the Brazilian far right to support our claims.

Language as Hope

“…Access to digital technologies, we want to emphasize, indicates an important shift in activism. And while sociolinguists, political scientists, and other analysts point out that digital technologies have been also instrumental to far-right political groups, who harness digital affordances to challenge democracies worldwide (Blommaert, 2019;Cesarino, 2020Cesarino, , 2022Cesarino & Nardelli, 2021;Maly, 2019;Stolee & Caton, 2018), we believe that our documenting in this book of the use of digital technologies by favela activists, including Mariluce and Kleber (Chapter 4) and Coletivo Papo Reto, points to digital action as also being fundamental for the grassroots advancing of human rights. We may say that life at the online-offline nexus (Blommaert, 2019) is a field of disputes.…”

Crypto Crowds

“…In the case of Brazil, it is interesting to reflect on the relation between hyperbitcoinization and far-right radicalization within a crowding framework in order to understand how Bitcoin maxis often identify and relate to former President Jair Bolsonaro's most ardent supporters, characterized by their 'swarm behavior' and the employment of digital guerrilla techniques (Cesarino 2020;Cesarino and Nardelli 2021).…”

Bolsonarismo sem Bolsonaro? Públicos antiestruturais na nova fronteira cibernética

“…Muito já foi dito sobre as ações táticas de marketing e guerrilha digital que ficaram conhecidas como "gabinete do ódio" nas eleições de 2018 (MELLO, 2020;LEIRNER, 2020;NARDELLI, 2021;. Minha intenção aqui não é rastrear quem pensa e orquestra essas ações, mas, como apontei acima, observá-las como uma propriedade emergente do sistema como um todo, formado também por agentes algorítmicos e usuários comuns.…”

“…A redução da relação sinal-ruído (1) se dá pelo aumento da equiprobabilidade ou ambiguidade dos enunciados, tanto do próprio presidente quanto do amplo espectro de possibilidades narrativas disparadas nos ecossistemas digitais que o apoiam (CESARINO, 2021c). Já a quebra de padrões e regularidades no sinal (2) se daria pelas constantes interpelações que o presidente e outros fazem nos públicos do mainstream, mantendo-os sempre instáveis e orbitando em torno de suas declarações ultrajantes (LEIRNER, 2020;NARDELLI, 2021). Aquilo que vem sendo chamado de "cortina de fumaça" não teria como objetivo esconder algo que esteja sendo feito, mas tornar impossível a própria estabilização de um pano de fundo onde qualquer ação possa ser rastreada, e responsabilidades, atribuídas.…”