The rise of the Namephag

In 2006, Time Magazine named ‘You’ as their Person of the Year. The magazine’s Lev Gross applauded You for “seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game”.

The magazine put a reflective plastic mirror on its front cover, editor Richard Stengel confirmed, “because it literally reflects the idea that you, not us, are transforming the information age”.

This claim marked the rise of an accepted wisdom that that some form of online participatory democracy would break down the barriers of politics. Around 2006, a lot of key individuals in business, academia, and various appendages of mainstream cultural production paid lip service to this idea, and a lot of people seemed to genuinely believe it. This enthusiasm kept burning throughout the financial crisis, and faded slightly until it was snuffed out less than a decade later.

This was the era of YouTube, the era of the ‘blogosphere’. The People, it was claimed, would use the newfound popular power of Internet 2.0 to criticise oil-spilling chief executives and cocaine-sniffing bankers’ bonuses.

This naïve assumption rested, more implicitly than explicitly, on the notion that we would be largely anonymous. Sure, there would be outlets like Facebook, but there would also be a kaleidoscope of forums, blogs, and video-hosting sites in which the norm of anonymity (and it was a norm at this time) would continue. Roughly concurrent to this was the rise of the modish idea of ‘hacktivism’, embodied in the incoherent group Anonymous.

Running alongside this general mood of participatory, direct-democratic fuzziness was the rise and rise of the anonymous right. In the UK, political blogs in the UK like Guido Fawkes – and Paul Staines was initially anonymous – were starting to break the hegemony of the newspapers in getting scoops. The Telegraph, grasping towards relevance with an ageing audience, launched its own Blogs section. It was a halcyon, unpaywalled era. It was also, funnily enough, the era in which the (anonymous) Telegraph Blogs comment section was to the right of Genghis Khan.

YouTube was awash with libertarians, conspiracy theorists, and the beginnings of what would later be dubbed the ‘alt-right’, most of whom were pseudonymous or anonymous. Twitter’s Ts&Cs were only loosely enforced, in an era of genuine levelling where anons could freely launch information campaigns against various representatives of cultural and political power.

2016 lifted the lid on all of this. The accepted wisdom was upended. We weren’t just micro-blogging about rising sea levels and debt-for-equity swaps. We were commenting, sometimes very loudly and assertively, that we hated globalism and we hated the left. This scared a lot of people in power. Anonymous accounts were – and are – very important sources of truth on the internet, and as far as political commentary goes they are often the only sources of truth. Therefore the received wisdom by globalists and their left-wing lackeys changed to “shut it down”.

The rise of the ‘blogosphere’ in the mid-00s had led to an attendant growth in media serving ‘comment’ by the early 2010s, albeit usually for little in the way of remuneration for the commentator in question. This included new outlets like Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, Daily Beast. It also included existing outlets like Salon, Vice, and The Guardian, which leapt to incorporate a growing empire of comment as a cheap strategy to drive their digital output. The snowballing of Twitter’s popularity ensured that no newspaper went untouched by this process, and 20th century pretences of distinctions between Opinion and News became increasingly irrelevant.

These people were often the vanguard against the power of anons, whose own platforms that railed against globalism and the left they viewed with a vicious narcissism of small differences. The run-up to 2016 would see the rise of the ‘technology and politics reporter’, a very explicit oppositional function designed to call shenanigans on the part of their anonymous or anonymously-supported opponents, as well as a rejuvenation of the related ‘specialist researching the far-right’.

Partly in response to the rise of this New Media Journalist, another breed of scribbler and shouter also entered the online scene: the conservative namephag. There was, however, a problem with this. The conservative namephag was a negation of a negation. Where the past promise of anonymous online freedom was attacked by the Buzzfeeders, conservative namephags existed to obtain the Buzzfeeders’ legitimacy. This necessarily meant that the namephags were going to compromise with truth for a variety of reasons.

Namephagging means gatekeeping and counter-signalling. Namephag conservatives have to live with the unhappy conscience of coexisting uneasily alongside a large pool of anons tapping into genuinely radical ideas. Some struggle to reconcile themselves to this reality. When they are charitable, they may studiously follow these anons and selectively take their insights and repackage them in a sanitised manner. Sometimes this is a net positive, but very often ideological pressure ends up contorting perspectives into a facsimile of real analysis that serves more to confuse than clarify.

Blackpilling and doomerism is a common feature of the nominally ‘right-wing’ namephag. Strictly speaking, this is distinct to the bitter, young fogeyish demeanour that so many ‘true conservatives’ naturally have, although in practice they can be found together. The point is however that a conservative namephag cannot propose genuinely right-wing solutions to problems without being viciously denounced.

This leads to a perverse situation. This type of person may have some analytical capacity for seeing what the situation is, but he is always pulled into a corollary of offering nothing good. The reality that any thinking man can see is that radical, revolutionary changes are required in the machinery of government. Departments and quangos need to be closed down, budgets need to be slashed, tight borders and deportations, petty localisms abolished, universities razed and the charities reigned in.

Namephags are at best only selectively able to openly call for the solutions we need. The main reason for this is because they desire respectability in the eyes of the same useless people who need to be swept away, for reasons of career advancement. He might want tenure in a think-tank, a book deal, a newspaper column, or an academic post. He can’t rock the boat too much by outlining the necessary radicalism and treading on toes of big-time members of the Blob. The social dynamics at play might be even more trivial than this: his wife might be friends with one of these people.

This invariably, instead, pushes the debate towards an accommodation with the Blob, as the namephag searches desperately of socially acceptable ways of positioning the unacceptable. This bends towards straw-man attacks on things like ‘liberalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. This is quite literally what the phenomenon of ‘post-liberalism’ is. Post-liberal commentary is always framed as: “This is what [mainstream political force] needs to do to fight the actual evil populists”. It never claims: “I support the populist right, I think the ruling elites are clueless incompetents; here’s why.”

Another more sinister option for namephags is to turn a feeling of inadequacy into resentment, and use their position to present themselves as a voice of reason and moderation. A certain type of conservative namephag is particularly desperate to seek the left’s approval by attacking the dissident right. It gives them a sense of purpose and self-definition.

The average self-described post-liberal Christian Red Tory Blue Labourite who dislikes ‘metropolitan liberals’ is probably insulted a fair bit by Marxoids and softer progressives, who think they are fash-adjacent if not an actual fascist. Attacking to the right is a good way of demonstrating that they are Not Evil. “No, you don’t understand”, such a person might say, “it’s these Darwinian eugenicist racist Nietzschean anon weirdos you need to go after”. Don’t underestimate the people in this space who might do you harm.

There are other games that namephags play. There are a bunch of grifters on the right who like to point out the hypocrisy of people they disagree with. I must be clear that this is another structural feature of namephaggery. Again, being a namephag means someone is concerned with denunciation from the left-wing Blob. This is how we end up with fake-right grifters pointing to all-white, all-male meetings of EU officials and deriding them for lacking diversity. It’s insanely dumb but when you realise that they’re namephags looking for easy clout at the expense of serious ideology, it makes sense. There is a far greater incentive for this to be done by the Tom Harwoods of this world than by the anonymous Guido Fawkes of 2006.

Some namephags can afford to be more free. Some namephags are men of independent means. Some namephags live in countries that don’t indulge the far-left or don’t care for western politics. There are others who exist in a delicate balance of power which gives them a better toehold. But this does not describe most namephags, it’s not even close.

There are times when it suits to be a public figure. When leading a political movement with the aim of seizing power, it is necessary. But in most other circumstances, it is not. Anonymity gives us the ability to judge ideas on their own terms. It gives us breathing space in a time of overpowering left-wing suffocation – a constriction that is only tightening. It gives the architects of a better social order suitable cover to let them design the necessary blueprints. It gives future leaders who can and will assume real material power an opportunity to network and organise in safety.

The namephag plays a game of ‘debate’ and ‘balance’. We do not need this. We need positive propaganda and influence tied to a political vision and the concrete exercise of executive power, even if its exact manifestation is not yet clear.

We are in this for the long-run. Anonymity is the promise of truth, and the promise of the power to one day assert this truth.