Taleban and the failure of internet activism

The Taleban have entered into Kabul well ahead of the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

If you use Twitter or Instagram or have been following the news in the past few days you probably knew this already. I am not here to offer analysis on the causes of the failure of the occupation nor offer my ideas about the future of the country. There are few clear things: the blood of soldiers and civilians who have lost their lives in the past 20 years are in the hands of George W. Bush, but the blood of civilians and Afghan allies of the US and NATO forces is very clearly in the hands of Joe Biden. The retreat of the US forces and the failure to evacuate civilians in time, is in my view is a failure to live up to the standards which supposedly informed the invasion in the first place.

But this is not what I intend to discuss. Rather, I want to say a few things about the phenomena that have proliferated in hyperspace in the past few days. Twitter has been filled with the opinions of various political commentators, politicians, activists and pundits on the situation in Afghanistan. The opinions themselves are not the interesting bit about this, but rather the proliferation of posts and tweets clarifying the opinion of the individual in question: whether or not they originally supported the invasion, if they did, on what basis and why and how they think the invasion and subsequent occupation failed; what the individual thinks should have been done earlier; how the withdrawal of US forces was a failure; how civilians should have been evacuated, etc. In between these various clarifications of individual opinions there are tweets accusing these same people for having held views that are either imperialist or sympathetic to the Taleban. In the opposite ‘deep-ends’ of the hyperspace there are the tankies who champion the Taleban as anti-imperialist heroes and neo-conservatives who fail to realise they are not supposed to say the silent part aloud: the war was always ‘a forever-war’, and the Trans-Exclusionary Feminists who champion the Taleban for knowing what a woman is.

While ‘virtue-signalling’ is a term invented by the reactionary right to debase anyone who suggests that so-called ‘progressive’ policies are actually good, I do think that what is going on, on Twitter can absolutely be described as virtue-signalling. What these various commentators are doing is clarify their own positions to their bases of support. Since no one can do anything about Taleban taking Kabul, all that is left is to show to people in hyperspace that at least one has the right opinions about the situation. There is something sobering about the fact that nothing one posts on social media can have any positive influence on the situation. It is inevitable that many civilians will die in the hands of Taleban, that women will suffer greatly as a result of the Taleban gaining power and that nothing I can do will help. No petition, or fundraiser will help anyone in Kabul. And what is left for the western audiences is to watch in horror as Afghans — desperate to escape the rule of the Taleban — fall from the sky as the airplane to which they have held on to takes off. This complete impotence to do anything about the situation is a fertile ground for the kind of virtue-signalling that I described. As individuals are faced with the impotence to have any effect on the situation the implicit nature of any kind of political activism on social media platforms reveals itself: it is and has always been about signalling one’s own commitment to certain set of ideas and convincing others that these ideas are the better ones. It has never been about and can never be about enacting real-world change at least in the way that it has been conducted until now. As the possibility of petitions and fundraising is stripped away all that is left is the individual trying to situate themselves in the right position in the field of normative and factual statements.

While the situation in Afghanistan is perhaps not universalizable it does show the true nature of social media activism. Any real change through the corporate territorialized spaces of the internet is impossible. I do not deny that ideas can influence events and that — at least in one point of time — the internet had potential to serve as a medium for an effective proliferation of emancipatory ideas, but I do think that it is an absolutely false notion to hold that internet activism could enact any change, at least in the way that it is conducted today. The main problem is not that sharing information about issues would be bad per se, but rather that it directs the energies of people away from more productive endeavours. And it is not so much that there is no activity in the hyperspace that could be classified as productive but that most of what is being done is not productive. From being an important channel of communicating the Arab Spring revolutions in 2011 Twitter has devolved into a platform where mere opinions and ‘takes’ proliferate, completely separated from anything that could be described as ‘real’. If social media platforms are good for emancipatory politics it is only insofar as they can be used to mobilise people to do something in the ‘real’ world.

But the reason for why so much activism takes place in the hyperspace is precisely because in the real world we are confronted with the capitalist realism as described by Mark Fisher. Social media was only thought of as a platform for emancipatory politics precisely because reality no longer was a feasible arena for that. But it should it be recognised that internet no longer is a place for emancipatory politics. Climate change, racism, human rights violations cannot be resolved by sharing petitions or posts. The only thing Twitter is anymore good for is radicalizing people and to get these radicalised subjects to engage in subversive if not outright revolutionary acts in the real world. A great example of this is the attack on Capitol Hill on the 6th of January this year. Unfortunately the left has not been very good at this game and mostly it is the right that has reaped the benefits of internet radicalisation while the rest of society has suffered from it. But it seems that even the potential to radicalize people is becoming exhausted or is deliberately being hindered. Twitter already has put into place mechanisms that inform the user about outright lies about Covid-19 and vaccinations. It then seems increasingly likely that the reterritorialization of internet discourse by hegemonic liberal Capital is rather immanent.