Tales from the Bitface

A great post from Ian Betteridge, called Zen fascists will control you…. Dead Kennedys fans will recognise the title as a quote from ‘California Über Alles’, their single and album track from 1979. Ian builds on it to write a history of the various movements, ideas, cults, that have believed or supposed that humans can be improved or perfected, by diet, exercise, drugs, physical enhancement…

Or by following the word of an ’enlightened’ leader, for example.

He sees the overarching theme as purity:

This is the thing about the politics of purity that makes it so durable, and so dangerous: it doesn’t require malice. It requires only the conviction that you know what clean looks like, and the will to impose it on others, for their own good.

Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It’s how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you’ve made a wrong turn.

He traces the idea through Joni Mitchell singing ‘we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ to the Human Potential Movement and the Whole Earth Catalog, to est, and from there to the modern biohacking idea¹, and billionaires trying to extend their lives using the blood of young people.

You can draw a straight line from est to the productivity cult of contemporary tech culture, to the biohacking movement, to the particular flavour of self-optimisation that has become the dominant religion of the Silicon Valley overclass.

And connects it to the Nazis:

The line from the organic farm to the death camp is not straight. It requires many other things to be true simultaneously. But the fact that it is possible to draw the line at all should give us pause, every time we find ourselves in the presence of someone who is very, very concerned with purity — of whatever kind.

It’s an excellent piece, and the guy’s a great writer. So it slightly surprises me that, after he writes:

somewhere in the feed, the purity logic is still running, clean and patient, waiting for the next person to decide that they have woken up. That they are clean.

he doesn’t extend his argument to the state of the modern ‘woke’ idea. Detached from its origins in Black US culture, its adherents demand such a strong acceptance of all parts of the ‘omnicause’, that any disagreement about one tenet of the belief system can lead to ostracism. Purity politics at its purest.

Or so it seems, at least. And indeed, Ian appears to insulate or distance himself from such an attack in his first footnote:

I should make this clear up front: when I talk in this essay about “purity politics”, what I’m not talking about the kind of instant condemnation that happens on social media platforms (Bluesky, I am looking at you). That’s interesting, but it’s not what I’m interested in right now.

Those attackers on Bluesky sound like exactly the type of hyper-woke folks I’m thinking of.

OK, he’s mainly talking about the danger of these beliefs from today’s super-rich; but they need foot soldiers. Mobs can be as dangerous as rich individuals.