Post to @emsenn@kolektiva.social, 2025-09-08 08:18h, On the failure to intellectually process [Stop] Cop City
Original Post
Part 1
There's some new post from some academic about how academic intellectuals should look toward Gramsci's "organic intellectual" in order to do their duty against rising fascism.
I'm not linking it because I think it's hot trash, so instead I'll link my own writing, that explains how the narrative around Stop City City doesn't line up at all with the experiences of those who tried to stop Cop City, and how Gramsci's idea of the organic intellectual may have been co-opted by American intelligence before his writing was even translated into English!
The piece isn't fun to read, but I do wish more people did; the people I'm criticizing are folk I once considered friends, and it should be respected that I put sharing my perspective about their misinterpretation of events above our friendship, when that misinterpretation hurt people.
Part 2
To me, it is very troubling that:
- The paper I critique got published in the first place.
- It took as much time and resources to publish it as it did
- I released a critique that co-sourced and counter-argued, 4 days after the original was published
- the original publisher and original author both have ignored the critique for months
- there is no wider structure of appeal to highlight there is critique of this published paper.
—
Like, I want people who aren't in academia, and who experience it through Fediverse posts about the ethics of mutualism and police abolition, to understand:
someone published a thing about an event they went to once, and someone who was a part of that event, over years, critiqued that writing.
The Fediverse posts, newspaper think pieces, that folk read about the event? They're all based on the official narrative, and usually written assuming there is some process of accountability involved; I mean, even The Federalist will edit old pieces to link to published critiques, and they're a private fascist think tank!
I just really don't know what to say that makes it clear how much "does it support a vibe of confidently trusting the future?" is the test for what gets traction in discourse, whether it's a shitpost or dissertation, beyond… literally demonstrating the practice in my method, and even doing that, doesn't make it clear!
Part 2.a
Also I just wanna brag on myself that I engaged with the reddit thread that sparked this post.
It's tough for me to approach this stuff from such a truly outsider perspective, and tbh I wish I had some sort of advisor I could trust on the matter. (But, see my essay: the advisor's I've trusted haven't been trustworthy.)
So I'm always proud when I muster the energy to, as the adult form of a kid who got kicked out of school before getting taught algebra, dive into a conversation with a bunch of people with letters after their name explaining just how much philosophy they know, to tell them that they are being wrong, naive, and, probably, a bit of an asshole.
I know a fair few of you have been my followers for a few years so I bet you're a little proud of me too.
Fuck those poseurs and the publishing contracts they rode in on, right?
Part 3
Unrelated to any content of the critiques I really do think it's worth considering that the original paper took years of study, travel, board, etc., and the result was "institutional advisor advises institutional student attend institutionally-organized event, leading to their arrest and the material that the student produces into value for the related institutions, who provided both resources and guidance toward checks notes getting someone arrested by police to validate rechecks notes, carefully… that police abolition occurred??
????
????????
And then I, with a $150 laptop, collection of text files, and some carefully constructed search queries, used the same sources as the original paper to, over a long weekend, construct a counterargument…
…That then is of no value at all to those same markets?
—
Clearly something is very very wrong with critical theory and institutions and stuff, and I honestly am too distant from these systems to do a deeper diagnosis than I have, but like.
Literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to say that getting arrested is proof of police abolition, so poorly that a chronically homeless fuckwit with an 8th grade education can unprove it using the same math?
Something is wrong.
Conversations
Rich Puchalsky at Mastodon.Social
Replying to the original post
It's a good piece, although it's sad that it's on Substack.
What did you think of crimethinc's final writing about this?
It's on my website too: https://emsenn.net/citing-for-containment
I think CrimeThinc is partially responsible for the misrepresentation of Stop Cop City; while their coverage was accurate and good in other ways, framing the movement against Cop City as a reaction to Cop City, instead of as a response from the Weelaunee Forest, fatally misconstructed the sequence of relationality that occurred, reproducing a teleological narrative that does more to support Cop Cities everywhere than it does to stop a Cop City anywhere.
Rich:
I understand that: I'd have to think about it some more. One of the problems I had with the crimethinc piece was the way it presented conflicts between anarchists and environmentalists as a sort of bare fact, not really examined. (I generally support crimethinc but of course they aren't beyond critique.)
I did like their piece because it was one of the few that forthrightly admitted that the movement had been a failure.
I don't agree with how the frame the conflict but it is definitely a conflict that occurred and continues to in many forms. (To demonstrate how silly their frame is: I, who socially identify as an militant anarchist, am one of the environmentalists they say were resistant to militant anarchism.)
I will say, liking it because it admitted the movement was a failure is… something I could criticize. Political movements must fail, it's the condition of the success of the ideas they carry. Being the most popular person to point this out the quickest in a specific context is not really an accomplishment, in my view.
What would be is saying which ideas succeeded (Which I do: the entrenchment of organic intellectual as a productive reaction to academic intellectual) and how they succeeded, so we can understand the ground we're on now, and how we might avoid reproducing this pattern.
People can of course criticize a failure vs success binary but I don't agree that it's better to replace it with a unitary understanding that they must fail: some are generally judged to have succeeded at their limited goals.
At any rate, I personally operate under a deficit of thinking-time available so I have to congratulate the entity willing to state the obvious most quickly without dragging it out.
Your reply here touches on concepts that are on the cutting edge of my own philosophizing about things like subjectivation, ethics, intellectualism, and social media discourse, and as you've said, truth is measured by how well information fits the aesthetics of its genre, so I'm at an impasse that leads me back to my digital gardening, which might produce the appropriate aphorism for this, in the future.
Can I quote "At any rate, I personally operate under a deficit of thinking-time available so I have to congratulate the entity willing to state the obvious most quickly without dragging it out," in something, perhaps anonymously? It is a really really great demonstration of a concept I don't have a name for yet.
sure
I think my best reply to this thread is one of my old poems. Poetry, even when it's obviously "about something", uses ambiguity to resist being crystallized into some sort of narrative. I could have written this poem as a "so this is what's happening" prose piece but didn't.
I think appealing to the potential poetry of terms with established meaning in a field of discourse, within a discussion of that field, is an inadequate justification for the amount of conceptual movement your rhetoric attempts, and given that I'm expressing how these movements are a form of colonization, I wish you would leave more space to try and understand me, rather than tell me what you already believed.
Basically: It's cool you admit your truth is defined by the aesthetic coherence of claims, but that doesn't leave a means of dialog with those who find truth otherwise, and I'd encourage anyone to reconsider that position. If "movement" can't mean anything that destabilizes your ability to know quickly, how can it mean anything but what you already know it to mean?
Despite appearances, it may be possible to choose ignorance or slowness rather than, as you imply, it be necessary to act out some compromised urgent naivety.
That I can't do! Sorry. It really has been good to read your stuff though.
So, uh. Let me get this straight. You're explicitly saying you can't make space to understand me on my own terms, so are not going to listen to me at all, and you're justifying this with the scarcity you experience.
I want to highlight that there's no difference between that claim and the foundational doctrine of liberalism that leads to things like settlerism, nationalism, etc., and so at this point I am left wanting to strongly encourage you to reflect on your own claimed political ideologies, because you've explicitly said you are choosing to let your perceived scarcities rule your decision-making, and that's not very anarchistic.
I'm weirdly grateful how much our conversation this morning has validated a lot of my recent theorizing about what the everliving fuck is going wrong with American's ability to think, but want to emphasize that I see you believing in individuality and using that individuality to participate in systems that others are saying harm their own individuality, a contradiction between the ethical foundations of your own right to choose and your treatment of others.
No, I'm explicitly saying that I don't think that you can demand that I listen to you in a particular way that you like. You wrote and linked to something on Substack and don't seem to have any understanding of what kind of solidarity failure that is: there are free platforms that don't support Nazis.
I don't think that you understand anything about me or why I write the things that I do yet you're developing a theory about them. Why should I take your ideas seriously when you don't?
It's fascinating how hung up on me having a Substack a certain group of people, who almost always have jobs in the information and intellectual sector, are. I wonder how much money I make for Substack, compared to how much you make for your employer?
Also, I'm developing theories about people who use social media platforms, people who are subject to Liberalism (in the Foucault sense), people who discuss political theory on these platforms, and other sets of people to which your behavior in this thread includes you, regardless of anything external. That's part of why I was asking for permission to use your comments in my research!
It also wasn't a demand, it was a request along with an explanation of the perceived harms. If you feel that as a demand, but excuse the force of starving you into not being able to think about your personal philosophy, how can I take your ideas seriously?
"I wonder how much you make for your employer" JFC you don't follow your own proposed listening or ignorance at all, it's just something for other people.
Oh no we're all hung up on Substack because it supports Nazis, and you want to keep using Substack because it gets you a trickle of money. I'm glad that you're open about your basics here! And no I don't think an extended engagement with this is worthwhile.
I didn't see your request to quote as a demand; I assented to it.
So you're bringing up topics, like my Substack, to make false accusations about both my actions (earning money) and interiority (why I use Substack), and then closing off those topics before I can respond?
That's… rude.
But for the home audience: I don't think I make any money off my Substack (and if I do, I can't tell the difference between it and Ko-Fi, so it's not a motivator for me.) I'm there because I've been asked by other folk on the platform to syndicate my posts there, because, in their argument, there are lots of folk who only read Substacks (because they are time-scarce and idea-hungry), and so cannot (by the same line-of-reasoning you use) access the ideas in my writing otherwise. I actually got asked that by folk after saying i was planning to leave, so changed my mind.
Which seems like a fair-enough argument relative to the potential harm: I don't think I make Substack very much money. If my post views ever cross 100-per-post maybe I'd reconsider, or if someone else wants to make an argument to leave that addresses my reasoning, I'd also listen to that.
Also, different economic positions might mean that "a trickle of money" is very important. I know people who earn what others would see as a trickle from their Substack, but combined with their other practices (squatting, thieving), is enough to let them remain decently autonomous in their decision-making.
Which, given you aren't unable to choose to take the time to try and understand people if they don't affirm your radical vibes, and other defensive attitudes in this conversation, might be something you have some un-interrogated envy of?
This is bullshit. You've now both settled on saying that you don't get any real money from Substack and are on the platform for selfless public educational reasons and that I should respect people who take Nazi money as if that's like squatting or thieving. It's a self-justificatory mess and shows no signs that you've actually internalized your own critique of instant answers or assumptions.
I don't want to block you because that erases the conversation, which you at least seem to think is valuable – and also, I think that what you write in your linked pieces is valuable. But I have no interest in continuing to respond to this. I will block you if you continue to be annoying in this way.
Slizzers on Kolektiva
Just slowly and finally made it through your post about the Han critique (had to look up a lot of things, never heard of Han or read much philosophy, just was raised very devout Catholic, of course without the choice to opt in or out).
And… this whole exchange was honestly helpful in illustrating your points there, too. Especially the part, "It's really weird how much the liberal left has redecided so much of what the Church believes…"
No other fully formed thoughts, and maybe the pattern recognition is wrong on my end, because it's out of my range, honestly. Trying to expand while being aware of my limits. So thank you again.