Harassment Architecture is a 2019 novella, self-published and written by far-right online influencer Mike Ma. A sequel, Gothic Violence, was published in 2021. It follows an unnamed protagonist who wishes to destroy the United States. Some sections are narrative, while others are more ranting or political discourse. It is popular among the online far-right, particularly among ecofascists and in the decentralized series of fascist Telegram channels known as Terrorgram. The book contains ecofascist, white nationalist, and militant accelerationist themes and content, espousing several conspiracy theories including that of the Great Replacement.
 | |
| Author | Mike Ma |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Self-published |
Publication date | 2019 |
| Pages | 146 |
| ISBN | 978-1-79564-149-4 |
| OCLC | 1110014277 |
It is written in a fragmented and sometimes hallucinatory style, described by some commentators as reminiscent of Fight Club or American Psycho. It contains scenes of extreme violence, attacks on ethnic minorities and transgender people, including a scene where the narrator shoots up a gay nightclub, as well as extreme misogyny and racism. The book suggests that violence is the only solution to the perceived issues of modernity, and criticizes industrial life as opposed to the purity of nature. The narrator of the book suggests that the reader commit murder and blow up power stations.
Summary
editThe book opens with a warning declaring the work purely fiction that does not reflect on the author. It also denotes the most important chapters, as deemed such by the author, with an x following the chapter title, "for those people who don't read entire books", or those "who don't give a shit about everything I say", or for those who will come back later.[1] It follows this with a second warning warning the reader that there is not intended to be a coherent plot or structure, but that he questions whether the reader will care about that. The book is written in a fragmented and sometimes hallucinatory manner, with the protagonist often daydreaming or fantasizing about committing mass homicide.[2][3] Several chapters are short, not more than a single paragraph. Many do not connect and jump from one to the other.[2]
The novella opens with the unnamed protagonist, a young man, listening to music in his car; he gets into an accident. The protagonist then speaks to the reader directly, before jumping to a concert he must attend with his friends; he says they are not his real friends because he cannot be "racist, sexist, or myself around them".[4] While at the concert, he begins fantasizing about committing a mass shooting there, before he is interrupted by a girl who flirts with him, before he leaves. Then he is in New York City, a place he loathes and complains about, eventually fantasizing about someone destroying the whole city. The book includes scenes where the protagonist suggests that he has shot up a gay nightclub, and curb stomps a leftist woman, as well as attacks on ethnic minorities, the poor, and trans people.[5][2] The protagonist wishes to destroy the United States.
Towards the end, the main character tells the reader that:[5]
We’re here because we understand that today is unsustainable and cruel, that tomorrow will only be worse, unless somebody takes action.... It’s today that you have accepted that you, yourself, are an engine of chaos, an accelerationist. You architect harassment...In a week, we’ll reenter the world as our usual selves...But this time, we accelerate heavily from within.
The book's narrator encourages the reader to channel their nihilism into something "productive" through violence and become an accelerationist, sarcastically suggesting that they "especially do not" destroy power stations without getting caught.[6][7][8] Other suggestions by the narrator of the book include that the reader "kill someone important", commit arson, commit a mass shooting, or engage in self-harm for attention.[9][8] The book ends with the narrator proclaiming all the things he has seen both God and demons in, concluding that "I saw God and he told me to burn it all down", before closing with a poem.[10]
Publication history
editIt was self published by Mike Ma in 2019.[5] It is sold on Amazon and on Audible as an audiobook.[5] Mike Ma is the pseudonym of far-right internet influencer Mike Mahoney, a former Breitbart writer and former associate of Milo Yiannopoulos.[5][11] Ma is also the founder of the Pine Tree Party accelerationist movement, founded in 2017, which had previously brought him prominence among ecofascists.[11][6] Ma, a militant accelerationist, has been outspoken in his praise for Unabomber Ted Kaczynski,[11][7][6] and with the Pine Tree Party encouraged mass shootings and other violence for the purpose of "promoting the advancement of the white race" and to safeguard nature.[6] Following the book's publication, Ma became popular among online accelerationists; one commentator described it as a "staple of accelerationist and ecofascist reading lists".[9][11] One description said it "sits alongside Mason’s Siege in the canon of prominent accelerationist writings".[12] The book's specific method of describing methods to conduct infrastructure attacks, utilizing repetition of the qualifier "I hear some people...", is often duplicated by online accelerationist graphics; sections of the writings are often brought together with neo-Nazi activism in memes.[13][14]
Two years later, he published a sequel, Gothic Violence; this book focuses on a group of terrorist surfers taking over Florida.[11][15] Like much far-right literature, the book and its sequel are easy to find as free PDFs online.[11] Since the book's publication it has been regularly spread by accelerationist and ecofascist Telegram channels;[5][16] the book is popular among Terrorgram, an interconnected series of Telegram channels that promotes extreme fascism and worships far-right mass murderers as "saints".[17] Along with works like The Turner Diaries and the manifestos of white supremacist mass shooters Brenton Tarrant and Dylann Roof, it has been included in an "Audio Nazi Library" on Telegram.[5][17] The novella was found among the possessions of an individual who was arrested for terroristic threats in 2021; he ran a white power-focused Telegram channel, and possessed a collection of firearms.[9]
Themes and style
editThe novel contains far-right accelerationist themes, and promotes the targeting of necessary infrastructure in order to destabilize society.[6][2] Several commentators have compared it to the 1996 novel Fight Club in style.[7][2] Helen Young said that both the book and its sequel were stylistically similar, both being reminiscent of the novels American Psycho as well as Fight Club, in their expression of misogyny and violent masculinity, as well as its inclusion of "hallucinatory episodes".[2] Graham Macklin writing for the academic journal Terrorism and Political Violence called it "saturated with irony and dark mordant humour", in a way that was reminiscent of online message boards.[7] The book is ecofascist and militantly accelerationist in its ideology, but also white nationalist and identitarian.[2] It, as well as its sequel, espouse several conspiracies, including that of the Great Replacement, as well as antisemitism and anti-vaccination ideas.[2] Helen Young noted its inclusion of slurs, vitriolic and violent language against groups, as well as several pages describing violent attacks against them, that were often targeted by far-right extremists; the book dehumanizes these groups.[18] The book also focuses substantially on diet and physical fitness, which are part of the "transformation" the protagonist undergoes.[19]
The Southern Poverty Law Center classed it as "standard fare within the radical right", calling it an "accelerationist fantasy".[9] "Alex Amend said the work was full of "brutal violence, racism and misogyny".[5] One commentator called it a "memoir-cum-manifesto";[17] Helen Young and Geoff Boucher described the book as a "fictionalized lone wolf rage fantasy" that justified hate crimes in what the book portrayed as a "degenerate civilization", targeting typical "culture war" topics like political correctness, mixed-race relationships and sexual harassment laws.[15] Macklin argues that the thoughts expressed in the book are "broadly congruent" with Kaczynski's civilizational critiques and the negative affects civilization could have on many aspects of life, including personal autonomy and freedom.[7] Harassment Architecture lists by name several mass murderers in its discussion of aesthetics of violence, saying that each has been forgiven "simply by looking good".[7] The book's narrator argues that mass murder is the solution to the perceived terror of modernity, part of the book's general position that violence is the only solution for many problems.[20] The book's core message, as described by one analysis, is the "concretized hatred for all that maintains society", with the perspective one that desires to cause offense to it.[21]
The style of the book is fragmented, combining a typical first-person style with ideological ranting and sections on "political and aesthetic discourse".[2] The novella bemoans technocracy ruining the chance of man to live a genuine life, with the protagonist expressing the desire to live in the "purity" of nature and calling the existence of industrialized man a "violent preface to his looming and inescapable consequence. The final consequence."[7] It views the solution to this as being found in nature, which towards the end of the book the protagonist declares has always won.[7] Harassment Architecture criticizes the apathetic and nihilistic outlook of the modern world, which in its view has killed beauty; as a consequence the modern world must be burned down.[21] Helen Young argued that the book and its sequel were both "profoundly gothic" in their contents, functioning as "narrative manifestos", viewing modern America as "inherently terrifying", and were an example of the far-right's exploitation of online media ecosystems.[22] She said they were "blueprints and fantasies" for white supremacist thought, like many other works of far-right fiction, narrating a path utilizing violence for white supremacists to acquire political power.[23]
References
edit- ^ Ma 2019, p. 5.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Young 2024, p. 299.
- ^ Young 2024, p. 306.
- ^ Ma 2019, p. 9.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Amend 2020, p. 9.
- ^ a b c d e Basha 2023, p. 19.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Macklin 2022, pp. 985–986.
- ^ a b Loadenthal 2022, p. 176.
- ^ a b c d Miller, Cassie; Gais, Hannah (June 16, 2021). "Texas Man Arrested on Charges of Terroristic Threats Ran White Power Telegram Channel". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved September 12, 2024.
- ^ Ma 2019, p. 151.
- ^ a b c d e f Young 2024, p. 298.
- ^ Hughes, Jones & Amarasingam 2022, p. 1006.
- ^ Krill & Clifford 2022, pp. 24–25.
- ^ Loadenthal 2022, pp. 176–177.
- ^ a b Boucher & Young 2023, p. 147.
- ^ Loadenthal, Hausserman & Thierry 2022, p. 105.
- ^ a b c O'Connor 2020, pp. 80–81.
- ^ Young 2024, pp. 299, 301.
- ^ Young 2024, pp. 305–306.
- ^ Young 2024, p. 301.
- ^ a b Loadenthal, Hausserman & Thierry 2022, p. 109.
- ^ Young 2024, pp. 299–300, 307.
- ^ Young 2024, p. 300.
- Sources
- Amend, Alex (2020). "Blood and Vanishing Topsoil: American Ecofascism Past, Present, and in the Coming Climate Crisis". The Public Eye. pp. 3–9. ISSN 1094-8759.
- Basha, Saddiq (2023). ""Death to the Grid": Ideological Narratives and Online Community Dynamics in Encouraging Far-Right Extremist Attacks on Critical Infrastructure". Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses. 15 (4): 17–24. ISSN 2382-6444. JSTOR 48743374.
- Boucher, Geoff; Young, Helen (February 2023). "Digital books and the far right". Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. 37 (1): 140–152. doi:10.1080/10304312.2023.2191905. ISSN 1030-4312.
- Hughes, Brian; Jones, Dave; Amarasingam, Amarnath (July 4, 2022). "Ecofascism: An Examination of the Far-Right/Ecology Nexus in the Online Space". Terrorism and Political Violence. 34 (5): 997–1023. doi:10.1080/09546553.2022.2069932. ISSN 0954-6553.
- Krill, Ilana; Clifford, Bennett (September 1, 2022). "Mayhem, Murder, and Misdirection: Violent Extremist Attack Plots Against Critical Infrastructure in the United States, 2016-2022". Reports, Projects, and Research. National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center.
- Ma, Mike (2019). Harassment Architecture. ISBN 978-1-79564-149-4.
- Macklin, Graham (July 4, 2022). "The Extreme Right, Climate Change and Terrorism". Terrorism and Political Violence. 34 (5): 979–996. doi:10.1080/09546553.2022.2069928. ISSN 0954-6553.
- Loadenthal, Michael (January 2, 2022). "Feral fascists and deep green guerrillas: infrastructural attack and accelerationist terror". Critical Studies on Terrorism. 15 (1): 169–208. doi:10.1080/17539153.2022.2031129. ISSN 1753-9153.
- Loadenthal, Michael; Hausserman, Samantha; Thierry, Matthew (2022). "Accelerating Hate: Atomwaffen Division, Contemporary Digital Fascism, and Insurrectionary Accelerationism". In Bacigalupo, James; Borgeson, Kevin; Valeri, Robin Maria (eds.). Cyberhate: The Far Right in the Digital Age. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-1-7936-0697-6.
- O'Connor, Brendan (2020). "The Accelerating Gyre: The American right wants to get on with "the cleansing "fire"". The Baffler. No. 52. pp. 70–83. ISSN 1059-9789. JSTOR 26922852.
- Young, Helen (2024). "Extremist Nostalgia: Mike Ma's Novellas as Twenty-First-Century Far-Right Gothic". In Bacon, Simon; Bronk-Bacon, Katarzyna (eds.). Gothic Nostalgia: The Uses Of Toxic Memory In 21st Century Popular Culture. Palgrave Gothic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3. ISBN 978-3-031-43852-3. ISSN 2634-6214.