Notes 7/10/2024

On the Miller & Power v. Turner case

The latest in the war over calling people “fascist” on the internet. Last week it came out that Nina Power has joined Daniel “DC” Miller in declaring bankruptcy as a result of last year’s UK High Court defamation case against Luke Turner. Nina Power and Daniel Miller had sued Luke Turner for calling Miller and Power fascists (among other related things) in tweets and webpages from 2018–19, and Turner filed a counterclaim against Miller and Power for harassment. The ruling dismissed both claims—all parties should just log off—but the court formally recognized that Miller and Power had waged a campaign of bullying against Turner and ordered them to pay 80% of Turner’s legal costs.

The case was not so much about one’s right to post edgelord accelerationist shit on the internet as it was about punishing the people who don’t get the supposed irony. But yes, they debated the meaning of Nick Land tweets on the stand. That the High Court wasn’t convinced by Miller’s/Power’s faux-naïve sophistry about Landian hyperracism being an innocent deconstruction of fascism/antisemitism/etc to bring the might of the British state down on Luke Turner (whatever you think of his art and “metamodernism” otherwise…) is ultimately a win for free speech.

I won’t attempt to tell the full story because doing so means wading through a particularly exhausting morass of internet lore, and most of the relevant information is already available online on Turner’s website. You can read the UK High Court’s ruling here.

Also public now are WhatsApp messages between Power and Miller (which were evidence at the trial) that illustrate their own far-right radicalization pipeline. On top of all the sympathetic talk about Mein Kampf and antisemitic conspiracy theories and TERFism and fairies and aliens and so on, there’s the student-teacher eroticism of Miller introducing Power to his naughty world of Hitlerian delights—their excitement about booking Airbnbs in cities where he’ll be giving lectures on Evola, the aliases and code words they’d have to use in public, their whimsical dreams of fleeing to Argentina like Mengele—now that’s love...

I haven’t met Nina personally but she’s someone with a palpable shadow presence in the New York scene. Nina gave a talk at one of the first Sovereign House events I’d ever heard about, months before I had ever been to the venue. She was also an editor of Compact before her resignation last week. I’m always running into grad student types who say they know her from “before the turn,” and see her as a serious leftist based on her activity in accelerationist theorycel Facebook groups, or at least a serious philosopher, and they comprise the small cottage industry of Nina Power apologetics. “Yeah, she’s been getting into some weird stuff, but fascist? No way, she’s too smart for that, it’s got to be some kind of 4D chess…”

As for Miller, as long as I’ve been aware of him on the internet he’s been like an archetypal Frogtwitter mystic crank with virtually no plausible deniability. Just another one of my haters from the beefing-with-Logo-Daedalus days. He is also on the masthead as the literary editor for IM–1776 magazine.

To me, the most astounding thing about the case is that this defeat for Miller and Power was self-inflicted. They took Luke Turner to court! Why not just let the guy have his little website where he posts the mean things the so-called fascists publicly say about him? Why does that matter? Did anyone ever really take Luke Turner seriously in the first place? Shouldn’t this all just enhance their notoriety? Notoriety is currency, right? They’re dangerous thinkers, and the philistines simply don’t get it… Alas, the dangerous ideas alone collapse without the armor of naïve innocence. “We’re just asking questions.” They can’t actually lean in to being the truly abject fascist poètes maudits they idealize because that would forfeit the duplicity for their aesthetics to survive. With his nefarious SEO-maxxing, tattletale Turner threatened the ambiguity they needed to stay in the good graces of academic and art world types. His malicious misreading of their advanced ironyposting undermines the social status they’d built in academia (or at least the status that Power had built). And for whatever reason the acceptance of those crowds does matter a lot for such dangerous thinkers—at least enough to bet the farm on it.

The expense and the formality of the legal proceedings casts this whole Landian edgelord discourse in a radically different light than it usually gets on weird theory Twitter. Consider a hypothetical Twitter anon groyper who posts throwaway tweets praising Hitler while claiming to be “not a fascist” (which to them is simply an accusatory slur of the ultimate evil), and that the normie libs are the real fascists for not understanding. A generic edgelord everyman. Does the poster actually believe this claim themself? Who knows. A tweet is supposedly so disposable that we can never “actually” know, and the amount of commitment needed to make such a statement is so disproportionately insignificant relative to how extreme its meaning is. It’s impossible to tell how exactly the disembodied digital neurotic relates to their own obscene jouissance. Discerning readers may have a hunch, but do you have access to the poster’s interiority? Oh, you don’t? Thought so… they must just be playing 4D chess or something. Anyway, this is all so fleeting that you’re the crazy one for caring so much about deciphering it. It’s old news, but an entire dissident right ideology of aesthetics (the exaltation of the 4chan avant-garde, etc…) relies on the idea they’re doing some real Derridean magic here, that nothing they say can ever really be accounted for…

No surprise that this discourse completely collapses when put under the scrutiny of the legal system. Miller and Power went all-in on the claim that they clearly aren’t fascists/antisemites/etc, that Luke Turner knows this and is willfully misrepresenting them to hurt their reputations, and that this constitutes defamation. This level of mad-online commitment suggests that they actually believe themselves that they’re not the “real fascists” at all—and, once they explain the intricate rhetorical techniques at work in their discourse, it will become clear to the court not only that they aren’t fascists, but that they themselves are the true antifascists… No, they aren’t simply self-aware fascists psyopping the libs into gangstalking paranoia with bad-faith trolling. No, the fascists aren’t them, that’s impossible, to think otherwise is character assassination, and they’ll bet everything on this. They believe in all this even as they and indulge themselves in a whimsical occult world of Aryan faeries and Hyperborean gods. They also seem to have gone into this legal process unaware of the possibility that their anonymous Twitter accounts and blog posts would also be brought forth as evidence.

By bringing this to court Miller and Power sacrifice the veneer of disposability and ambiguity, which is really the only thing they had in the first place. Ironically, they’d seem less fascist if they didn’t care so much about it. Then you take a quick look at the shit they and their allies are actually saying and it's all totally damning, the sort of stuff that doesn’t pass the smell test at all.

Take a look at this excerpt from Turner’s lawyers questioning Miller from the court transcripts:

I first saw those excerpts from the court transcripts posted in this tweet by Justin Murphy, a comrade of Miller and Power, and the way he and his followers interpret it makes it seem like the court was baffled by the transgressive genius of the tweets in question. Another banger, Mr. Land…