Er ist einer der Occupy Wall Street Organisatoren: Micah M. White. Vor ein paar Jahren, 2011, trollte der bekannte US-Aktivist das Establishment weltweit. Mit Hilfe von Memen, Bildern und Slogans im Netz, gelang es ihm und seinen Kollegen des kanadischen Adbusters-Magazins eine anhaltende Grossdemonstration bei der Wall Street, im Herz der weltweiten Finanzindustrie, loszutreten. Es folgte eine globale Welle von Occupy-Demonstrationen, und bald auch der Arabische Frühling. Der wiederum wurde in Putins Russland mit grosser Sorge betrachtet. War das vielleicht eine amerikanische Strategie um künftig Russland zu unterwandern? Den «Arabischen Frühling» nannte man dort «Farben Revolutionen», wegen der orangenen Flaggen der Demokratie-Bewegung in der Ukraine, die zu dieser Zeit auflebte. Russland versuchte aus den Strategien zu lernen, um sich gegen die vermuteten digitalen Intrigen der Amerikaner zu wehren. So began, was wir heute russische Troll-Armeen nennen. Dann meldeten sich die Trolls auch bei dem, der alles losgetreten hatte, Micah M. White. Und der fiel drauf rein.
Hannes Grassegger
How did you participate in the #BlackMatters Movement?
Micah M. White
I don’t know if I participated. I got an email from this guy named Davis in May of 2016 saying he’s with #blackmatters and would do an interview about protest. From the beginning the email was a little weird – I can send it to you – and I did not reply to it for about two weeks. Later I was like, ok, why not, lets do it. That’s how I ended up talking to him on the phone, giving an interview, and they put me on their page.
HG
What’s the problem about #BlackMatters?
MW
#BlackMatters is not an American activist organization. Which was what they were saying. In his mail Davis said, we have a 200 000 members community. It turns out that they were, I guess, a front group for Russian quasi state operatives and were designing to masquerade as American activists and influence America activism.
HG
And you were not the only who got hit, right ?
MW
Apparently they had dozens of different group names, they were active on all the different social networks, I think I even saw the CEO of Twitter retweeting one of their things. A lot of people experienced at least one of their messages. They were prolific. They really had an influence on American activism.
HG
It looks like activism is facing a new challenge.
MW
I think it is also important to give us kind of an historical context. What Russia is doing is kind of a continuation of their critic of what they call Color Revolutions. Russia has been complaining over two decades that America is engineering street protests in countries that are sympathetic to Russia and using those street protests to create regime change. They’ve been complaining about this, but now, it’s like they’ve gone from complaining to actually trying to master that and to be better than America at that. If it’s true, they managed to start a kind of destabilizing civil war. This is changing the nature of activism. This makes it more dangerous to be an activist.
HG
How can activists protect themselves against getting involved in things they don’t see?
MW
There are some forces who want activism to be non-revolutionary, some of those forces are Americans and some of those forces are foreign governments. And so there is a whole shadowy world of people trying to influence activism. It’ll be very difficult to find an example of a successful revolution that did not receive foreign support. It’s not like we can just say as activists: ok, we’re not going to receive any foreign support. Even if you could try to weed out all the fake foreign support, you might need foreign support. As activists, we need to have a more sophisticated and nuanced relationship, because what Russia is trying to do is control American activism. They weren’t trying to be like, allies of American activism. But we might need a foreign ally to, for example, get rid of Donald Trump and replace him with a revolutionary social movement.
HG
What is really new about this?
MW
Part of what is new is the decrease in resources necessary in order to pull this off. In the past, with Color Revolution, the tactic used to be: America state department would train foreign activists and give them support and then deploy them in the country. But with the Russia thing all they did were setups on Facebook pages, call people on Skype, interview them. I mean, the amount of resources they put into it proportional to what they got out of it is probably a lot less than previous examples of that kind of things. And then it gets even more complicated because the Russian Internet Research Agency, the troll factory where the attack against me originated from presumably, isn’t really a governmental institution. It acts on its own.
HG
So how do you protect yourself ?
MW
I don’t know if there is a way to protect yourself other than to realize that this is the new world we are playing.
HG
In 2015 when we talked, you were playing with this thought that the right-wing Tea Party Movement and Occupy could have united to build real revolutionary power. Today, shouldn’t activists start to use such deep fake tech and influence operations for their own ends?
MW
I’m not sure that we can get what we really want if what we really want is a broad-based social movement that is going to institute democratic regime change and grand positive social transformations. The way social movements work is that when they really take off they spread uncontrollably. If Russia had been successful in creating a social movement, part of the boomerang back would have been street protests in Russia. It’s like whether or not Cambridge Analytica and its micro-targeting can be used for good. The deeper question is: are these technologies inherently authoritarian, are they inherently negative?
HG
Sometimes in Russia the opposition is funded by their own enemy – so that they can just pull the plug, make this public and discredit the opposition. Isn’t it a dead end street for activism if everything that happens could be fake, can be put into doubt?
MW
Protest is kind of based on the idea that the people in the streets are somehow representing the collective will of the people. This is the foundation of our democratic myth, it goes back to Rousseau. And that power derives from the fact that we are the people, we are the system. Part of what Russia is doing is completely delegitimizing and destroying that foundational democratic myth because now, when you see people in the streets, you’re not like “those are the people, those are citizens or everyday people” you’re like “oh, those are funded by Russia” and so you loose the ability to use protest, you lose how people manifest their discontent. That’s really dangerous.
HG
Should activists become super transparent about their financing, for example? Still, this could enable your enemy to cut your money off.
MW
When you look at the Russian revolution, even up until weeks before Lenin has set into power, he was in hiding because everyone was accusing him of taking German money, and Russia was at war with Germany at that time. The public widely believed that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were tools of a foreign government that was at war with their own state. Historically such debates have been a symptom of the creasing tension and possibility of the coming of a real revolution. The optimistic reading is like, oh, yeah, Russia, China and North Korea are going to start throwing resources at American activism. Maybe we will have a revolution in this country. The negative side might be what kind of revolution it will entail if it becomes widely known that foreign governments are supporting American activists? What kind of revolution could occur? The Russian revolution ended up in an armed insurrection.
HG
Would you say the Russian revolution was a success in 1917–18?
MW
For sure.
HG
The iconography of that revolution, these black and white movies of that moment where the communists storm the palace, are manufactured. Fake. This has been filmed years later. Then, if we look at the fall of that same Soviet Empire, it started with people hearing – during a mass demonstration – shots. So they assumed Ceausescu, the Romanian communist party leader had ordered to shoot protesters. This started the outrage which took down the system. In fact, these shots came from loudspeakers. There is a whole history of using fakery exactly for turning over a system. Speaking of which, Bannon is currently touring Europe and in Switzerland right now, have you heard?
MW
No, I want to meet
Bannon so badly.
HG
Bannon is meeting Swiss billionaires and right wingers. I remember you told me years ago about the Italian Five Stars Movement’s dream to build a global populist movement. Is Bannon doing it now?
MW
For me that would be great. If Steve Bannon’s on that, then the left will be able to get even better, which would be great. I think why the right wing will always loose in their current formulation, is their refusal to think globally. Imagine they said: ok, there are global problems, and there are global solutions that can only be solved by a global populist party – and we are going to build it! The left should do this. This has been the dream of the left. Even the Green party was supposed to be that. So I agree, I think the race is on for who will create the first social movement electoral party that wins elections in multiple countries and create a unified agenda. When I met the Five Stars movement in Italy, Gianroberto Casaleggio, the founder, was so exited about the idea of a global populist movement. I think it’s the future.
HG
Don’t you fear the Right is currently leading the race?
MW
I think the social movements are like a weapon and this is why they’re a weapon a lot of people can use. From the Color Revolutions, to the Arab Springs, to Occupy Wall St, for example. Occupy Wall Street was created by a Canadian magazine. So you can create movements in other people’s countries very effectively. I think the left is automatically going to be better at these social movements because of our willingness to let go off control. I think the reason why Occupy Wall Street spread to eighty-two countries is because we had no control over it, because it was leaderless. And I think the next movement doesn’t have to be completely leaderless like that. The right always wants to “maintain control” which will probably prohibit the movement from spreading very widely. But again I don’t know because fascism has spread to multiple countries, Spain, Germany, Italy. I think the lefts will crack the code first.
HG
So, you would say democracy is the ultimate tool to win this race?
MW
Yes. Even at logistical levels. Social movement’s eruptions are so complicated you can’t actually tell people what to do. If Bannon just wants to do a coalition type, axis of evil-type thing…I don’t think that’s going to work versus a true bottom up electoral movement. I would love to see it though.
HG
Why would you love to see it?
MW
I think it would help our revolution. We learn from each other. The Russians learned from Occupy. If Bannon really cracks the code, maybe the left will wake up. I don’t find him very concerning for some reason.
HG
Why?
MW
Because up until now the Right refuse the idea of global problems. For them climate change doesn’t exist. No need to work together. They are isolated. It’s an inherent limitation in their ideology and that means they can’t actually win. The social movement that is actually going to win and take power in multiple countries and become some sort of global government is precisely the one that sees there are global challenges, that we need global solutions and we have to all work together. We need to open up some borders, let people move more freely, in order to create solutions.