Why I Stay

There is a particular sound a phone makes when a swarm arrives. It is a stutter, a fast run of notifications that does not let up, that keeps coming while you hold the thing in your hand and watch your own name turn into a target. I have heard it more than once. I have learned what lives inside it. Death threats. My home address, posted for strangers to keep. The venues of my lectures, named so that someone might come. Rape threats aimed at the women in my life. The flat medieval promise that I will be hanged. I have read these in the small hours of a Palmerston North night, in a quiet house, with my children asleep down the hall and the Manawatū running dark past the window, and I have felt the precise thing the swarm is engineered to make a person feel, which is alone.

I know how these swarms are built, because I study them for a living. I have watched a sitting member of parliament point the machinery at me and then sit back while it ran. That is the part people outside this work find hardest to believe. The hate is not weather. It does not roll in on its own. Someone with standing names you, and the infrastructure does the rest, the accounts that wake at the same hour, the screenshots stripped of context, the quote-posts that multiply the original a thousandfold, the followers who arrive carrying the same three insults like a uniform. It looks spontaneous. It is a supply chain.

The chain runs through one address now more than any other. Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 and rebuilt it from the studs. He took a public square, a flawed and noisy one but a square, and turned it into a hunting ground. He gutted the moderation. He tuned the algorithm to reward the cruellest voices and called the reward free speech. He reinstated the people the old rules had thrown out, and he handed the megaphone to a politics that wants women silent, that reads a multiracial democracy as theft, that dreams in the grammar of the camp and the purge. The feed learned what we clicked when we were frightened and angry, and it fed us more of it, because frightened and angry is profitable. The result is a recruiting station. It radicalises in plain sight. It takes a lonely young man and walks him, post by post, from grievance to ideology to action. In the plainest words I can find, it is a cesspool of fascist hate.

So the decent people have been leaving. The activists, the scholars, the organisers, the writers, my own comrades, have walked off in great migrating flocks, mostly toward Bluesky, where the air is clean and the timeline is kind and nobody arrives at three in the morning to tell you how you will die. I understand the wish for clean air. I have stood at the window at that hour and wanted it badly. The tiredness is real. Being flooded, week after week, with people who hate you for sport wears a groove in you that does not close fast. Anyone who tells you the swarm does not land has never been underneath one.

And yet. Here is what the long years of digital ethnography have taught me, the lesson I keep arriving at against my own exhaustion. The far right is not defeated by being left alone in the room. It is strongest precisely where no one is willing to stand. The disinformation has to be met where it is told. The lie has to be corrected in the same feed that carried it, at something near the same volume, or it sets like concrete. Every false claim answered, every fabricated screenshot exposed, every act of recruitment interrupted, chips at the one thing the platform is actually for, which is the manufacture of new fascists. You cannot dismantle a recruiting station from a building across town. You dismantle it by standing in the doorway.

A colleague I love and respect asked me the question gently, from a place of real care. Why are you still on this fascist platform. It is a fair question and I have turned it over many nights. Here is my answer.

I stay because of who I am, and I mean that as an account of debt, not of virtue. I carry a great deal of privilege. Academic, intellectual, heterosexual, cisgender, upper caste, upper class, male. The swarm can frighten me, but it cannot do to me what it does to a trans teenager or a Muslim woman or a brown migrant with no institution at her back. My skin is thicker because the world made it thicker, unfairly, and that thickness is not a comfort to retire into. It is a tool. Those of us who can stand in the doorway and take the blows owe something more than a study of the hate. We owe its refutation. To leave the fight to the most vulnerable, or to leave it to no one, is its own quiet act of harm.

This is what the oligarchs are counting on. The strategy is not subtle once you see it. Make the square unbearable for everyone with a conscience, and the conscientious will go, and the square will belong to the swarm, which is the point. The exodus they provoke is the victory they want. Musk does not mind that we find his platform vile. He minds whether we are in the room. An empty public sphere, surrendered without a contest, is exactly the prize these men are playing for, because a democracy argued out of existence on one platform is rehearsal for a democracy argued out of existence everywhere.

So I stay on the fascist platform. I stay knowing the cost, knowing the address is out there, knowing the next swarm is a matter of when. I stay because the people doing this would prefer that I did not, and that preference is information. I stay because correcting a lie in front of the people being lied to is among the few things a single scholar can still do with his hands. They want the decent ones gone, the room cleared, the door left open. I am going to stand in the door.