New book explains how the internet has propelled extremism to forefront of 21st-century politics

In a new book, Virginia Commonwealth University professor Christopher Whyte explores why conspiracy theories, extremist rhetoric and acts of antagonism by fringe elements of society are becoming increasingly prevalent.

“Subversion 2.0: Leaderlessness, the Internet, and the Fringes of Global Society,” (Oxford University Press) sheds new light on how and why the internet has fueled the rise of extremism in U.S. society and politics, but it also suggests there may be reason for optimism.

Whyte, Ph.D., an associate professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness in VCU’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, recently discussed his new book.

What is the driving force of “Subversion 2.0′?

The book’s core motivating question is simple: What explains the meteoric rise in visibility of fringe rhetoric and actors in mainstream societal discourse during the first decades of the 21st century?

This collision of the fringe with the mainstream is clear in so many developments over the past decade. Extreme far-right populist forces have entangled themselves in Western politics in unprecedented fashion, and conspiracy theories—from medical skepticism to racist replacement concepts—are real forces in society, including in the 2024 U.S. election season.

And this dynamic is far from unique to democratic nations in the West. Clearly, something has made the relationship between fringe advocacy and the sociopolitical processes of mainstream society increasingly sensitive and mutually responsive.

What explains this relationship?

The answer to this question is inevitably complex, but I focus on what is arguably the single most significant enabler of this transformation of global politics in the 21st century: the internet. While the average person would probably be unsurprised that the internet is such a powerful enabler of counterculture and subversive intention among society’s fringe elements, existing scholarship actually doesn’t do a good job explaining why.

Extreme, fringe communities are most commonly defined by fragmentation, ideological infighting and pariahism, all of which feels antithetical to the far-reaching impact we see in the mainstream today. So, beyond the general argument that the web reduces barriers to exposure for diverse kinds of information, why does fringe rhetoric and antagonism seem to characterize mainstream politics in the 21st century in a way that was the exception in the past rather than the rule?

My book argues that the answer is the emergence of a condition of “leaderlessness,” driven by developments in socialized web technologies, as the default format of subversive activity in the world today.

What inspired you to write about this topic?

I began this project almost a decade ago, at a time when Western countries were beginning to have their first brushes with weaponized information. My doctoral training was in international security through a lens of political communication, which has turned me into a researcher that studies how people encounter information technologies in a variety of national security situations today.

And back in 2015–16, I became interested in how cybercapabilities were increasingly being used by both foreign adversaries and different kinds of nonstate actors not purely for hacking but to help create influence effects. I ended up being fairly ahead of the curve on that, and I’ve spent my early career here at VCU researching all aspects of cyber-enabled influence activities.

This book comes from my dissertation, where I set out to fairly narrowly study how fringe social movements and extremists hack. But it has become so much more in the last five or six years at VCU, as real-world events—like January 6th, broad-scoped Russian interference in Western political processes, the growth of fringe social media platforms and more—have prompted me to develop a coherent theory for why fringe antagonism is so much more visible and impactful today than in almost any era past.

Could you elaborate a bit on the concept of leaderlessness?

The idea of leaderlessness is a play on a strategy commonly employed by subversive social movements, like those tied to white supremacy, called leaderless resistance. Leaderless resistance is the idea that subversive causes benefit from maintaining a separation between parts of their campaign to create social change.

On one level, public-facing elements of advocacy, like political parties or celebrity commentators, push fringe ideologies in a format and framing that is palatable (or, at least, digestible) to the mainstream. The other level, by contrast, contains the raw substance of fringe causes in the discourse and actions of elements beyond the mainstream. This benefits the cause by allowing for deniability, while at the same time slowly selling the reality that fringe ideas might actually have mass appeal.

And how prevalent is leaderlessness now?

Today, this leaderless dynamic is commonplace. But it’s also invariably not something that is explicitly engineered by the leaders and planners of a fringe cause. Instead, the leaderlessness of today is something brought about by the Web 2.0 turn toward social media and user-generated content online in the past three decades.

At its core, leaderlessness is characterized by an evolving and uneven feedback loop linking fringe spaces to mainstream popular discourse and the rhetoric of elites, like Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen. Cult-like conditions in conspiratorial virtual communities simplify, standardize and amplify extreme narratives. These narratives are then rapidly filtered into mainstream settings thanks to a series of socio-technological conditions present in the Web 2.0 era.

As a result, fringe narratives and symbols often become the lens through which social and political elites interpret information and find meaning that they then spread through public speech. Finally, this public speech is projected back to subversive spaces and communities, where it is interpreted and used to further perpetuate fringe narratives.

The important element of this, however, is that the flow of information and interpretation between fringe and mainstream is imbalanced. A host of information controls applied to the running of fringe media platforms and communal online spaces mean that mainstream ideas don’t drive the rhetoric of subversive discourse nearly as much as the other way around.

The end result of this is that fringe communities are able to socially construct people and events as symbols with far-reaching meaning. Political celebrities are targeted because their words are given meaning not by mainstream discourse but by the chatter of subversive online forums. Poll workers and FEMA officials are threatened even as they undertake the most civically responsible jobs imaginable. And something like the certification of electoral votes on January 6th becomes unprecedentedly meaningful for diverse groups spread across the electorate, leading in part to the conditions for an attempted insurrection in 2021.

What do you hope readers get from ‘Subversion 2.0,’ and how will it contribute to our understanding of extremism?

I hope that readers get a good understanding of how technology affects our national security beyond the simplistic idea that new tools empower new threats. That’s true, but the story is inevitably far more complex.

The story I’m telling in this book is that the evolution of internet technologies has advantaged an often-understudied kind of sociopolitical actor (i.e. the subversive and subversive social movements) more than others, like conventional activists or even terrorists. That doesn’t come from the intrinsic qualities of digital technologies but from how those technologies have transformed society, and thus expanded the space for potential subversion more than it has increased opportunities for coercion or mass violence.

I think it’s also important for readers to realize that the arguments I’m making and the evidence I offer actually imply good reasons for optimism. The meteoric rise in the visibility of fringe rhetoric and antagonism has been brought about by time-and-place conditions in society. This is the kind of thing that often happens in history when an information revolution (like the printing press or the telegraph) brings about massive changes in global politics and economics.

The simple fact is that our institutions, the norms we track against and more all need to catch up. And, of course, the man-made character of these technologies implies that we can regulate and design our way out of today’s increasingly contentious new normal.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I hope that readers find something for themselves in the book. It’s not just timely for the events of today, but it stands as a unique survey of subversion as a force in world politics. If you want to learn about the different ways subversive actors as distinct as white supremacists, digital nomads-turned-hacktivists, Falun Gong and anti-vax communities have used the internet to further their causes, this is the book to read.