Episode Transcript
Episode Six
A Dare Wrapped in a Joke Wrapped in a Void
Part Two: Conversation with Cy Canterel
Hosted by Matthew Remski
[00:00:07] Matthew Remski
Welcome, patrons, to the temporarily paywalled continuation of the main feed interview for episode six, A Dare Wrapped in a Joke Wrapped in a Void, with Cy Canterel.
I am really grateful for your support, and I hope this project brings some joy, hope, and utility to your work and days. I just want to reiterate that my plan for these second halves is to review and maybe reflect a little beforehand on what I learned in part one, then roll the rest of the conversation, and then return with some further reflections.
Because Cy Canterel’s studies are so compressed, I thought it would be worth listing the main points of my interview with her before rolling part two. I have eight quotes here that I will quickly summarize.
First: “What looks like politics is often subculture. What looks like a manifesto is sometimes a dare wrapped in a joke wrapped in a void.”
This is the key line, the viral aphorism. It is why I titled the episode the way I did. It is really Canterel’s take on how online extremism hides behind layers of irony and coded humor, where political meaning and nihilistic play can become indistinguishable. But the important thing to remember is that the irony and coded humor can also just be what they are. They can be hiding nothing but disillusionment.
In the vein of who does and does not get the jokes or the jargon in an event like the Charlie Kirk assassination attempt and the details that emerge around Tyler Robinson, Canterel says, “Humans are always drawing lines between who belongs and who does not, and those lines are what make both fringe and dominant cultures tick.”
So she reframes belonging and exclusion as universal social dynamics, not fringe phenomena. I think this shows that fascist movements exploit the same need for identity.
Next, some really good advice from Canterel, especially for me as a culture observer: “Trying to decode memes one by one misses the point. It is like dissecting the punchline of a joke. The meaning lives in who laughs.”
There is this overly confident, sometimes dogged gumshoe attitude that can guide a technocratic analysis of online radicalism: I am going to get my answers by decoding each meme. But understanding intentions and motives requires knowing the audience and the cultural context, not just the content.
Next quote: “Irony is not always a recruitment plan. It is a current that pulls people along. Most do not set out to radicalize. They drift there.”
This is an approach to narratives about radicalization. Canterel’s point is that subcultures operate more like gravity than strategy. I think that is a more forgiving picture of radicalization because it suggests that conditions around a person could also change in order for a redirection to happen.
On the question of how to interpret or categorize contradictory political actors, Canterel says, “Fringe ideologies often fuse contradictions as proof of purity. That is how we get neo-Nazi trans people. This is not logic. It is about belonging.”
So she exposes how extremist identity formation rewards paradox and incoherence as demonstrations of loyalty, and even unique forms of loyalty.
On the topic of men, Canterel says, “Men in isolation become prey to meaninglessness, despair, and rage, not because they are men, but because we give everyone in these conditions nowhere to belong.”
This is a social-psychological analysis of how alienation, not ideology, primes vulnerable men for extremist or nihilist worldviews.
And then finally: “People use racism, sexism, and irony as anxiety management systems.”
I find this a very interesting psychological frame: reactionary expressions often function as emotional regulation rather than ideological conviction. That is really worth keeping in mind, especially when we are thinking about young people whose views may not be as fixed as they seem.
So in all of these cases, I think what Canterel is offering is a way of thinking about the abstract, archetypal young person who is on the edge of the alt-right pipeline online, and how it is not necessarily a foregone conclusion that they are going to be sucked all the way in. It really depends on the other social factors in their lives.
So here we go with part two, picking up with my questions about Graham Platner.
I have two other questions in this grouping of “What does the Platner story expose.” One is this feeling that I think a lot of people run up against: does my brother, or my son, or my cousin actually have noxious views that they otherwise hide? Do they code-switch at home or in their communities? What do they really think? It seems like some of the online culture that we think most about really operates to increase that sense of paradox.
[00:06:17] Cy Canterel
Yes, and likely. I mean, we all have biases and we all have to constantly interrogate our positions.
I would say that because there is such a plethora of this content, this red-pill content, out there now, there are probably quite a lot of people who have been exposed to it and may resonate with it, usually for reasons of metastasizing and unreconstituted grief and anger.
You want to have a place to put those feelings. You do not know how to process them. No one is taught, at this point in time, how to deal with discomfort and how to deal with the confrontation with ambiguity. We should have courses on this.
So I do think that people use irony, nihilism, racism, sexism, all of those things, as anxiety management systems.
And we have larger systemic issues with that as well. It is baked into the system.
Yes, I would say most people probably do have some controversial, if not outright noxious, beliefs that they may not want to pull out in mixed company. But they may pull that joke out in, you know, a private setting, like we saw with the recent Young Republican text message group.
[00:07:43] Matthew Remski
Exactly right.
[00:07:44] Cy Canterel
It is important to recognize that, and to recognize the divide between what might be a more private identity and a public identity. It really just shows how deeply in the groundwater these views are.
These are things that have been with us from the beginning, and I think part of American exceptionalism has been the denial of that narrative.
We see that even more actively now with the administration trying to pull back on historical representations of slavery and things like that.
We have a very, very dark history. I live in New Orleans. I confront that every single day.
I think that denial is a huge part of why these narratives become so magnetic to people.
[00:08:28] Matthew Remski
We will turn to identity in a moment. But the last question in this list of anxious provocations is this: if my brother, my son, my cousin, my neighbor had fascist views at some point, can they turn themselves around?
I think that is at the center of what is happening with Graham Platner right now. Can you be an edgelord, can you shitpost, and can you change?
[00:08:58] Cy Canterel
I think the short answer is yes. Anyone can change, with some caveats.
There are people who suffer from or live with certain types of personality disorders, like malignant narcissism, and I do not think someone like Donald Trump has any capacity to change. People also tend to get more ossified as they age, and it becomes very difficult to have that kind of fundamental conversation with oneself and really incorporate all the changes that are required.
But in Platner’s case, for example, I think it looks like it may be possible. Again, I do not know him. This could be completely inaccurate. He could be hiding a lot more. That is totally possible.
[00:09:40] Matthew Remski
Exactly.
[00:09:41] Cy Canterel
But it is possible for someone to have held poorly informed and offensive positions at one point, to have done very stupid things, and then to come back from that and say, “That is not who I want to be.”
I do think that is possible.
[00:09:57] Matthew Remski
We were emailing before meeting, and in discussing Platner a bit, you really honed in on the problem of identity, especially online identity. The question “Who is Graham Platner really” is a narrative question. It is a story.
Can you unpack the narrative of “Who is Graham Platner really,” or how that is always a narrative question?
[00:10:24] Cy Canterel
Narrative is essentially the organizing principle of the human brain. It is how we make sense of the world.
We cannot not make a story in order to understand some aspect of what we are trying to incorporate into our own lived experience.
When we ask, “Who is Graham Platner,” or “Who am I,” or “Who is my significant other or my family,” a lot of it is about the relationship between several things: the actions I choose to take, the way I see myself, and the perception of those actions and that presentation by others.
That is where you get into a very ambiguous space. It is a bit like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
For me, I might look at a series of things, like how Graham Platner represents himself, the choices he has made in his life, and I will make an interpretation based on my own experiences and my own self-concept. How much do I incorporate who I think he is into my own sense of self.
This is why, for followers of Donald Trump, the narrative they have created about this person is incorporated into their own self-concept. When that narrative is threatened, they feel personally threatened.
So this gets into how humans form meaningful connections and how culture, as a whole, is a narrative process: the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
I do not think it is really possible to understand the sum of anyone. I do not fully know who I am, so how could I claim to know that about anybody else.
Any interpretation I make is always going to be based on my own lived experience and what I might want to believe about that person.
I had written in our email that this also comes into play when we are talking about Taylor Swift and her recent controversies, because this new album has rewritten some of her fans’ interpretations of who they thought she was, and thereby called into question their own self-identity.
That has caused a lot of consternation. So I think we are seeing something similar there, maybe.
[00:12:53] Matthew Remski
One question I have about the term narrative is whether it promotes or discourages ambiguity.
The way we are talking about it now, a certain picture or impression of the person forms very concretely, and then it becomes very hard to challenge. It becomes painful for the follower to question it.
When I hear the word narrative, I also think of a storyline over time in which a person might change. I wonder if there is a distinction to make there. Do narratives promote or discourage ambiguity?
[00:13:27] Cy Canterel
I think it depends on the context.
This gets at one of my core beliefs about humans, which is that we tend to shy away from ambiguity. Sartre even called it the horror of the ambiguous.
Ambiguity forces us to confront our blind spots and to experience our own anxiety in the face of the unknown, and then to decide what to do with that anxiety. That is a huge cognitive load.
If you look at novels with an unreliable narrator, there are people who will not read them because they do not want to be misled by the person telling the story or interpreting reality for them.
So in certain contexts, ambiguity can be seen as a more sophisticated version of narrative. We use ambiguous narratives to try to confront aspects of our own anxiety and fear.
But in politics, people generally do not want an ambiguous narrative. In politics, people want something very clear, very hero’s journey. That is why the Platner trajectory is getting messed up. It turns out he is an unreliable, flawed hero.
[00:14:48] Matthew Remski
It is interesting, because from one point of view, his trajectory over that longer and more ambiguous pathway should be everything a populist-minded Democrat is yearning for. From another point of view, fixed in a single time and pinned to Reddit, the associations with him are just cursed on their face. The desire for clarity is certainly foiled by what has been reported.
[00:15:17] Cy Canterel
He is such an interesting case because he has attached himself to an archetype, consciously or unconsciously. The archetype of the white working man’s hero. The kind of person who would have been out in the front lines in the sixties and seventies, striking and on the picket lines, maybe a union head during that period.
That is an archetype that is, by and large, fairly devoid of contemporary resonance, or at least it is not the most contemporary interpretation of what is needed.
It is interesting that he is invoking things that are a bit nostalgic.
And none of those people in the past were as perfect as we remember. We just did not have as much data about them as we do about people now.
I wonder too about looking at Mamdani versus Platner. The difference between those two can tell us a lot about the next generation’s version of that archetype versus the previous generation’s version.
[00:16:34] Matthew Remski
Do you see more coherence in the way Mamdani has presented himself and been received by his general following?
[00:16:43] Cy Canterel
I think so. That is just my interpretation, again.
Mamdani also has the curse and the gift of being much younger, and he may have been more aware at a younger age of what he wanted to do, in a way that Obama also was. That can help someone stay very clean as an archetype.
Who knows, maybe something will be uncovered about him too. No one is perfect. I really want to stress that: no one is perfect.
Think back to Clinton, who was an incredibly imperfect, kind of terrible person in many ways, with all sorts of tensions in his character. But the big deal was that he revealed that he had smoked marijuana a few times.
[00:17:33] Matthew Remski
Shock and horror.
[00:17:37] Cy Canterel
Right.
[00:17:38] Matthew Remski
Never mind dismantling the welfare state, never mind Middle East policy.
[00:17:43] Cy Canterel
Or rampant sexual abuse, or anything else.
So the archetypes of what is expected of a hero or heroine change with our cultural narratives and expectations.
I sort of feel like Platner is coming out of an older version of that narrative. Some of the past that is catching up with him now are also the ghosts of an earlier generation.
[00:18:17] Matthew Remski
One distinction I have just thought about, listening to you, between Mamdani and Platner, is that Mamdani’s unacceptable or intolerable statements in the past were not made anonymously. They are not buried on Reddit. He is sitting there in Zoom calls or interviews saying, “Yeah, we have to seize the means of production.”
There is not as much mystery around who this guy is. I find that very interesting, that Platner’s dark night of the soul seems to happen in a space that is so contested and so difficult to read from day to day. It is liminal.
[00:19:05] Cy Canterel
I think the Platner archetype is someone who would make a great novel. A great novel.
[00:19:12] Matthew Remski
Incredible. That is the first thing I said: this is going to go farther and farther and farther, and we have no idea where it is going to wind up.
[00:19:20] Cy Canterel
Right.
[00:19:21] Matthew Remski
And that is a great novel.
[00:19:22] Cy Canterel
But I do not know if he is going to make a great politician.
I am the last person who would make a great politician. That has never been something I have wanted with any part of my being. I do not want to be in politics.
The person who is attracted to politics in the first place is already carrying a certain host of associations. You have to look at that person with a different eye.
That is something we have to think about too.
[00:20:01] Matthew Remski
Neither of us are psychologists or psychotherapists, but I think what we are both circling is this: a person who wants to be on stage, like Platner, and who knows somewhere that that Reddit history is in his past and the tattoo is on his chest, is asking for some kind of conflict.
There is a drive toward overcoming something that is in the shadows, perhaps, or maybe toward doing it without fully facing it.
[00:20:31] Cy Canterel
I think it is not even just conflict. It is a hubristic impulse. It is daring the gods a little bit.
[00:20:41] Matthew Remski
Right.
[00:20:42] Cy Canterel
That is an interesting characterological fascination. Again, I do not know if it makes for a great public servant.
Do we want our public servants to be consistent and to show up day after day and be slightly boring functionaries, but at least stay on message. If that message is inspiring to a larger number of people, given the macro conditions of the world right now, I kind of argue maybe yes. We need that consistency. We do not need complexity right now.
[00:21:19] Matthew Remski
If we need consistency, it would be great if that consistency could also carry the history he has brought, apparently, which is: “I saw firsthand what it was to be at the center of American empire with a gun in my hand, and I am against that, and that is not going to happen anymore if I have anything to say about it.”
It would be great if those two things could come together, but wisdom born out of trauma is going to be hard to find, I think.
[00:21:48] Cy Canterel
Again, I could be totally wrong about all of this, and he could make a great public servant.
But countering the military industrial complex and the surveillance industrial complex at this point is another matter. That personal realization of being the still point of the turning world, where you are there with a gun in your hand pointing it at somebody and saying “never again,” that is a very narratively inspiring moment.
Turning that realization into a systemic intervention against something as deep and global as the defense industry is another thing entirely. I would want to see a policy platform that actually turns that into policy, because I think that is the thorny point.
[00:22:38] Matthew Remski
It is so interesting. As a side note, what you are describing in terms of these historically different paradigms comes up for me all the time, because I fetishize the images and the literature of past antifascist movements in a very strong way.
Some of my favorite stories in the world come out of the International Brigades gathering in 1938 and sailing to Spain as civilians. I think, that is incredible. I see that kind of energy replicated by the Global Samud flotilla, and I think that is impressive.
But I also know there is no universe in which a civilian can hitchhike their way to Spain, pick up a bolt-action rifle, and fight the enemy. That world does not exist anymore. I have to adjust my expectations of justice accordingly.
[00:23:39] Cy Canterel
The revolutionary as an archetype is sort of the twentieth and twenty-first century romantic ideal.
We are surrounded by systems that are so big, so opaque, so inhuman, that the revolutionary becomes the avatar for systemic change in our stories. This goes back to Hemingway going to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
[00:24:06] Matthew Remski
Exactly.
[00:24:07] Cy Canterel
The idea that there is this central domino, this one figure whose action causes an entire empire to fall, is everywhere. The Matrix is also based on that: the epic story of the alienated individual who is actually the key to undoing the inhuman system.
Of course we all want to believe in that. But it gets dangerous when it butts up against policy or reality.
[00:24:38] Matthew Remski
In all honesty, the answer to Peter Thiel is not Che Guevara on the motorcycle. These are two entirely different things in terms of concentration of power, money, surveillance, and control. The notion of physical force or resistance has fundamentally changed in ways that are very difficult to understand.
[00:25:02] Cy Canterel
And the answer to Peter Thiel being “better tax policy” is not something you are going to get a feature-length film out of.
[00:25:12] Matthew Remski
No, you are not. It is not going to go on Netflix.
Last question, and thank you so much for your time, Cy.
If you could imagine yourself into 2025 as the fourteen-year-old you once were, this is impossible, but give it a shot. What skills and supports would you hope to have as you navigate life and online life, so that you would hopefully come to the kind of rich and nuanced understanding of human psychology, online and off, that you have now? What advice would you give to yourself?
[00:25:54] Cy Canterel
This was a hard one for me, because I naturally gravitated toward nihilism as a young person. I absolutely had a nihilistic streak.
If I could go back and offer something to myself at that age, it would be to validate that the things I saw and continue to see are not crazy.
A lot of people do go around pretending that everything is fine and pretending that they are happy, when in fact they are not. The environment itself at this point is toxic. The fact that you feel really out of place and gross in a big box store is not your fault.
But I would also say: in recognizing that nobody really knows what they are doing, and that many people are subscribing to narratives because there are no other narratives available, you have to understand that it will take a lot of work to uncover a path through a pathless territory.
You are not going to find that path by looking at what somebody is buying and buying the same things. You are not going to find it by looking at someone who has millions of followers on a platform and trying to emulate them. That is not how you will get to yourself.
There is no neat, packaged version of what it is to become an individual and to interact with meaning on a daily level. It is a process. You never finish it.
[00:27:36] Matthew Remski
Are you saying that to be nihilistic is to forget that the process is ongoing? That if you were to speak to yourself as that fourteen-year-old, you would say, this might not make you feel better entirely, but everybody is full of it and everybody is trying to figure it out.
Because nihilism is the foreclosure on the possibility that something else could grow. It is the feeling that things are as bad as they are, and everybody just wants it to be that way.
[00:28:13] Cy Canterel
There is a huge component of both nihilism and eternalism, if we look at this as a polarity.
I am with David Chapman on this. He is a philosopher who has published his book Meaningness as a hypertext book. I recommend that to anybody. It is free.
He sees this as a polarity between eternalism and nihilism. Nihilism says that nothing matters. Eternalism says that everything matters. They resolve to the same place.
You have folks like Christian nationalists, who are eternalists and say that this version of God’s will is the only thing that matters and everything else is subjugated to it. On the other side, you have the nihilists, the Tyler Robinsons, let us say theoretically, who are saying, nothing matters, we just need to burn everything down and dance in the flames as the world goes up.
Both positions negate and abrogate responsibility. They hand it off to something else.
The responsibility is for everyone to stand in that place where meaning and purpose come and go, appear and disappear. Chapman would say meaning is patterned and nebulous.
You have to be willing to face and be present with the anxiety that ambiguity provokes. That is the absolute hardest thing for humans to do.
Both of those narratives foreclose that work.
[00:29:39] Matthew Remski
Cy Canterel, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate your work.
[00:29:43] Cy Canterel
Thank you, Matthew. It was a joy.
[00:29:49] Matthew Remski
A few weeks ago I took our eldest downtown on his thirteenth birthday to hang out in the Annex, which is the old University of Toronto rooming-house core. We stopped in at the Anti-Capitalist Book Fair at the old Tranzac Club.
This place opened in 1965 as a club for Australian and Kiwi expats. It has been a folkie coffeehouse, a Fringe theatre spot, and a grungy jazz and punk venue, often all at the same time. It is also the home of the Toronto Zine Library.
It is a low-slung, rabbit-warren of a building, and walking through it I remembered dozens of shows and poetry readings and even little plays I was in back in the early nineties.
I remember going to this book fair back then. It probably had a different name. There have probably been a number of ferocious schisms within the planning committees over the years, but here they still are.
On the Tranzac website today, they say they host fourteen hundred events per year. I suppose that scratching out tiny rental fees from each one is how they have survived the gentrification that has eaten up most other third, transitional, or hangout spaces like this, especially in that beautiful part of town.
For me this club was a fully offline space in my memory and body. On this recent October day, the groups gathered in the various rooms brought all of that back, from the Celtic music jam session in the bar to the fifty-odd booksellers in the low auditorium space.
My son made a beeline for the art books at the Between the Lines Press table, which has been cooperatively owned since 1977. We picked up a beautiful book called The Art of Solidarity and another on anarchist art through the years.
Then I stopped at the Democratic Socialists of Canada table to ask when their meetings were. A few tables over were the Revolutionary Communists of Canada. Beside them was an anarchist collective selling zines and artwork.
These are factions that compete and argue with each other. They have a long history of debate and struggle, as they theorize and experiment with different social forms and argue over theories of change and the science of revolution. But here they all were, under the same roof on a Sunday afternoon.
From table to table, I knew that the language and ideas and values were going to share the same general dialect, the same values, the same epistemology.
How about the mood.
It was serious but not dour.
People sharing the same vision can generate a cheerfully somber buzz in a room when they are doing something together, and that is what it felt like.
There were a few tables with print newspapers that had very large headlines focusing on one catastrophe or urgency after another, related to many different issues, and rightfully so. But none of that slipped into any nihilism that I could feel in the room, and I have a good radar for that.
I also did not feel any sense of hipster irony.
It felt like everyone was saying what they wanted to say directly.
I bring this up because the political internet feels so different from this.
First, we know it can be disembodied, populated by anonymous actors, disrupted by bots, and accelerated by echo chambers and algorithms.
It is also a culture scrambler.
Our online politics happens in the same flattened space as our social media, our gaming, our streaming shows, our banking, and our porn.
I remember Amber A’Lee Frost remarking on a Chapo Trap House episode that you really do not want to do your politics through the same box you use for online gambling.
Back in the early nineties, it might even have been the late eighties, when I came to this same book fair in this same club, the building was also a multipurpose space, as it is now. It was a library, a pub, a music venue, a theatre.
But it was not flattened onto a screen. It was not in my pocket. It did not sit on my desk.
Those categories of human experience did not collapse into each other. They were interwoven, but not an amorphous clump.
All of this is disquieting for me, but the future is not written.
It would be easy, as a pre-digital guy who has washed up on the shores of the internet, to feel that the Tranzac Club and other third spaces are under relentless assault, that they will not exist in a few years because young people like my own kids will not know what they are well enough to care about or nurture them.
So what will they have beyond their screens.
I have to own that as my fear. As a fifty-three-year-old given to melancholy over the past, these feelings are about my own vulnerability and my own death as much as anything real and pressing for my kids.
If I pay close attention to the actual kids around me, not the kids I invent to exercise my worries, they are never completely sidelined or buried in their screened worlds. They are not allowing nature to wither around them.
For them there may be more fluidity between online and offline worlds, but this does not mean they are not fully here and alive and able to learn how to use this technology, as opposed to having it use them.
My kid that day was fully immersed in this celebration of books. Then we walked out into the fall day, grabbed an outdoor table at Future’s Bakery next door for a cup of coffee, and thumbed through the books.
Then he said, reaching for his phone, “Dad, I want to show you this meme.”
And everything felt like it was one continuous thing, one continuous life.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
