On Blackmail

And how AI will make it worse for leftists

Imagine if every major media outlet published the worst things you’d ever done. Imagine if they found what you were most ashamed of, things you’d never told people for fear they’d abandon you or think less of you, interviewed the people you did them to, and put them in writing for the world to see. Imagine if everyone you knew, and millions of people you didn’t, talked about those things online. Then imagine if the media did this to you because you opposed the West’s genocide in Palestine, for-profit healthcare, and corporations exploiting people.

Something like this happened to U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner a few weeks ago. Platner is a former alcoholic and U.S. soldier who worked as a Blackwater mercenary in 2018. He had a Nazi tattoo on his chest that he reportedly referred to as “his Totenkopf” and he now works as an oyster farmer with his wife. He’s running for U.S. Senate as a social democrat and wants to create a universal healthcare system, pass a constitutional amendment to “ban billionaires buying elections,” and to “use every means available to America to bring [the Gaza genocide] to an end,” among other policies. You can read those policies here and decide for yourself what you think of him.

I’m not particularly interested in Platner’s candidacy, as I’m a communist who lives in New Zealand, but I am interested in how capitalist media tried to blackmail him out of the race and how it didn’t work. By capitalist media, I mean The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, NBC, and other for-profit outlets. The week before Platner’s Democratic primary election, which he won in a landslide, these outlets dropped a story about how Platner sexted other women early in his marriage. Platner’s wife, Amy, responded “I know the man I married and the husband he has been to me on the best and the worst days of my life. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t.” The Facebook comments I read under the articles were broadly sympathetic to Platner. People brought up the moral latitude afforded to Republicans and the fact that Platner’s against the Palestinian genocide while the Democratic Party supports it. Many also seemed sympathetic to someone’s marital problems being aired out by media outlets they perceived to be acting in bad-faith.

Later that week, The New York Times published a story in which one of Platner’s ex-girlfriends said he abused her ten years prior. The ex-girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, said that he “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks,” that “on one occasion, [he] yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.” She said that “during [another] argument... [Platner] twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm...’ [after which] she fell asleep and left the next morning.” (Platner’s campaign “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations, per the Times.) Fifield also said that Platner said told her he would “rape [prospective home invaders]” to show that he was “dominant” and called women “hatchet wounds.” A separate ex-girlfriend said that “In 2021 [Platner] arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over,” and that “she cut off contact soon after that episode.”

I suspect Platner did all the things Fifield and his other ex-girlfriends described in the article. I used to be an investigative newsroom fact-checker, and the stories about him have a quality of idiosyncratic detail that rings true to me. Blackmail material works best when it’s real, and there’s no reason to risk making things up when your enemy’s already done things that will alienate people. That Fifield, the ex-girlfriend, is now a fascist political operative, and Katie Glueck, one of the New York Times reporters who wrote the story, seems to be a supporter of Israel’s genocide in Palestine and the degradation of women that entails, doesn’t change my belief that Platner did those things. If a man locking his girlfriend in a room and not letting her out or calling women “hatchet wounds” means you’d never vote for him, I respect that principle, because I appreciate when people respect mine of never voting for anyone who supports settler-colonial genocide.

People’s reactions to the Platner stories interested me more than the stories themselves. After the media dropped them, genocidal liberal political operatives like New York Times columnist David Brooks, talking head Charlotte Clymer, and countless Democratic elected officials emerged to voice their “grave concerns” about Platner’s character. Commenter after commenter on Facebook and Instagram seemed to understand that these liberals only cared because Platner was anti-corporate and pro-Palestine. There seemed to be a widespread understanding that organizations that support genocide, which both The New York Times and the U.S. Democratic Party do, don’t actually care about women’s rights and publish stories like this with ulterior motives. When Platner won, I felt like I watched the spell of Christian moralism break and give way to a more vulgar left-wing realpolitik. People’s adoption of that realpolitik relieved me, because I think we’re going to need it now that AI has expanded capitalists’ blackmail capabilities and made it easier for them to assassinate our characters.

I think most people do worse things than they’ll ever admit to. When people confess their flaws publicly, they’re usually sympathetic ones, like that they ghost sexual partners too much or are chronically late to things. I rarely see them confess really bad things they’ve done because they fear ostracism or imprisonment. In the same way that far more people cheated on their spouses in the 1950s and 60s than would admit to it, I think more people have done terrible things than they’ll ever publicly announce. I maintain relationships with people who’ve abandoned their children to drink and do drugs, cheated, stolen money and pills, gotten people killed, and more. They don’t publicize these things to their communities, as I don’t publicize the things I’m ashamed of, because they don’t want to be abandoned themselves. Our collective silence about our sins creates an impossible standard for being a “good person,” a standard which capitalists have used our failures to meet to blackmail us with for centuries.

I think AI pattern and facial recognition software will only make their blackmail dossiers thicker. In a recent Associated Press story, Dake Kang and Sam Mednick reported that Israel uses AI facial recognition software to scan thousands of hours of hacked Iranian street footage to find targets to assassinate. The problem with pre-AI spying, from what I understand, was manpower for surveillance. You needed to have someone with eyes on a person at all times or who was able sit through hours of collected footage. Capitalists no longer have that problem. They can use AI to scan cameras they have access to and find what they’re looking for almost instantaneously. I keep waiting for a capitalist government to threaten a left-wing enemy of theirs with AI-gathered footage of them cheating, or by threatening to reveal the porn they watch, or by releasing Facebook messages they thought were private in which they said something they regret. I think any of these things could happen soon, if they haven’t happened already, and that we’re going to have to develop new moral frameworks to deal with them.

I took heart watching Maine voters reject Christian moralism and make vulgar political decisions for left-wing causes because we’re all going to have to do it soon. Capitalists own the Western press, social media companies, and AI software, and it’s only getting easier for them to find and release dirt on us. I think much of that dirt will be real. There’s also no morally pure way to reach the communist horizon. I don’t think American social democracy will get us there, but this blackmail problem applies just as much to communist political organization as it does to the American Democratic Socialists. We’re all going to figure out what we can stomach to get what we want. I hope we can come to a left-wing accord instead of eating each other alive.

Recommended Reading

• I liked this essay by Kate Wagner about how taking lithium felt like a miracle. She describes how prior to taking lithium, getting screwed over by a landlord would’ve sent her into a rage for a week, but after taking lithium and getting disrespected by a landlord, she thought to herself “I’ll probably find something else. It wasn’t meant to be. Maybe these kinds of people are not who I’d want as my neighbors. Such thoughts as these were alien to me. So alien, in fact, that I wondered if I might have just elided, seamlessly, into hypomania, a state in which one becomes suspiciously magnanimous. But no, I was simply yanked back down to earth, where I stood rather stunned, like a bird that’s just had a too-close encounter with a window.” It’s on the website Flaming Hydra, which you can only access through the paywall but is well worth the $3 a month it costs.

• I liked this essay by Dylan Saba in the Law and Political Economy Project about how Trump’s shakedowns are the logical continuance of the decaying liberal international order. In it, he writes that the liberal international order was held together by “the sale of oil—the world’s most important commodity,” which until the development of the petroyuan was “denominated in dollars, generating surpluses for the Gulf monarchies that are then reinvested in the United States in exchange for military hardware within broader security arrangements.” America and Israel’s aggression is causing this tenuous deal to end, and per Saba, “whatever replaces the liberal international order will need to emerge from beneath the wreckage caused by a United States in terminal decline.”