Somebody Please Take a GCHQ Angle Grinder and Pulverize Joshua Cinderella’s Guardian Snitch-Piece

Why is Cinderella writing censorship remote 'research' papers for the Anglo-US intelligence nexus in summer '21? And why r sustainable shadowland DAOs any different to a derelict Chinese Disneyland?

JOSH CINDERELLA IS ASS

Somebody please take a GCHQ angle grinder and pulverize Joshua Cinderella’s recent Guardian snitch-piece and then delete his Instagram and the rest of the New Models-post-Web2-adjacent Biden era omnilapse rss feeds they rode in on.¹

It isn’t just that The Guardian is no longer a paper of record,² it isn’t just that as an institution they have been directly infiltrated by British Intelligence and the power of the Queen’s Golden Shares since at least 2011,³ it isn’t just that they colluded with the Israeli state to make it impossible for Jeremy Corbyn to interrupt Tory party hegemony in 2019,⁴ it isn’t just that Guardian America still campaigns against Donald Trump every day on its homepage even beyond his metaphorical assassination, it isn’t just that Cinderella’s writing style is weak ass middlebrow no-brainer as all hell, it isn’t just that this recent piece doesn’t offer a single link to or image of the online phenomenon it confusedly pretends to be able to condemn,⁵ it isn’t just that the broader project to create left wing memes already terminally failed by definition (in roughly early 2017), it isn’t just that Cinderella admits his project is a failure without cognizing what he himself has just said, it isn’t just that Cinderella happened to allow this text to be published on the day that one of the most laughable and atrociously unethical journalists in the world (Luke Harding) dropped a new anti-Trump Russian spy story propaganda piece on the same site, it isn’t just that Cinderella’s article coincides exactly with Jen Psaki saying ‘if you’re banned on one social media platform, you should be banned on other social media platforms’, it isn’t just that Cinderella spends his time stockpiling likes for other peoples’ meme-labour, it isn’t just that Cinderella loves to team up with New Models to collect shiny empty jargon and present it as a form of empty prognostics, it isn’t just that this text of his will be streamlined and co-opted into prototyping material for an accelerating worldwide censorship kill switch, it isn’t just that Cinderella will have been given top dollar for publishing with The Guardian and that The Guardian is not an independent financial entity as it claims, and it isn’t just that the very targeted individuals Cinderella is in some ways almost valiantly trying to save will be misled even further by his cheugy ass cruel meme optimism.

Instead, what really disturbs any sensitive reader about this text is its timing. Cinderella’s article is chronically out of time given the extreme flow of world events rn, and the metonymic consequences that follow. His argument—which boils down to weirdo-lurking on a few rogue Instagram accounts that apparently now and again spike normie MAGA content with extremist memes—has to be placed alongside a number of overwhelming world urgencies, including the Covid-industrial-censorship-complex and above all the impact of accelerating co-extinctions on all forms of (non)human life, anticipation, cognition, health, sanity, plasticity, which is to say on the general aesthetic sector Cinderella claims to occupy and watch over.

Again, not only this coincidence of the article’s appearance in the worst place at the worst time, that is, during an intense wave of state/media censorship and neurological infiltration; not only the fact that British intelligence remains unacknowledged as the most brutal and advanced in the world, always delegated to when the Americans have something beyond murky to achieve.⁶ More than this, the article reaches new levels of eschatological triviality, like listening to Toby Shorin describe different Zoom interfaces on the deck of the Romandisea Titanic.

HOW NOT TO BE (DE)RADICALIZED BY JOSHUA CINDERELLA

Here are some localities of discussion we can use to disband the presence of Cinderella’s fail-state from our minds:

First of all, there is a yet to be fully designated genre of ‘journalism’ to which Cinderella now belongs, which people like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have spent the last year or so deconstructing, invalidating, warning about and meticulously documenting.

This genre is a kind of preparatory work for the state.⁷ It works by means of remote prototyping. For example, if the worldwide ‘Trusted News Initiative’ wants to get Tucker Carlson taken off air, then they set about making the case first of all in the legacy media. If a link can be made between Carlson and Alex Jones, who was already gang-cancelled, then a step has been taken towards Carlson’s eventual removal or at least de-animation. In this way, mainstream media ‘journalism’ becomes nothing more than a sublimed prototyping for the kind of daily increasing state censorship we’ve seen for example even in the last few days.

What eventually gets enacted by the broadest most unhinged version of something like the shallow administrative state is worked out first by advocate journalists and their research. We can go even further and say that what the administrative/intelligence/pharmacological caliphate is now doing in the name of Covid restrictions was prepared for many years back by the aesthetic state—or even, to be more localized for the sake of it, by what happened in online art diasporas in early 2017.

Let us speculate that the current wave of tightening Cosmo-Sino-American Covid censorship was atavistically prototyped on the first wave of cancellation culture in the Anglo-American art diaspora just after Mark Fisher bowed out and Trump was inaugurated. What Hannah Black and Aria Dean celebrated in open letters to max out their own future visibility in 2017 (taking white bodies and painters hostage to secure decades of artworld inviolability), Jen Psaki now laughingly turns into a hostage trope in the WH press room.

Enter Cinderella herself, at midnight, with their own Halloweenteen Ballet Flats dangling in their teeth, mute. The following is the (not so) amazingly disingenuous leading idea of his article, casting very low iq Cinderella as the New Models DAO equivalent of Claude Frollo:

I once followed the work of a group of far-right teenagers who devoted much of their time to radicalising people.

Ummmmm. And:

I spend a lot of time on Instagram. Not posting stories, but researching Gen Z online political subcultures.

The term for this sort of lowlighting isn’t really meme research: it’s meme-snitching. It isn’t really sociology—which Cinderella claims to be a practitioner of, lol—it’s ontological irreverence. It isn’t really ethics, it’s confusion. It isn’t really de-radicalization, it’s preparatory censorship. It isn’t quite ‘left-wing’ at all, it’s the haunting uselessness of low iq Mark Fisher. It is a complete occlusion of the Extinctive Real now impacting everything from in and outside.

The author is claiming to be above mere use-value on Instagram. He doesn’t use Instagram to post stories. He doesn’t act like the rest of us suckers do on there; instead he collects data on ‘far right teenagers’. But who are these teenagers exactly and why spy on them? Hasn’t the CIA got that covered? Why so insanely trivial?

BASELESS ALLEGATIONS FROM CINDERELLA AT MIDNIGHT

This brings us to our second point, that after spending the bulk of the article outlining without any evidence at all (as they like to say) of the modus of these extremist accounts—since when have rando teenagers taken it upon themselves to work for the fringes of the Republican party on Instagram?—Cinderella then twists all the way round and claims he is not making a pro content moderation argument at all, despite every appearance to the contrary:

There is no content moderation solution for a political problem. . . . Perhaps it is time to accept that this kind of political mobilization is here to stay. . . . Meme pages, influencers and online groups aren’t going anywhere. 

This is typical of the Cinderella-vanish-as-the-clock-strikes-midnight style of completely confused head ass type thinking we’ve come to expect from the New Models Berlin enclave. Having written an article providing the perfect profile for the state content moderation media apparatus pipeline to get going (remote prototyping), and by allowing The Guardian to use this idea as its lede without qualification, she then collapses her own ‘research’ back in on itself and lets us know that content moderation was in fact never the point. Too late. Since if that really were the case, why provide outline content for the GCHQ angle grinders in the first place?

The Guardian, 15 July, 2021.

Notice how the editorial framing presents the article as a pure content moderation ‘dog whistle’ analytic from the word go. That is, regardless of its eventual (hidden towards the end) counter-arguments, the whole presentation and thrust is ‘here’s how (they do it)’. The article is an ‘opinion’ under the label ‘the far right’. Other things are said at the end, including ‘here’s how we can do the same’, and yet this framing is entirely consistent with the overall dumb tenor of the piece.

RED-PILLED IS ONLY ONE PILL

There’s something immensely confused as well about Cinderella’s use of the term ‘red-pilled’. ‘Red-pilled’ has a broad sense, and even though he points out these tactics can be used by anyone, the term is here restricted to right wing extremism. Nothing is said, for example, of the recent viral Darryl Cooper thread that went someway towards making sense of many of the MAGA protagonists who Cinderella burlesques out of existence.

We know that Cinderella went on record several times during the 2020 election as a full-on zero-evidencer disavower.⁸ In other words, he was already repeating without pause the DNC/CIA talking points he has now fully swallowed as a member of the MK Ultra on-remote angle grinder crew at The Guardian. Previous articles by Cinderella pointed in that direction, but this one goes full Luke Harding and half-hard Luke Turner.

The point isn’t whether this is coded anti-moderation or not, it’s the fact that played out in this context and providing the analysis it does, the text remains manipulable in the exact same way it wants to diagnose as problematic elsewhere.

CINDERELLA’S BASELESS MIDNIGHT

As mentioned, not a single piece of evidence for the claims about the teenage accounts is given. The word ‘baseless’ was used in a hackneyed and non-objective way to dismiss the Hunter Biden lap top story in the run up to the American election (all the details of that story have turned out to be true—please @ yourself if you don’t know), but in terms of lack of evidence, Cinderella’s claim really is a ‘baseless allegation’. Where are the links? Where are the screenshots? Who exactly are these teenage right wing extremists spending their time radicalising us? Moreover, how do we quantify that the account followers actually did move right and because of the content splicing? And most of all, why provide this vague outline at all if content moderation does not work and that’s not what we’re here for?

Cinderella’s article is not just a snitch-piece that will help the Queen’s Golden Shares stay bullish, it is an incoherent weak-assed attempt to bridge some kind of gap between—*Carly Busta voice—the clearnet legacy media and the darknet forest of thinkers and radicals, *chokes, at the helm of the New Models underwater Clubhouse. As one of the team put it on the NET POVERA episode, ‘Red Scare is a vibe, New Models is a way of life.’ That’s right, snitching for the CIA is a way of life.

Olivia Rodrigo visits the WH to promote vaccines, 14 July 2021.

It’s not that I doubt such teenage accounts Cinderella points to exist, but so what? How much more learning-to-code-on-a-replica-Titanic can you get? And the question remains: why give no evidence at all? The danger of course is that one could claim anything about anything, which is precisely the state of play in the media as it now goes in lock-step to reduce political freedoms to a zero out all across the meme-space. Let’s note that this has accelerated decisively after Trump.

Cinderella’s argument is not only atrociously timed but achronically superfluous. Next to niche finitude, the Ivermectin story,⁹ extreme weather events, truly radical and beautiful aesthetic work that might be embraced and promoted as a reaction to these issues, the choice of the general New Models chat diagram handler is overwhelmingly ass head ass in its bad taste and lack of inner justification—as well as conveniently hidden from those of us still on the old-fangled Clearnet.

Obviously, choosing to publish in this or that venue is nowadays always a matter of compromise. The writing may act with a degree of autonomy. All venues, including Substack, are or will be compromised in time. But the gap between the interim neutrality of Substack and the intelligence-defined operations of The Guardian still exists (see footnotes).

Let’s be clear: this rejection is not based on nonpure venue choice alone but on writing manipulable snitch-ass headasshead trash for a newspaper that more than any other reduced free analysis while pretending to do otherwise. Doing one is forgivable, the other remarks itself in advance as terminally negligible.

Since Joshua Citarella did not publish something new or courageous at all in this newspaper which is the embodiment of the ongoingly digital colonial British intelligence state, the choice of venue becomes meaningful and structurally saturating. We need to dismiss Citarella’s work accordingly.

As for the general New Models project and Interdependence and the whole deluded ass enclave, srsly, do the deepnet DAO bros really think the CIA didn’t already crack Tor open decades back? Why would Web3 solve or even mitigate the problem of extological sociality, like, in the slightest? Who would be dumb enough to think that gathering on the darknet will make any real difference to the massive issues now sunsetting and accelerating towards us? Why pretend that ‘declining rates of union membership’ and ‘the divergent trendlines of productivity and wages’ are still even among these issues? And who will be helped by grooming thousands of Discord members into believing that copying unidentified rw teens is the next step for some kind (im dying) ‘revolution’?

And like, wait, do you really think there are *centuries down the line*?

1. The article originally appeared on Do Not Research. One might ask: why therefore republish it on The Guardian? The more pressing question is why publish it at all.

2. The best recent template-argument for x or y no longer being a media of note is probably Matt Taibbi’s 2019 ‘The New York Times is no longer the paper of record’, TK News Substack, 22 August 2019, here. Although about The New York Times and not The Guardian, the description of how newspapers under Trump used the argument that Trump was exceptional in American history (compared for example to one million dead in Iraq) and that strong advocacy journalism was therefore necessary to cut corners and ditch actual objectivity, applies across the board. Taibbi is sure to point out that journalism has never been a pure art at all but also that the alibis for nonobjectivity ‘under Trump’ only seem to have exponentially increased since November 2020. What The New York Times did was either a model for or had already been achieved by The Guardian, which on its American site has done nothing for the last few years except energetically campaign for the DNC and by implication the current very much worse president.

3. To understand this in detail, perhaps the best place to start is the 2014 article, ‘Footage released of Guardian editors destroying Snowden hard drives’, 31 January 2014, here. Not only was The Guardian infiltrated by the intelligence state at this point and coerced into the destruction of its copies of the Snowden hard drive, but even more important is what then happened. This was just the beginning of the compromising of the paper of record’s supposed independence, as written about for example in ‘How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper’, 11 September 2019, here. Also see here, here and here.

4. See, for example, Jonathan Cook, ‘Is Israel’s hand behind the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn?’, 25 August 2018, here. But for The Guardian’s own direct role in rendering Jeremy Corbyn an impossibility, see here, here and here.

5. One can of course argue there are reasons for this. For example, exposing the account names or giving screenshots of the supposedly harmful memes in question would be tantamount to ‘actual doxxing’, supposing the article does not already provide ‘doxxicological’ material. But the simple fact is: absent any evidence for his claims about the Instagram accounts, Citarella has moved into a space familiar to mainstream media now—the spectre of ‘right wing extremism’ allows one to assert anything, even falsehoods.

6. For instance, here.

7. A more subtle example is here. Also see, for instance, here.

8. Here the bro is doing a Dominion ‘deep dive’ which was everything but ‘deep’. Cinderella has been proven 100 percent wrong on this count. If you don’t agree, please give evidence in the comments section below.

9. On The Guardian’s already diabolical ivermectin coverage, see here but then, crucially, here.