Don't waddle away

A conversation with Kit Knightly

Imagine minding your own business and then quite out of nowhere receiving an email from a certain “Edward Slavsquat” asking if you would be willing to answer a few questions.

“Sure,” you reply out of politeness.

“Great. First question: WHAT’S THE POINT OF ALL THIS?”

Kit Knightly, editor of OffGuardian, was kind enough to humor me.

Don’t forget to follow OffGuardian on Telegram and subscribe to Kit’s Substack.

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Edward: Perhaps this is a gross generalization, but by the end of 2021, it seemed like Covid (or, more accurately, the totally insane “public health” policies that were adopted by basically every government on earth) had disabused many of the false paradigms through which they interpreted world events. People seemed fed up with the geopolitical horserace that we’re told to cheer for. Then, basically overnight, Russia’s SMO breathed new life into the BRICS/Axis of Resistance/Global South/Multipolar World vs. Collective West (or whatever) narrative. Do you think this worldview is still as prevalent as it was in February 2022, or are people starting (again) to grow weary of the idea that there is a Side that will save us? Or maybe you completely disagree with the premise of my question?

Kit: That’s a good question.

It’s not a gross generalization, but an accurate one. And I would say that world view is still very much prevalent in the minds of many ordinary people. There is still a mass mistrust of all authority and a swelling in “they’re all the same” thinking.

Where it has retreated—or at least appears to have retreated—is in the minds and works of journalists and pundits in “alternative” or “independent” sphere. Many of whom arguably should know better, but have returned to the pre-covid world of multipolar geopolitics narratives.

Now, whether this is due to a kind of muscle memory, adherence to old allegiances, the reassuring comfort of the familiar or more cynical real-world motives I couldn’t say and wouldn’t wish to speculate.

Edward: Your observation that much of “independent” media seems to exist in a universe entirely foreign to the realities of ordinary people is a very interesting one, especially given that “alt” media was once commonly referred to as “citizen journalism”. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of good-faith open dialogue between “alt” media-persons who hold opposing views on various subjects. It seems that the same gatekeeping, deplatforming, and blacklisting that we see in legacy media is now also quite prevalent in “alt” media. In my experience, every time I try to reach out to an “internet thought leader” who adheres to a worldview different from my own, I'm either ghosted or called a fifth columnist (and then blocked on social media). What has your experience been in this regard?

Kit: Our experience is broadly similar; the feelings of community created by cross-spectrum Covid resistance didn’t survive long after the “special military operation” launched.

There were almost instant, quasi-factional splits and widespread refusal to discuss those splits. Instead it became an ideological issue, and nonbelievers were shunned. Covid era groups, previously warm and friendly, dissolved almost overnight.

That gave birth to a newer 3-tier model of media. There used to be “mainstream” and “alternative”, but what sprang up between them is the “mainstream alternative media” (MAM), that served to corral the dispossessed and doubting back into the mainstream fold via the backdoor.

Whether that was purely a social pressure issue, or there was some kind of financial or other manipulation at play I couldn’t say. Though it is my experience that even “alternative media” sites can be beholden to grants and donors some times.

That said, it felt much more pathological than cynical at the time, there was almost a need to return to the old worldview.

As you say, certain views and opinions lead to ghosting from the bigger indie platforms. You can believe Covid is a lab leak, but not fake, for example. You could distrust Trump or Harris, but not both.

We’ve covered it extensively on OffG, but both the MSM and the MAM devolved into a set menu of false binary either/or choices, and discussion outside those parameters was frozen out.

Edward: I don't think it’s an exaggeration to say that false binaries are the glue that binds us together. One could even say that our modern conception of “freedom” is based on the idea that you get to “choose” from a set of pre-approved, curated options, and your choice is very, very important, even though your choice is indistinguishable from the other choices; you are then supposed to yell at strangers on the internet about how your choice is the correct one, and all other choices are for fools, even though everyone has chosen the exact same thing. In the USA, we have even evolved to a point where everyone admits that there are no good choices, but still scream at each other about which choice is possibly slightly less horrific (the “lesser of two evils” argument that is now commonplace during each and every election). Okay, now I will formulate a question: Surely you must be exhausted by all this? OffG is in the trenches trying to hold the line as the internet is carpet-bombed with Marvel Comics worldviews—are you ever tempted to uninstall the internet, toss your computer out the nearest window, and then start walking towards the unknown, like one of those renegade penguins who waddles away from his flock? What’s the point of all this? I ask myself this question almost every single day, so I'm hoping you have a good answer that will put my troubled mind at ease.

Kit: Yes. I am tempted to walk away. The penguin is a nice reference.

The point, I suppose, is that it’s the right thing to do. “Should” overrules “could”. And your conscience is the voice that turns “should” into “must”.

As long as it feels like this work is what I should be doing, it takes precedent over the laundry list of things I could be doing.

The frontline is an apt metaphor, it does feel like that. We have a localised sea-level view of a fight stretching to the horizon to right and left, and all we can really do is plant a foot in the ground and hold our chosen spot. But it is holding.

You could say the very fact we’re still fighting is a sign we might be winning.

The very real truth is that, sometime soon, the decision to walk away will be taken out of our hands. We can be shut down forcefully any day, or the resources could dry up to the point continuing is simply not possible.

So we do what we can while we can.

Edward: On the subject of doing what we can while we can: The UK government seems extremely eager to adopt “digital ID” that would essentially bring an end to any semblance of anonymity on the internet. (Unfortunately this is a global trend.) Do you think this plan will ultimately succeed, and if so, how will it affect your work at OffG? Substack is already complying with Australia’s internet ID laws. The screws are tightening. Do you have a contingency plan? I don’t and I badly need one.

Kit: Yes, the plan will succeed, in that most tech platforms will comply and officially it will be illegal to have unverified profiles. I’m almost certain about that. But there will likely be workarounds, the most obvious being VPNs, but there could be others that a tech-savvier person could tell you about.

In terms of impacting OffG, hopefully—big emphasis on that word—it won’t much. We host the site on our own server space and own the domains so our “homebase” is secure.

There’s the ever-present threat of de-banking and such, and we don’t know how much verification culture might work its way into financial sites. But that kind of vulnerability is nothing new, we’ve all been hurt by it before.

Social media is a different issue, we could easily simply have to say goodbye to those platforms, but hopefully not.

It’s a difficult issue to decide upon, because you have to weigh up principle and pragmatism. You don’t want to comply, but if you comply to broadcast awareness maybe you help more people than fading out of sight.

It’s an age-old ethical dilemma, at what point living by a standard becomes about ego, I suppose.

So, to sum up, no we don’t have a contingency plan.

Thank you, Kit!