You’ve gotta trust your instincts on these things.

There is no other human with their own agency, just an NPC for you to perform combos and trickshots on.

This is such a good way of putting it.

Ultimately you’re never gonna know exactly what was motivating that behavior in them and you’ll sooner go mad trying to make sense of it than you will arriving at a comprehensive and accurate understanding of it.

There’s another aspect I didn’t really go into where online discourse has degraded to often being symbolic, both in the sense that you’ve described above and in the sense of “I depicted you as the soyjak…” So much of what I see being used as placeholders for arguments that are articulated is “This is x” but people aren’t able to provide their justification for it and it’s just devoid of substance. I think that’s partly due to people not being expected to write out a decent essay justifying their take on a novel or movie in school anymore, partly due to the internet culture becoming very siloed into echo chambers so people become accustomed to getting praise and validation because they can just say something like “Vaush Derangement Syndrome” and they collect dozens of upvotes for just invoking the same old tired trope (algorithms have a lot to answer for in this respect), and partly because they aren’t capable of doing more than vibes-based analysis. (I’m gonna sound curmudgeonly, and maybe I am, but it feels like the art of discussion is becoming endangered.)

There was that video that dropped recently where some content creator on the progressive left claimed in a video essay that a few figures were “recruiting leftists to become Nazis by using dogwhistles.” Big if true. Now I’m loath to entertain peak breadtuber pseudointellectual content stretching where they read through a paraphrasing of the Wikipedia entry on dogwhistles and fascism but this creator made the accusation that The Kavernacle, amongst others, was a cryptofascist who was turning people into fascists. Their argument amounted to nothing besides “He has a colonizer accent, he speaks with a flat affect, and he interrupts his girlfriend on streams [with the implication that this is domestic abuse]”. There wasn’t any attempt to make criteria for the argument and to show how it was being met, it was basically just being asserted as self-evident fact.

I’m not a huge fan of The Kavernacle - he’s fine, just a bit 101 for my tastes and kinda uninteresting to me. But at no point did the creator elaborate how he was using dogwhistles or how you can turn a leftist into a Nazi by using dogwhistles or how he was a Nazi himself. It was all just throwing out buzzwords and doing really loose association (which is a charitable way of putting it because there basically wasn’t any through line at all imo.) He did use the term “Nebula elite” to refer to people like Lindsey Ellis in one tweet, which honestly is a pretty fucking accurate assessment, and the closest thing to an argument was that this is a dogwhistle because using the word “elite” here is basically invoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jewish elite globalists control the world. If The Kavernacle actually did make positive or veiled references to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion or something then I’d be more sympathetic to the argument but instead the next thing they very heavily implied was that this is basically him wanting to put Jews on trains to Auschwitz. The connecting thread between this argument was so tenuous that it might have not existed but it was brain-melting to see people praising the analysis because they basically just did the verbal equivalent of pointing to a picture of The Kavernacle then to a picture of the cover of The Protocols then to a picture of Auschwitz then nodding emphatically.

It’s pretty shocking to see people agree with things just because it feels truthy and salacious.

My take on this is that if you’re capable of being converted into becoming a fascist just because someone used dogwhistles on you then you have zero political principles. Ironically, the people who were won over to the idea that this is a real and significant enough phenomenon on the left worthy of being discussed were the ones who were being convinced of a political position based on vapid symbolism and thus they’re probably the most likely candidates for having their own political position subverted through the strategic use of dogwhistles. But I don’t think any of them are ready to hear that take.