The Social Injustice Warrior is an unavoidable figure stalking and monitoring the distribution of justice across the social field. He is a misogynist, quite often a white male, with a notably curious relationship to technology. The SIJW uses all media platforms available to monitor the injustices and social inequalities claimed by others. He labors hard at his interface to counter and debunk the legitimacy of all such claims. He casts all forms of modern social justice related to racial difference, gender, class, and sexuality as an injustice upon himself. He feels left out of postmodernism, held back by the term rape culture, and disgusted by non-binary life. He takes a violent and/or vitriolic stance oriented against feminism, queer life, and colored skin.
It is true that the SIJW is a misinformed political actor, but he is also a technological phenomenon. The SIJW exists not just because of poor debating conditions or by virtue of how often he is playing with his devices, but because he is able to organize the field of the social in and through technology. The Social Injustice Warrior operates with a perspective on technology that explains the way he conceives of gendered and other forms of social difference. Understanding his conception of technology and his technological strategies are the key to undoing him in the name of justice. It also offers feminist and anti-racist activists a potential means to dismantle him through the power of technology. So let us go deeper into the ways of the social injustice warrior and lay open, not the disturbing content of his hate speech, but instead his technological strategies.
The Way of the Social Injustice Warrior 1: Seek Cover in your Mama’s Basement
The popular caricature of the SIJW has him sitting at home in Mommy’s Basement clutching his keyboard and attacking the comment section like a medieval soldier with a crossbow in a siege tower. All the multi-culti feminist decolonizing queer black intersectional gender neutral toiletry taking place out there is just too much for him to contend with. The “feeling disposed of” male who hunkers down in Mommy’s Basement and turns to technological portals to design a more habitable world for himself seems to beset the wounded masculinity that festers in the right-wings of the political spectrum.
Across the political spectrum from Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) to contemporary feminist scholars there is an accepted correlative link made between the escapist world of technology and its burgeoning population of antisocial white men. Whether it is angry alt-right types or quiet brogrammers or Musk planning his next mission to Mars, the industry or a device, tech is largely imagined as a means of escape. Whether to mars or to Mommy’s Basement, it is the ruse of the escape that gives the SIJW power.
The Way of the Social Injustice Warrior 2: Drain the (social) batteries
Feeding the trolls while you are on the frontlines of social justice is generally inadvisable. Feminists and anti-racism activists are told to not feed the trolls. But this point might be especially moot since Vladimir Putin’s first started financing troll factories in 2011. These factories were set up to maintain his power in 2011. In 2016 they were reactivated in order to create social unrest in the West during the US presidential election of Trump. They produced more than false news and unrest – they produced exhaustion. A tried and true way of re-organizing the social and maintain one’s supreme power is to drain others of capacity to effectively retaliate and respond.
And this is exactly what happened here: right wing hate mongers in the form of bots or paid trolls would meet almost every leftist claim of injustice with a swarming e-army of cries of counter-injustice. Exhaustion and apathy spreads across the social body as all political discourse appears to be futile. All the while struggles for social justice wage on in factories, streets, outside police stations, in prisons, at the university, in classrooms. But what we see here, is that the need for social justice gets cast off as part of all that noise that just.needs.to.be.turned.off.
The Way of the Social Injustice Warrior 3: Replace the Broken Machines
If feminist and other social justice activists persist then the Social Injustice Warrior is left to turn to technological solutions. Marshall McLuhan perhaps didn’t really realize the gendered equation of technology and patriarchy he revealed in Understanding Media:
Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.
The contemporary updating of this begs the question of what happens when the machine world no longer reciprocates man’s love and instead questions his power? Judging from the current state of right-wing attacks on feminism, postmodernism, black lives matter, immigration, it would seem that the solution is to replace the broken machines.
Feminists, anti-racist activists, factory workers, the non-normative and the non-abiding emerge as broken parts of a system precisely because of the ways their existences make obvious the structural injustices of the current social system. To eradicate social injustices would render obsolete white male power. The imagined technological future is one in which social justice is no longer a demand because all of the broken technologies can be discarded and replaced. But it precisely in this final stance of the SIJW, as he turns to new technologies, that feminists can meet him at his own game.
Conclusion
Like the “escapist” internet where the SIJW gets his political power, women too have been the most significant portals for patriarchy. Similar to Haraway’s calls for a new feminist ontology in the Cyborg Manifesto, the SIJW might unwittingly delivered a new feminist politics for the taking. The technological needs to be recognized as central to the maintenance of injustice but it also needs to be elevated as an absolutely necessary component in cultivating conditions of justice. Evict mommy’s basements, block off masculinist technological escape routes, and refuse becoming a drained battery. Co-opt the logic of a broken machine. Upend the technological conditions for the possibility of the SIJW.