Put the White Paper Down
Put the white paper down. Step away from the quote-tweet. Take a breath, and exhale a long, intentional, grounded breath.
I am watching good people burn their nervous systems to absolute ash on the feeds again. It is midnight, the blue light is frying your retinas, and some fascist troll just posted something so repulsive, so maliciously stupid, that your thumbs are twitching to reply. You want to cite a study. You want to tag a watchdog group. You want to write a blistering takedown that finally exposes them as the fraud they are.
I get it. Your anger is valid. When you watch authoritarians dismantle basic human decency for clicks and profit, rage is a sane human response.
And that's where the trap springs shut.
Because the town square you think you are defending is (almost) dead. Not wounded. Dead. The corporate platforms where we actually spend our days were bought, paved over, and converted into extraction engines long ago. They are machines designed to capture human beings in a low-grade neurological trance and monetize the friction.
The algorithm does not care if you are right. It does not care about democracy, truth, or justice for the least among us. It cares about velocity. And because our bodies react to dread and disgust faster than to nuanced policy, the machine spontaneously feeds fascism.
Every time you quote-tweet the monster to dunk on them, you are not refuting them. You are subsidizing their distribution. Quote-tweeting a fascist is public relations before it is dissent. Dunking feels great. It changes nothing.
They got the reach. You got the ulcer.
Enter Lula's Army and Janonism
In 2022, Brazil was staring into the exact same abyss.
Jair Bolsonaro and his far-right apparatus had the courts intimidated, the police primed, and the social feeds locked in a chokehold of manufactured terror. Liberal institutions responded with their usual weapons: polite press releases, earnest fact-checks, and moral scolding.
They had neither the speed nor the stomach for the fight.
Then came André Janones. Janones, a working-class organizer and federal congressman, helped build what became known as Exército do Lula (Lula's Army) and its combat communications arm. They looked at the algorithmic battlefield and threw the entire progressive etiquette manual directly into the incinerator.
Their insight was brutal and simple: space and attention on the feed are finite. You don’t reason with a machine designed for grievance. You overwhelm it.
They called the strategy informational brute force. The underground text that codified it, The Mini-Manual of Informational Insurgency, outlines what is now called Janonism.
It is not an academic philosophy. It is an asymmetric field manual for people who actually want to win.
Read the English version here (additional languages below)
The Iron Rule: Starve the Beast
The first law of Janonism is the hardest pill for American progressives to swallow: never engage with the opponent's content. Ever.
No snarky replies. No reaction GIFs. No quote-tweets to show your circle how depraved the other side is. When you engage, the platform's math registers high-value friction and pushes that post into the feeds of millions of undecided people.
Janonism demands a discipline that feels almost unnatural to online activists: scroll past. Fast.
Do not even bother blocking en masse if it tricks the platform into thinking you were simply shielded. When a piece of fascist ragebait hits your screen and your thumb flicks past it in half a second without a single click, the algorithm logs the post as boring. Dead weight.
Rage on demand is just obedience with extra steps. Starve the beast of your attention, and redirect every drop of that energy into our own lines.
The Art of the Wave and the Mirror
If you aren't fighting them in the replies, what are you doing?
You are building the signal.
Janonism runs on two operational engines: the synchronized wave and tactical mirroring.
First, coordination. A thousand comrades posting random thoughts across twelve hours is just background static. But a thousand accounts dropping the exact same graphic, hashtag, or video within a single sixty-minute window? That is an algorithmic earthquake. It shatters the trending tabs and forces the platform to deliver our message. Janones organized broadcast channels on WhatsApp and Telegram, turning ordinary users into coordinated action nodes. Missions were simple, clear, and gamified.
Second, mirroring. When the right launches a viral attack, you do not scramble to defend. You steal their meme format, flip the polarity, and fire it back with twice the volume.
When the Brazilian right weaponized the national yellow-and-green soccer jersey as a badge of fascism, Lula's movement did not surrender it. They flooded the timeline with photos of ordinary workers wearing the jersey while flashing the 'L' hand sign. It broke the enemy's monopoly on patriotism, sowed paranoia in their ranks, and made space for regular working people to come home.
That isn't just clever social media strategy. It is cognitive sovereignty in action: refusing to let empire define the symbols or the boundaries of our imagination.
From Pedantry to Contagion
The old left loves a seminar. We want people to read three thick books on political economy before they are allowed to hold a sign.
Janonism takes the opposite stance: anything goes.
Culture moves the heart long before political theory touches the head. Pop music edits, sports montages, humor, shitposts, kitsch, street challenges, and sacred community symbols are all fair game. If a catchy dance remix or a viral meme carries the seed of dignity to somebody outside our self-referential bubble, you deploy it without hesitation.
More than that, the screen is only an engine for the pavement. The digital wave must pour into the physical world: flyers, wheatpaste, QR codes, curiosity campaigns, and bodies in the street. And the energy of the street must be captured and poured right back into the digital slipstream.
The missionary fantasy of "consciousness-raising" through patronizing lectures has collapsed. The inside and the outside are connected. What matters in the algorithmic age is contagion.
Joy is contagious. Courage is contagious. Coordinated action is contagious.
Enough Fighting. Time to Build.
We are watching a handful of tech oligarchs coordinate with authoritarian reactionaries to turn our collective communications infrastructure into a slaughterhouse for human hope.
If we keep trying to fight this with good manners, fact-checking committees, and fragmented despair, we will lose. The Brazilian comrades proved that the machine can be hijacked, but only if we trade individual vanity for collective discipline.
Stop feeding their grift. Turn around and look at the person standing next to you.
We are capable of this.
🖤 Mikester
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Available in 14 languages at time of posting
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