Sam Kriss is a writer and dilettante surviving in London.

Once, there was a strange and subtle art practiced among the elect of London and Washington, called Kremlinology. The idea was that through various interpretative techniques, Cold War intelligence agencies could find out what was really going on in a Soviet Union that—it was assumed—was always hiding some great secret about itself. In practice, it was a farce. Analysts would pore carefully over all the minute details of everything the Soviet state produced, and try to pry open meaningless flecks of data to get at the grand narrative within. Is Kulakov standing to the left of Chernenko in the official Politburo photograph, and what does that mean about the internal power struggle? Why is this transcription of a speech slightly different from this other one? How are the chairs arranged at the state dinner? Who didn’t finish their herring? When a Russian child kicks a ball down the street, is he telling us what they’re doing with the submarines?

As Freud once noted, all superstition rests on the idea that absolutely nothing is simply a matter of chance. Less well-funded versions of the same operation are everywhere: the people who think that a malignant conspiracy has, for some reason, left clues to its existence on the paper money; people who think that corporate logos actually contain the ancient symbols of dark pagan gods; people who think that the screaming infinity of the world is actually transmitting something in code, and who think that they’re the ones who’ve worked it out.


In the end, Kremlinology said a lot more about the people practicing it than it ever did about the Soviet Union. Like all fantasies, it expressed a desire. A universe that could make sense, if only you were smart enough to understand it. A politics that could be reduced to the competing ambitions of a few graying and liver-spotted men. Above all, a global order that—like the dull machinations of MI6 or the CIA—is always powered by conspiracy. So it’s significant that Kremlinology is back. Except this time, the mysterious closed system to be analyzed is no longer far away on the chilly edge of Europe. America has turned its suspicions inward, on the strange and spooky world of Donald Trump.

This has been going on for a while now: During the campaign, it was almost impossible to publicly laugh at his latest hammy and ludicrous tweet without someone coming along to tell you that actually, this is all just a distraction, he’s hogging the headlines to divert your attention from whatever serious allegation was about to sink his presidential bid on that particular week. (As if any allegation, his pussy-grabbing, his tax returns, could halt a Donald Train screaming toward Washington on rails greased with malice and revenge.) But now, with Trump sprawling lugubriously all over the White House, it’s gone into overdrive. As thousands blockade airports and fill up city streets, a new generation of amateur Kremlinologists is coming forward with its hastily assembled theories, assembled from bureaucratic signifiers, to say that by trying to stop the harm he’s actually doing, all we’ve done is play into his tiny, tiny hands.

In the past few days, two Medium posts that quickly seeped through the cloistered know-it-all sector of the internet have exemplified this weird form of politics. The first, “Trial Balloon for a Coup?,” is by Yonatan Zunger; the second, more forceful piece, comes from Jake Fuentes, and is titled “The Immigration Ban is a Headfake, and We’re Falling For It.” Both tread largely the same ground: They argue that the chaos and indeterminacy surrounding Trump’s ban on travel to the United States by anyone from seven Muslim-majority nations is actually a devious ploy. This is done through some very familiar techniques. Which positions are still unfilled at the State Department? Why did Trump’s statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day not make any mention of Jews? And why, of all people, was it Reince Priebus who defended that decision, when it’s not part of his usual job? And, like with the old Russia-watchers, these questions lead us to the idea that nothing is irrelevant, but that something monstrous is afoot.

Some of these conclusions are straightforwardly true. Zunger tells us that “the aims of crushing various groups—Muslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the press—are very much primary aims of the regime”—but you don’t need a sophisticated analysis of bureaucratic sub-departments to know that; just basic reading comprehension. Others are a little more suspect. Trump and his cronies want people to protest, Zunger writes. “The goal is to create resistance fatigue.” They want judges to issue court orders demanding that people detained at airports are allowed to see a lawyer; it’s all part of their game, “testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government.” What looks like the beginnings of a breakdown in effective government, or an opportunity, is nothing of the sort. They planned everything, and everything fell into place.

The left is no stranger to this kind of defeatism, and it’s not hard to see why. Capitalism is omnivorous and polymorphously perverse; today’s revolutionary slogans are found on tomorrow’s Coke cans. Radical demands—the emancipation of women, the liberation of sexuality, the expression of cultural difference—have a tendency to end up being shallowly incorporated into an existing order, suckered up by a vast and shapeless amoeba that keeps squelching disastrously across the world as if nothing had happened. Right-wing politicians and right-ish editorial boards now honor Martin Luther King Jr., a small-c communist and big-h Hegelian, and try to claim him as one of their own: a preacher of hard work, personal responsibility and subservience to the all-conquering devil-god. If you look backward from the state of the world today at all the heroic resistance movements that have failed throughout history, it’s easy to think that this was all part of the plan.

Much of this is true, but its effects can be paralyzing. We’ve fucked up so much that it’s made us afraid of victory; faced with an enormous and implacable enemy, there are people who are now convinced that its power is infinite. Whenever it looks like the reactionaries have massively over-reached themselves it’s just part of a larger plan, one that we can’t see. If Steve Bannon’s pants fell down tomorrow and he tottered crying into a muddy pond, there would be someone ready to announce that actually, this made him even more omnipotent than he was before.

But the pathology that’s animating these viral conspiracy theories is different. It’s a determinism of a far more granular sort: It assumes, quite improbably, that the Trump team knew exactly what sort of thing would happen after their every move, that they were only testing out the details. As if Jared Kushner could see through time, as if Stephen Miller could read our thoughts. Its universe is one that’s programmable. To adopt their own hermeneutic stance: What’s really going on, underneath all the layered lies, and what little puncta might give it away? The most notable clue here is that neither Zunger nor Fuentes are political analysts or journalists or academics or even civil servants. Instead, both come from the tech industry.

Zunger is on the privacy team at Google; Fuentes was behind LevelMoney, an app since acquired by Capital One. They belong to a particular class, with a particular way of looking at the world. Silicon Valley doesn’t really approach politics as a sphere of competing social interests, a space in which people have the ability to make collective demands and collectively alter the conditions of their existences, but as a system—something with an input, an output and reams of complex programming in between. Whenever the tech world turns its attention to politics, there’s always the hint of this nerdish fascination for system: an inattention to what politics actually is or does, but a fetishization of efficiency, the latent notion that all these 18th-century structures really should just be replaced with something you can download on your phone.

Often, this can lead to fascism: Take Curtis Yarvin, a startup founder (backed by Peter Thiel) who proposed replacing all government with a repressive corporate dictatorship, and who—despite his almost total ignorance of political and social theory—ended up providing the pseudo-intellectual underpinnings of what went on to become the neo-Nazi alt-right. The Bay Area might not like the current president, but it’s not intrinsically opposed to racism and repression either. After all, many of its luminaries came out to meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the subcontinent’s very own Donald Trump, a man fairly recently banned from traveling to the U.S. or Britain for his role in deadly anti-Muslim pogroms. But in the hands of stalwart liberals like Zunger and Fuentes, the baseline tech-ideology gives you this: a society in which people are users or consumers, in which democracy is a series of in-app purchases, in which all power belongs to the programmers.

“Popular attention,” Fuentes writes, “must focus less on whether we agree with what the government is doing, and more on whether the system of checks and balances we have in place is working.” (Never mind that every American president in living memory has managed to trample on the law with all checks and balances apparently in place.) It’s impossible for him to imagine that the Muslim ban really is directed against Muslims. Anything happening within the system can only really concern the system itself. We shouldn’t be fighting for our rights and our dignity, but to make sure that nobody tampers with the source code. Never mind the danger Trump poses to so many lives: What about our abstract institutions?

This isn’t to say that we should ignore any potential power grab within the political system, or hope that by protesting in airports we will bring down the government. But it’s worth keeping in mind that politics is about more than clashing personalities and chthonic power-plays. These clever little games do happen, but there’s a clinamen that tends to screw with the results—Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for instance, energetically promoted Trump during the primaries, under the impression that he’d be a far easier opponent; we all know how that turned out. It’s almost comforting, in a way, to imagine yourself as a pawn. There’s no moral duty involved: The evil plan is grand and inscrutable; it gives a sense of order in what looks like disintegration, and tells you what your place is in it. But there is a moral duty, and we need to face up to it. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes the people in charge are just as blinkered as we are.