Harassment Architecture is a 2019 novella, self-published and written by far-right online influencer Mike Ma. A sequel, Gothic Violence, was published in 2021. Some sections are narrative, while others are more ranting or political discourse. It is popular among the online far-right, particularly among ecofascists and in the decentralized series of fascist Telegram channels known as Terrorgram. The book contains ecofascist, white nationalist, and militant accelerationist themes and content, espousing several conspiracy theories including that of the Great Replacement.
It is written in a fragmented and sometimes hallucinatory style, described by some commentators as reminiscent of Fight Club or American Psycho; Ma described it as "more of a mental breakdown than a story". It contains scenes of extreme violence, as well as extreme misogyny and racism. The book suggests that violence is the only solution to the perceived issues of modernity, and criticizes industrial life as opposed to the purity of nature. The narrator of the book suggests that the reader commit murder and blow up power stations.
Background and publication history
Harassment Architecture was self-published by Mike Ma in 2019.[1] Mike Ma is the pseudonym of far-rightinternet influencer Mike Mahoney, a former Breitbart writer for Glittering Steel and former associate of Milo Yiannopoulos.[1][2][3] Ma is also the founder of the Pine Tree Party accelerationist movement, founded in 2017, which had previously brought him prominence among ecofascists.[2][4] Ma, a militant accelerationist, has been outspoken in his praise for Unabomber Ted Kaczynski,[4][5][2] and with the Pine Tree Party encouraged mass shootings and other violence for the purpose of "promoting the advancement of the white race" and to safeguard nature.[4] Ma is a proponent of raw foodism.[6]
Harassment Architecture was advertised in Raw Egg Nationalist's magazine Man's World, as was its sequel.[6] Ma described Harassment Architecture as "more of a mental breakdown than a story".[7] In 2021, Ma published a sequel, Gothic Violence; this book focuses on a group of terrorist surfers taking over Florida.[2][8]
Summary
The book begins with an author's note declaring that "if you came here expecting coherent plot or structure, you bought or stole the wrong book."[9] The novella's protagonist is an unnamed white man in his early 20s. He works for an unspecified job and regularly goes without sleeping for days on end due to insomnia; as a result, he frequently loses track of time and his own train of thought. He is a self-avowed racist who is disturbed about the state of the world, particularly technological advancement, and is prone to violent fantasies. His self descriptions are inconsistent; at one point he says he has never been nervous in his life, while at another he describes himself as anxious about everything. The story jumps around, interrupted by the narrator's constant daydreams, extended hallucinations, and commentary on topics like nostalgia, women, and culture; one chapter is a review of the album Midnight Snack by Homeshake.
The book begins with him listening to Richard Wagner in his car, "with the windows down, mostly because I want the people at this red light to think I'm a cultured guy".[10] He narrates that recently he feels like he is dead and on edge; he says he is a "manic superbreakdown in waiting", and that he is "terrified for everyone around [him]", but that he has no worries for himself, because he feels that whatever bad things may happen to him are his destiny. He harasses a woman and then gets into a car accident.[11] The narrative shifts to a concert he must attend with his friends; he says they are not his real friends because he cannot be "racist, sexist, or myself around them".[10] While at the concert, he begins fantasizing about murdering everyone there, before his fantasy is interrupted by a girl who flirts with him; broken out of his fantasy, he leaves and decides to abandon all his friends for good.
The book's narrator maligns nihilism and irony, and suggests that if the reader is a nihilist, they channel it into something "productive" through violence, either killing other people or getting themself killed, sarcastically suggesting that they "especially do not" destroy power stations without getting caught.[4][5][12] He then says that the reader should not do anything he says when he is having one of his "tirades". Another day, he has a pleasant discussion with a leftist woman who does not know his political views. He bemoans that art culture is leftist, and worse, made up of fake revolutionaries, saying they should "Kill someone important! Burn something down! Cut yourself for attention! Anything!"[13][12] He thinks about what would happen if the woman knew what he believed, and thinks about curb stomping her.
The protagonist narrates the life of a depressed woman who he stalks, who accidentally kills herself when the narrator breaks into her apartment to load her gun. He kills one of his friends by tipping a bookcase onto her; he claims it was self defense, and there are no apparent consequences. He goes nearly a week without sleeping and wakes up not knowing what month it is. His sleep deprivation and hallucinations worsen to the point where he is no longer sure if he is dreaming or awake. He tries energy drinks; after a monologue about accelerationism, he warns the reader to never drink energy drinks. He gets into another car accident and almost dies, resulting in delirium as he heals. He leaves America under unclear circumstances, possibly having killed people, and returns with several thousand dollars.
The narrator decides that he will, for reasons unknown to him, attempt to cause as much harm as he can. He kills several people by throwing rocks through their windshields, leading to a pileup car accident. His campaign escalates to mass murder and he attracts followers, declaring war on the world; he is arrested and decides the experience was a daydream, hallucinating further that he sees Lucifer speaking to him. His followers break him out of jail, and he gives a speech advocating accelerationism. The book ends with the narrator proclaiming all the things he has seen both God and demons in, concluding that "I saw God and he told me to burn it all down".[14]
Themes and ideology
The book is ecofascist and militantly accelerationist in its ideology, but also white nationalist and identitarian.[15] The novel contains far-right accelerationist themes, and promotes the targeting of infrastructure in order to destabilize society.[15][4] It, as well as its sequel, espouse several conspiracies, including that of the Great Replacement, as well as antisemitism and anti-vaccination ideas.[15] The book includes scenes where the protagonist suggests that he has shot up a gay nightclub, as well as attacks on ethnic minorities, the poor, and trans people.[1][15] The book also focuses substantially on diet and physical fitness, which are part of the "transformation" the protagonist undergoes.[16]
Jenny Rice noted it as "filled with White nationalist imagery, brutal sexual violence, and gory fantasies of killing anyone who is not a straight White man".[9] Helen Young described it as including vitriolic, dehumanizing, and violent language against groups often targeted by far-right extremists, as well as several pages describing violent attacks against them.[17] The Southern Poverty Law Center classed it as "standard fare within the radical right", calling it an "accelerationist fantasy".[13] Alex Amend said the work was full of "brutal violence, racism and misogyny".[1] Helen Young and Geoff Boucher described the book as a "fictionalized lone wolf rage fantasy" that justified hate crimes in what the book portrayed as a "degenerate civilization", targeting typical "culture war" topics like political correctness, mixed-race relationships and sexual harassment laws.[8]
The novella bemoans technocracy ruining the chance of man to live a genuine life, with the protagonist expressing the desire to live in the "purity" of nature and calling the existence of industrialized man a "violent preface to his looming and inescapable consequence. The final consequence."[5] Macklin argues that the thoughts expressed in the book are "broadly congruent" with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's civilizational critiques and the negative affects civilization could have on many aspects of life, including personal autonomy and freedom.[5] It views the solution to this as being found in nature, which towards the end of the book the protagonist declares has always won.[5]Harassment Architecture criticizes the apathetic and nihilistic outlook of the modern world, which in its view has killed beauty; as a consequence the modern world must be burned down.[18]
Harassment Architecture lists by name several mass murderers in its discussion of aesthetics of violence, saying that each has been forgiven "simply by looking good".[5] The book's narrator argues that mass murder is the solution to the perceived terror of modernity, part of the book's general position that violence is the only solution for many problems.[19] One analysis argued its core message was a "concretized hatred for all that maintains society".[18]
Style
The book is disordered in structure and many events do not directly follow one another, instead jumping from one to the other. Several chapters are short, some not more than a single paragraph.[15][9] The book is written in a fragmented and sometimes hallucinatory manner, with the protagonist often daydreaming, hallucinating or fantasizing, with this not made distinct from the rest of the story.[15][20] Several commentators have compared it to the 1996 novel Fight Club in style.[15][5] Helen Young said that both the book and its sequel were stylistically similar, both being reminiscent of the novels American Psycho as well as Fight Club, in their expression of misogyny and violent masculinity, as well as its inclusion of "hallucinatory episodes".[15]
Writer Andrew Marzoni noted it alongside Bronze Age Mindset as evidence that "the current trend of far-Right literature is pseudo-academic in its pretensions, but lacking in novel interventions". He said Harassment Architecture "blends the Nietzschean pastiche of Bronze Age Mindset with a flat, affected, first-person narration derivative of Houellebecq and alt-lit writers such as Tao Lin". He compared the disclaimer at the beginning of the book to 4chan posters saying their trolling was merely doing it for the "lulz".[3] Graham Macklin writing for the academic journal Terrorism and Political Violence called it "saturated with irony and dark mordant humour", in a way that was reminiscent of online message boards.[5]
One commentator called it a "memoir-cum-manifesto";[21] the style of the book is fragmented, combining a typical first-person style with ideological ranting and sections on "political and aesthetic discourse".[15] Helen Young argued that the book and its sequel were both "profoundly gothic" in their contents, functioning as "narrative manifestos", viewing modern America as "inherently terrifying", and were an example of the far-right's exploitation of online media ecosystems.[22] She said they were "blueprints and fantasies" for white supremacist thought, like many other works of far-right fiction, narrating a path utilizing violence for white supremacists to acquire political power.[23]
Reception and influence
The book became very popular among extremist online communities.[9] One description said it "sits alongside Mason's Siege in the canon of prominent accelerationist writings".[24] Like much far-right literature, the book and its sequel are widely available as free PDFs online.[2] The book was widely regarded by readers, even those who agreed with its messaging, as a deeply uncomfortable read. Jenny Rice attributed the book's appeal in part to this, writing that "readers often explicitly link the uncomfortable experience of reading Harassment Architecture with the experience of self-transformation".[25]
Since the book's publication it has been regularly spread by accelerationist and ecofascist Telegram channels;[1][26] and it is popular in extremist communities online.[9] The book was popular among Terrorgram, an interconnected series of Telegram channels that promotes extreme fascism and worships far-right mass murderers as "saints".[21] The book was mentioned by Solomon Henderson, the perpetrator of the 2025 Antioch High School shooting, in his manifesto.[27] The novella was found among the possessions of an individual who was arrested for terroristic threats in 2021; he ran a white power-focused Telegram channel, and possessed a collection of firearms.[13]
The book's specific method of describing methods to conduct infrastructure attacks, utilizing repetition of the qualifier "I hear some people...", is often duplicated by online accelerationist graphics; sections of the writings are often brought together with neo-Nazi activism in memes.[28][29] Along with other far-right literature, it has been included in Nazi audio collections on Telegram.[1][21] Following the book's publication, Ma became popular among online accelerationists; one commentator described it as a "staple of accelerationist and ecofascist reading lists".[13][2]
Basha, Saddiq (2023). ""Death to the Grid": Ideological Narratives and Online Community Dynamics in Encouraging Far-Right Extremist Attacks on Critical Infrastructure". Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses. 15 (4): 17–24. ISSN2382-6444. JSTOR48743374.
Loadenthal, Michael (January 2, 2022). "Feral fascists and deep green guerrillas: infrastructural attack and accelerationist terror". Critical Studies on Terrorism. 15 (1): 169–208. doi:10.1080/17539153.2022.2031129. ISSN1753-9153.
Loadenthal, Michael; Hausserman, Samantha; Thierry, Matthew (2022). "Accelerating Hate: Atomwaffen Division, Contemporary Digital Fascism, and Insurrectionary Accelerationism". In Bacigalupo, James; Borgeson, Kevin; Valeri, Robin Maria (eds.). Cyberhate: The Far Right in the Digital Age. Lanham: Lexington Books. pp.87–118. ISBN978-1-7936-0697-6.
O'Connor, Brendan (2020). "The Accelerating Gyre: The American right wants to get on with "the cleansing "fire"". The Baffler. No.52. New York City. pp.70–83. ISSN1059-9789. JSTOR26922852.
Young, Helen (2024). "Extremist Nostalgia: Mike Ma's Novellas as Twenty-First-Century Far-Right Gothic". In Bacon, Simon; Bronk-Bacon, Katarzyna (eds.). Gothic Nostalgia: The Uses of Toxic Memory in 21st Century Popular Culture. Palgrave Gothic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.295–310. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-43852-3. ISBN978-3-031-43852-3. ISSN2634-6214.
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