I do not believe in Stochastic Revolution

Did you hear about a warehouse fire allegedly started by a contractor employed at a Kimberly Clark warehouse?

The alleged arsonist recorded himself starting the fire while claiming that it could have been prevented if only the firm had paid living wages.

This sentiment, this outlet for malaise and disappointment, went viral in some circles.

If you were following this story, especially if you were watching videos about it, you may have noticed that you started getting served other videos describing fires across the United States.

At least some of these creators, as also noted by Eden Riley, wanted these fires to be a monumental act of social upheaval, the beginnings of the proletariat participating in class warfare in the United States.

The influencers who created these videos found (or often had others find for them) headlines about other fires across the country, and each one only further confirmed their belief that the United States was on the verge of glorious change. Clearly these dozens of fires over weeks had to be evidence of something!

The United States, of course, is not on the verge of entering open class warfare; in many senses, workers identify less with their class than they did 100 years ago.

But, if your feed became dominated by these sensationalist stories, you may have almost started to believe them. Perhaps there really were people in the United States ready and capable of challenging the overwhelming powers of capitalists and their influence over the violent state, a brief hope of release. Maybe, like some of these influencers claimed, these fires would grow to a conflagration; the groundwork had been laid for realignment, and it was going to be sudden and all-consuming. Revolutionary organizations would arise and align quickly in this conflagration, and their obviously overwhelming power would subsume the existing system and rapidly bring about a change.

This hope, you may note, does not involve you, the viewer, needing to act.

Notably, it does not even need you to go start a fire, which, if these fires are as significant as some of these people claim, would seem to be an act necessary to make the power of the populace seem sufficient to challenge the capitalists to accelerate this fire you hope burns quickly.

I believe this is a disabling hope, a hope that does not sustain you, a hope that does not keep you in the fight but prevents you from ever becoming a part of the fight.

There seems to be a subset of content consumers and content creators who implicitly or explicitly, however, believe in a stochastic revolution.

Stochastic Revolution

I use the term Stochastic Revolution to draw an analogy with Stochastic Terrorism.

Stochastic terrorism originally was used to describe the process of figuring out the probability of terrorist attacks.

However, that is probably not how you have heard it used. Over the last decade and a half, it has come to describe how speakers can effectively increase the likelihood of lone-wolf terrorist attacks.

One of the people most commonly accused of stochastic terrorism is Chaya Raichik, who runs the 'Libs of TikTok' social media accounts. She had a tendency to attack certain hospitals for the medical care they provided to transgender individuals. Many of these hospitals would later report bomb threats, most prominently Boston Children's Hospital.

In that case, Catherine Leavy called in a bomb threat, and she eventually pleaded guilty to making a false bomb threat as well as a related charge.

Leavy ended up meeting with representatives of Boston Children's, who eventually filed a victim statement in her sentencing. The hospital argued that Leavy should not go to prison; they pointed to her sincere remorse, her cognitive impairment, and the fact that she "was manipulated by the instigators' online disinformation campaign."

The hospital claimed that "the real culpable individuals in this case are the four instigators who have orchestrated this disinformation campaign unabated for the past two years."

This type of thing is generally what people mean when they use stochastic terrorism nowadays; they're describing how our ability to influence millions of people at one time means that this type of targeted speech can create the conditions that will lead to the violence and terror acts.

So a stochastic revolution would be a revolution in which people using these tools of mass communication end up creating an informational environment that will, in aggregate, move enough people to the necessary acts required for a revolution.

In the same sense that Raichik does not personally send violent threats, these stochastic revolutionaries do not need to personally partake in violent acts; they do not need to take the risk of personally firebombing a warehouse. Their role is instead to create the ideal environment.

Thus, each time people look into their camera and suggest in excited tones and bombastic speech that each new BREAKING fire, each fire that is JUST IN, every fire that is CONFIRMED prove the people are waking up; if they believe in the stochastic revolution, then they believe that they are doing an important job. They are leaders in making this idealized change possible, in creating this new world, and in bringing about this wondrous change.

However, it can extend even further than that, with this belief in this wonderful power of change moving beyond the creator.

Even the content consumer deludes themselves into believing they have an important and essential role in helping shape this informational environment, often encouraged by the creator. Each like, each comment, each repost on your story is not just consumption of content, is not entertainment, but is a revolutionary act. You are the vanguard of the modern seizure of the press by the proletariat to create the class consciousness that will inevitably lead to your desired outcome.

In some sense a belief in stochastic revolution feels similar to certain utopian belief systems. There was a belief that education and consciousness raising would eventually make it clear to everyone that their proposed system is so obviously superior that it would win out.

However, this is not really the same as that type of utopian thinking.

It is instead what Jean Baudrillard described in Simulacra and Simulation:

"It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes."

Even the work of education and consciousness-raising has been replaced with a sensationalist mania that sustains itself on convincing everyone that victory is mere moments away. The real is substituted for the signs of the real and thus deters the real process of understanding.

There is not evidence of a spate of warehouse fires. There is no Warehouse Revolution. The United States is a massive and economically productive nation; it has warehouses and corporate buildings aplenty. An analysis from the National Fire Protection Agency suggests that we average nearly 3 warehouse fires per day in the United States.

The people who seem to believe in the Warehouse Revolution created a "Crowdsourced Industrial Incident Map" which declares in bold at the top of the page that it is a "US WAREHOUSE FIRE TRACKER 🔥" to try to figure out just how fast this is spreading. The website has 131 fires, with the oldest dating back to July 2025, but is mostly focused on the last two months.

However, as part of the sloppiness inherent in crowdsourcing they have included a large number of fires which are not 'Industrial Incidents' or 'Warehouse Fires.' There are construction incidents, there are multiple abandoned buildings, there is a police station, there is a home, there are vehicle fires, there is an accidental fire at a college, there is a garage, there is a vacant church, there are municipal buildings.

Honestly, I think they're missing a number of fires! I think a bunch of fires have happened that even these people obsessed with fires have not found! That's like the funniest thing here; they're being sensationalist about every fire they can find, talking about how each fire is more proof of their thesis, but fires are so mundane and commonplace that many are never even rising to their awareness.

Additionally, most of these fires they include are not even arson; in no way is it targeted; it is just what happens when you store a bunch of things in buildings and have chemicals or electricity or heat or whatever it is in each case that made the fire.

However, for the folks who believe in the Stochastic Revolution, it does not matter. The point, as it is for most propagandists, is not slavish devotion to the Truth, but finding ways to make the truth work for you. They are building up the fervor, they are shaping the minds, eventually they will win out.

They will not win out

"The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived." - Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle

It is quite possible that some of the people I have indirectly been criticizing in this essay have themselves become convinced by their obsession.

Whenever I go really deep into research, where I am probing beyond the edges of what more experienced journalists have already reported, I find myself often being pulled deeper into my own pet theories and obsessions. Because I am searching each and every page of their website for extraordinary claims and mistakes, I end up finding them, and I start to convince myself that this company is an obvious outlier in terms of extraordinary claims and mistakes. But is that true, or have I just stared too long into the abyss?

This is why it is so important for me to work with partners when I am doing that work, either Cas, my long-suffering co-host and investigative partner, or the newsroom and editors I collaborate with. They are an anchor, a tether, that reminds me that Tether is not behind EVERY door.

However, I worry instead of finding reliable and trustworthy partners who can help these enterprising investigators and promoters of information stay grounded, they instead develop a relationship with their audience. Their audience directs their attention to more news, more creators, more ideas that are similar to the things that originally attracted them to this creator. Thus, a creator who originally wanted to share the alleged video from the alleged arsonist starts being pushed by the audience to see more fires, to create more videos about fires, to talk about the economic considerations that were apparently promoted by this one arsonist.

As Debord noted, "Even the deceivers are deceived."

This process has been described as "audience capture," where as a creator acquires a monetizable audience, they end up in turn captured by the expectations of that audience. Think of a musician who wants to create a work in an entirely new genre but has a set of fans that have very strong expectations of what type of music this artist will create.

Creator and audience alike end up pulled deeper into a self-affirming gyre. Each more and more convinced of how widespread their belief is, they seem to have hundreds or thousands of comments, an overwhelming number of videos, and an incomprehensible number of updates. How could it not be True?

Whereas some people reading this essay never knew that there were people convinced of the grand Warehouse Revolution. Their algorithm, their life, had not put them in contact with it, they were completely unaware that there was this massive gyre sucking up folks that never even rose to their awareness.

Thus, these stochastic revolutionaries are far more isolated than they imagine. The overwhelming numbers they are seeing confirmed in front of their eyes are statistical noise. The revolutionary acts that feel imminent are unlikely to be executed.

They are shaping an informational ecosystem, but it is not an ecosystem that is shaping the masses; instead, it is only reaching the people who are naturally sympathetic to that message already.

Each person is pacified by content that convinces them that their desired reality is Reality. The potential for this type of pacification will be amplified by the ability of artificial intelligence to create even more specific gyres, isolating people further.

As Baudrillard observed, "The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these."

What that means for change

The practical implication of these observations is that if you want to enact change, you must take action outside of algorithmically mediated spaces.

You will likely need to organize yourself along with others in your community and find places in which you can start creating the leverage necessary for the change you hope to enact. If you want higher wages, then consider if your workplace is one that could be unionized. If you want public healthcare, then organize with groups that focus on that goal, like DSA. If you want to improve your living conditions, then consider if a tenant union might be appropriate. If you want a better politician to inhabit a certain position, then look at the various people who are running in the primary and consider volunteering for the one you believe is best.

If you want a violent revolution, then I am a bad person to give you advice, but make sure you think about what matériel can be seized, where you will land supplies, and think critically about the tactics that your likely opponents have promulgated.

That is not to say that the creation of media has no value. I think reaching people is clearly valuable, but it needs to be the real, not the hyperreal. If you want to raise people's consciousness, then you must actually think about educating them and how to expand that process of education. You must think critically about how your message will reach not just those already sympathetic, but also those who have never encountered this idea.

In some sense, this is all to say that you should not trust your own perception that 'everyone is talking about this,' I frequently end up overestimating the salience of countless issues because of the informational ecosystem I exist in. This is despite the fact that I deliberately try to avoid many algorithms; I still end up self-selecting into a certain collection of books that cite other books, articles that cite other articles, and publications that are shaped by much of the same background intellectual structure. It is not completely avoidable, but you can minimize it by doing things; reality is the ultimate constraint on all ideas. While imagining a better future is somewhat valuable, building a better future is orders of magnitude more valuable.