Schrödinger’s Terrorism: is it or is it not in the box?

An emerging tactic, technique, and procedure (TTP) within the Com Network and adjacent “Edgesphere” milieus is the deliberate co-opting of the branding, aesthetic repertoires, and multimedia archives associated with historically established terrorist and violent extremist (TVE) entities (including but not limited to Atomwaffen Division, The Base, Order of Nine Angles, ISIS and al-Qaeda). While selected visual indicators and nomenclature may superficially map onto conventional warning signals used to identify terrorist and violent extremist entities, the actors driving Com Network activity differ materially from their “traditional” analogues in motivational structure, organizational logic, recruitment practice, and communicative intent. In many cases the primary functional role of legacy TVE branding in the Com is less about doctrinal transmission and more about status acceleration within an attention economy, where notoriety and transgression operate as currencies of subcultural capital.

This produces a Schrodinger-like condition: the performance simultaneously signals “terrorism” and “just trolling.” The ambiguity is not accidental. The status payoff comes from keeping both interpretations live until external audience collapse the ambiguity through misclassification, thereby validating the performance and amplifying its reach.

The analytic implication is that assessments anchored predominantly in ideology or doctrine risk systematic misclassification: they can both overestimate the strategic coherence and external connectivity of Com-branded formations and underestimate the violence-enabling dynamics embedded in performative, trolling-centric, and LARPERcore oriented participation.

Terrorist Semiotics as Modular Signifiers:

Historically, assessments have privileged ideological content, doctrinal commitments, command-and-control indicators, and discernible operational planning as the primary discriminators between violent extremist “support” activity and credible mobilization. In the Com Network ecosystems, however, the ecology of risk is frequently mediated through aesthetics, networked performance, and competitive identity work rather than stable ideological adherence. Legacy terrorist semiotics (logos, mottos, anthems, martyr iconography, stylistic templates, and archival propaganda fragments) can be instrumentally redeployed by nihilistic violent extremists (NVE) without implying continuity of membership, lineage, or even sincere ideological identification. In effect, the coopted TVE brand becomes a modular signifier: a ready-made package of feared symbolism that can be imported to produce social effects (shock, attention, intimidation, and reputational lift) independent of the coopted groups original doctrinal content.

This dynamic is consistent with broader patterns in Edgesphere subcultures where symbols circulate as “floating signifiers,” and where meaning is negotiated through in-group interpretive and performative norms rather than fixed ideological norms.

The Field of Extremist Practice:

A useful way to interpret dynamics is through Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. Rather than treating Com-native and Com-adjacent formations primarily as ideological movements, we can conceptualise them as a field of extremist practice: a relatively autonomous social space with internal hierarchies, status contests, and struggles over legitimacy – over what counts as “authentic,” “elite,” or (in Com vernacular) “sinister.”

In this field, actors compete for position using forms of capital that are recognised as valuable inside the ecosystem:

• Social capital: access to exclusive chats, affiliation with high-status users, ownership of channels/handles, roster inclusion, and the ability to mobilise audiences across groups.
• (sub)Cultural capital: fluency in memetic language and aesthetic codes; knowledge of lore, texts, and reference points; technical competence (editing, archiving, basic tradecraft); and in some fields, possession/curation of extreme content that functions as a credibility marker.
• Symbolic capital: the authority to define what is “based” versus “cringe,” to set the boundaries of acceptable performance, and to confer or revoke legitimacy through inclusion, ridicule, or exclusion.

This matters because brand co-opting can be read as a capital-conversion tactic. The actor imports a legacy terrorist brand as symbolic infrastructure (an off-the-shelf reservoir of feared meaning) then attempts to convert that borrow symbolic capital into social capital (network centrality, deference, influence). The signal appears costly (because it invites potential law enforcement scrutiny), but it is often low-cost in practice because the commitment is aesthetic, ironic, and performative rather than organisational.

Habitus, Illusio, and Trolling as Social Infrastructure

Within the saturated economy of attention of the Com, “newgens” face a structural problem: status is scarce, attention is competitive and driven by a culture of one-upmanship. Edgy and shocking novelty (deployed to gain status and recognition) decays quickly, forcing individuals to find new ways to compete. In this context, co-opting a notorious terrorist brand therefore functions as a perceived reputational shortcut to greater levels of notoriety.

The legacy terrorist organization’s historical violence and media footprint are mimicked and then leveraged as a pre-existing reservoir of symbolic power, which can be reattached to the new actor’s digital persona. This is due to the informational asymmetry of the Com Network’s field and what Pierre Bourdieu called subcultural capital. In the Com this takes the form of specialized knowledge of memetic language and style, being able to demonstrate understanding of history of culturally relevant actors and events, aesthetic competence, mastery of the objects and social practices that grant status and authenticity within a specific youth and non-mainstream milieu.

The deployment and cooption of a legacy terrorist brand operates as a costly signal in appearance (as it invites scrutiny and reputational risk), yet it is often a low-cost signal in practice (because the actor’s commitment is aesthetic and memetic rather than organizational). By importing a feared brand, the actor increases salience within the network, differentiates themselves from peers, and attempts to compress the time required to become legible as “serious” (or at least dangerously performative). In Bourdieu’s terms, the actor is attempting to convert symbolic capital (the brand’s notoriety) into social capital (network centrality, deference, and influence), with the ultimate objective of gaining positional power over others in the same ecosystem.

Bourdieu also emphasised the importance of habitus: the deeply ingrained and embodied systems of dispositions in his theory (the ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving within a milieu) that actors acquire through their social experiences. Habitus functions like a form of social muscle memory. It tells actors what feels “natural,” appropriate, or possible within a given field.  

One defining feature of the habitus of nihilistic violent extremists within the Com is humor and trolling.  These are not incidental stylistic choices but are the foundational cornerstone of the Edgesphere’s creation and continued existence. Humor and trolling operate as central social mechanisms that manage ambiguity, enforce hierarchies, and maintain plausible deniability. The ability to deploy irony correctly, to humiliate without appearing earnest, and to push boundaries without overstepping them signals insider status and cultural competence.

The circulation of historical propaganda within co-opted channels should therefore be interpreted through the pragmatic lens of how it is deployed:

• as a component of “edgelord” self-presentation;
• as bait for outraged outsiders; and/or
• as material for in-group bonding through transgressive consumption.

Trolling, “edgy” jokes and performative self-presentation, and rage-baiting outsiders are all expressions of the Edgesphere habitus. Acceptance of - or comfort with - these dispositions each help actors “fit in” to the field and gain social status within the group(s). Discomfort, hesitation, or visible moral resistance, by contrast, often marks individuals as outsiders or legitimate targets for ridicule.

To maintain and extend the accumulation of clout (social status) group owners or prominent users are frequently embedded across multiple Com groups. In this context, brand co-opting becomes one tactic among many for cross-pollinating audiences and importing reputational signals into new Com chats. Prominent actors look to use their symbolic and cultural capital to colonize and expand into adjacent Com fields, leveraging recognition earned in one space to accelerate status acquisition in another.

The consequence in the ecosystem is that legacy TVE propaganda can become decoupled from their original strategic messaging function as they are re-embedded as memetic objects or instruments for harassment and intimidation. This reality does not neutralize risk, it reframes it and that is what is key to understand: an environment that normalizes violent imagery and extremist iconography can still cultivate desensitization, amplify grievances, and escalate to harm and violence even when explicit doctrine is unstable.

Joining, Vetting, and the Performance of Commitment

A key discriminator between Com-native and Com-co-opted groups vis-à-vis legacy TVE organizations is the functional purpose of “joining.” Traditionally, terrorist and violent extremist groups have  usually employed vetting oriented toward security, tradecraft discipline, ideological purity, and (in some cases) offline operational integration. Admission was designed to minimize risk to the organisation and to ensure alignment with strategic objectives.

 In Com-native fields, by contrast, admission requirements are frequently ritualised in a way that serve as public performances that manufacture notoriety signal exclusivity, and generate subcultural capital within the wider ecosystem. What appears are vetting is often better understood as auditioning

In some Com fields, admission may consist of a credible demonstration of (sub)cultural capital: displaying mastery over the fields aesthetic, its language, skills in video editing or other non- or low-level criminal acts. These function as proofs of fluence; signals that the individual possess the habitus required to operate in the field. In other Com fields, however, the threshold for recognition is significantly higher. Individuals may be required to share CSAM or extreme gore, demonstrate participation in extortion or harassment campaigns, or provide evidence of real-world violence or coercion. While these practices vary across groups, the underlying logic remains consistent: risk itself becomes currency. The act of exposing oneself to legal, reputational, or moral danger increases the perceived authenticity of the performance and, by extension, the symbolic value of the actor.  

The primary objective of these tests is to create subcultural capital due to the information asymmetry in the ecosystem, rather than a driving force which seeks societal change by accelerating system collapse (as in the form of accelerationism). However, there is a risk of a similar end result is still present, though it is vectorized differently. Therefore, prospective members of these groups are tasked with proof-of-commitment behaviors that are echoed throughout the Com Network. The salient analytic point is not the specific content of any demanded acts but the underlying logic: admission is an attention-generating mechanism that externalizes risk while enhancing the owner’s prestige within the network. This is structurally different from clandestine recruitment models, and it aligns with an ecosystem where reputation is built through demonstrable transgression and where audiences reward escalation.

Symbolic Capital, Rosters, LARPing, and Reflexive Signalling

Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital (the power to define what is legitimate, authentic, or valuable within a field) maps directly onto how Com Network groups produce and enforce status. Symbolic capital is the authority to decide what counts as “based” versus “cringe,” who is “sinister” versus a poser, and what forms of extremity are treated as authentic rather than merely performative. In Com spaces, symbolic capital is often produced publicly and theatrically: through visible affiliation, status displays, and mechanisms that certify belonging.  

Another consistent divergence is the presence of explicit roster lists and public membership signaling. This is a common practice in the Com, but one not operationalized by many legacy TVE organizations that sought to preserve operational security, protect identities, and maintain compartmentalization. The Com’s social incentive structure often rewards the opposite: visibility, traceable association (as a form of clout), and the theatrical display of perceived collective strength. This inversion is analytically significant. It implies that what looks like *organization* may be closer to 'scene,' 'fandom,' or 'subculture,' and what looks like *recruitment* may be closer to 'auditioning.' Nonetheless, the performance of membership can still have downstream mobilization effects, particularly when escalation spirals, impacts of rivalry dynamics, and competitive one-upmanship generate pressures toward real-world action as the ultimate proof of in-group authenticity.

In Bourdieusian terms, rosters function as symbolic capital infrastructure: they certify membership, convert visibility into legitimacy, and concentrate definitional power in the hands of those who control the list. Inclusion becomes a form of recognition that can be traded for influence; removal or public denouncement becomes symbolic punishment. Roster culture also externalizes risk. Where legacy organisations often attempted to minimise traceable association, Com fields frequently reward it because being seen to belong, and being seen to control belonging, is itself a status technology.

In many observed cases, there is no publicly available information indicating that Com groups coopting TVE brands are linked to the real-world legacy organizations they mimic, nor that they contain prior members or leaders of those organizations. The dominant behavioral trait is LARPing: role-play that borrows the aesthetics of historical violence to confer identity and status. Importantly, LARPing here should not be read as harmless fantasy. Rather, it is a mode of social organization that can stabilize violent norms while preserving interpretive ambiguity. The ecosystem’s meta-objective often includes eliciting recognition from high-status external audiences such as journalists and the media, researchers, activists and law enforcement. Why? Because public commentary about a “resurgence” or “revival” of a notorious TVE brand can be converted into reputational capital and notoriety inside the network’s wider field. In other words, the actor seeks to weaponize institutional attention, exploiting the gap between symbol and substance. This is a form of reflexive signaling: i.e. the actor’s credibility is increased when outsiders misclassify the performance of a terrorist habitus as continuity, thereby **validating the performance and amplifying its reach** more so then it would have *a priori*.

This is where symbolic capital and LARPing connect. The performative claim to a legacy brand is not only inward-facing status play; it is also outward-facing reputation management. External recognition can be converted back into symbolic capital within the Com field. The more an outside audience treats the performance as “real,” the more valuable it becomes as proof of authenticity inside the network.

In our and a growing body of research we can see a number of pathways into these co-opted brand environments that often do not run through official or legacy distribution channels. Instead, growing evidence in our research of primary Com chats and court records appear to indicate that most Com users encounter TVE propaganda via gore sites and adjacent archival ecosystems that function as persistent repositories of terrorist and violent extremist content. Within Com-adjacent cultures in the Edgesphere, gore editing and gore consumption operate as both a social practice and a skill-marker. The persistent engagement with extremely violent content can lead to desensitisation and increased risky behaviours. This matters for law enforcement and social service/prevention agencies’ risk assessment because it suggests that the initial contact point is frequently aesthetic and affective rather than purely doctrinal. Users are drawn into a media ecology (the field) that rewards shock tolerance, technical remixing (edits), and transgressive curation (announcement channels, lorebooks, archives and hall of fames) with subcultural capital. Over time, habituation and escalation dynamics can blur the boundary between consumption and endorsement, particularly when peer status is contingent on ever more extreme displays. In other words, the individuals habitus – the deeply ingrained and embodied systems of dispositions or social muscle memory that are embedded within harmful media ecologies guide how an individual interprets and responds to the world.

Read through a field theory lens, these media ecologies do not merely “expose” individuals to extremist content; they help produce the dispositions that make escalation socially intelligible and status-producing. That is, the pathway often begins not with doctrinal recruitment, but with aesthetic immersion, which is them stabilised through symbolic capital / status games (rosters, recognition, authenticity contests) and reinforced through performative group practices.

Traditional TVE organizations tend to promote strict operational security norms that discourage excessive public digital activity, emphasizing discipline, compartmentalization, and offline anchoring. In contrast, Com-native and Com-co-opted groups are often populated by hyper-online individuals whose social lives, identity, emotional relationships, and status contests are predominantly digitally-mediated. This behavioral signature (persistent presence, rapid content turnover, performative antagonism/trolling, and networked relationality across multiple groups) becomes a critical discriminator when legacy TVE branding is present. In practical analytic terms, the “digital phenotype” can be more diagnostic than the iconography: the intensity and style of online engagement, the reliance on trolling and in-group humor, and the performative orientation toward audience capture, all point toward Com-native NVE dynamics rather than traditional TVE organizational and doctrinal continuity.

As we have highlighted, the main motivation of individuals within the Com appears to be the competitive acquisition of social, cultural, and symbolic capital. Within this field, Com actors vie for dominance – the power to define the group’s values, aesthetics, and direction). The climbing of social hierarchies (individually and inter-group) and gaining more clout than the next actor or group. At it’s core the social aim is to become the most “sinister” or notorious, and therefore the most celebrated and admired (or feared!).

Therefore, the formation and maintenance of Com groups (which includes those that co-opt terrorist brands) should also be analyzed through social identity dynamics rather than solely through ideology (as assessments often boil down to). As Tajfel’s formulation emphasizes, social identity is “the part of an individual self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that group membership." In Com Network settings, identity is frequently distributed: the self is constructed through recognition by the community, and group identity is negotiated through intergroup rivalry, comparative status, and reputational contests. Identification with the in-group involves self-knowledge, motivation, evaluation, and emotional attachment, and these dimensions are continuously re-performed in public. Brand co-opting therefore functions as an intergroup comparison mechanism. By adopting an infamous external TVE brand, the group seeks to elevate its perceived standing relative to competitors, achieve positive distinctiveness, and project an image of power. The instrumental preoccupation is the in-group’s image and positionality in relation to the wider field of extremist practice, not doctrinal coherence. This aligns with the broader observation that nihilistic violent extremism in the Com is often organized as a scene of competitive authenticity (a symbolic capital game) rather than a movement with stable doctrinal or ideological foundations.

The principal analytic risk for practitioners is category error (which impacts triage and assessment): treating aesthetic continuity as organizational continuity or treating propaganda presence as doctrinal commitment creates the risk of over categorisation. Overcorrection by dismissing brand co-option entirely, however, is equally hazardous. Dismissing this performance of subcultural capital as mere trolling can obscure pathways by which performative violent extremism becomes violence-enabling. Particularly when the extremist ecosystem rewards escalation and when admission requirements or in-group competition push participants toward offline mobilization as proof of authenticity. A robust assessment posture should therefore integrate three concurrent lenses:

• The first is semiotic: what signs and symbols are used, how consistently, and with what intertextual references.
• The second is behavioral: how actors engage online, how they recruit, how they manage publicity versus secrecy, and how they respond to external attention.
• The third is relational: how the group is embedded within the broader Com Network, how it competes with and differentiates from peer groups, and how status is allocated and contested.

In this combination, the presence of TVE legacy branding is treated as a signal whose meaning is contingent on milieu norms rather than as an automatic indicator of TVE lineage.

In Com-native and brand co-opted cases, the diagnostic weight should shift toward indicators of capital accumulation and identity play such as performative status production, attention-seeking escalation, and network embeddedness, while treating doctrinal articulation as potentially instrumental or ornamental. Analysts should be attentive to whether the group’s communications prioritize audience effects (shock, humor, baiting, antagonizing out-groups) over strategic messaging; whether membership signaling is public and theatrical; whether the group’s internal status economy centers on notoriety and clout; and whether the actor appears motivated to elicit external recognition from institutions. Conversely, claims of “revival” that lack credible lineage indicators should be treated with caution, not because risk is absent, but because the nature of risk may be different: less hierarchical command-and-control and more diffuse, competitive, and potentially stochastic mobilization driven by subcultural capital-generaing incentives.

Brand co-opting in the Com Network represents a meaningful evolution in the semiotics (what are the signs) and performance (what are the effects of the signs) of TVE: a shift in which the symbolic infrastructure of legacy TVE entities is co-opted and then repurposed as a status technology within a hyper-online youth driven and performance-centric milieu. Therefore, the core requirement for practitioners is analytical adaptation. Determinations of “NVE” versus “not-NVE” should be grounded in milieu-centric assessment that privileges behavioral signatures, performance incentives, and social identity dynamics over doctrinal parsing as the dominant lens. The principal challenge is not simply the presence of TVE symbols and signals, but the way those symbols are mobilized within an attention economy to generate belonging, hierarchy, and escalation of risk. This environment can simultaneously produce frequent false positives for indicators of legacy groups “organizational resurgence” and create genuine violence risk through competitive transgression and identity-driven mobilization. The appropriate posture for professionals is therefore neither alarmist reification of every legacy logo nor complacent dismissal as trolling, but a disciplined, conceptually modern assessment framework that treats aesthetics as operationally meaningful, performance as structurally central, and social identity as a primary driver of group functionality.

A Cross-Pollination between Legacy and Com fields?

To conclude we want to point to that the growing evidence of Com Network instructional material and propaganda, which is more closely associated with National-Socialism and accelerationism, that is making its way into traditional TVE spaces. An interesting recent case study come from the sentencing remarks of Robert Adamski which highlights the presence of Com Network instructional publications, in the digital evidence of an individual who presents an accelerationist, and national-socialist profile that is otherwise legible through conventional doctrinal and capability lenses. In that sense, Adamski is analytically valuable not because the evidence found on his devices illustrates how Com-distributed materials can be imported into, and operationally aligned with, ideologically motivated violent extremists. Adamski (29) was arrested on 11 July 2024 after a search of his home located a 3D printer actively producing components for a semi-automatic FGC9 Mark II, as well as a fully printed “Harlot” pistol. While the weapons were incomplete  when seized and no ammunition was recovered, the court accepted that completion was feasible and that, absent intervention, he would likely have progressed toward functional capability. His residence also contained extensive neo-Nazi iconography, and digital examination identified that he created and operated a Telegram channel used to disseminate antisemitic and far-right material.

The most salient aspect is the publications were treated as “terrorist publications” and the court’s differentiation between dissemination as encouragement and dissemination as assistance. The remarks identify, in the encouragement-related counts, a set of titles strongly associated with accelerationist and national-socialist currents: The Great Replacement (manifesto of the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque attacks), James Mason’s Siege, National Socialist Order of Nine Angles version of Siege the 666 Edition, Haters Handbook 3rd edition (MKY publication), and RapeWaffen’s  Acausal Terrorism. This cluster is diagnostically important because it shows the continued centrality of accelerationist and occultic propaganda in contemporary online assessments.

What is also revealing is how instructional guides form the Com Network can sit alongside classic accelerationist material within a single dissemination profile as they have already borrowed tactics, techniques and procedures from the accelerationist milieu. Haters Handbook is particularly noteworthy because it is linked to Maniac Murder Cult (MMC), a boundary-crossing formation that overlaps neo-Nazi accelerationist themes with Com Network social forms and attention-economy dynamics. In practical risk terms, its presence does not necessarily imply organisational lineage; rather, it evidences convergence in media ecologies and a shared repertoire of transgressive texts circulating across networked extremist scenes.

The sentencing remarks list instructional and technical items circulated by Adamski, including NLM Kill Guide, MMC-Manhunt Instructions, and MMC-Cold Weapon, alongside other weapons-related files. These manuals are widely recognised within Com environments as “how-to” artefacts tied to performative and operational subcultures. Their appearance in a terrorism sentencing context matters because the court treated the dissemination, including the NLM Kill Guide, through the concept of providing assistance in the commission, preparation, or instigation of terrorist acts. That framing is a substantive development because it reinforces that Com-popular instructional materials can be interpreted not merely as subcultural signalling or shock content, but as capability-enabling artefacts within a terrorism offence architecture when circulated in the relevant context.

The circulation of these manuals and publications demonstrates that Com and TVE ecosystems are not insular, and that accelerationist milieus can operate as a transmission belt through which Com-native instructional guides enter cases that otherwise read as doctrinally motivated. The Adamski case also demonstrates the importance of not over-correcting analytic posture: despite the presence of Com-adjacent manuals and MMC-linked material, his profile is more consistently explained by doctrinal and ideologically motivated indicators, coupled with capability development. His embedding in accelerationist chat spaces like Mordwaffen, the ideological thematics, and the progression toward improvised firearms manufacture all support prioritising the doctrinal dimensions of assessment alongside other risk factors, while treating the Com content as evidence of convergence and diffusion rather than as the primary driver of classification.