Who is the person behind the handle @Asher_Wolf?

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Asher Wolf – the pseudonym used by the digital activist who helped bring the robo-debt scandal to light – describes themself on Twitter as a “mutant network node herder who devours entropy”.

Academics have described Wolf as a partisan version of Andy Carvin, the American blogger who used Twitter to communicate with protesters during the Arab Spring.

But while the critical role Wolf played in exposing one of the most shameful failures of Australian public administration has been documented, less is known about the person behind the Twitter handle.

Asher Wolf.Credit: Jason Robins

I contact Wolf (on Twitter, naturally) and they agree to meet for lunch in Wangaratta, the regional Victorian city Wolf moved to with their son during the pandemic. (Wolf uses they/them pronouns and asks that we not use their real name).

So what exactly is a mutant network node herder who devours entropy?

“I see myself as a speck in a massive powerful network; the power is not mine as a sole activist but the combined work of many people,” Wolf says. “My role is like spinning a web and linking people along the way.”

We lunch at Cafe PreVue, a light-filled restaurant that overlooks the Ovens River and provides vegan and gluten-free options, not always an easy find in Wangaratta.

The avo toast – sans egg.Credit: Jason Robins

On Twitter Wolf can be spiky and combative and is not shy of a public spat. Foreign Policy magazine – which in 2013 named Wolf in its annual Twitterati 100 list of people you should be following to make sense of global events – described them as “tart-tongued”.

But in person Wolf is warm and empathic, agonising over whether to return the avo toast, which comes with an egg, even though Wolf specified they were vegan.

Eventually, Wolf tentatively raises it, apologising profusely. The waiter is disarmed, assuring Wolf it was the cafe’s fault, and returning with a beautifully presented fresh dish, this time topped with enoki mushrooms.

Today Wolf is dressed conservatively; a persona they say fits into Wang, the nickname they use for Wangaratta.

“If I close my eyes and I think about who I feel like, it’s not the person that is covered in this form. It’s much more punk. I used to be punk. I used to have half a shaved head, I’ve got a dozen earring holes punched, I’ve had ink lasered off.”

Wolf has felt like an outsider all their life. They grew up in suburban McKinnon, chafing against the expectations of their parents. Wolf’s father, who was born in a Siberian gulag, was an engineer, and their mother, who came from generations of poverty, became a teacher.

“Because my parents had come from trauma and they had some success, they wanted their children to be doctors and lawyers,” Wolf says. “I was incredibly artsy. I was a weird child. I could spend a million hours outside looking at insects. And nobody was willing to indulge that sort of stuff.”

Asher Wolf in Cafe PreVue.Credit: Jason Robins

Wolf ran away from home and school in year nine. “I was rejected all the way through high school. I never felt part of anything.”

They stayed in a youth refuge, spent some time on the street and lived in a residential youth unit. Then they dyed their purple hair brown, converted to Judaism and completed year 12 at an ultra-Orthodox Jewish girls’ school.

“I was constantly trying to fit in somewhere,” Wolf says. “I think that is part of how I was born as an activist – rejection, constant rejection. In the end I just ended up fighting systems wherever I went. And it’s funny because when I started telling it like I saw it, other people agreed. And I didn’t care that they agreed with me. I was grateful that I could bring them on board for campaigns, but I no longer needed them.”

Wolf became an accidental information activist in 2010.

They were stuck at home with a newborn when WikiLeaks released a classified US military video called Collateral Murder. During the long nights Wolf would scan the internet for stories about WikiLeaks and post them on Twitter.

“It became a thing I did whenever I was anxious – it used to be obsessive from the moment of waking to sleep that I would be tweeting.”

Journalists and members of the hacker collective Anonymous began following Wolf in droves, mistakenly assuming they had something to do with WikiLeaks.

“I had information flowing through me from multiple directions. I had information flowing from Anonymous, I would give titbits to journalists to find something else out, I had whistleblowers coming through me and people at WikiLeaks were sitting there watching me, going ‘what the f—?’.”

Wolf became involved in other campaigns including the Occupy movement, which protested against social and economic inequality around the world, CensusFail, which highlighted privacy concerns around the census, and a push to revert to an opt-in My Health Record system.

They also joined forces with The Guardian to expose an immigration department data breach, which meant the personal details of asylum seekers were available online.

“When you look at the sort of activism that I do, it’s always around systems that screw people over,” Wolf says.

But the robo-debt campaign felt especially personal. The automated debt recovery scheme – which has since been ruled unlawful – ruined lives by issuing 373,000 people with inaccurate Centrelink debts through a method of “income averaging”.

Wolf felt they had skin in the game. Although they had not received a robo-debt, both Wolf and their mother had been hit with separate family tax benefit debts a decade apart. Wolf fought their debt and it was wiped. But shame meant neither Wolf nor their mother told each other about their debts until the robo-debt campaign.

“When you look at robo-debt, people didn’t talk about it because they were ashamed,” Wolf says. “They committed suicide. They went into debt. One of the most powerful things with activism is when you take your own personal experience and say ‘You’re not alone. This is not your fault, this is systemic. And we can fight this together’.”

In late 2016 a social media campaign formed to fight robo-debt. The movement was centred around a website built by web developer Lyndsey Jackson to provide people with a place to tell their robo-debt stories. The Twitter hashtag #notmydebt was quickly established as a rallying point.

“The campaign against robo-debt didn’t have leaders per se,” Wolf says. “It had nodes of power – campaigners like Lyndsey Jackson, [IT industry veteran] Justin Warren and many others – who helped shape the work. It was a network that spanned the political spectrum and focused the wrath of people both on the right and the left side against the abuses of government.”

Dr Ehsan Deghan, a digital media lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, examined the Twitter conversations around robo-debt as part of his research into the dynamics of the scandal.

He says Wolf – who at the time had 65,000 followers – was the central curator of news and information. In fact Wolf was so active he initially suspected they were a bot.

“But when we went deeper into the data and looked at the actual tweets and levels of activity, I saw that no, it’s not a bot, it’s a human being sitting at the computer, very actively tweeting and curating news about this issue,” Deghan says. “If we want to use an analogy, I would say Asher’s role was very similar to what Andy Carvin did during the Arab Spring.”

In 2020 the federal government announced it would repay 373,000 Australians with unlawful debts at a cost of $721 million.

“It was ordinary people’s complaints … and advocacy of Asher Wolf, Lyndsey Jackson and the #notmydebt campaign that broke the cycle of invisibility around this unlawful program,” Dr Darren O’Donovan, a senior lecturer in administrative law from La Trobe University, told the royal commission into robo-debt.

The royal commission will deliver its findings by June 30. Wolf worries its recommendations will only tinker around the edges. “We haven’t won robo-debt,” they say. “We need algorithmic oversight – systems without accountability are tyranny.”

For years Wolf was fuelled by pure adrenaline: “I was constantly ill in those years.”

Doctors put it down to anxiety, but Wolf was certain something else was wrong. “I was on a constant diet, I was going to the gym, I was gluten-free, but everything hurt constantly. I had migraines and I was vitamin deficient and my fingernails were cracked and I was still covered in eczema. I went out one night and I just felt like my limbs were hanging wrong.”

Lunch at Cafe PreVue, Wangaratta.Credit:

That night Wolf collated a list of all their symptoms and posted it on Twitter. “The first diagnosis came from doctors and nurses on the internet.”

Wolf went to a rheumatologist, who confirmed that Wolf had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic condition that results in hypermobility. “The internet saved me basically.”

These days Wolf leads a quieter life in Wangaratta. They are partway through a master’s degree in social work. Last year they studied the Five Mindfulness Trainings at Nhap Luu, a Buddhist temple at Porcupine Ridge in regional Victoria. Sometimes Wolf holds a stone and imagines their anger flowing into it. Then they put the stone on the ground and let it go.

“I knew I was having a lot of problems with anxiety around activism and my life,” Wolf says. “Buddhism is a practice of sitting still. It’s an act of gentleness of self, which I need to be capable of enjoying my world.”

But Wolf remains committed to what they call algorithmic justice. “I will go and find something in my life that pisses me off and I’ll make a fuss over it again,” they say. “You have to have people that say something. Otherwise, we end up with situations like robo-debt.”

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