A Fascist Internet?
By: Rowan Fortune, Rte
Tags: Fascism, Celebrity, Socialism, Politics, YouTube

chapter 2. fascism reloaded

As with any problem of technology, Seymour stresses that it only ever exaggerates existing contradictions, rather than inventing new ones. For example, he notes that even though ‘Modi, Duterte, Bolsonaro and Trump have all used the social industry and messaging services effectively to bypass legacy media, they have each benefited from the (perceived and actual) corruption and stalemate of the political establishment.’ Likewise, ISIS ‘exploited social media far more efficiently than the protest movements of 2011, without unconsciously mimicking or depending on the model of association found on the platforms.’ Indeed, as extensively outlined in The Twittering Machine, the problem is not limited to fascism, however conducive social media is to it. Any kind of degrading and repressed content can be elevated by this peculiar, anonymised and exploitative media:

The content agnosticism of computational capitalism has political valences, but the algorithm’s effects go well beyond political content. The artist James Bridle has written of the surprisingly outré and noir YouTube content for kids, which involves erotic or violent content: Peppa Pig eating her daddy or drinking bleach, for example.

Moreover, the problem cannot be overcome so long as the social industry exists on the basis of a for-profit infrastructure. A 2017 study, for instance, ‘found that Trump alone was worth about $2.5 billion to Twitter, a fifth of its share value at the time.’ Therefore, it would seem, ‘the social industry firms can’t afford to lose the alt-right’. Society’s are made up of people and their decisions, but human beings create and occupy elaborate systems and technology is adapted to these systems. That online systems of the social industry favour the far right should concern is greatly, not only because it puts the left at a disadvantage, but because it tells us something about the society that gave rise to that social industry.

We should begin to take seriously the possibility that something about the social industry is either incipiently fascistic, or particularly conducive to incipient fascism

In one of the most important statements of the book, and the main take-away from this essay, Seymour urges: ‘We should begin to take seriously the possibility that something about the social industry is either incipiently fascistic, or particularly conducive to incipient fascism.’ When that is applied as much to the internet’s left ecology as to the right, it is my contention that we ought to be profoundly alarmed and distrustful of even most attempts to combat it. No medium is ideologically neutral, and this medium has proven itself to be especially dangerous.

Still, whatever one has to say about examples of misbehaviour from the left, it is to creeping fascism that we must turn most of our concern. Here, again, Seymour has insights. Mirroring much of Faulkner’s analysis of the far-right politics that has taken hold across the world, Seymour notes that fascism today — while still fascist — is shaped by different forces than the fascism of the past.

For Faulkner, the fact that the fascism of the 30s had to fight an organised and militant left explains most of its differences with its contemporary iteration. Those experiences of street violence fashioned militant reactionaries into what he dubs the battering-ram fascism of, for example, the German Nazi Party. For Seymour, this is also the case, ‘fascist movements of the interwar period were rooted in imperialist ideologies, popular militarism, paramilitary organizations and a world system run by colonial empires and menaced by socialist revolution. These circumstances will not return.’ That is focal for understanding the far right we now face.

However, what Seymour adds to Faulkner is a keen sense of how the social industry, with its excessive unleashing of the repressed, socially atomising technology and faux countercultural dressings, also shapes the new fascism in unique ways. It is therefore the case that even were such a fascism to break down at the electoral level, it would remain an iminant threat to society: