Medien|Denken – Simon Strick – A Creature With Life Of Its Own (Audio)

Three days after Trump (along with many other far-right actors) has been banned from digital platforms, the messaging application Telegram registers a record number of 25 million new users in the last 72 hours (now at over 500 million users in total). At the same time, the fascist-facilitating app Parler is deplatformed from major app stores and a courageous hacktivist has released 56 Terabyte of sensitive data from its users, some of which reveals details about the crowd that stormed the Capitol Building in Washington on January 6.This talk will seize this current, confusing and precarious moment, to offer some speculation about the futures of digital fascism and how it might endure and further mutate within digital environments. The visual, media-specific and memetic registers that online activists of the Alternative Right use in their highly effective communication will be discussed. Introducing analytical concepts like „reflexive fascism“, „participatory propaganda“, and „memetic protest“, various figures, memes, and styles of fascist agitation and media practice will be analysed for affect, gender, meanings, and possible intervention points.