Shift to the right | “Fascization”? It's the internet, stupid!

An internet effect: Donald Trump is no longer seen as a real person. Photo: Imago A feeling is spreading that was already sung about in 1980 by the old punk band Slime: "Fascism here in this country is gradually getting out of hand." Is he coming, isn't he coming? What can you do? And what did people actually think in 1932, before everything was too late? For the cultural scientist Simon Strick, this is the wrong approach: "There is more fascisation than there are fascists," he writes in his book "Fascization." By this he means a brutalization of thinking through digitalization, which has been taking place for 30 years, in relation to daily patterns and behavior on the Internet.

So you don't have to wait for fascism to become a dictatorship. It does not come from “outside”, from the bad guys, the agitators and their delusional followers, but neither does it come from the “middle of society”, as is often said. It's been there for a long time: "Fascization works constantly inside, in general," namely on the Internet, which everyone uses. It's a constant competition. People used to laugh at the stupidest accidents in everyday life, but today these accidents are caused in politics, with or without AI.

People laugh about it, shake their heads and shudder, because the Internet is always about the reaction to the Internet. You can say: the more blatant and crazy, the more successful. Strick calls this the “escape line of the digital.” It is a mixture of irony and madness that radicalizes friend-enemy thinking, if only because it drives up the number of hits by which everything is evaluated.

The power of the algorithm? The imperialism of tech companies? Bad, but that is the usual form of criticism and is not the point for Strick. For him, “Fascization is fundamentally conceivable as a participatory process that develops regularly and serially between users and media networks.” It covers politics, the media and society.

It's about distancing, persecuting, destroying the other - a dynamic of exclusion fueled by fantasies of annihilation with practical effects that range from school shootings and pedestrian zones to Trump's ICE raids. Because the Internet is always present and reacts to itself, ideally in real time like on Twitter or X. If it doesn't hurt, you don't notice it.

Every meme can radicalize and every Trump statement can easily be increased by his followers. Everything is reported: The old so-called leading media (press and television) have given up their will to differentiate and are joining in because they want to get clicks. Every provocation is declared a newsworthy “controversy” or even “debate.” It doesn't matter whether Trump claims that Haitians are stealing cats to eat them or whether there are rumors that Berlin will soon be ruled by alleged communists and anti-Semites.

There is no need to warn about this shift to the right because its effects have been visible for a long time and are occurring on a massive scale,” writes Strick. With “Fascization” he has presented the book of the hour. A critique of the economy of attention. Strick neither analyzes the ownership structure, as a classic left-wing leaflet would, nor the AfD's program, as a political science seminar would require. No, he explains “fascistation” as a media move. It's the internet, stupid!

Questions of form are crucial here. They are explained very clearly by Strick. Precisely because people always wonder: How can it be that the Nazis are constantly getting stronger, even though all non-Nazis advise against them? Discourage is the right word, because there can be no question of political combat on the part of the governing parties. The AfD is not banned, instead it is discussed and reported on up and down. At most, you ask yourself: When will the CDU tip over?

Politically extremely backward-looking, the AfD was for a long time the party with the most modern social media work, just as the tech billionaire Peter Thiel thought in 2010: "I think technology is an incredible alternative to politics." The more fictional the content, the more it is believed.

The NPD was already enthusiastic about the Internet in the early 1990s, viewed its mail servers as “nationally liberated zones” and celebrated its “Thule network.” At the same time, the Internet was proclaimed by leftists as a utopian, primal democratic free space. John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the US hippie hero band Grateful Dead, propagated it as the new promised land, free from censorship and manipulation. For this purpose, the writer William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace,” in which rebellious “cyberpunks” experienced unprecedented technological adventures.

The more fictional the content, the more it will be believed.

Such ideas corresponded to the dogmatic market radicalism, as was propagated at the same time by the right-wing economist Murray Rothbard. Libertarians agreed: coming from the left or the right, hatred of the state was the consensus. It was perceived as an imposition, controlled by the “old money,” by a traditional capitalist elite that Rothbard called “throne and altar.” Later, the right-wing influencer Curtis Yarvin coined the expression “cathedral” that needed to be torn down. Rothbard had also recommended active destruction as a solution: the disruption with chainsaws that the right-wingers still like to proclaim today. Is it real or just a symbol?

In “Trump’s Twitter government” (Strick) it becomes real. She claims to be in the “resistance” and is fighting the state she governs. Trump presents himself on social media as Jesus or Jedi Knight, and no matter how you feel about it, these symbols are conveyed further because "the permanent reaction to the Trump irritation machine is practiced worldwide," writes Strick. For him, Trump is less a real person than an "anchor point of historically dense and, above all, collectively conscious image worlds" on the Internet. His gestures were influenced by the ironic cable television of the 90s (according to the motto "So bad it's good again") and show sport wrestling ("The main thing is that it's done well"), but only became a model thanks to the Internet - with an offensive ridiculousness that everyone took seriously.

This contains the violence that Walter Benjamin had already described in 1936 in his famous essay “The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility”: “All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. This one point is the war." In the USA it is the internal war against the poor, internationally it is the trade war against the competitors, but not the "war of all against all" that is constantly invoked on the Internet as if we were living in a "dark time" in which the only thing left is the fight for survival.

In this way, anger is fueled against invented enemies - a placeholder for every conceivable minority that needs to be persecuted indiscriminately in right-wing calls. In 1978, Leo Löwenthal called this form of agitation a “backwards psychoanalysis”: the bad feelings are mobilized and increased, but never resolved, because cause and effect are reversed.

According to Strick, stricter conditions apply to the digital world. The old terms of “leader,” “mass,” and “authoritarian personality” are no longer sufficient for him to describe the new violent relationships. Because the “leader” is now just a media platform, the “mass” sits isolated in front of computers, and the “authoritarian personality” is not submissive, but rather goes along with all sorts of nonsense, which is why it identifies less with any leader than with “patterns of the machines and digital platforms”. Here it is finally, “The man-machine” that Kraftwerk sang about almost 50 years ago: “half being and half thing”.

Pop and sarcasm, the cartoon and the comic-like, have long been fed into the “fascistation” of online politics. Everything can be combined, as Strick demonstrates using various memes: from the fascist clown frog against the queers, from whom the symbol of the rainbow needs to be "taken back", to the "Queers for Palestine", the demo banner from the 2010s that was accidentally photographed in Australia and is intended to forever disavow demonstrations of solidarity with Palestine - by presenting it together with the much older nonsense slogan "Chickens for KFC". will.

Where is the human element in that? It will not be possible to push back such patterns of digital violence through demands for more rationality and education and “better media consumption” or something like that. That would be “like a clock radio trying to make itself heard in a turbine hall,” says Strick. Because there are generally too many "offers of truth" on the Internet and an "inflation of overview," he instead suggests dissection - away from the idea of ​​the big picture: "The dissection must replace the myth, interrupt or redirect the line of flight," ideally towards democratization.

Work out the problems? Maybe use the phone to make calls again? Hmm, that sounds kind of like Karl Popper's old piecemeal theory, so not particularly glamorous. But that's not supposed to be the case.

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