1st Edition
Metapolitics, Algorithms and Violence New Right Activism and Terrorism in the Attention Economy
Metapolitics, Algorithms and Violence argues that we need a more finegrained approach to understand contemporary far-right violence – an approach that takes language and cultural production in a digital economy seriously.
This book underlines the importance of socio-political, economic, historical and technological context in understanding the rise of the new right. More concretely, based on a digital ethnographic approach, it argues that we should understand this violence and the contemporary rise of new far-right practices and actors in relation to the theoretical renewal of ‘La Nouvelle Droite’ in the 20th century; the ‘democratization’ of new right metapolitics in the 21st century as a result of the rise of digital media; and the development of a layered, transnational and polycentric new right cultural niche in which far-right activists and terrorists produce identity, discourse, digital cultures and practices.
This work will be an engaging and necessary read for researchers interested in social media, digital culture, far-right politics, extremism and terrorism.
Introduction 1. Ideology and activism in the digital age: theoretical and methodological reflections 2. The birth of metapolitics 2.0 3. The global new right and the algorithmic activism of Schild & Vrienden 4. Metapolitical influencers and far-right culture 5. Data voids, junk news and metapolitics 2.0 6. Metapolitical terrorism and digital media 7. The global new right: between mainstreaming and deplatformization 8. Metapolitics, algorithms and Violence Epilogue: Metapolitics, digital ethnography and democracy
Biography
Ico Maly is Associate Professor of Digital Media & Politics and coordinator of the Digital Culture Studies master track at Tilburg University, The Netherlands, editor-in-chief of Diggit Magazine and senior fellow at FRAN (Far-right Analysis Network).
‘Maly has emerged in recent years as one of the most intrepid venturers into the dark territories of the digital. In this book, he dissects the dangerous imbrications among digital cultures, algorithmic infrastructures, and the violence of the radical right. This is an urgent warning and a necessary reckoning for everyone who has the future of democracy and humanism at heart.’
Emiliano Treré, Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies, School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC), Cardiff University, UK; Co-director of the Data Justice Lab; author of Hybrid Media Activism (2019)
'In this highly insightful and wide-ranging study, Maly lays out the crucial role that discourse plays in creating the environment that produces far-right violence. Maly’s analysis tracks how social media and digital communications technology, along with the cultural practices that have grown up around them, facilitate the production and circulation of this discourse, and how this interplay of extremist ideologies and digital affordances has led to the evolution of a new form of metapolitics which transforms our understanding of far-right activism. For anyone wishing to understand how extremist ideas achieve such disturbing purchase in contemporary mainstream society, this book is essential reading.'
Philip Seargeant, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, Open University, UK
