Suicidal Fascism in the Age of Algorithm

By Jude James Howery

“To be absent from the body is to be present with the lord”

— 2 Corinthians 5:8

“There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another […] There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

— Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Society of Control

“We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room do not bind together and fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”

— Steve Bannon, 2014 conference at the Vatican

Deleuze & Guattari’s most revolutionary political claim is that fascism is not the opposite of liberatory desire but its nearest neighbor — a line of flight turned suicidal, the same destratifying impulse that elsewhere produced life, mobilized instead toward abolition. Microfascism is the name for this tendency at its most intimate source: not in the party or the state but in each of us, as runaway stratification collapsing into a black hole of self-referential subjectivity, surveilling itself as readily as it surveils others. It is a desire that has learned to thirst its own annihilation, and to experience said annihilation as glory. Many contemporary theorists have demonstrated that the digital architecture of platforms is unusually well suited to harnessing it.  That the feedback loop— the algorithm— is in effect a microfascism machine. The majority of existing accounts rest on the positive feedback loop: the recursive intensification by which each interaction tightens the next, descending the user toward what Deleuze & Guattari name the “cancerous body-without-organs”. But cybernetics also describes a negative phase, in which the subject turns outward— or externality is met— and the system stabilizes. I believe that under algorithmic conditions this stabilization never arrives. The negative phase does not retract the augmented subjectivity but fragments it further: the user faces the exterior, is alienated from it, and internalizes that alienation as the constitutive “other” of the self. There is no corrective pole. What cybernetic theory treats as a system’s self-limiting mechanism has been captured and inverted, so that the loop has no outside. We can name the resulting condition digital realism – in the same vein as Deleuze & Guattari denounce oedipal realism and Mark Fisher diagnoses capitalist realism— the foreclosure of the very sense that an alternative could ever exist. This is the mechanism through which a microfascism that was historically inhibitory to the state — frantic, isolating, productive of nothing — comes to resonate across millions of black holes into a war machine capable of appropriating it. And it is why the most coercive features of our condition, from the dissolution of work to the harnessing of death, are lived not as capture but as liberation.

This current remains especially difficult to pin down and point at in a world of accelerating change and catastrophe. And evidently the topic reaches into an infinitely large scope of social theory and political genealogy. Nevertheless, these are first steps of a personal attempt at such.

Part 1. Suicidal Fascism

a. Foundations: Desire and the BwO

Deleuze & Guattari displace the question of desire from “what does it mean?” to “how does it work?” — no problems of representation, only of use. Desire produces reality directly; as labor power shapes the material world, psychic drives shape the phenomenal one. The consequence is immediate and total: the conscious representation of an unconscious desire is not merely imperfect but impossible, as representing the referent is already to frame it, and to frame it is to repress it. To subordinate desire to a structure like the Oedipus complex is therefore not interpretation but capture. Desire and un/consciousness exist as flux — an assemblage of partial objects, lines coupling and decoupling, crystallizing for a moment and breaking off toward new points of attraction. It becomes determinate only when an ordering system of social representation has seized it, and that seizure is precisely what secures the system’s reproduction: the determination then refers to itself within the subject as natural, inherent— as simply what we are. I call this oedipal realism. Desire is pre-social and pre-human — perhaps one of the topics on which Freud most misled us.

The “body-without-organs” sits sprawling out somewhere at the center of the schizoanalytic framework , and it resists definition by design, so I take it through use rather than general concept. The “organs” are the desiring-machines — assemblages, or in psychoanalytic terms “partial objects”: shifting points of energy and intensity that constitute the body’s relation to its outside, in continuous coupling and decoupling, never settling long enough for an object to crystallize.

“The partial objects are not representations, they are the real production of the unconscious. They are not representative, but produced. […] They are not representative in the sense of being representatives of a whole; they function on their own, in connection with flows.” — Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 42

The organism is the opposing principle: that which appropriates the energy the organs produce, envelops them, caps the surplus, and channels it upward toward a higher stratum that lives off the siphoning. Content for the sake of the higher stratum’s expression. And that higher stratum is the enemy of this account, in both the Deleuzian and the Marxian register — it is a transcendence, feeding on a production not its own. And so… how do we make ourselves a body-without-organs?

By a careful practice of destratification, of alternativizing — a disturbance of the organism’s organization. But the BwO comes in three modalities, and this critique rests on holding them apart. The full BwO is reached through careful experimentation: “the point at which a particular organization of organs called an organism no longer holds and matter-energy flows are arranged immanently without reference to a transcendence profiting from the siphoning action of the organism.”^[1] It is matter occupying space to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced — materialism, desiring-production, open to an infinity of connections with other full BwOs, capable of existing in a collectivity of self-organization. The empty BwO is destratification gone too fast: the body voided of its organs, every horizon of connection eliminated, isolated at the zero point of intensity. Guattari frames the difference between the careful and the catastrophic as a matter of soft drugs against hard — the soft drug releasing the intensities and flows of the BwO while holding the line, the hard drug answering the same call destructively:

“Drugs can produce a BwO, but a counterproductive one, a cancerous rather than a healthy BwO. […] There is a call to the BwO, but it is a call that can be answered in many ways, not all of which are good.” — Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 284

The last line is the hinge. Soft drugs model a careful experimentation in which destratification remains the goal but the risk of descent into the hard-drug register — the empty body, the cancerous body — is ever-present. The call can be answered catastrophically. And here is the third modality, the cancerous BwO: an overabundance of sedimentation, of territorialization, of organization. Runaway stratification, an organizing body whose sedimentation rate climbs out of control, overcoding in cancerous fashion. John Protevi gives this its sharpest mirror in two nihilisms. Lunar nihilism is that diagnosed by Nietzsche— the depressive, reflective sinking toward zero, alignable with the empty BwO. Solar nihilism is its inverse: the passionate, crazed burning “out to zero on a trajectory through a super-intensity of heat produced by its own manic motion, its fascinated pursuit of war.” That fascinated pursuit of war — the suicidal, thanatropic drive — is what Deleuze & Guattari identify with fascism.

Fascism, then, lives on the line of flight. Destratification unleashes affirmation, connection, creativity — but the line of flight can turn, with terrible ease, into a “passion for abolition,” where the suicide of the body is staged as crowning glory. When destratification itself becomes the goal, the body has moved to hard drugs. In Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist, Guattari defines it as the fusion of the two drives: “All fascist meanings stem out of a composite representation of love and death, of Eros and Thanatos now made into one.” Dying for life. The diagnosis shifts across the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia — in Anti-Oedipus, fascism is the catatonic paranoid body, the empty BwO of the hard drug; in A Thousand Plateaus it migrates onto the pole of speed and acceleration, set against the conservatism of totalitarianism. There it appears as a line of flight: the mangled face of the very destratification they prize most — all that contests the territories, habits, and relations the transcendent order has ascribed to us. To conceive fascism as molecular, on the same pole as the liberatory movements, is the revolution of their thought.

And so the warning. Destratification cannot become the goal of the BwO process; suicidal fascism aims at realizing the body-without-organs in the most extreme sense and meets there its destructive fate, because the realization is impossible:

“A system cannot survive without a BwO, but it also cannot live AS a BwO either. […] For it to be realized would be to realize no-thing. Suicidal, solar, State fascism is a realizing of no-thing, a realized nihilism.” — John Protevi, A Problem of Pure Matter

Solar nihilism — the passionate, crazed burning out to zero — is not a casual metaphor. The sun is Georges Bataille’s image for an economy of pure expenditure: it pours out energy lavishly and receives nothing in return. From this he builds what he calls a “general economy,” in which the fundamental problem of any society is not scarcity but excess — a surplus of energy that cannot be wholly absorbed into growth and use, and which must therefore be spent. The question is how. Expenditure can be glorious and non-productive: Art, festival, sacrifice— the erotic. Or it can be catastrophic: war. Fascism, on this reading, is the catastrophic solution to the problem of the accursed share. It seizes the excess that capitalism generates but cannot discharge, and burns it as war and sacrifice rather than spending it in life. This is the suicidal line of flight under another name: destratification not toward connection but toward expenditure-unto-death, experienced as glory. Cancerous line of flight.

Hence the degree 0 of desire is met in junction with its point of maximum intensity. This is the diagnosis of fascism as suicidal. This is the perversion of desire we find within each and every one of ourselves — the tendency towards fascism (or microfascism). And for this same reason, a never ending and constant problematizing/resisting of our many fascisms is called on as necessary.

If the full body without organs is a body open to flows — to the streaming and coupling of desire described above — then fascism has a body too, and it is the exact inverse. Klaus Theweleit found it in the historical archive. In Male Fantasies, in his study of the Freikorps — the demobilized paramilitaries who hunted down the German revolutionary left after 1918 and supplied the early SA with much of its manhood — Theweleit reads their novels, diaries, and letters and finds everywhere the same dread: a horror of everything that flows. Women, the masses, the “Red flood” of Bolshevism, mud, swamp, dissolution, the body’s own warm interior — all of it streaming, engulfing, threatening to wash the self away. Against this the soldier-male builds an armor. He makes his body rigid, total, mechanized; he holds his boundaries by force, a dam thrown up against the flux. This is the “organism” raised to a terrified absolute — a subject so frightened of the destratifying flow of his own desire that he stratifies himself into steel. And here is the turn that makes him fascist rather than simply rigid or conservative: the dammed flow does not vanish, and the only release the armored body will permit itself is the discharge of violence. He survives the threat of dissolution by producing it in another — beating the enemy into the very bloody mass, the very formless flow, that he could not bear to become. The terror of the flow resolves into the manufacture of death. Theweleit, reading Deleuze & Guattari closely, gives the cancerous BwO faces and a biography: Runaway stratification that finds no outlet but that suicidal, murderous discharge.

2. Black Holes

In the runaway sedimentation identified with the cancerous body-without-organs, an abundance of individual “black holes” form. An abundance of self-referential truths and drives that prescribe and complete unto themselves as command centers, as figures of authority that not only impose surveillance on others, but equally unto themselves. Each body is set up as its own black hole of subjectivity, not only abandoning the transcendent stratum imposed on itself, but abandoning everything of the exterior. The situation of microfascism is one in which a “war machine”, that which mobilizes the self organizing of organs against the imposition of the organism (or state), has been set up in every single individual. Isolating the war machines in a black hole. However, these black holes do in fact increasingly resonate with other black holes. And instead of the productive connection in the coupling of lines of flight, these black holes only reflect upon each other respective to each individual command center, and accelerate their intensification in “rumble and buzz” rather than desiring-production. Microfascism is inhibitory for state function, as individuals construct their own state and enforce their own laws. Microfascism moves frantically, but does not produce or make progress. The real danger is when the resonant mass black hole or war machine does in fact over-power, or in fact appropriate, the state.

A black hole is as much molar imposition as it is molecular liberation, and in this junction/contradiction, it is powerless. Capitalism produces black holes. In one moment it liberates molecularity in the destruction or reorienting of territories (innovation) and tradition (habit and home). In the next moment it reorients everything according to the dominant (molar) ethereal capital. However, a microfascist black hole projects a facade of molarity because of his molecular collapse. The distinction lies in capitalism’s cycling of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The distinction also then lies in microfascism’s withdrawal from the state and (in some sense) from transcendent impositions such as capital. For the last twenty-thirty some years, it has seemed that capital was simply too strong for a microfascist war machine to appropriate the state. There was a reason. The decades after 1989 were governed by what Fukuyama could call, without embarrassment, the end of history: the state was steadily hollowed into an instrument of capital flux, clearing the road for the free movement of money across borders rather than governing it. A war machine of blood and soil had nothing to bite on in a world dissolving every territory into flow as fast as it could code it. Microfascism could rumble and resonate, but not crystallize — the molecular currents had no molar body to capture, because capital was busy liquefying every such body.

What changed is that capital’s consensus began to break on its own crises. The 2008 collapse cracked the inevitability; austerity, migration shocks, and the pandemic of 2020 — with its sudden proof that the state could after all close borders and halt circulation — supplied exactly the molar promises the end-of-history order had called impossible. The same deterritorializing capital that once starved microfascism of any state to seize now generates, in its breakdowns, the reterritorializing hunger it feeds on: the demand for the wall, the camp, the strongman who will stop the flow. In a sense, the moment of historical fascism as we knew it under Hitler or Mussolini is finished. This project of the domesticated and withdrawn fascist nation could do little other than fail to crystallize in the face of global capital. But we must contend with both molar and molecular threats now. Hence the real problem is microfascism and its multiplicity of crystallizations, in currents that exist within the extremes of our current day and age of capital flux. In a world where capital may no longer solely function as a dominant centralized signifier, but as a dispersed and imminent set of infinite significations.

3. Death

Death, as a symbol, holds an important semiological role regardless of a movement’s place on a political spectrum. The signification that a collective derives from death dictates the characterization of a martyr. The commemoration of death is the most easy and hence powerful ritualization, as a mechanism for bonding a movement. However, this ritual takes on particularly concerning displays when found in fascist, or microfascist movements. It is important to point out that within nearly every liberation movement, from Palestine to Ukraine, and within nearly every fascist movement, from Iran to Russia, the harnessing of a willingness towards death — suicide — is central. Here I hesitate to use the term “ideology”, as often these movements can be characterized as “post-ideological”, but nonetheless it is important to point out how fascist movements and liberation movements can find themselves on the same pole, and hence how microfascist currents can so easily infiltrate or underline said liberation movements.

In movements that reflect the Christian treatment of martyrdom and death, human death is treated passively and commemorated depressively. Human death is not something to be sought out, because it would violate the sacred nature of human life. These types of movements reject the suicidal drive that is found within fascist movements^[2] (and liberatory movements to a certain extent). We have already established that the modern age of capitalism is characterized by a continuous decoding of ritual and destruction of tradition. This “breakdown of tradition” extends to the fascist movements as well. The exception, however — the one constant symbol, holding infinite power unshaken by time and deterritorialization of the socius — is death. It has been shown that death is what holds the most power to harness the desire of the masses and call them towards action. And hence this means that the masses can still be affected towards action without following a totalitarian-conservative doctrine, such as the Christian dogma, or for a more specific political-historical example: Stalinism. The doctrines of today — of fascist movements today — are assemblages, they re-appropriate selectively without concern for contradiction, and often without concern for structure and teleology. This is why people like Dominique Venner — member of the French New Right and founder of the neo fascist organization Europe-Action — can practice paganism, worship Christian civilization, and form a seemingly impossible assemblage in a neo fascist movement. This is the same reason that we find unlikely alliances between misogynistic far right neo fascist groups, and radical feminist anti-trans anti-gay groups.

“Since fascist regimes were largely defeated after WWII, neofascist intellectuals, movements, and organisations have produced a more decentralised, even contradictory, politics of the dead” — Arsenio Cuenca, Death Cult in Hypermedia Environments: Martyrdom and Terrorism in the Neofascist Movement

Dominique Venner was a worshiper of the “Zen” as a triumph of will and action over the restraints of reflection and reason. Here again we are reminded of the dangers of the line of flight, the dangers of Nietzsche’s will to power, and we remind ourselves of Deleuze & Guattari’s call for careful destratification. Dominique Venner along with many other European neo fascist thinkers and figures were mourning the “death of spirit” they diagnosed in Europe. However, to fight against the death of the spirit, perhaps one must live the spirit! And on May 21, 2013, Dominique Venner culminated his life’s political movement by committing suicide in the Notre Dame Cathedral of Paris.

This is not a contemporary peculiarity, nor does it belong exclusively to any doctrine. Fascist Italy built the culto del littorio around its fallen, staging the dead of the squadrist years as an ever-present congregation summoned by roll-call, answered by the living with “Presente!“^[3]. The Nazis went further and consecrated the entire movement on blood: the sixteen killed in the 1923 Munich putsch became Blutzeugen, “blood witnesses,” and the Blutfahne, the flag stained in their fall, was used to sanctify every new standard by touch, as if martyrdom were a flow that could be conducted from cloth to cloth. Horst Wessel, an SA man murdered in 1930, was raised into a saint with a song, and the song into the anthem of a state. And the structure is not European, nor is it of the “right” alone: in the Iran–Iraq war, Basij volunteers — many of them children — were sent in human waves across Iraqi minefields wearing plastic keys to paradise around their necks, their sacrifice later memorialized by the fountain that ran red at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. A secular pagan like Venner and the theocrats he would have despised share no god and no program. What they share is the form: the conversion of death into the highest expression of life.

Bataille tells us why death, of all symbols, can do this work. We are, he writes, discontinuous beings — sealed off from one another in the isolation of our individuality, and obscurely tormented by the loss of a continuity we cannot remember having had. Death is the one passage that dissolves the boundary; in the death of the discontinuous individual, continuity is revealed, if only to those who watch. This is the secret economy of sacrifice: the victim dies so that the spectators may glimpse, in the rupture, the continuity they crave. The martyr cult is this revelation industrialized — death offered not as loss but as the doorway through which the isolated self is returned, gloriously, to the whole. Eros and Thanatos, once more, made into one.^[4]

Suicidal drive is harnessed and affected as a liberatory act. And death is commemorated within these movements as life. The framework for the diagnosis of fascism as the junction between the drive for life and the drive for death proves itself relevant. The neo fascist Nordic Resistance Movement echoes statements in commemoration of martyrs who have “fought and died for our cause, for the survival of the white race”. Now tell me, how can one die for survival? The danger of both cancerous and empty BwOs lies in their mobilizing of destratification, and nothing else, as their aim. Fascist movements that hold the continuous pursuit of war and nothing else as aim. An aim only met in the fate of suicide. According to historian Emilio Gentile, the cult of martyrs in Fascist Italy only intensified the “idea of politics as a total experience (…) to not returning to the banality of everyday life, but perpetuating the heroic impetus of war”. This diagnosis is spot on. Perhaps the fascist tribe did not want to accept that a “totality” of politics — its “absolute” — is simply  impossible. Perhaps in this same vein, readers can see why Giovanni Gentile— the founder of Italian fascist philosophy— was a self proclaimed Hegelian. This philosophy manifested in Mussolini’s regime and may also explain the parallel prominence of futurist art and aesthetics. The pursuit of this totality only found itself in an acceleration of war.

Part 2. Technology

1. The Cybernetic Emergence

The year is 1994. IBM’s Simon Personal Communicator is launched. We touch the screen of our personal devices with our fingertips now. Netscape Navigator 1.0 is released. Cyberculture is starting to get big. 30 years have passed and the year is now 2024. Data is ten-fold — trillion-fold. This data is extracted at a rate incompatible with human conception. Deep networks of optimized algorithms exist to recognize, sort, and analyze data. Obscure economic networks exist to extract maximum profit from this data. And it’s Machinic. And it’s immediate. And the scariest part: it’s decentralized. These mechanisms— the “working principles of computation” — form our conception of reality, our degrees of visibility/invisibility, etc.

We have found ourselves in a biological and essential crisis. Faced with the rise of computer usage, humanity has realized that everything developing, is being developed by both the “natural” and “synthetic”, both the biological and technical. And this society is accelerating to a point of bridging the gap — a point where the biological seems technical in as much as the technical seems biological. And perhaps to a point at which the biological seems technical more than the technical seems biological. And perhaps to a point at which the distinction dissolves entirely. This is where the cybernetic question emerges. It  concerns the interactions of the two, and to what degree they can be mirrored: Human brains and computer systems both functioning and developing through positive and negative feedback. The question that is being posed concerns the degree to which synthetic algorithms mimic natural cognitive systems (think the LLM debate and John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment). The reason this question seems to be so messy is (amongst many things) because of the level at which algorithms perform today: Not simply at the level of mathematical performance and sequence, but regarding the active imagination and prediction/determination of real actions and sequences concerning the state/s of the world.

Navigating the complex technology that built “the web” would be, or should be, a difficult experience to most people. For most people, the web as an experience should serve as a deep phenomenological disruption. A point of no return. This question of phenomenology is surpassed/integrated thanks to what we know as the “interface”. The aim of the interface is to give the user an embodied experience. Similar to the way in which a blind person’s cane becomes a part of their sensory experience, our devices and their many functions have become, and only increasingly become, a core member of our understanding and navigation (not just, geographically, but generally) of the world. The image of the cane is Gregory Bateson’s. He asked where the blind man’s self stops and the world begins — at the hand, the tip of the stick, the pavement? — to show that the mind is not bounded by the skin but distributed across the circuit of body, tool, and environment. And now the cane is cybernetic. Our interfaces only extend the circuit and, crucially, close it: where Bateson’s stick transmitted the street back to the man unchanged, the algorithm transmits a street it has already edited.^[5] An embodied experience of the web finds its inception at the keys, the trackpad, the touchscreen. At this point, the user can experience the browser’s movement, and the selection of whatever function on the device, as his own movement. This movement is not only conscious, but very much sensory. And here we can see the cybernetic question re-emerge. The phenomenological question is settled because the usage of the device joins two incompatible states into a feedback loop, whereby the interiority of the loop — the digital network — can appear to be actively modeled and remodeled by the exterior reference — the user (and their interface). They model each other: It is the question of the digital device becoming just as much influenced by its human user as the human user is influenced by the digital device. The distinction between the two, however, and what puts the digital device at perhaps both an advantage or disadvantage, is the indiscernibility of its interior functions. It is in this line that I would like to introduce the human alienation that is inherent to this cybernetic engagement.

The human not only engages in feedback between themself and the machine, but instead finds themself in the process of being subjected to the machine, through an overpower of positive feedback loops inherent to the user interface with algorithms. The positive feedback of the algorithm lies in its self perpetuation and its unlimited capacity and potential:

“Opposed to the stability resultant of a negative feedback loop, the positive loop moves and makes systems volatile, accentuating perturbations and tending to result in instability. One common example is when a microphone connected to a speaker picks up and amplifies sound from its own speaker, resulting in the familiar screeching sound called feedback.” — Anthony Faramelli, Everybody wants to be a Fascist Online:  Psychoanalysis and the Digital Architecture of Fascism

We interface with the recommendation algorithms that direct our media consumption and interaction. When we affirm a choice or direction, we experience it as an extension of not only conscious decision, but the movement of our bodies (the trackpad + touchscreen). The algorithm registers the movement of the human (feedback), and then refers to it in order to produce the next suggestions. Thus it recursively affects the user’s subjectivity and consciousness in a positive feedback loop that descends an increasingly unstable trajectory with every iteration:

“The diminishment of subjectification occurs within a field of so-called decisions about choices generated in advance on the basis of extrapolations from aggregated prior choices” (23) Gary Genosko, Critical Semiotics: Theory, from Information to Affect

Every interaction metastasizes within cyberspace based on the previous interactions. When a racist subjectivity interacts with the algorithm, the closed loop architecture dictates the conditions for an intensification of this racism. This is especially dangerous, as the rearrangement of desire and descent of subjectivity within algorithmic dependence produces a black hole effect, and thus it is particularly easy to find oneself attached to a microfascist line of flight or assemblage. It is precisely this overcoding of desire, overcoding of the “digital unconscious”, which tends towards the cancerous body-without-organs.

Branden Hookway gives us the two phases. The first is positive feedback: the user confined within the closed loop of the interface, subjectivity fragmented, certain lines intensified and others starved. The second is negative feedback, which kicks in when the user faces outward, beyond the loop, toward the exterior of his own consciousness. Classical cybernetics tells us what should happen here. Negative feedback is the stabilizing pole — it dampens, corrects, returns the system to equilibrium. The augmented subjectivity should retract. The screech should settle.

But it doesn’t. In our digital age the outward turn does not stabilize; it fragments further. The user faces the exterior, recoils from it, is alienated by it — and then internalizes that alienation as his own. What he meets outside the loop is not a corrective but a threat, metabolized not as information but as enmity. Hookway foresaw the internalization in Interface (2014). What he did not follow all the way down is that this second phase does not merely confine the user — it furnishes him with an other. The exterior, encountered and refused, is cemented as the constitutive outside of his subjectivity: the enemy against which the black hole defines itself. Negative feedback, here, does not close the wound. It draws the border.

And so I doubt the positive/negative binary survives contact with the algorithm at all. There is no stabilizing pole left. Heinz von Foerster distinguished a first-order cybernetics^[6] of observed systems from a second-order cybernetics that puts the observer back inside the loop he observes. Our condition is worse than second-order: the observer sits inside a loop that has captured even its own correction mechanism, converting every glance at the outside into further interiority. The thermostat has been wired so that cold air only makes it hotter.

2. Alienation: 3 Knowledges, 3 Revolutions

During the time that these developments are occurring, something else is also happening. User experience is becoming more important, and the user interface is being linked with empathy in design. Essentially, the feedback loop described above now needs to actually simulate a conversation. It needs to be more conversational in design— easier, nuanced, genuine— human? However, here again returns the distinction/imbalance in this conversation between user and machine: the user never needs to understand the machine, the machine only needs to understand the user. There lies an inherent alienation in this dynamic. The user, despite so frequently interacting with rhetoric + symbols of empathy, is only able to process the world through a “personal screen that serves and compounds individual prejudices and needs”^[7]. We live in a world ruled by infinite and dispersed capital. And we also live in a digital world ruled by intuitive algorithmic design. When these two worlds meet, we find a world where profit is produced through interaction. And in every interaction with the algorithm, microfascism — the narcissistic internal human algorithm — is affected. In his essay Digital Face-ism and Microfascism, Tom Penney applies Deleuze & Guattari’s conception of microfascism and faciality to the digital world, specifically the function and our interaction with dating apps. He sums up our alienation:

“In critiques of digital media people often think of mechanical and digital devices as being inhuman perversions of existing systems of human capacity and behaviour. But if we consider faciality, we can see that digital systems may actually just exacerbate and mirror pre-existing tendencies of judgement and orientation. Pop culture is filled with references to organic humans being minced through mechanical systems that sap their humanity, but humans invented such systems, and now with empathy, algorithms, and big data in the mix, they are designed to evolve from and reflect human input and behaviour. Machines learn more from how humans think and behave in their systems than we learn about those systems in return.” — Tom Penney

Penney, referencing our swiping from left to right of faces and bodies on Grindr, points out that there are two zones of indiscernibility, both of which contribute to alienation and the formation of a microfascism. The interface presents a grid of faces and bodies, and not only are the functionings and design of the technology indiscernible, but also “similarly hidden are the internal worlds of other users that are presented interact with”. I’d like to focus here on the former zone of indiscernibility, regarding the design of the technology, and I will return shortly to the latter zone in order to elaborate the digital black hole effect.

So let’s rewind a little bit. The year is 1765. James Watt is developing an improved version of the steam engine. One with a separate condenser. Production is becoming mechanized, and we are in the first industrial revolution. A certain extent of human knowledge is being transferred to machines by the workers that handle them. Although it may seem orthodox, let’s appeal to Karl Marx for a second. According to Marx, in the industrial age, it is in fact the machine that contains the “skill and strength” rather than the worker, as the worker’s work is wholly determined by the machineries movement, rather than vice versa. And this technology, this science — that which makes the machine operate and move how it may — does not exist in the workers’ consciousness. It is indiscernible, and thus acts upon the human as an “alien power” (Marx, Grundrisse, 693).

 Soon enough, a good hundred years later, a more radical form of consumerism is beginning to emerge.  A culture industry is beginning to assert its dominance. We feel stimulated and secure at the same time, or we fluctuate between the two poles continuously, both in material and phenomenon. Adorno and Horkheimer claim that the culture industry produces conformity without instruction — and the conformity that follows only confirms the omnipresence of the culture industry: “Conformity has replaced consciousness” (The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception — Adorno and Horkheimer). It provides art (consumption) as easy amusement from labor: Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.^[8] 

This is the second industrial revolution. But what happens when, a good hundred years later, society has been both financialized and digitized: A third industrial revolution. Bernard Stiegler claims that this accumulates today in a human loss of work knowledge (savoir faire), life knowledge (savoir vivre), and a loss of conceptual knowledge. We’ve lost our work knowledge in the mechanisation of industry and transferring of many jobs to technology / the digital sphere. This can be identified with the legacy of the first industrial revolution. We’ve lost life knowledge in the way in which life is now navigated / filtered / dictated through pathways of consumption. This can be identified with the legacy of the second industrial revolution. And we’ve lost conceptual knowledge in the automatic relocation of “knowledge and memory into devices like cell phones” (Stiegler 2006; 2019: 24). This can be identified with the legacy of the third industrial revolution. And the compounding effects of all three we live in today.

The same first revolution that transferred the worker’s gesture into the machine also produced, in 1804, the Jacquard loom — a loom that stored the weaver’s know-how on punched cards and executed it without him. The know-how did not vanish; it was exteriorized, encoded, made to run on its own. Those cards are not a metaphor. Herman Hollerith borrowed them to tabulate the 1890 US census; his tabulating firm became IBM; and the punched card went on to run the century’s bureaucracies — including, notoriously, the ones built to ensure each and every one of us exists as data forever. The line from the artisan’s lost gesture to the algorithm is one of inheritance. Savoir-faire was the first thing computers were built to hold.

3. An Uneven Compromise

Let’s return to Marx for another second. In his conception of the machine’s alien power, he provides a valuable analysis for, lets say, neural networks, among other technologies, as their functioning exists outside of human conception. In the algorithmic age, the technology holds control and power over the user — a power that the user is unable to conceive of truly. However, Marx did not fully forecast our modern algorithms. Rather than acting on the user as an alien (autonomous) power, the algorithm and its feedback loop flow unto and into the user, and the intensification process of positive feedback is mirrored by the users’ extremification of subjectivity. They draw parallel lines. Remember here the cybernetic question: the junction of human and technological processes. It can be said that both the signifying chain, and the statement within that signifying chain (produced by an algorithm) affects and creates a subjectivity intertwined with human consciousness but may be perhaps semi-autonomous (inhuman) terms of process.

Okay. The year is 2015. Google is updating the Youtube recommendation algorithm in order to integrate neural networks. Neural networks mimic, in computation, our brain’s neurons’ ability to form connections, send signals, and produce pattern recognition. The year is 2015, and the recommendation algorithm on Youtube can, at once, in one moment, form the connection web between every video in its database. The algorithm can then delimit the range of visibility for the user through the interface. The architecture determines these connections, patterns, and proposes a range of suggestions for the user. With every interaction, the user’s subjectivity is further delimited because of a process the human brain could never reconstruct — it cannot identify the connections that determine what it is shown. The destructive forces of positive feedback loops are connected to economic forces equally destructive, and in our interface with them, our living with them, platforms essentially tether them to our collective psyche: Eros and Thanatos in junction— Guattari’s prophecy. Google’s 2019 review of their recommendation algorithms:

“The decisions made by these systems can influence user beliefs and preferences which in turn affect the feedback the learning system receives – thus creating a feedback loop” (Jiang et al. 2019: 383-90)

The very idea that media feeds are personalized is exemplary of these positive feedback loops that lead to an alienation. Bernard Stiegler gives this alienation a precise name through the distinction he draws between adoption and adaptation. Adoption, for Stiegler, is the active and care-ful taking-up of a technical milieu — the work by which a psychic life makes a technology its own and, in doing so, individuates both itself and the collective to which it belongs. Adaptation is its degraded opposite: a merely behavioral conformation in which the human is fitted to the system rather than appropriating it. The algorithmic milieu traffics almost exclusively in the latter. Worse, in what Stiegler calls the age of disruption, the recursive acceleration of these feedback loops moves faster than any capacity to adopt — and finally faster than the capacity even to adapt — so that conformity never settles into anything that could be made one’s own. Our “hyper-adaptation” to modern omnipresent platforms (such as Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok) is the “runaway sedimentation” that Deleuze & Guattari attribute to the cancerous body-without-organs, and hence to microfascism. Its result is a double foreclosure: the human spirit can neither truly individuate as a psychic being nor transindividuate within collective movements. It is at once a paralysis that also moves in a frantic, “pathogenic form of sublimation” (Stiegler 2013: 60) — desire deprived of the binding that would let it form an object, spinning in place. This is the condition that produces the sense that “there is no alternative.” Mirrored to the Oedipal realism that Deleuze & Guattari identified, and to the Capitalist realism that Mark Fisher diagnosed, here we find a “digital realism” produced by algorithmic feedback loops that dis-individuate.

4. Ecstasy of Control

And now let us return to the mechanism itself. The algorithm produces “black holes.” Deleuze & Guattari claim that microfascism occupies black holes. Tom Penney elaborates the black holes of dating apps, claiming that the face on the app that attracts the most interactions is “generally not a revealing face” but instead one that would allow another to project their desire unto it. Similarly, the post handed to the user by an algorithm is typically interacted with if it reflects or confirms the desire of the user. On dating apps, the face, the waist, the ass, etc. become partial objects of desire, separated from the whole. Because partial objects are purely symbolic, and because they cannot be read or confronted in the context of a whole (in the classical subject/object dynamic of psychoanalysis), they tend toward reflecting what is projected unto them, ensuring a never-ending process of consumption. Here we can think of the videos, threads, posts, even advertisements that we interact with. It is on this level that algorithms trap our desire in partial objects, ensuring that no sublimation could ever be reached (besides, let’s say, catastrophic dissolution).

Now, when we interact with other users, things get seriously intense. The black hole — a subjectivity pulled inwards recursively — does not deflect another black hole but resonates with it: micro black holes gathering into larger ones, each strengthening the other, everything in the digital space read as a partial object. Remember that a good portion of these microfascist engagements — from the dating apps to the neo-fascist communities on 4chan — are done through effectively anonymous accounts. “Through the participation of individuals of tiny to large degrees, particular subjective intensities gather these individual microfascisms into larger swarms where the shared intensities produce even more intense black holes.”^[9] Black holes trap subjectivities and absorb energy in their resonances across digital media, pulling from a large, novel, and wholly contradictory range of content. There is a constant necessity to push the limit of taboo, to contradict itself. Finally, let’s not forget that it has been widely confirmed that platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram promote content that violates their own policies and regulations. Meaning collapses.

“Every fascism is defined by a microblack hole that stands on its own […] before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole.” — Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 250

Desire, more specifically desiring-production, is released always in the junction of life and death, in the junction of user and device, in the junction of post and persona. Individuation is foregone, and yet the assemblage formed is always a partial one, a fragmented one, a rhizomatic one. If individuals are managed as data, the user/subject enjoys his new definition as an open and ever-changing collection, often recomposed as a profile. The recomposition of the individual very obviously serves a greater mechanism of control, and yet we experience it as an intense liberation. How is that possible? The answer lies in the mechanism described throughout: liberation experienced fascistically. If the identities imposed upon us are released by capitalism’s deterritorializing flow, if we are alienated from the transcendental impositions of social and self by our interfacing with devices and data, then there is liberatory potential there — a potential very easily hijacked by microfascist flow, runaway sedimentation, the cancerous body-without-organs.

The experience of control-as-liberation is specific to our time. “The society of control” was diagnosed by Deleuze in 1990 as an update of Foucault’s “disciplinary society” — the progression from one enclosure of discipline to the next, each coming to share the characteristics of an efficient surveillance that produces “discipline.” For Deleuze, the new mechanisms of control embedded within those enclosures were no longer separable from one another, forming a system whose language “is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary).” Think data:

“Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.”

The persona-as-data is our particular status. The individual now navigates society through these ever-changing modulations of data, his range of ability/inability delimited by a continuous accumulation of points (think credit scores). Disciplinary societies have beginnings and ends to their enclosures; in the society of control, one is never finished with anything. The disciplinary individual was a “discontinuous producer of energy,” the individual of control is “in orbit, in a continuous network.” The disciplined man goes to work at 9, works until 5, and goes home. The controlled man works from home — hours fluctuating, the enclosure of home and the enclosure of work no longer distinguishable. This is among the strongest mechanisms of control ever enunciated by technological machines, and yet we experience it as a liberation: the retreat from the workplace, from school, from the battlefield, lived as freedom even as the omnipresent data-mechanism that granted each retreat only continues to tighten. It is coercive and counter-intuitive. And soon we will experience further “retreats” of the sort, of everything we once thought of as “human.” Our interactions with the algorithm run on the same inversion: coerced into the addiction of consuming, we believe the web gives us the freedom to consume all the content we want, ignorant that our development online is recursively regulated by an architecture feeding into itself, pulling the user down unstable paths of addiction, depression, radicalization — microfascism.

There is a strong correlation between the currents of microfascism and the algorithmic architecture of the society of control; between the black holes produced and the internalization of surveillance and control coerced unto us in our contemporary age. Arendt, Foucault, Deleuze, and many more theorists of power share this diagnosis of the omnipresent spy — a state in which the duty of spying upon oneself, a panopticonization, is spread amongst the people in perpetual insecurity. As outlined above, individuals are unable to individuate and unable to transindividuate. Deleuze gives us a name: dividuals. It is a paralysis often experienced as liberation, and Deleuze & Guattari diagnose it as a black hole, as microfascism. Arendt extends her analysis of the internalized spy to the fascist mechanism: the state can embed secret police within individuals and society. But this is not enough to realize the fascism of our day. The whole body of the people must function as millions of centers of control — a proliferation of sites of espionage. And this is not only particularly affected, but harnessed, by the digital space, in the digital age.

Part 3. Last Remarks, for Now

Perhaps it is our classical and neo liberal institutions protecting us from the mass proliferation and resonance of microfascism. What philosopher Nick Land— proving himself more and more unfortunately relevant today— resentfully names the “Human Security System”^[10]. Holding the floodgates. Protecting us from the harnessing of microfascism into a war machine that appropriates the state. Perhaps this moment is over, in light of Donald Trump’s second term and the proliferation of a catastrophe industry consuming, desensitizing, and sterilizing our humanity. A politics optimized for the feed will look exactly like the feed: accelerating, self-contradicting, allergic to the banality of ordinary governance, addicted to the next escalation because the last one has already lost its charge.  And so the feed becomes a machine for the catastrophic discharge of collective attention — a permanent, low-grade, distributed war, conducted in the nervous system, that produces nothing and consumes everything. Each catastrophe must be larger than the last, more transgressive, more taboo, because the threshold of feeling keeps climbing. This is the cancerous body-without-organs experienced from the inside — runaway sedimentation— hard drugs— the constant necessity to push the limit, to contradict oneself, meaning collapsing under the weight of its own acceleration. You are not persuaded of anything. You are spent.

The moment of historical fascism is finished. We are now left to worry about a risk much larger in scale and significantly more difficult to confront. The mobilization of a social body in which microfascism is potent, appropriating a state, and in our recent case, deconstructing it. It finds then no coherence or object besides war, isolation, abolition. Any attempt at isolationist totalitarianism would be foolish in the face of capital and the states that only increasingly function as vessels for its realization. However, while capital “appropriates the state”, it also undermines it, and continuously fractures its traditional fabric and regulation.

The multiplicity and molecularity of new forms of fascism is what allows them to adapt to capital flux and to “seep into the pores of a society”. And this is what characterizes the choked mental ecology^[11] of the America who elected Donald Trump not too long ago. A black hole election, and we are bound to see many more of such happenings, regardless of mass depression, resentment, dumbfoundedness, and what have you. It should not be surprising when those at the top of the pyramid are increasingly blunt, explicit, and shameless. For now, contradictory subjectivities seem to coexist and resonate in an attachment to a spiraling nothingness. A molar certainty within molecular assemblages. Do we speak of fascist rhizomes? We don’t often, but we must start.

Guattari saw the rise of machines and he was hopeful. He looked towards the free radio movement in Italy and saw how media network systems could reconfigure our collective enunciation of desire. He saw the potential in being alienated from the subjectivities imposed on us. He thought that, through the feedback loops he witnessed in radio, the blurring between producers and receivers in communication would tend towards dissolving their distinction. This had the potential to reshape subjectivity in liberatory ways.

We’ve seen the worst of this effect on society today. Maybe we should still be hopeful of a reconfiguration, a reversal, or a rebirth. That part remains unclear to many, including myself. 

Sources:

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Volume 1: Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

Bataille, Georges. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler, 1972.

Cuenca, Arsenio. “Death Cult in Hypermedia Environments: Martyrdom and Terrorism in the Neofascist Movement.” Perspectives on Terrorism, vol. 18, no. 2, 2024, pp. 119—136. https://doi.org/10.19165/2024.3642.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, Winter 1992, pp. 3—7.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Preface by Michel Foucault, University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Faramelli, Anthony, and Imogen Piper. “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis and the Digital Architecture of Fascism.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 24, no. 4, 2022, Article 6. https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4089.

Genosko, Gary. “Black Holes of Politics: Resonances of Microfascism.” La Deleuziana, no. 5, 2017, pp. 59—67.

Genosko, Gary. “Micro-Fascism in the Age of Trump.” Spectres of Fascism: Historical, Theoretical, and International Perspectives, edited by Samir Gandesha, Pluto Press, 2020, pp. 164—176.

Genosko, Gary. Critical Semiotics: Theory, from Information to Affect. Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Gentile, Emilio. The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Translated by Keith Botsford. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Gray, Chantelle. “Algopopulism and Recursive Conduct: Grappling with Fascism and the New Populisms vis-à-vis Arendt, Deleuze & Guattari, and Stiegler.” Acta Academica, vol. 54, no. 3, 2022, pp. 156—175. https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa54i3/8.

Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Power Publications, 1995.

Guattari, Félix. “Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist.” Chaosophy, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by David L. Sweet, Semiotext(e), 2007, pp. 152—173.

Holland, Eugene W. “Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life: Deleuze & Guattari’s ‘Revolutionary’ Semiotics.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 27, no. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 19—29. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hookway, Branden. Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2002.

Jiang, Ray, Silvia Chiappa, Tor Lattimore, András György, and Pushmeet Kohli. “Degenerate Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems.” In Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES ’19), 383–390. New York: ACM, 2019

Laberge, Jean-Sébastien. “Postmedia and Dissensus: Reinventing Democracy with Guattari.” Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia: Schizoanalytic Applications, edited by Joff P. N. Bradley, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, and Manoj N. Y., Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, pp. 113—126.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books, 1973.

Milani, Tommaso M. “Why Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist and Why We Should Study Language to Understand It.” Journal of Right-Wing Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5070/RW3.41981.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Translated by Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Penney, Tom. “Digital Face-ism and microFascism.” The Official: International Journal of Contemporary Humanities, vol. 1, 2016, pp. 1—16.

Protevi, John. “A Problem of Pure Matter: Deleuze & Guattari’s Treatment of Fascist Nihilism in A Thousand Plateaus.” Nihilism Now!: Monsters of Energy, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Diane Morgan, Macmillan, 2000, pp. 167—188.

Stiegler, Bernard. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Translated by Daniel Ross, Polity Press, 2019.

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^[1]  Protevi, John. “A Problem of Pure Matter: Deleuze & Guattari’s Treatment of Fascist Nihilism in A Thousand Plateaus.” Nihilism Now!: Monsters of Energy, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Diane Morgan, Macmillan, 2000, pp. 167—188.

^[2] Contrary to the Christian treatment of martyrdom diagnosed would be the active call towards martyrdom proposed by Islamic Jihadism, for example.

^[3] This roll-call “Presente!” has been appropriated by several far-right organizations throughout Europe, from Greece to Sweden.

^[4] For more on this see Eroticism (1957) by Georges Bataille

^[5]  (It is worth remembering that Deleuze & Guattari take the very word plateau from Bateson — a “continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities.” The cybernetic and the schizoanalytic were never far apart.)

^[6] see von Foerster, “Cybernetics of Cybernetics,” in Understanding Understanding.

^[7] Penney, Tom. “Digital Face-ism and microFascism.” The Official: International Journal of Contemporary Humanities, vol. 1, 2016, pp. 1—16.​

^[8] See Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 126​

^[9] Anthony Faramelli and Imogen Piper, “Everybody Wants to be a Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis and the Digital Architecture of Fascism,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 24, no. 4 (2022): article 6

^[10] See Nick Land, Meltdown

^[11] See Genosko, Gary. “microFascism in the Age of Trump.” Spectres of Fascism: Historical, Theoretical, and International Perspectives, edited by Samir Gandesha, Pluto Press, 2020, pp. 164—176.