Suicidal Fascism in the Age of Algorithm

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”.