Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right

1. Why did you choose this topic?

National and international politics have taken a reactionary lurch rightwards, fueled by a confusing mix of familiar and new fears, actors and practices. Digital networked technologies mediate contemporary far-right politics and political campaigning, and are playing an underestimated role in normalizing far-right attitudes. Civil society needs to develop and share the tools to critique and reverse this scary, nationalist shift of the mainstream. To do that, we need a common digital literacy.

2. What new perspectives does your book offer?

It takes seriously the strategic value of individual and unofficial online activism to organized far-right parties, groups and campaigns. It also takes seriously the tactical, tailored approach such groups use to target and recruit different audience segments in an attention economy. Furthermore, it follows the networks it analyses by considering the gaps and overlaps between intranational and transnational flows of ideas, content and people. The unique frame it brings to analyzing these issues is the concept of the post-digital: that online and offline worlds are inter-effective.

3. What makes your topic relevant for current research debates?

The book is full of concrete case studies that demonstrate how the resurgent far right exploits tactical media approaches to recruiting and strengthening their support base, and how ideologues teach new recruits to continue that work, sometimes in genuinely innovative ways. It brings together a unique range of voices to offer informed analysis of where, how and why these campaigns are being waged. It also pushes the case for broader, bolder and more ambitious counter-cultural responses.

4. Choose one person you would like to discuss your book with!

Boris Johnson, who epitomizes so much of what is regressive and repressive about scared old Europe in the 21st-century, including its inexplicable power.

Susan Benesch, whose amazing work on the consequences of dangerous speech, and whose politically-engaged approach to the subject, inspired us so much.

5. Your book summary in one sentence:

A grounded survey of the tools, platforms, tactics, groups and people who are re-mediating far-right cultures via the internet, and what we can do to counter them.