Fascintern Media

Feeding The Trolls Fascintern Media Chris Kremidas-Courtney talks about the Fascintern , a term modelled on the historical coordinating role of the Comintern and that captures the fact that the far right is acting internationally as one party, with explicit backing from Moscow, Washington, and tech monopolies. The reality of the Fascintern isn't in doubt. Putin's hybrid warfare has been destabilising democratic information spheres for years (just ask the Georgians), Trump's recent National Security Strategy is openly pushing to end coordination between European democracies - our primary strength - while laying out a series of far right grievances, billionaires on multiple continents are fuelling anti-democratic sentiment because they have (correctly) understood that democracy is the only tool we have to put an end to the growing inequality they enjoy, and tech monopolies are busy supporting this whole endeavour. All political movements need some form of media aligned with them, it's long been a core function that helps coordinate positions once a movement needs to scale beyond local actions. With the Fascintern, however, we see a surprising evolution of this trend. With the exception of state-aligned dominant media, media aligned with a specific political cause has historically mostly been read by direct adherents of that cause. A political outlet is read as a sign of belonging, a point of pride, not by unaligned citizens. But today's Fascintern media - X, the Meta portfolio, YouTube, Google Search, Substack - are widely read not just by unaligned citizens but even by politicians who purport to defend different politics. In an unusual turn, we are dealing with a power-aligned dominant media ecosystem that is pushing to overthrow the existing political system. Why is that happening? I left X a while ago. It wasn't an easy decision, it took years of work to grow an audience of ten thousand followers, amongst which were many fascinating voices from different walks of life and a great number of people I thought of as my friends from the internet. I left because it had become painfully obvious that it was no longer the convening space that had made it such an important location both personally and professionally. When Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute during the second Trump inauguration, I thought that anyone who hates Nazism - which last I checked was still most people - could do nothing other than jump ship as well. A year later, many of them are still there. Based on conversations I've had with people who still maintain an active presence there (and I'm not counting journalists who don't post but read it for coverage purposes), my conclusion is that non-fascists who stay on X do so for a simple reason: they have a completely faulty understanding of how power works in the digital sphere and operate according to mental models of social media that simply do not match reality . Interestingly, this lack of digital literacy isn't generational and can apply equally well to people who nominally grew up with the...

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