ODD Theory #8 _ The Fascist Creep in the Tech Industry
Join us for a talk by Ana Teixeira Pinto, followed by an open debate on the topic of the fascist creep in the tech industry.
Far-right organizations are increasingly setting the political agenda in the so-called western world. Their nihilism bleeds vividly into everyday life, opening a toxic conduit between anti-establishment sentiment and outright racism and misogyny. Yet these are fascists without fascism as a fully developed political doctrine, whom we may call post-, neo-, crypto- or techno-fascist.
Hence the questions: how to describe the new configuration of fascist ideology taking shape under the aegis of, and working in tandem with, neoliberal governance? How to describe the nexus between ideology and fascist curious aesthetics? And how, drawing an arch above and across all, the tech industry is taking over in constructing a social structure specific to the far-right imagery? If every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution, one could say that the rise of cryptofascist tendencies within the tech industry bears witness to the failures of the “digital revolution,” whose promises never came to pass. From this perspective the mix of cyberobscurantism, far-right esoterica, and paranoid ideation so popular online could be read as the morbid symptom of this ongoing transformation.
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Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a lecturer at the DAI (Dutch Art Institute) and a research fellow at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Afterall, Springerin, Camera Austria, e-flux journal, art-agenda, Mousse, Frieze, Domus, Inaesthetics, Manifesta Journal, or Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of The Reluctant Narrator (Sternberg Press, 2014) and, together with Eric de Bruyn and Sven Lütticken of a forthcoming book series on counter histories, to be published by Sternberg Press.
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ODD THEORY. A series of public meetings around a set of theoretical notions. In 2018, the project is co-curated by Cristina Bogdan and Anca Bucur and functions a partnership between ODD, Modulab and Editura Fractalia.
Project co-funded by AFCN. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not to be held responsible for the content of the project, nor for the ways in which the results of the project might be used. Those are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the grant.
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