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Faculty of Arts and HumanitiesErich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies

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Research Project

Screenshot, Repost, Like: Digital Surveillance and Fascistization Desire

The repost as paratext, the screenshot as snapshot, the like as affective commentary: these objects, which are actually expressions of micrological bricolage in Internet cultures, are booming as media for generating evidence under the current conditions of fascistization. They are supposed to bear witness to politically unpopular attitudes and to prove facts relevant to criminal law. In the sense of this very function of evidence, they can be understood as surveillance media. The granularity of these media objects seems to cement control as a “microphysics of power” (Foucault). However, the subject that is to be disciplined and sorted on the basis of the observation, recording, and logging of these media objects is only addressed to a limited extent due to the infrastructures of the control society (Deleuze), which – similar to the microfascist logics (Guattari) – are determined by serial, post-psychological existences (Banaji) and lack an ideological metanarrative. Accordingly, the media microcultures of reposts, screenshots, and likes are to be considered in the context of data collections that can no longer be clearly assigned to individual subjects (Matzner). The algorithmically mobilized dispersion of individual data is intertwined with a microfascist culture of affect. In this culture, only the possibility – instead of the probability – of a nasty surprise or inflammatory gesture still prevails. The project aims to discuss the transition from a preventive (Davis) to a preemptive (Massumi) fascism in the context of the dehumanizing technologies of algorithmic prediction – also to understand the extent to which reposts, screenshots, and likes directly incite actions such as dismissals, disinvitations, and rejections, thereby in turn differentially producing subjects along the lines of categories of inequality.

Katrin Köppert