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Abstract
Among the many provocative activities of the digital far-right, one that remains under-examined is its counterclaim on public narrative and aesthetics. This project maps the history and theory of fascism’s relationship to and marshalling of narrative and aesthetics in their seizure of power and construction of their political ethos. It takes examples from futurism, Italian fascism, the Third Reich, Francoist Spain, and the many distributed far-right movements since the advent of the digital age, each of them bearing out a unique relationship to narrative and aesthetics. With the decline of official state fascism and with the advancement of technologies of social and political discourse, the far-right has found new means of making their political and philosophical case. This often comes in the form of a countercultural position that seeks to incorporate works of public narrative and aesthetics into the digital fascist paradigm. Prominent historical examples of this include the right’s incorporation of such cultural touchstones as the films Fight Club and The Matrix, but the phenomenon extends to ever-increasing numbers of prominent cultural texts. This project considers the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert as a core, representative, and influential practitioner of this political and cultural strategy, analyzing his self-published book, The Bronze Age Mindset, as well as the body of his Twitter feed to develop a precise understanding of how narrative and aesthetics construct this new, digital fascist project.
