Talks
Simon Strick
10 Years in American Fashosphere
11 April 2025, 6pm
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This lecture presents a meme-centric timeline of rightwing online agitation in the past 10 years, from obscure messageboards to Trump’s 2nd (or 3rd) presidency. Paraphrasing Adorno that „fascism is obsolete but up to date“, it will trace various rearticulations of old fascist ideology in the new guises of digital culture. Rightwing agitation, and a reactionary reworking of political and popular culture, will be shown as the current mainstream of the digital public sphere, a set of cultural conventions and discourses that dominate lifeworlds, attentions, and sensibilities far beyond the limits of what has been called the „alt-right fringe“. The talk will draw on traditions of media and critical theory to come up with assessments of what this means for our reactionary present.
Simon Strick is a scholar of Cultural, Media and Gender Studies. He received his PhD from Humboldt University with a thesis on pain, sentimentalism and biopolitics; the book American Dolorologies was published with SUNY Press in 2014. He has held positions at Humboldt University, Paderborn University, JFK-Institute Berlin, ZfL Berlin and the University of Virginia. His monograph Rechte Gefühle: Affekte und Strategien des digitalen Faschismus (2021) received the Hans Bausch Media Prize and its analyses of online fascist spaces and their political impact has been a widely discussed. Together with Kat Köppert (HGB Leipzig), he currently pursues the VW-Project Digital Blackface at University of Potsdam. Together with Susann Neuenfeldt and Werner Türk, he founded the performance group PKRK, which is active in Berlin theatres since 2009.
TW: lecture features examples of racist remarks, images of guns and descriptions of violence
This event was part of Let’s Talk About… Anti-Democratic, Anti-Queer, Misogynist, Antisemitic, Right Wing Spaces and Their Counter Movements project.