Metapolitics, Algorithms and Violence : New Right Activism and Terrorism in the Attention Economy

Metapolitics, Algorithms and Violence argues that we need a more finegrained approach to understand contemporary far-right violence – an approach that takes language and cultural production in a digital economy seriously. This book underlines the importance of socio-political, economic, historical and technological context in understanding the rise of the new right. More concretely, based on a digital ethnographic approach, it argues that we should understand this violence and the contemporary rise of new far-right practices and actors in relation to the theoretical renewal of ‘La Nouvelle Droite’ in the 20th century; the ‘democratization’ of new right metapolitics in the 21st century as a result of the rise of digital media; and the development of a layered, transnational and polycentric new right cultural niche in which far-right activists and terrorists produce identity, discourse, digital cultures and practices. This work will be an engaging and necessary read for researchers interested in social media, digital culture, far-right politics, extremism and terrorism. Introduction 1. Ideology and activism in the digital age: theoretical and methodological reflections 2. The birth of metapolitics 2.0 3. The global new right and the algorithmic activism of Schild & Vrienden 4. Metapolitical influencers and far-right culture 5. Data voids, junk news and metapolitics 2.0 6. Metapolitical terrorism and digital media 7. The global new right: between mainstreaming and deplatformization 8. Metapolitics, algorithms and Violence Epilogue: Metapolitics, digital ethnography and democracy