Opinion | Who Goes Alt-Right In a Coronavirus Quarantine? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...-isolation-radicalization.html
culture crisis politics radicalization alt-right media disinformation
shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 20
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radicalization is often built out of very real and understandable dissatisfactions. Moreover, isolation can be a strong contributing factor, as can personal uncertainty and political instability — both of which will be widespread in any society facing a rising death rate, extreme unemployment and extensive governmental failures.
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it is my fear, as a researcher of far-right and anti-feminist digital spaces, that continuing mass anxiety and material depression will combine with the contemporary digital landscape in an ugly fashion
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the reality that this post captured is that the internet is a very dark window through which to view the world. Yet more and more people will be doing so for the next few months
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It is undeniable that crises like a pandemic demand radical solutions. There is nothing wrong with pointing out the failures in the systems that led to so many dire consequences, or even being angry about them — as many are — and pushing for change
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the subcultural aspects of the internet — the communities we go to for support, or to talk to people going through similar things, can make us feel less lonely in the short term but often end up entrenching us further into certain fatalistic and misanthropic ways of thinking.
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the best thing we can probably do at this time is seek to better understand how digital radicalization and the far right works, so that we can be better prepared to counter it.
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We tend to overestimate our own ability to scan through, comprehend and categorize information we read online. The human brain is remarkable for its ability to adapt to new technologies, but not all of these adaptations are beneficial, either for us as individuals or collectively.
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As we retreat to online enclaves and obsessively check the news, our vision of reality is bound to become distorted
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Some psychologists have theorized that when reminded of our own mortality, we retreat to familiar institutions and more vehemently reject what we perceive as different and strange
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What could happen as a result is our being bombarded with tempting offers to rechannel our guilt into anger at those who were most affected, who serve as a reminder of our relative good luck: undocumented immigrants, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, even the dead.
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it’s worth noting that secular societies struggle with providing mechanisms to resolve feelings of guilt. The contemporary radical right has been particularly successful in encouraging its followers to redirect any societal guilt they might feel about past historical wrongs or current states of injustice into rage at those groups who would make them feel guilty: women, people of color, Jews.
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These ideas could even be promoted by those in power, who will no doubt be grateful for the transference of accountability.
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we can already see these forces mobilizing — see, for instance, arguments on the far right that discussions of Chinese culpability for the virus are being suppressed in the name of “political correctness,”
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To understand how such a spiral of anger and guilt might work, we desperately need to update our understanding of how internet subcultures function.
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we often think of radicalization as something the radicalized passively fell into and got swept up in.
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In fact, the internet — for good and for ill — is a collaborative and imaginative space, rather than somewhere one group of people talks and another listens. We can be both influencer and influenced
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“audiences often demand ” increasingly radical content from their preferred creators. Then, as far-right content continues to get enormous engagement, we see the numbers, and our understanding of this content as beyond the pale naturally decreases.
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before we have even made the decision to watch a video or read an article, our perception of it has already been altered almost imperceptibly by the various tiny signals surrounding it. Whatever social media platform you use to engage with the world, your timeline is almost certainly the greatest source of unchecked and frequently subconscious influence.
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In this age of isolation, we need to be aware of how far-right actors will attempt to exploit this unprecedented situation — and we need to be prepared for the fact that it may very well work.