‘Where #freedom and #patriotism live:’ Linking digital media to far-right geographies

Abstract

This paper explores some ways that far-right worldviews are digitally encoded and strategically-assembled in and through built environments. The paper argues that an understanding of far-right spatiality will be limited without a more inter-scalar, relational and material framing of the various components of far-right world-building. Assemblage ontologies, seen through comparative cases, therefore hold value in making sense of the far-right today.

Explorations of how digital media and the far-right are entangled with and co-producing built environments, are thus vital. As ideologies and philosophies (e.g., nationalism or conspiracism) travel across networked medias, complex hybridizations become infrastructurally-fixed-in-place. These affixations produce, and are produced by, geographical communities (e.g., urban developments). Far-right material infrastructures thereby extend from, and into, the digital, mediated by both human and nonhuman processes (such as generative AI), thus becoming co-constitutive elements of place, via land ownership, buildings, aesthetics, social encounters and practices, urban planning processes, and electoral politics; e.g., the assembled spatialities of everyday life.

The paper juxtaposes two international cases, drawn from ethnography and critical discourse/visual analyses. The first is the territorialisation of circulating notions of American hyper-patriotic nationalism in the suburban South via urban developments and recreational spaces. The second case explores how far-right representations of conspiracism and debates around urban traditionalism versus modernity, are contested online and offline in Dresden, Saxony. Both cases point to the powerful entanglements of far-right ideology, digital media, and place. Conceptually, the paper juxtaposes phenomenological notions of far-right space/place with ideas of ‘strategic assemblage’ and online/offline ‘code space’, as ontological lenses to interrogate the relationships between far-right online worlds and the material configurations of physical infrastructures and materials which have troubling implications for everyday environments and democratic life.