Invitations to fascism: Mediated nostalgia in far-right Discord servers

Communication and information technologies continue to shape political movements in increasingly abstract ways, demonstrated by far-right violence blurring with memetic digital styles. Building on this, I apply insights from postphenomenology to examine how social media platforms mediate the vernacular practices of far-right users, with a specific focus on right-wing Discord communities. I illuminate practices related to a genre of memes called ‘fashwave’, a bricolage of the vaporwave aesthetic and fascistic iconography. I suggest that fashwave memes magnify a nostalgic worldview whilst inhibiting other kinds of affective modalities, in turn producing a collectively felt sense of community which resonates with Griffin’s conception of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism . Not all consumers of fashwave memes on Discord turn to fascism, however. As multidimensional cultural artefacts, fashwave memes stabilise in relation to the overarching orientation of Discord, and the motivations of individual users. Here, by attending to forms of macro-mediation and micro-mediation, I argue that the platform’s affordances invite particular action scripts that, when interpreted by far-right community members, activate sensorial resonances which translate into harm. Through this translation, vernacular practices like proliferating fashwave memes are rearticulated by far-right users as mechanisms to symbolically align with the nation by undertaking a contemporary palingenetic struggle.