Abstract

We are living through a decisive moment of polycrisis — ecological collapse, the rise of the far-right, financial instability, and the erosion of trust in institutions. At the heart of these crises lies a profound transformation in the production of subjectivity, as algorithmic governance and digital technologies reshape how we think, feel, and resist. Drawing on Félix Guattari’s schizoanalytic framework, this paper argues that the 21st century is marked by a new form of fascism: one that operates not through overt violence or propaganda, but through the subtle, pervasive mechanisms of algorithmic control.

This paper explores the "grey zone" of contemporary subjectivity — a space of ambivalence, indifference, and functionalism where traditional political analysis falls short. It traces the genealogy of desubjection, from the mass-mediated subjectivities of the 20th century to the fragmented, data-driven "dividuals" of today. Through case studies of algorithmic systems like 4chan’s bump algorithm, BlackRock’s Aladdin, and Palantir’s predictive policing, it maps the machines of subjection that underpin our current crisis.

Yet, within this grey zone lies the potential for resistance. This paper proposes a Guattarian praxis of anti-fascist resistance, grounded in luddism, abolition, and destituency. By seizing the means of subjection, we can dismantle the algorithmic infrastructures of control and create new lines of flight toward liberation. This is not merely a theoretical exercise — it is a call to action for clinicians, practitioners, and scholars to confront the psychosocial dimensions of our algorithmic age.

Despite Félix Guattari’s hopeful prospect for a rhizomatic and decentralised Post-Media environment, the current media, especially the social media environment a quarter of a century later, on the other hand, is becoming increasingly polarised and fascist. Drawing from Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault and their theories on simulacra, power, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics, this paper focuses on the Post-Media environment in the context of China—a nation that heavily relies on technology and the Internet—and examines how the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) utilises social media to create a hyperreality which I term “Pink-Red Realism” in which “THE Chinese subjectivity”—a homogenous collective of subjectivity that is nationalistic, xenophobic, and han-ethnic-centric—is produced. On top of that, this paper explores how young Chinese adults—late millennials and early Gen Zs—find ways—leaving the Chinese online environment with the aid of VPN (Virtual Private Networks)—to resist the CCP’s monotoned subjectivity-creation. This paper attempts to argue that, despite the ever-more confined online space and the “digital border” in China, new ways of connectivity across social media platforms in China and the West—facilitated by VPN—allow lines of flight among young Chinese adults and hence mutations of “THE Chinese Subjectivity”. This mutation of subjectivity opens up new opportunities for creativities in resistance and offers new ways for young Chinese adults to rethink their identities and relationships with the world and, eventually, break down the rigid structures to pursue transformation.

Considering the rise of radicalization as one of the most pressing global crises today, my aim with this paper is to contribute to the conversation on the conditions that foster the formation of the far right online. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I conceptualize the Internet as a system of processes and connections—of assemblages—that generates a flow of desire, regulated and shaped by relations of control.

In this framework, I analyse how figures like Trump or Milei are not isolated political anomalies but rather part of a transatlantic infrastructure that propagates and amplifies a reactionary cancerous infection through digital networks and strategic alliances. This infrastructure is built upon signifiers such as woke, which serves as a catalyst for a reactionary international movement that finds in the supposed defence of freedom the backbone of its discourse. This re-signification of freedom points to the consolidation of new alliances and intersectional pacts structured around masculinity.

I suggest however, that one of the key links in this infrastructure is the network of media, counter-media, social media, affiliation groups, influencers, along with their follower bases. This matrix not only channels information and signifiers, but also configures a chain of desire that shapes subjectivities. I argue that there is a direct relationship between the design of digital platforms—based on the logic of profiles and its followers—and Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of black holes. Each profile within this networks functions as a node that absorbs and redirects the flow of information and desire, operating as an escape-vanishing point that amplifies microfascism. In this process, digital platforms capture masculinities, reinforcing and making resonate the affective and political structure of difference.

The mediated microfascist time of 2013-2023 was, affectively speaking, the era of the desurgent figure--incels, trolls, and failsons. They composed a network of black holes, fueled by goading and competitive lulz, resulting in action-oriented dissociation. They formed the fasces of the alt-right and beyond.

More recently, the comi-cruelty inherent in boy prank has shed any veneer of irony. Despotic passions are on full display—a triumphalist affect of having won not just an election but the culture war. Social injustice warriors, outrage traffickers, podcasters, comedians with delusions of cancel grandeur, and Mannerbund influencers turned their platforms into rallies. The groupuscules made up of brotherhoods, packs, and squads were able to bind into a more organized fratriarchy.

This paper tracks some of these fascist social body formations and transformations through their reliance on laughter (podcasting comedians and pranksters) and the fighter-subject. Felix Guattari (1996) once noted that “Languages of desire…tend to lead straight to action; they begin by ‘touching,’ by provoking laughter, by moving people, and then they make people want to ‘move out,’ towards those who speak and toward those stakes of concern to them.” While these obviously have liberatory possibilities, how have they been deployed by (and thereby compose) fascist subjectivities?

The fascist abject (Faramelli & Piper, 2022) now binds through camaraderie in the digital architecture and platform unconscious through seemingly apolitical spaces that Max Read calls the Zynternet. How did these spaces become metamorphosis machines (Patton 2000), producing the laughing fighter, a morbid symptom pivotal to how a [masculinist] war machine takes over a State (Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of fascism)? The goal of mapping these tendencies is to glimpse a microantifascist social body, one that can overcome obstacles and thwart defeatism, refusing the right’s attempt to monopolize the end of the world and its attendant affects.