I’ve been thinking about your post today, because I’ve just finished a great book called “Against the Machine” by Lee Spiegel, which analyses the corrosive mentality created by the internet. I agree with what you’ve said, but I wanted to add some things.

One of the very comforting delusions that many people in the west have is that fascism is something that is imposed from the top by a dictator or elite group. It isn’t. Fascism and other forms of totalitarianism are powerless unless there’s widespread buy-in from the population, which is generally achieved by people whipping up outrage and encouraging each other into vigilantism and boundary-crossing. Almost all fascist movements insist that people identify themselves by what they’re not - it’s called ‘self-identification by opposition’. If you’re not part of the self-righteous in-group, you deserve to be humiliated, excoriated, wiped from the face of the earth, in order to create a glorious new tomorrow in which all social problems have been punished out of existence. It’s a very seductive process, because it tells people that by banding together against the “bad guys” they can make a better world - rather than holding up a much less dramatic vision of a world in which the privacy and rights of each citizen are respected, regardless of who they are, and asking oneself how to get to that state, which would mean each person accepting very hard limits on the information they can have or share about others.

We live in a fully developed, fully equipped fascist system in which the internet is playing the role of the state. In pre-digital forms of fascism, a state was required in order to provide a surveillance system and an ideology, since these are the two main ingredients necessary for social control. Everyone always hyperfocuses on state or corporate surveillance, without realising that this is completely irrelevant – we have the surveillance infrastructure, in the form of pocket cameras that see everywhere and record everything, and we have an ideology, derived from reality TV and social media, in which it’s everyone’s job to surveil, police and punish everyone else all the time. Full global fascism took hold silently, invisibly, somewhere around 2015. The people who run this world appear to be completely aware of this, and have helped this process along by eroding norms of public behaviour until there are now virtually no limits.

Fascism = social control via mob rule. It really is that simple. The fasces symbol was a bundle of sticks around an axe, which was used to represent people banding together to get their own way by force. Mussolini himself was very clear that fascism is not at its core a political system, but is just a way of thinking about the world, a way of behaving – the exaltation of an idealised, powerful community rather than individual rights. This mentality has always lurked at all levels of all societies, but in the analogue age, it was kept in check by laws on personal rights and the fragmentation of information about people, which worked to preserve privacy. What I’m trying to say is that although you’re right that there’s a push from the top to control the internet and manipulate people, there’s also a massive groundswell from the bottom.

In a world where 80% of people will murder a stranger if they think a TV audience is egging them on to do it, we went ahead and created a giant infrastructure that allows everyone on the planet to spy on, surveil, harass and police everyone else, decided we didn’t need laws on personal privacy or decency because it was all so much fun, and now we’re all shocked and amazed to discover that we’re living in totalitarianism.