Fascism and Its Digital Parallels

Fascism, as a twentieth-century political phenomenon, left an indelible mark on world history. Yet its animating logics, the cult of the leader, the subjugation of truth to power, the manufacture of enemies, the subordination of the individual to the collective machine, did not vanish with the defeat of the Axis powers. Scholars of authoritarianism have long warned that fascism is less a fixed ideology than a recurring political style capable of adapting to new institutional and technological contexts.

The emergence of digital infrastructure, social media platforms, algorithmic recommendation systems, data-driven surveillance, and network-enabled propaganda, has created a new terrain on which the structural features of fascism can be expressed. This analysis draws on foundational scholarship in fascism studies (Paxton, Eco, Arendt, Griffin, Stanley) and in digital politics and political economy (Zuboff, Morozov, Noble, Tufekci, Benkler et al.) to map the conceptual overlap.