Abstract
The role of negative affects such as fear and hate, their manifestation in atmospheres, manipulability, and mobilization as a response to threat perception play a pivotal role in the current political conjuncture. This essay traces the dissemination of fake news and the role of affective labor in its digital spread through the example of the recent Pizzagate phenomenon. This particular viral story and its real world fallout speak to the turn to a ‘post-truth’ politics, which has been embraced by President Trump and his surrogates, through the appropriation of the term ‘fake news’ and rhetoric of ‘alternative facts’, to describe all forms of dissent and justification for executive actions, respectively. By examining the circulation and coalescence of negative affects such as fear and hate, and their utility in a moment of political uncertainty defined by divisive populist rhetoric, it becomes clear that a reorientation to affective engagements with digital media and facticity is necessary and pressingly urgent.
Highlights
Within the current political conjuncture, the manipulation and mobilization of negative affects as a response to threat perception have become a key tool in the promulgation of hate and fear-based policy, legislation, and democratically damaging rhetoric
Hate has become a uniquely mobilized affect and gathering point for public sentiment in the era of Trump, signaling a dangerous turn toward a politics predicated on distrust and demonization of all imagined outsiders and ‘others.’ This essay explores the significance of hate in the 2016 U.S election cycle and its fallout by tracing the dissemination of fake news and the role of affective labor in its digital spread through the example of the recent Pizzagate phenomenon, which was largely perpetuated by hatred for an imagined ‘other’, embodied by Hillary Clinton among other actors
Affect is an apt mode of analysis for the viral spread of fake news as it extends beyond emotion to include the precognitive and unconscious ways that individuals and collectives engage with biases and feelings, here in regards to facticity
Summary
Within the current political conjuncture, the manipulation and mobilization of negative affects as a response to threat perception have become a key tool in the promulgation of hate and fear-based policy, legislation, and democratically damaging rhetoric. Hate has become a uniquely mobilized affect and gathering point for public sentiment in the era of Trump, signaling a dangerous turn toward a politics predicated on distrust and demonization of all imagined outsiders and ‘others.’ This essay explores the significance of hate in the 2016 U.S election cycle and its fallout by tracing the dissemination of fake news and the role of affective labor in its digital spread through the example of the recent Pizzagate phenomenon, which was largely perpetuated by hatred for an imagined ‘other’, embodied by Hillary Clinton among other actors. This particular viral story and its real world fallout speak to the turn to a ‘post-truth’ politics, which has been
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