The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline
The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline
Classical statues in the profile? Racism and misogyny in the feed? Tallulah Trezevant looks at the alt-Right and Classics...
A good article in which the author researched how Twitter's algorithm pushed people interested in history into alt-right content.
Quote: "Adhering to my guidelines to follow accounts suggested by the algorithm, I clicked the “follow” button. This was the first time I was recommended content adjacent to alt-right and "manosphere" ideology. Prior to that, it was all history related. After “liking” approximately 100 Tweets, however, I saw that the accounts suggested to me were becoming increasingly political, and I was specifically being recommended accounts run by internet political commentators – as opposed to professional politicians or journalists. I cannot definitively call this observation evidence of being led down an alt-right pipeline, but it was interesting to note that those were the types of accounts suggested to me by the Twitter algorithm."
You're viewing a single thread.
TBH the underlying problem is "classics" itself. It's an extremely subjective eurocentric construct that's inherently racist. It elevates slavers, imperialists, and colonizers. It's no surprise when white supremacists adopt ideologies that validate their viewpoint.
We can't fight this with more "classicism".
What if you live in Europe, though? I like our classical architecture, and I saw a post advocating for different countries to go back to their historical architecture instead of big plain concrete and glass boxes
There is no such thing as "our classical architecture". Who is we? Where are you actually from? Italy, Greece, Sweden, Iceland?
Europe is a large and varied "continent" (not even). Architecture comes from all over the world including the middle east, africa, and beyond. These phony constructs like "european classical architecture" are just white supremacy with another name.
United Kingdom. Getting called a white supremacist for liking architecture really is something
Are you suggesting that architectural styles are not based on interactions with different peoples and that the type of architecture, for example, from 200-500CE is not going to vary greatly in different regions such as East Asia and Europe? And that those peoples with individual cultures and ideas about architecture won't ever interact with their neighbors, creating cross-cultural styles? That these cultures will never interact and reach a quorum on specific styles of buildings, especially when brought together through larger institutions such as religion?
I hope you are merely trolling.
Classical architecture is an extremely broad term.
Are you talking about Greece or Roman architecture? Gothic? Byzantine? Renaissance? Baroque?
Even when you talk about "European" there are a variety of styles among different countries.
Victorian 😎
At least when it comes to languages, the eurocentrism and subjectivity are being addressed for at least a century. Sapir for example proposed that the "classical languages" weren't just two but five - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. And the definition became roughly "varieties with a heavy and outlasting impact outside their native communities". (Personally I'd also add Sumerian, Quechua and Nahuatl to that list. But that's just me.)
Additionally plenty linguists see the idea of "classic" not as specific languages, but as a potential stage of a language, assigned retroactively to the period when its prestige and cultural production were specially strong. For example, Classical Ge'ez is defined as the one from centuries XIII~XIV.