The paranoid infrastructural imaginary of alt-tech: understanding how the reactionary mind fuels digital fascism

Alt-tech, the constellation of right-wing social media platforms, has created a problem for internet governance as it is currently practiced because of these platforms’ well-researched connection to hate speech. This article focuses on one alt-tech platform, Gab, and employs thematic analysis to triangulate the public-facing words of Gab founder and CEO, Andrew Torba, with a year-long digital ethnography of Gab. In my analysis, I chart Torba and his users’ shifting understanding of their place on the internet and track three central concepts that Torba continually returns to as he writes about internet governance. I find that as Torba constructs his understanding of and for “digital sovereignty,” “the regime,” and “the parallel economy,” he displays and promotes what I call a “paranoid infrastructural imaginary”–– a concept that I argue is central to the alt-tech movement and crucial for understanding an aspect of the “reactionary mind” that is fueling what Christian Fuchs (2022) has called “digital fascism” or “Fascism 2.0.”