Seeking Friction in Fascism

How do I fight fascism in my screens and fascism in me?

X screenshot of a Xeet I saw this morning.

My for you timeline on X repeatedly shows me the worst of society. What it delivered me today was a quote retweet in critique of the tweet above. The original poster is a member of eating disorder Twitter/X, as evidenced by their username. This side of Twitter is typically contained to other eating disorder encouragers, but what concerned me was how this tweet escaped its enclave and resonated with the public. It sits at 140,000 likes as I write this.

We know that mainstream culture has been dutifully moving towards the right over the past few years. Reactionary conservativism is all around us, from Trump's 2024 re-election to the proliferation of "anti-woke" media. Even discourse in leftist spaces is prefaced by a "not to be that friend who's too woke" disclaimer before a mild, formerly-centrist take. The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, which was cancelled in 2019 due to mounting backlash for symbolizing misogynistic, fatphobic, and white supremacist ideals, quietly restarted in 2023 and ramped up its production in 2024, with hefty musical features including Tyla and Lisa. This shift is fueled by the majority of the political spectrum--conservatives feel that they are losing cultural power they must violently reclaim, while liberals and leftists legitimize right wing sentiments with online "left wing" in-group fighting.

In 2025, residents of the American imperial core sit in the middle of multiple climate catastrophes, economic crises, a pandemic, social isolation, and national and international political shifts, all while witnessing genocide abroad that we fund. The mental toll this takes on the average person has to go somewhere. Thus, we all have various ways of coping. There is digital distraction: the doomscrolling on social media, the perpetual split screen to overwhelm all senses, the voyeurism of others' online lives to substitute for living yours. There are addictive, risk-taking behaviors: abusing weed, nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, pornography; sports betting and gambling; participating in digital gacha games that incentivize pay to play; buying excessive blind boxes. Finally, there are behaviors that grant one a brief feeling of control in a world that is chaotically uncontrollable: mindless consumerism, restricting one's caloric intake, and hypervigiliantly curating the branded persona one presents to the digital sphere.

The last point is echoed by the TikTok screenshot at hand, where the caption reads, "i'm only interested by shopping and losing weight this year sorry," over the image of a young white woman holding shopping bags. This screenshot is a microcosm for the issues we face in 2025. We have no real interests or hobbies. Mainstream, overt fatphobia is having its own 2000s-nostalgia revival. People are shopping too much, on platforms that are too cheap, and through delivery services that are too brutal to workers and the planet. We ultimately lack imagination, hope, and curiosity, which funnels us back into simplistic, repetitive, comfortable behaviors. Here, the emphasis of "shopping" and "weight loss" identify an in and out. In comes new material products and out goes the physical presence of one’s body. Possessions then replace physical flesh and blood. There is no input of new ideas, interests, skills, friends, or community. There is only a rigid exercise of control until your body becomes another "thing" that has been mechanically altered by human force. Often, eating disorders require obsessive calorie counting, regimented movement that prioritizes appearance over function, and a fundamental belief that those who exist in their weight naturally are inferior to you. When trapped in an eating disorder, one's thoughts are consumed by the disorder, which then necessitates distraction (re: shopping) to have temporary reprieve from, and this process eliminates mental room for joy and exploration.

“The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

- Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property (1844)

Unfortunately, the behaviors that are harmful to us are often extremely easy to partake in. Shopping in 2025 is a seamless experience. With several taps and double-button presses, one can spend money from their phone and receive a package at their door without ever interacting with a person. Meanwhile, the TikTok interface is similar to a slot machine in a casino, with the promise of a new video with each swipe/lever-pull and no clock in the top left corner to track how long you've been scrolling. (Imagine if there was a video watch count for each session you spend on TikTok. This function would fundamentally conflict with the app's business model.) Drugs are a quick way to feel dopamine and make everything entertaining, especially when life feels unbearable or understimulating. Particularly, cannabis smoothes the sharp edges of one's reality until they are blind to glaring issues that need to be changed. Fast food is perhaps the original model of unearned dopamine. It's immediate, it's objectively unhealthy for you, and you feel physically bad afterwards, despite the temporary high of consumption. Additionally, fast food is assembled by an anonymous, replaceable force of low-paid workers, and sourced from a mass-production factory. In other words, the labor is alienated, just like the online shopping and delivery labor.

I'm tired of reaching for unearned dopamine. I am what I consume, and I've consumed lots of mindless inflammatory content, from people I don't know and never will. There is some sort of ratio of good-to-bad content quality out there, of course, but it follows the slot machine model. Sometimes I'll see something deposited by the for you algorithm that is funny, or informative, or inspiring. That happens maybe 5-10% of the time—people colloquially refer to these as “mythical pulls,” which reinforces the gambling nature of scrolling on TikTok. Mostly, I'll see content that is mildly entertaining or just okay, which takes up the majority of my consumption. The last sizeable portion of content I see is the inflammatory part, particularly on X, where Elon Musk’s algorithm has incentivized emotionally reactive discussions. This is how screenshots like the above reach me, when they would never have crossed my radar otherwise. Often, they won't be bolstered by the algorithm from the original poster, but by somebody disagreeing, and others (similar to my views) supporting the disagreement, which just shows me the inflammatory fascist content anyway. And then the opposers of the fascist content still platform the fascism anyway, and we all move further right, wasting our time discussing the legitimacy of right wing ideals.

The only way to prevent our personal descent into fascism is to opt out of these discussions completely. More often, I find myself feeling like I have to fully do away with social media consumption to feel like myself again, despite my unbreakable and unquestioned internet addiction for a good decade and a half of my life. It's hard, when I know the call of the endless, mildly-entertaining distraction is always there, just one screen tap away. However, I've recently come to understand the value of turning away from the easy. I've mentioned before on my Substack that I used to always want comfort, and I did not believe that I had to suffer to get what I want. Now, I've reframed my concept of comfort. What does my comfort come at the expense of? Who does it come at the expense of? How is my pursuit of constant comfort stunting my own growth and development? How does just one more scroll, just one more phone pick up, just one more edible prevent me from becoming a person I'm proud to be? How does our collective avoidance of discomfort stunt our growth as a community?

"What is smooth does not injure. Nor does it offer any resistance. It is looking for Like. The smooth object deletes its Against. Any form of negativity is removed."

Byung Chul Han, Saving Beauty (2015)

I first read this excerpt by Byung Chan Han in 2018, when I was following feminist theory blogs online. An account I followed posted a screenshot of this text in relation to the concepts of beauty and digital society. Back then, I interpreted this quote to apply to our society's beauty standards, which aim to smooth out wrinkles, blemishes, and natural physical differences. Now, I understand this quote to apply to what I do in everyday life. I want the smooth. I don't like friction. I avoid making necessary phone calls because they cause a temporary friction in my nervous system. I prolong beginning projects I want to do because it will require activation energy, disrupting my inertia, which wants to continue on its smooth path. I let myself stay cramped in tight boxes because breaking out of them to find a new one requires friction. Stopping the scroll requires friction. Doing something new requires friction. Organizing to make the world better requires lots of friction. All of these behaviors are objectively good for me and others, and they require some discomfort to achieve.

When I do push myself to tolerate the friction, I find that the experience is not as bad as my comfort-seeking mindset would believe. I also find that I receive a lingering sense of accomplishment that can’t compare to any sort of quick dopamine hit. The afterglow of accomplishment motivates me to keep up my positive momentum and empowers me to seek out more friction, because I have tangible proof that confronting friction creates meaningful results. Moreover, coming out on the other side of tolerated discomfort makes me identify more clearly those who are stuck in comfort-seeking cycles. Their thinly-veiled misery becomes evident. Of course you are unhappy, disregulated, arguing with people online, and have no interests if all you do is stay trapped in what is already smooth and easy for you. Smoothness offers no discomfort but no real joy either; the result of a continuous frictionless experience is a hollow absence in the soul and mind. There is visual static that eliminates boredom, but boredom is necessary for curiosity and exploration.

A society of unmotivated people who lack hobbies, community, and curiosity for the world beyond their perspective is ideal grounds for fascism to flourish. Fascism seeks to eliminate the "against" that Byung Chul Han mentions, and it aims to only reward those it "likes." Moreover, fascism purports that the stranger is the enemy and the existing state is right and natural. We see this in the reactionary right wing, white supremacist politics that permeate culture and our government, with the alleged oncoming “Project 2025.” These politics rely on "protecting" white nationalism from external and internal threats, including the "woke" left, China, opposition to Palestinian genocide, women's reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, education, libraries, critical race theory. Thus, we get sentiments like "Make America Great Again" and modern trad wife propaganda, the latter of which markets the stripping of women's rights away as an idyllic and natural life to aspire to have. These are attempts to "restore" white patriarchal capitalist power that has been perceived to be taken away by liberal “gains” in the 2010s. In reality, marginalized groups saw minimal sociopolitical advancement, and conservatives never lost power to begin with. If anything, we see ourselves in a more right wing American culture now than when Trump took office for the first time in 2016.

"The ordinary white subject is a fantasy that comes into being through the mobilisation of hate, as a passionate attachment closely tied to love. The emotion of hate works to animate the ordinary subject, to bring that fantasy to life, precisely by constituting the ordinary as in crisis, and the ordinary person as the real victim. The ordinary becomes that which is already under threat by the imagined others whose proximity becomes a crime against person as well as place. The ordinary subject is reproduced as the injured party: the one that is ‘hurt’ or even damaged by the ‘invasion’ of others. The bodies of others are hence transformed into ‘the hated’ through a discourse of pain. They are assumed to cause injury to the ordinary white subject, such that their proximity is read as the origin of bad feeling: indeed, the implication here is that the white subject’s good feelings (love) have being ‘taken’ away by the abuse of such feelings by others."

Sara Ahmed, Fascism as Love, republished in 2016

Fascist white supremacy fears friction, resistance, and injury. To be clear, our white capitalist state is tightening its stronghold now because it feels itself falling apart. Its methods of existence are unsustainable, largely because it is reactive. It functions almost like the quick, unearned dopamine cycle, in which it makes political and economic decisions based on what can benefit capital production immediately, despite these decisions causing issues later on. We are currently suffering the effects of these for-now decisions; the American government ignored climate scientist warnings in the 70s and 80s, which identified that our destructive models of resource consumption will make the earth inhabitable down the line. As a result, the residents of the imperial core suffer from climate crises, economic crises, and health crises, as we see currently with the Los Angeles fires. We are following in the steps of the Global South, where the imperial core violently and unsustainably extracts resources and labor from, and whose environments have already been destroyed by this endless pursuit of capital. The imperial boomerang is in full effect.

To keep consuming forever is frictionless to the imperial core. To implement internal policy change that would save even a few lives would cause friction. Keeping its populace complicit, exhausted, uncurious, uninformed, distracted, sick, addicted, in debt, and isolated is beneficial to the policies of the imperial core. Even now, the TikTok ban is motivated by the elimination of awareness about the American-sanctioned Palestinian genocide, couched in fascist anti-Chinese rhetoric. Thus, we as people and collectives must move towards friction, because the alternative is to sit by and allow the imperial core to continue destroying and killing, or allowing our brains and bodies to go lifeless while we are still breathing. We must seek resistance, even when it is easy not to.

Seeking friction in every day life looks different for everybody. For me, it means talking to strangers, participating in organization efforts, and picking up new skills and hobbies. It includes being on my phone less and creating more, and shopping less and donating more. A big point of friction for me is to continuously restart the same uphill battles when my progress is thwarted by a relapse. Simply trying again is hard but necessary, no matter how many tries it takes.

It is important to remember that resistance is not just uncomfortable or scary--it can be pleasurable and rewarding. It is thankless, but meaningful. Seeking friction will open you up to a range of complex emotions that you were avoiding by seeking comfort, but we were meant to experience it all and do hard things. Friction will breed newness and variety, as opposed to the flat, predictable, apathy-inducing experience that the smooth guarantees. It is a necessary part of life and growth. These are reminders I have to tell myself repeatedly, especially when I fall back into quick dopamine-seeking holes.

This year, I am committed to seeking friction in experiences and finding joy in it. What goes "in" must be knowledge, genuine entertainment, love, art, and the products of labor that are connected to the laborer. What comes "out" must be creations, new skills, physical aid, assistance to those in need, and increased time spent with people rather than screens. It won't be easy but it wasn't meant to be. I will pursue and tolerate friction, because the alternative is to let myself be consumed by apathy and smoothness until there is nothing around me worth experiencing friction for.

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”

Elie Wiesel, U.S. News and World Report (1986)