The Aura of the Selfie: How Fascism Learns to Scroll, Gen Z and the Trap of Contentification of Politics

Generation Z, running in the endless race to consume content, does not realize that in chasing “relatable” content, it also absorbs fascist content along with it simply because that content has learned to wear the same relatable packaging.

In a media ecosystem where everything is subordinated to the content race, a fascist actor does not need to announce itself. It only needs to manufacture content that is relatable to Gen Z, and in doing so, it can keep its fascist character concealed behind a friendly, meme-able surface. Because everything runs on content, it is content itself not fact, not record, not consequence that ends up deciding what counts as right and what counts as wrong. Facts are pushed off to the side.

The idea that fascism specifically depends on aesthetics, on being felt rather than evaluated is not a fresh insight of the social media era. It is close to a century old, and it comes from thinkers who watched fascism build its image in real time.

Walter Benjamin, writing in 1935 as fascism consolidated power in Europe, coined the term “aestheticization of politics” to describe exactly the mechanism the original argument names. Benjamin argued that fascism, unable to change the underlying property and power relations that oppressed the masses, offered them something else instead: a chance to “express themselves” spectacle, pageantry, mass participation, a feeling of being seen, while leaving the actual structure of power untouched. In Benjamin’s words, fascism’s “logical result… is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” turning citizens into spectators of their own subjugation. A late-night selfie reel engineered to feel personal and spontaneous is a direct, low-budget descendant of the same move: emotional access substituting for structural accountability.

Susan Sontag, in her essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1975), extended this by showing how fascist aesthetics don’t announce themselves as harsh or threatening, they can be seductive, intimate, even beautiful, which is precisely what makes them effective. The danger, in Sontag’s framing, isn’t that propaganda looks like propaganda; it’s that it looks like something worth loving.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1944), described how the “culture industry” standardizes emotion and turns even resistance into consumable entertainment, neutralizing critical thought by making everything  including politics feel like content to be enjoyed rather than judged. Recent media-studies scholarship applies this directly to algorithmic platforms, arguing that the algorithm functions as a “machine of distraction” that converts emotional consumption into political and economic value, anaesthetizing exactly the kind of scrutiny democratic accountability depends on.

Umberto Eco, in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt,” made the point most relevant to Gen Z directly: fascism does not require jackboots or an official ideology to function. It is a style that can “coagulate” around a society whenever a few of its recurring features are present, appeals to a wounded national pride, a cult of unquestioning loyalty to a leader-figure, the folk-Manichean division of the world into “us” who are pure and “them” who are corrupting it. None of these require a uniform. All of them can be delivered in sixty seconds, in a friendly tone, in a language young people already trust, which is exactly how a “fascist style” can travel wearing the costume of relatable content instead of the costume of a rally.

A 2026 study on “technofascism” argues that AI-driven social media has become a new engine for exactly the spectacle-over-substance dynamic Benjamin described, allowing strongmen leaders to bypass rational deliberation and secure mass loyalty through emotionally engineered content rather than argument. Separate research on “network fascism” describes how the aesthetics of following, liking, and identifying with a feed-native persona reproduce, in miniature, the same conformist emotional structure that historical fascism cultivated through mass rallies arguing that digital platforms have created new, low-friction “modes of visuality” through which fascistic power relations can spread without needing to look political at all. And research specifically tracking meme culture on the far right has documented how movements deliberately use “user-generated content in the form of memes” as a delivery vehicle for ideology that would be rejected if presented directly, letting relatable in-jokes carry political content past an audience’s critical defenses.

In July 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted a selfie-style video on Instagram at 11:52 pm, filmed on a front camera with a deliberately handheld, slightly tilted angle, the visual grammar of a Gen Z “authentic” reel rather than a formal government address. The video addressed the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak controversy, but its content was almost secondary to its form: informal Hindi, a personal tone, and timing calibrated to when young people are scrolling in bed or on their commute home. Commentators noted the calculation explicitly that a “perfectly level camera conveys an official government message,” while a tilted, phone-style shot “feels personal, spontaneous and familiar.”

The results were extraordinary by any social media standard. The reel drew over a million views in twenty minutes, crossed two million within the hour, and eventually set a 24-hour world record with more than 303 million views, surpassing a record previously held by an internet personality’s viral fan moment, not by any political broadcast. Comment sections filled with affectionate, informal language  “I love you,” requests for his skincare routine,the same register young audiences use for influencers and peers, calling him “pookie” and “cutie” the way they would talk about a favorite creator, not a head of government. Modi had reportedly also instructed cabinet ministers to become active on Instagram and start making reels themselves, explicitly because “the youths are on Instagram.”

This is exactly the dynamic in question: Gen Z was not addressed as citizens being informed about a serious paper-leak scandal. It was addressed as an audience being entertained and it responded as an audience, not as a citizenry. By speaking Gen Z’s own visual and emotional language better than Gen Z’s own instincts could resist it, the messaging beat Gen Z at its own game, on its own turf, using its own content.

The mechanism has a name in media studies “parasocial relationships”, the one-sided sense of intimacy and familiarity an audience develops with a media figure who does not know they exist. Originally studied in relation to television personalities, the concept has been extended directly to politicians, and the findings are notable. One line of research found that parasocial connection was a stronger predictor of political support than nearly any other factor, including a person’s own voting history. Another body of work on what researchers term “personalization of politics” warns that as personality overtakes party and policy in how voters evaluate leaders, it introduces what scholars call irrational features into democratic decision-making, prioritizing a leader’s persona over institutions and the rule of law, while weakening the accountability structures that depend on voters evaluating substance.

A related concept, sometimes called “banana populism” in recent scholarship, describes how populist leaders across the ideological spectrum use deliberately informal, even absurd or self-deprecating performative gestures unusual clothing, casual language, staged spontaneity  to mainstream their political message, increase emotional engagement, and make themselves feel accessible rather than powerful. The visual and tonal choices are not incidental; they are a communication strategy designed to convert scrutiny into affection.

This is precisely the trap embedded in the “content race” the original argument names: when relatability becomes the currency, the audience’s attention is captured by “how”something is said, and the question of “what” is actually being done on paper leaks, on institutional accountability, on policy outcomes, recedes into the background, “pushed to the side,” as the original framing puts it.

The tool being described here is not neutral in its outcome even if it is neutral in its mechanics: whoever masters the grammar of relatable content wins the content race regardless of what they are actually being scrutinized for paper leaks, policy failures, or anything else. A fascist or authoritarian-leaning actor does not need to answer for its record if it can simply out-relate its critics. Once content itself is the arena, facts about governance lose the fight to facts about vibe.

For Gen Z, this means affection curdles into political cover without anyone noticing the switch. “Pookie” and “cutie” are not neutral words, they are the vocabulary of fandom, and fandom does not interrogate; it defends. Once a political figure is folded into that emotional register, criticism of them starts to feel, to their own audience, like an attack on someone they personally love, which is precisely how relatable content lets a fascist image hide in plain sight, protected not by censorship but by affection.