Summary
In this episode, hosts Annika Brockschmidt and Roland Meyer sit down with media scholar Roland Meyer to dissect the unsettling intersection of generative AI, right-wing extremism, and the emerging aesthetics of digital fascism. Meyer, a professor at the University of Zurich, breaks down why AI-generated visual culture is uniquely suited for far-right propaganda. Rather than acting as a neutral mirror of reality, these algorithms are structurally nostalgic—relying on past training data to build idealized, hyper-masculine mythologies, clean ethnic landscapes, and weaponized "slopaganda." From American frontier myths to European Islamophobic imagery, Meyer explains how mass-produced, engagement-optimized AI content is being actively weaponized to construct collective, racist fantasy worlds at an unprecedented scale.
The conversation pushes past simple deepfakes to examine the darker political economy and Silicon Valley ideologies underlying the modern tech ecosystem. Meyer and the hosts unpack the rise of "slop"—voted Merriam-Webster’s word of the year—and how algorithmic distribution networks reward dehumanizing depictions of marginalized groups while turning tech leaders into gladiatorial icons. By exploring how figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel's Alex Karp, and Charlie Kirk use these tools, the episode exposes a shared tech-authoritarian vision. This ideology frames AI not as a tool for public good, but as an unregulated, masculine force engineered for white, Western dominance, proving that the struggle over generative AI is fundamentally a battle over who controls the future of reality.
Meet The Guests
Annika Brockschmidt
Annika Brockschmidt is a freelance journalist, author, and podcast-producer who currently writes for the Tagesspiegel, ZEIT Online and elsewhere. Her second non-fiction book America's Holy Warriors: How the Religious Right endangers Democracy was published in German in October 2021 and was an immediate bestseller. She co-hosts the podcast "Kreuz und Flagge" ("Cross and Flag") with visiting professor at Georgetown University, Thomas Zimmer, which explores the history of the Religious Right.
Roland Meyer
Roland Meyer studied art history and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, where, in 2017, he finished his PhD on the media history of facial images. From 2007 to 2014, he was a research assistant for art and cultural history at the College of Architecture, Media and Design of the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2016/17 he worked as a curatorial assistant on the special exhibition »The Face. A Search for Clues« at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden. In 2017, he representatively led the research group Das Technische Bild at the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Cultural Techniques of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. From April 2018 to August 2022, he was a post-doc researcher and lecturer in art history at the Faculty for Architecture, Civil Engineering and City Planning of the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg. From September 2022 till June 2024, he has been an research associate in the SFB »Virtual Lifeworlds« at the Ruhr University Bochum. From July 2024, he is DIZH Bridge Professor in Digital Cultures and Arts at University of Zurich and Zurich University of the Arts. His research focuses on the history, theory and aesthetics of networked image cultures.
