If a Flower Bloomed in a Dark Room, Would You Trust It?

The body is always the primary heuristic of white nationalist self-improvement, the atomic unit of the state and of the glorious future to come. Arno Breker’s Bereitschaft (1939), a statue whose name translates to “readiness,” has new life in the perfectly sculpted, steroid bacne’d, body dysmorphic twenty-something. With social media has come a paradox: an intense atomization and sense of isolation, and the opportunity to connect with uniquely unmoored and unsettled people just like you. People who are also looking for answers. The message boards and the social media feed recapitulate historical discourses: grammars and ideas of individual-as-national transformations that will always accompany right-wing mobilizations. Strange new syntaxes emerge in recycled ideas peddled as novel strategies for self-help, some unisex and some deeply gendered.

ZOÉ SAMUDZI, 'Tomorrow Belongs To You'

Across platforms like TikTok and YouTube, a new digital mysticism has emerged, built from fragments of self-help, new-age philosophy, quantum theory, and conspiracy. It is a worldview shaped by algorithmic feedback loops, where each search for "higher vibration" or "spiritual awakening" leads deeper into a labyrinth of glowing faces, soft-voiced prophets, and mantra-like instructions. Ganslmeier & Zibelnik's work investigates the slippage between the individual quest for freedom and its ideological capture. In Repeat After Me, they reveal how the pursuit of transcendence can become a mechanism of isolation, and how the desire to escape the "system" can reinforce its most rigid forms - a fitness training for the soul, based on discipline, loyalty, and order.

Elisa Medde, 'Abundance is Our Birthright' (editor's introduction)