Escaping the Matrix of Mammon: Eastern Orthodox Men within an Online Battlefield of Debate, Speculation, and Conversion

In this thesis, I aim to tease out the motivations and trajectories of the online far-right by concentrating on the "Reactionary Orthodox", English-speaking converts to Eastern Orthodox Christianity who profess an anti-liberal and anti-secular traditionalism. Instead of moving along pipelines toward insular and identitarian communities, I situate the Reactionary Orthodox within a broader political ecology where people do not necessarily have common agendas and go down similar paths but rather share orientations towards conceptualizing the world and one's place as a man within it. I look at how affective mappings of alternative futures are discursively formulated in a field of debate and argumentation, and how the spaces and pathways for their spread are created as well. I hope to show how argumentation facilitates the formation and interaction of different groups whose concerns both reinforce and challenge hegemonic forms of masculinity and gendered economic arrangements, and whose affectual resonances are never fully solidified but open to contestation and change. By recentering religion's affordances towards how we can understand conversion, argumentation, and the dominance of the visual in online spaces differently, I hope to show how the online far-right's digital practices construct "images of everything" that affectually map out the subject's place within present arrangements of capitalism and an orientation towards fighting a way out of it.