The Age of Trump witnessed the visible rise of intense culture wars and polarization in the United States. While culture wars are not new phenomena, the current iteration has digital media acting as new discursive structures and mediating battlegrounds for all sides of the cultural conflict. This project chronicles these online culture wars, demonstrating how within a neoliberal and postmodern socio-cultural condition, the rise of ambivalent, profit-driven digital technologies and platforms structure affect and mediate newly networked neo-reactionary populist (sub)cultural ideologies and discourses. The resulting online ecosystems afforded the digital formations of obscure reactionary subcultures (trolls, antifeminists, the alt-right, etc.) with particular personalized and affectively driven memetic communicative logics. These reactionary affective publics eventually began converging under perceived common ideological and social interests as online actions and reactionary discursive (re)formations and (re)networkings were catalyzed by (sub/cross)cultural conflicts and moments of sentimental activation. This led to the emergence of affectively charged and informally networked reactionary publics which began spilling out into the offline world alongside Trump's ascendancy to the White House. The increasing progressive reactions during the Trump Era also faced limitations in combatting reactionary politics due to structural dynamics of digital media and the larger culture war filtering of politics. The overall macro function of these new online culture wars is the bipartisan obfuscation and undermining of a collectivist and materialist reality and engagement with politics in the favor of a more personalized, symbolic and affective engagement that is indicative of the neoliberalized postmodern era.

WEAVING PAST INTO PRESENT revolves around contradictory feelings towards, on the one hand, the lure of a mythic past, and on the other hand its absurdity and potential danger. This is done by stating that craft and weaving is inherently conservative, closely connected to nostalgia and claimed as something more authentic and pristine. In continuation used in the creation of an idealized and romanticized past generating a separation between an “us and them”. These problems are created by the main quest and question of this work, to weave the past into present and then ask; which past is woven into the present presence of the tapestries? The paper then continues to describe the methods and considerations used and made in this time-translation. Looking at the sketch and the collage as ways of materializing and enmeshing the transient flow of time through cacophonies of ephemera and threads. Concluding that I, just as the ones creating mythic pasts, am not weaving a past at all. But merely weaving a sketch trying to highlight the feeling and fear of loss apparent today in encountering the accelerated present, the eerie future, and the desirable progressive changes towards equality / WEAVING PAST INTO PRESENT rör sig kring motsägelsefulla känslor gentemot å ena sidan, lockelsen i ett mytiskt förflutet, och å andra sidan dess absurditet och potentiella fara. Detta görs genom att påstå att konsthantverk och vävning i sig är konservativt, nära kopplat till nostalgi och ansett som något mer autentiskt och ursprungligt. Fortsättningsvis används det i skapandet av ett idealiserat och romantiserat förflutet som skapar en separation mellan ett “vi och dom”. Dessa problem har uppstått tillsammans med arbetets huvudsakliga mål och frågeställning, att väva det förflutna in i nuet och fråga sig; vilket förflutet är det som vävs till den nuvarande närvaron av bildvävarna?  Uppsatsen fortsätter sedan med att beskriva de metoder och överväganden som använts och gjorts i denna tidsöversättning. Genom att betrakta skissen och collaget som sätt att materialisera och sammanfoga tidens förgängliga flöde genom kakofonier av det efemära och trådar. Slutfattningsvis att jag, precis som de som skapar mytiska förflutna, inte alls väver ett förflutet. Utan bara väver en skiss som försöker belysa den känsla och rädsla för förlust som är uppenbar idag i mötet med det accelererande nuet, den kusliga framtiden och de önskvärda progressiva förändringarna mot jämlikhet.