iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rob Topinka

@robtoes.bsky.social

236 followers 154 following 68 posts

Reader in Digital Media & Rhetoric Birkbeck, University of London. researching reactionary digital politics and the politics of shitposting (tinyurl.com/yc72aaah) recovering lurker

Posts Replies Media

Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

New paper on 'ambient extremism' out now - it tries to chart the collapse of the distinction between online subcultures and mainstream politics, looking at how rhetorics of defiance suffuse political culture, with X and AI slop playing a key role

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Farage defended his record saying he "worked extensively" from "2021-2024 as an influencer with over seven million followers on social media." Now he's doing the "I was cancelled because I revealed the truth about..." influencer move perfected during covid info wars. Let's watch MSM fall for it.

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

The right has a well-financed apparatus for amplifying social media momentum. Democrats just try to squash it www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Murray Rothbard wanted to repeal the 20th century. Curtis Yarvin thinks liberalism got out of hand when the Union won the US Civil War. The 'Donroe Doctrine' fits this line of thinking. Trump is more erratic now, but his 2nd term is actually more ideologically coherent. www.ft.com/content/4e0e...

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

nice materialist debunking of Jacob Savage's pseudo-materialist account of DEI hurting white Millennial males. www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/w...

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

I usually go on r/PoliticalCompassMemes to get annoyed but sometimes you find some bangers

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Trump’s lies always tell an ideological truth. The ICE agent obviously wasn’t hit, which is why Trump says he was nearly killed - ICE acts on Trump’s behalf, so anything bad ICE does must actually be the work of the enemy. The less popular Trump gets, the more detached he’ll become

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

so when Anthropic let Claude talk to itself, it started blissing out about spiritual unity. Nice piece from David Berry on how this is the result of LLMs encoding a kind of 'latent hegemony' - in this case, the hippie capitalism of the California Ideology stunlaw.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

obviously the Yookay Aesthetics account, devoted to mocking multicultural Britain, is based in South America

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

The NYTimes is out here defending the Great Replacement Theory as 'normal' I've been calling this ambient extremism - a once obscure French far-right conspiracy is now so ambient that one of the last avatars of the liberal order defends it, mistakenly attributing its origin to American politics.

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

checking into the shared X account I made for students in my digital method class. The account only follows the Met Office. Haven't clicked or searched on a thing. Here's the first post in my For You page. The 'this is fine' dog in the fire memes are getting too literal

Alex Jones posts a photo of Governor Newsom with a feather in his mouth alongside a claim that he caused the California wildfires

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Rob Topinka @robtoes.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

created a research account on X for a digital methods class I'm teaching, and these are the top suggestions. what a time to be alive and posting.

A list of suggested accounts to follow on X

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