In the 1990s tech evangelists told us that the internet would bring the world together; that it would help us share knowledge and learn from each other. Spoiler Alert: that didn’t happen. The world of digital politics is filled with hucksters, ideological entrepreneurs performing invective for a few likes and subscriptions. It’s a recruiting ground for far-right extremists, cultists and conspiracy fantasists. And it’s changing how all of us think, feel and do our politics.
This eight-part podcast series reports on the findings of a three-year academic research project into the political ideologies, rhetorics and aesthetics shaping the age of digital politics. Featuring interviews with leading scholars and researchers in this field – including Whitney Phillips, Matthew Feldman, Becca Lewis and Wu Ming 1 – it asks why right-wing & reactionary groups have been so successful in using digital technologies to push their ideologies, exploring the history and theory to assess the prospects for politics in an age of digital communication.
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In the 1990s tech evangelists told us that the internet would bring the world together; that it would help us share knowledge and learn from each other. Spoiler Alert: that didn’t happen. The world of digital politics is filled with hucksters, ideological entrepreneurs performing invective for a few likes and subscriptions. It’s a recruiting ground for far-right extremists, cultists and conspiracy fantasists. And it’s changing how all of us think, feel and do our politics.
This eight-part podcast series reports on the findings of a three-year academic research project into the political ideologies, rhetorics and aesthetics shaping the age of digital politics. Featuring interviews with leading scholars and researchers in this field – including Whitney Phillips, Matthew Feldman, Becca Lewis and Wu Ming 1 – it asks why right-wing & reactionary groups have been so successful in using digital technologies to push their ideologies, exploring the history and theory to assess the prospects for politics in an age of digital communication.
These days, it’s impossible to talk publicly about how things are going wrong with politics (economics, culture, society, climate etc.) without someone piping up at the end to spoil a good whinge by asking ‘So, what would you do about it?”. Well, we can be spoilsports too. At the end of all our conversations we asked our interviewees the same question: we now know that digital politics is a mess, but what do we do about it? In this final episode, we listen to and think about their answers - from demands to regulate social media platforms to calls to think better about our communications ecology. Are we just sharp edged critical theorists or will we turn out to have a soft moral centre? Listen to the end to find out.
Presented by: Alan Finlayson, Rob Gallagher, Sophie Ludkin & Rob Topinka
With: Clare Birchall, Florian Cramer, Matthew Feldman, Bharath Ganesh, Debbie Ging, Annie Kelly, Hugo Leal, Becca Lewis, Whitney Phillips & Wu Ming 1
Produced by: Sophie Ludkin
Special thanks to: Cassian Osborne-Carey
Music composed by Harriet Riley and produced by Tom Jacob
Find us:
On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNdYeOghWVoIb4vZF0B9jwQ/featuredOn Email: reactionarydigitalpolitics@gmail.com
Reactionary Digital Politics
In the 1990s tech evangelists told us that the internet would bring the world together; that it would help us share knowledge and learn from each other. Spoiler Alert: that didn’t happen. The world of digital politics is filled with hucksters, ideological entrepreneurs performing invective for a few likes and subscriptions. It’s a recruiting ground for far-right extremists, cultists and conspiracy fantasists. And it’s changing how all of us think, feel and do our politics.
This eight-part podcast series reports on the findings of a three-year academic research project into the political ideologies, rhetorics and aesthetics shaping the age of digital politics. Featuring interviews with leading scholars and researchers in this field – including Whitney Phillips, Matthew Feldman, Becca Lewis and Wu Ming 1 – it asks why right-wing & reactionary groups have been so successful in using digital technologies to push their ideologies, exploring the history and theory to assess the prospects for politics in an age of digital communication.
