CANCELLED: Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter
309 Regent St
Marylebone, London W1B 2HT
UK
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO ADVERSE WEATHER
Christian Fuchs will be giving an introduction to “Digital Demagogue”, a timely and topicalstudy of the expressions of ideology, nationalism and authoritarianism in the age of big dataand social media, and discusses the prospects for overcoming capitalism and renewing theLeft.
We’re all familiar with the ways that Donald Trump uses digital media to communicate, fromthe ridiculous to the terrifying. This book digs deeper into the use of those tools in politics toshow how they have facilitated the rise of authoritarianism, nationalism, and right-wingideologies around the world.
Christian Fuchs applies an updated Marxist frame, along with insights drawn from FrankfurtSchool thinkers counting Franz L. Neumann, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, HerbertMarcuse, Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, Leo Löwenthal and Klaus Theweleit, to show thepernicious role of social media in the hands of nationalist politicians.
Media like Twitter have been used to spread right-wing ideology far and wide, and make itseem like an ordinary part of contemporary political discourse. Fuchs diagnoses this problemin stark terms, but he doesn’t stop there: he also lays out ways to fight it, and analyses theprospects for pushing past capitalism and renewing the Left.
Christian Fuchs is Professor at the University of Westminster. He is Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS). His fields of expertise are critical digital & social media studies, Internet & society, political economy of media and communication, information society theory, social theory and critical theory. He has published extensively and is co-editor of the open access journal triple: Communication, Capitalism and Critique.
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