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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.
Episodes
Wednesday Oct 20, 2021
Wednesday Oct 20, 2021
Politics used to be easy. There was the left. There was the right. There was a bit in the middle. Politicians wore suits and were awkward on television. Protestors marched in the streets for fewer wars and more rights. And then everyone went online and found that they hated each other. In the last decade reactionary movements, from the alt-right to QAnon, have transformed politics using digital technologies. What happened? How? Why? We’ve asked some experts (because we can’t get enough of them) and we found out a lot. This first episode lays out the jigsaw pieces we’ll be assembling over the course of this series. We think about the social and cultural context against which digital politics have taken shape. We talk about the rise of social media platforms, the growth in what we call ‘ideological entrepreneurs’, the blurring of politics into celebrity culture, the early adoption of the internet by the far-right and the impact of networked hate campaigns like #GamerGate. All of these laid the groundwork for new kinds of political ideology, style and identity.
Presented by: Alan Finlayson, Rob Gallagher, Sophie Ludkin & Rob Topinka
With: Clare Birchall, Florian Cramer, Matthew Feldman, Annie Kelly, Hugo Leal, Becca Lewis & Whitney Phillips.
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/featured
On Email: reactionarydigitalpolitics@gmail.com
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