Digital Demagogue

WIAS and CAMRI are pleased to invite you to the book launch of Digital Demagogue by our director, Professor Christian Fuchs.  Due to adverse weather conditions, the original event on 1 March 2018 was cancelled and has now been rescheduled to Thursday 5 April 2018.

Christian Fuchs will be giving an introduction to Digital Demagogue, a timely and topical study of the expressions of ideology, nationalism and authoritarianism in the age of big data and social media. He will further discuss the prospects for overcoming capitalism and renewing the Left.

We’re all familiar with the ways that Donald Trump uses digital media to communicate, from the ridiculous to the terrifying. This book digs deeper into the use of those tools in politics to show how they have facilitated the rise of authoritarianism, nationalism, and right-wing ideologies around the world.

Christian Fuchs applies an updated Marxist frame, along with insights drawn from Frankfurt School thinkers counting Franz L. Neumann, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, Leo Löwenthal and Klaus Theweleit, to show the pernicious 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 it seem like an ordinary part of contemporary political discourse. Fuchs diagnoses this problem in stark terms, but he doesn’t stop there: he also lays out ways to fight it, and analyses the prospects for pushing past capitalism and renewing the Left.