[artinfo] Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter

[Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies]

Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies,
Communication and Media Research Institute
and Pluto Press are pleased to invite you to the book launch of

"Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in 
the Age of Trump and Twitter" by Professor 
Christian Fuchs.

http://fuchs.uti.at/books/digital-demagogue-authoritarian-capitalism-in-the-age-of-trump-and-twitter/

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 are 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 does not stop there: he also lays 
out ways to fight it and analyses the prospects 
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 tripleC: Communication, Capitalism and 
Critique.