Front Cover -- Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st- Century American Life -- Copyright information -- Dedication -- Table of contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Great Simplification -- Computation and the social question -- The limits of progressive neoliberal social theory -- Communication and the end of neoliberal politics -- A material consolidation -- Summary and outlook -- 1 Algorithms and the Critical Theory of Technology -- Data, politics and rights -- The code of capital -- Code as material governance -- Computational reason
Liberation is not opaque -- 2 The One- Dimensionality of Data -- Acemoglu and Robinson's econometrics -- The politics of quantities -- Reification, mystification and alienation -- The spector of positivism -- A depoliticization of the social question -- 3 Reactionary Tendencies in the Ruling Class -- Finance and class struggle -- Downplaying class differentiation -- Information robber barons -- Infrastructures for reactionary politics -- Ruling class solidarity -- 4 Platforms of Power -- Staving off class struggle 'from below' -- Democratic socialism was the compromise
The retreat from basic descriptions -- Courting disaster -- Institutionalizing hierarchy -- 5 The Whiteness of Communication Studies -- The conception of progress -- Race in America -- Misrecognition and modernity -- Capitalism's extra- economic dimensions -- 6 Misinformation and Ideology -- Popular rhetorics of misinformation -- Ideology and politics -- Reactionary racial agendas -- Externalization -- 7 Testbeds for Authoritarianism -- The reconceptualization of war -- Experimentation on new frontiers -- Blended information warfare -- Technology as the so- called solution to the social question
Conclusion: The Fatal Abstractions of Capitalist Rule -- Mystification, rationalization, externalization -- References -- Index -- Back Cover
Summary
This book is a timely analysis of the growing impact of digital technologies on populism in the US and beyond. Scott Timcke uses Marxist analysis to explore the way digital devices, social networks, data and algorithms, and the technology giants that lie behind them, are changing the way people think about politics and society.
Note
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on February 10, 2021).
