This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence, and ideology, their group dynamics, and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and... more
This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence, and ideology, their group dynamics, and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and political formations of digital capitalism. Interrogating not only the founders’ political and economic ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in our everyday lives, the authors provide robust evidence that a specific kind of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism’s mode of command. The ‘New Patriarchs’ examined over the course of the book include: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Peter Thiel. We also include Sheryl Sandberg. The book analyses how these (mostly) men legitimate their rapidly acquired power, tying a novel kind of socially awkward but ‘visionary’ masculinity to exotic forms of shareholding. Drawing on a ten million word digital concordance, the authors intervene in feminist debates on patriarchy, masculinity, and postfeminism, locating the power of the founders as emanating from a specifically racialised structure of oppression tied to imaginaries of the American frontier, the patriarchal household, and settler colonialism. This is an important interdisciplinary contribution suitable for researchers and students across Digital Media, Media and Communication, and Gender and Cultural Studies
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This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence, and ideology, their group dynamics, and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and... more
This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence, and ideology, their group dynamics, and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and political formations of digital capitalism. Interrogating not only the founders’ political and economic ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in our everyday lives, the authors provide robust evidence that a specific kind of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism’s mode of command. The ‘New Patriarchs’ examined over the course of the book include: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Peter Thiel. We also include Sheryl Sandberg. The book analyses how these (mostly) men legitimate their rapidly acquired power, tying a novel kind of socially awkward but ‘visionary’ masculinity to exotic forms of shareholding. Drawing on a ten million word digital concordance, the authors intervene in feminist debates on patriarchy, masculinity, and postfeminism, locating the power of the founders as emanating from a specifically racialised structure of oppression tied to imaginaries of the American frontier, the patriarchal household, and settler colonialism. This is an important interdisciplinary contribution suitable for researchers and students across Digital Media, Media and Communication, and Gender and Cultural Studies
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Online platforms are the origin of much of the content of the culture wars as well as the home for many of its struggles. This discussion looks at how the internet now functions as the most successful recruiting tool for far–right... more
Online platforms are the origin of much of the content of the culture wars as well as the home for many of its struggles. This discussion looks at how the internet now functions as the most successful recruiting tool for far–right politics in history. Millions of people are consuming, repeating and disseminating far–right 'culture war' material online, but if you do not seek out that content and are not served it by algorithms, it's very likely you'd never know it was there. And it is this media content and its vast audiences that increasingly shape contemporary mainstream politics. So if you want to know where the rhetoric and ideas of Donald Trump or Kemi Badenoch come from, this article will give you some good places to start.
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Online platforms are the origin of much of the content of the culture wars as well as the home for many of its struggles. This discussion looks at how the internet now functions as the most successful recruiting tool for far–right... more
Online platforms are the origin of much of the content of the culture wars as well as the home for many of its struggles. This discussion looks at how the internet now functions as the most successful recruiting tool for far–right politics in history. Millions of people are consuming, repeating and disseminating far–right 'culture war' material online, but if you do not seek out that content and are not served it by algorithms, it's very likely you'd never know it was there. And it is this media content and its vast audiences that increasingly shape contemporary mainstream politics. So if you want to know where the rhetoric and ideas of Donald Trump or Kemi Badenoch come from, this article will give you some good places to start.
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Paul Mason, Post-Capitalism: A guide to our future, Allen Lane 2015 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Post-Capitalism and a world without work, Verso 2015 Reviewed by Ben Little
Research Interests: History and Capitalism
Paul Mason, Post-Capitalism: A guide to our future, Allen Lane 2015 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Post-Capitalism and a world without work, Verso 2015 Reviewed by Ben Little
Research Interests: History and Capitalism
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Ben Little and Alison Winch explain the different meanings of generation in political culture and highlight the tension that exists between them. They argue that a successful application of the concept is able to mark both continuity and... more
Ben Little and Alison Winch explain the different meanings of generation in political culture and highlight the tension that exists between them. They argue that a successful application of the concept is able to mark both continuity and difference, turning the power of conservative thought to radical ends. In mainstream political culture, one of the most frequently recurring - and ...
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Ben Little and Alison Winch explain the different meanings of generation in political culture and highlight the tension that exists between them. They argue that a successful application of the concept is able to mark both continuity and... more
Ben Little and Alison Winch explain the different meanings of generation in political culture and highlight the tension that exists between them. They argue that a successful application of the concept is able to mark both continuity and difference, turning the power of conservative thought to radical ends. In mainstream political culture, one of the most frequently recurring - and ...
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Post-election 2015 general election analysis of the Miliband-Brand interview in April 2015.
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Post-election 2015 general election analysis of the Miliband-Brand interview in April 2015.
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In 2017, Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, travelled America with a former White House photographer who took pictures of him sharing meals with families, workforces and refugee communities. These were then posted to Zuckerberg’s... more
In 2017, Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, travelled America with a former White House photographer who took pictures of him sharing meals with families, workforces and refugee communities. These were then posted to Zuckerberg’s Facebook page, usually with a post by Zuckerberg drawing attention to socioeconomic issues affecting different American communities. This article argues that Zuckerberg is mediated on this tour as a worthy populist contender to Donald Trump, albeit of a centrist, liberal, corporate kind. In particular, divisions along the lines of race, migration and class, which have been appropriated and emphasised by Trump, are apparently bridged and resolved through the representation of Zuckerberg, and the promotion of Facebook as a mediated fulcrum for civil society. Zuckerberg is pictured sharing food with, for example, Republican voters in Ohio and Somali migrants in Minnesota. We investigate how the differences projected between Zuckerberg and Trump pivot o...
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Our case study looks at the events surrounding the sacking of Google engineer James Damore who was fired for authoring a memo which stated that women are biologically less suited to high-stress, high-status technical employment than men.... more
Our case study looks at the events surrounding the sacking of Google engineer James Damore who was fired for authoring a memo which stated that women are biologically less suited to high-stress, high-status technical employment than men. Damore, asserting that his document 'was absolutely consistent with what he'd seen online', instantly became an ambivalent hero of the alt-right. Like the men who own and run the companies of Silicon Valley, the software engineer subscribes to the idea that the world can be understood and altered through the rigorous application of the scientific method. And as he draws on bodies of knowledge from evolutionary psychology and mathematical biology, we see how the core belief structures of Silicon Valley, when transferred from the technical to the cultural and social domain, can reproduce the sort of misogynistic 'rationalism' that fuels the alt-right. We argue that Damore's memo is in line with Google's ideology of 'dat...
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In a video that showcases a new Facebook feature, Mark Zuckerberg chats to his users, telling them that he’s “just hanging out with you in my backyard.” In this video-which is on his Facebook page-Zuckerberg discloses the domestic space... more
In a video that showcases a new Facebook feature, Mark Zuckerberg chats to his users, telling them that he’s “just hanging out with you in my backyard.” In this video-which is on his Facebook page-Zuckerberg discloses the domestic space of his backyard, revealing his interaction with family and friends. Depicted hosting a barbeque while watching the electoral debate, Zuckerberg performs an affective white postfeminist paternity (Hamad, 2014) by talking about hunting, eating meat, and being a father. This video is key in explaining how Zuckerberg affectively models patriarchal power. We argue that this PR exercise (for both him and Facebook which are portrayed as inextricably linked) functions to represent Facebook as enabling an empowered “community,” rather than being just an instrument of data accumulation. In particular, Zuckerberg’s affective paternalism is also a means to recoup and obfuscate patriarchal power structures. Zuckerberg’s Facebook page constructs an intimate patern...
Research Interests: Sociology and Paternalism
Little, Ben (2006) 'Impractical Pragmatics in Doing Philosophy at the Movies', Film-Philosophy, v. 10., n. 3, pp. 122-128. <http:/www.film-philosophy.com/2006v10n3/little.pdf >. ISSN: 1466-4615 online ...... more
Little, Ben (2006) 'Impractical Pragmatics in Doing Philosophy at the Movies', Film-Philosophy, v. 10., n. 3, pp. 122-128. <http:/www.film-philosophy.com/2006v10n3/little.pdf >. ISSN: 1466-4615 online ... Impractical Pragmatics in Doing Philosophy at the Movies
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The final chapter uses the theoretical model advanced in Chapter 1 to provide a detailed exploration of four examples of Brand’s interventions into politics: the celebrity pseudo-event Buy Love Here in Los Angeles; his guest editing of... more
The final chapter uses the theoretical model advanced in Chapter 1 to provide a detailed exploration of four examples of Brand’s interventions into politics: the celebrity pseudo-event Buy Love Here in Los Angeles; his guest editing of the political magazine the New Statesman; his contribution to housing campaigns in East London; and finally his pre-election interview on The Trews with Labour Party leader Ed Miliband. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, the chapter argues that the precise form of the apparatus formed to make each of these interventions influences the kind of assemblage produced in response. It demonstrates that while in celebrity terms Brand’s interventions have been hugely successful in gaining media attention, the results have been very mixed in achieving their intentions or having a lasting political impact.
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[Summary of the book containing this chapter:] These essays from various critical disciplines examine how comic books and graphic narratives move between various media, while merging youth and adult cultures and popular and high art. The... more
[Summary of the book containing this chapter:] These essays from various critical disciplines examine how comic books and graphic narratives move between various media, while merging youth and adult cultures and popular and high art. The articles feature international perspectives on comics and graphic novels published in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Portugal, Germany, Turkey, India, and Japan. Topics range from film adaptation, to journalism in comics, to the current manga boom.
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A roundtable discussion on generational politic
Research Interests: Sociology and Mathematics
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... Full text is not in this repository. Item Type: Article. Additional Information: Expanded from the John A. Lent Scholarship Lecture International Comic Arts Forum 2008. Research Areas: Arts and Education > Media, Culture... more
... Full text is not in this repository. Item Type: Article. Additional Information: Expanded from the John A. Lent Scholarship Lecture International Comic Arts Forum 2008. Research Areas: Arts and Education > Media, Culture & Communication. ID Code: 5554. Deposited By: Ben Little ...
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Published in online debate by Soundings
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Soundings 4th Annual Summer Event: online debate summary article