Seizing the Means of Prediction: Interrogating Populist Technologies in the Emerging Asocial Society

Abstract

By enabling the compilation of ‘big data’ from which knowledge of our patterns of thought, consumption, and action can be drawn, social media platforms give state and non-state actors private access to our political imaginations and thus expose the fault lines within our collective consciousness. This paper investigates how emerging and disruptive populist technologies automate the manufacturing of consent on social media platforms and the impact these technologies are having on our civil discourse and democratic sovereignty. Populist technologies can be understood as the dialectical Other of techno-neoliberalism. Where techno-neoliberalism functions as an assemblage of the political power of the state, the market power of corporations and the scientific know-how of technocrats, we can see populist technologies suturing old hatreds with new technologies. While populist media technologies have been analyzed as software and engineering technologies, they have yet to be considered from a psychoanalytic political theory perspective. The socio-cultural effects of the changing nature of digital propaganda are only just beginning to be understood, and the advancement of this understanding is complicated by the unprecedented union of the social and the technical that the internet has enabled, and which has subsequently resulted in the erosion of democratic practices. Given the competing needs of security and privacy in an increasingly datafied asocial society, the need to understand how big data analytics shape contemporary electoral dynamics has taken on a new level of urgency. Using the lens of psychoanalytic political theory, this paper engages in a critical analysis of the implications of emergent digital technologies for public discourse and political practice in the age of (a)social media.