The end or extinction of the Internet and the massive expansion of platforms has been accompanied for many by a loss of the emancipatory potential of digital connectivity and by an overall degradation of the quality of political communication. While platforms as control technologies are no simple tools of emancipation, however, digital communication is far from being a pacified domain fully functional to the capitalist extraction of value. By expanding to billions worldwide from all kinds of backgrounds, digital networks are also inhabited by social groups expressing the oppositional consciousness of structural oppression based in gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and race. Caught between the attention economy’s drive to maximize engagement and algorithmic governmentality’s effort to secure circulation, the resurgence of feminism as well as the anti-feminist backlash of the manosphere express the ambivalence of digital platforms as sites of struggle .
Tiziana Terranova teaches, researches, lectures and writes about the culture and political economy of digital media and network cultures. She is currently Associate Professor in Cultural Studies and Digital Media at the Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’ where she co-founded the Technoculture Research Unit (www.technoculture.it). She is the author of Network Culture: politics for the information age (Pluto Press, 2004) and numerous other essays and reviews published in newspapers, magazines, websites and journals (il manifesto, mute, social text, theory, culture and society). She is a member of the editorial board of the journals Theory, Culture and Society; New Formations; Subjectivity, and Studi Culturali. She is currently working on a new book on the genealogy of digital social networks (Hypersocial. Minnesota University Press, forthcoming) and a collection of her essays on automation, neuro-capitalism, social cooperation and the commons is also to be published soon by Semiotext(e).