POSTDIGITAL POLITICS: or, How To Be An Anti-Bourgeois Theorist

This is an extended ‘author’s cut’ of a chapter that was first published as Gary Hall ‘Postdigital Politics’, in Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder, eds, Aesthetics of the Commons (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2021) https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/postdigital-politics-6925

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In ‘Postdigital Politics’ I examine our contemporary postdigital political conjuncture. This conjuncture, I argue, springs from the crisis of representative democracy we are currently experiencing and involves a shift to more direct forms of democracy via postdigital communications. The latter is evident in the decentralised manner in which movements such as the Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter operate. I analyse how the traditional political opposition between ‘left’ and ‘right’ has been overlaid in many places around the world by that between populist nativism and elitist internationalism. I also discuss the way in which populist right-wing politicians (e.g., Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro) have used the possibilities created by postdigital media technologies to create a new model of political communications, one that is capable of overcoming the apparent disconnect between professional politicians and ‘the people’.

By way of response, I offer some suggestions as to how those of us who position ourselves on the left of the political spectrum can resist this political takeover by the populist authoritarian right. In other words, I show how the new postdigital communications can be used for more progressive purposes that are attuned to today’s changed political landscape. Among the illustrative examples provided will be some of the grassroots, bottom-up projects for the production of free resources, technical infrastructures and the commons that myself and some of those I collaborate with have developed over the last twenty years. Those projects include, but are not limited to: the open access journal Culture Machine (http://culturemachine.net); the publishing house Open Humanities Press (www.openhumanitiespress.org); the online publishing experiments Liquid Books (http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/) and Living Books About Life (http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/); the Radical Open Access Collective (http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk); the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition (https://www.mandela27.com); the video-book after.video (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/after-video); COPIM (https://copim.pubpub.org/); and the Public Library: Memory of the World project (https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2015/05/27/repertorium_public_library).

By way of theoretical framing, I examine the particular mode of postdigital politics that underpins these initiatives. I will also foreground a number of operative concepts that help to shape them, with a special focus on anti-bourgeois theory.