Reactionary Technopolitics: A Critical Sociohistorical Review

This paper outlines a critical social history of reactionary media, political, and information networks—what I refer to generally as technopolitics—in the United States and their significance to the hostility towards truth and fact that is a central feature of our political present. I begin with a critical review of the unique right-wing media and political ecosystem that emerged from the alliance between neoliberalism and social conservatism in the twentieth-century. In the second section, I focus on digitization, Trump, and the alt-right, and discuss the historical tethers connecting the latter to the cyber-libertarians and white supremacists operating on the early internet. Next, I take stock of the history covered in the paper, and argue that we can see three general sociopolitical tendencies emerging from our current juncture: something like a paleoconservative hardening of the Republican Party's base; the degeneration of the core alt-right into white supremacist terrorism; and the rise of an "intellectualist" reactionary assemblage epitomized by the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). I provide a brief analysis of the IDW and discuss its chief political and social significance in the post-Trump, post-alt-right social landscape of what Jodi Dean describes as communicative capitalism. Author Biography Sean Doody, George Mason University Sean Doody is a sociology Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University studying political economy, science and technology, the politics of platforms, and digital cultures. His dissertation research focuses on the epistemological challenges and sociopolitical conflicts surrounding the rise of digitally-enabled autonomous political and epistemic communities online. His past work focused on precarious labor in the digital economy and its relationship to a pervasive cultural logic of entrepreneurship.