Forthcoming – Journal of Islamic and Muslim Societies
Thinking about Islam, Politics and
Muslim Identity in a Digital Age
Abstract
Since digitality emerges from a western, Eurocentric weltanschauung, it follows that the
digital sphere tacitly rejects Islam and Muslims, where Islam and Muslims are the archetypal
Other of the west. Digitality is a continuation of Orientalism, or a Eurocentric
power/knowledge project of (continued) global domination. Given Eurocentrism’s inherent
racism, given digitality’s omnipresence, and given that Islamophobia is the paradigmatic
example of racism, it is inevitable that there will be more and more anti-Islamic/anti-Muslim
sentiments throughout the world. This essay is an examination of the ways in which politics
in the digital age are re-configured to fit specific parameters preordained by the digital
sphere, and, concurrently, ideas around Islam and Muslimness—whether according to the
wider social (media) landscape or by Muslim actors themselves—are also significantly reshaped by digitality. Digital Islam is disrupting traditional ulematic authority in ways never
seen before. This is because authority/knowledge within the interactive spaces of Web 2.0 is
dissected, reconfigured and reassembled as another kind of knowledge. Digitality is
challenging various branches of Islam (whether Shia, Sunni, Wahhabi, or what have you),
when it comes to their authority, not least because traditional Islamic authorities have to
now—consciously and unconsciously—comport themselves and their message to the logic
of digitality.
1
Introduction
Since digitality—which I define as a coherent mode of being and thinking in the world that
emerges as a result of our living and being through digital media and technologies—emerges
from a western, Eurocentric weltanschauung (Silicon Valley is of course the major
progenitor of digital technologies, and is itself dominated by Eurocentric assumptions
around knowledge, what it means to be human, and how the west relates to the rest of the
world), it follows that the digital sphere tacitly rejects Islam and Muslims, where Islam and
Muslims are the archetypal Other of the west.1
Digitality is the west writ large, and, as such, it is a continuation of the west’s neocolonial penetration of the rest of the world. It is therefore inseparable from the west’s
Orientalist machinations, which are conscious and unconscious. This point builds on Wael
Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowedge,2 in which Hallaq argues that “in
modernity, Orientalism, like power, is everywhere.” “‘Orientalism’ can be said to pervade
nearly all academic fields, making such disciplines as philosophy and engineering no
different, in their knowledge structure, from Orientalism itself, as conventionally
understood.”3 Digitality, for me, is a continuation of Orientalism, or a Eurocentric
power/knowledge project of (continued) global domination. Given Eurocentrism’s inherent
racism, given digitality’s omnipresence, and given that Islamophobia is the paradigmatic
example of racism, it is inevitable that there will be more and more anti-Islamic/anti-Muslim
sentiments throughout the world.
What all of this means as far as how Muslims and Islam are conceived by the wider
social (media4) landscape, as well as the parameters and contents of how Muslims are to
conceive of themselves and their religion, they are significantly (re)shaped by the logics of
digitality. For example, the idea of religious authority in Islam is being radically
2
reconfigured. As the sociologist Saskia Sassen has pointed out, as I discuss in greater detail
below, the digital domain breaks up knowledge and reconstitutes it in such a way that we
lose the original “packaging” such that new possibilities open up. Although Sassen does not
mention this next point explicitly, this repackaging of knowledge—or anything that is
digitized—is due to the way in which digitization works. It breaks all information up into
tiny packets which can be transmitted across the net and then reassembled at the other end.
These packets are the metaphor for the way in which the internet works. If anything and
everything can be spliced-up, this means that everything and anything is reducible to
anything and everything else, because packets in and of themselves have no greater meaning,
and this allows for putting random and unrelated packets together willy-nilly. The net result,
therefore, is that all aspects of human life are manipulable, replaceable, and substitutable.
I specifically look at an example in 2014 when Tariq Ramadan announced online he
would not be attending that year’s ISNA and RIS conferences (the two largest Islamic
conferences in the US and Canada respectively) due to the tacit approval by senior leaders of
the two organizations of oppressive regimes in the Middle East and their lack of criticism of
the US for its support of such regimes. Examining Ramadan’s critique of ISNA and RIS,
which caused a considerable amount of consternation and self-reflection amongst Muslims
in North America, I argue that Ramadan, in his critiquing of influential traditional Islamic
authorities, was/is re-configuring Islamic authority through digitality (all these conversations
occurred online).
Without going into further detail about Ramadan here, I would like to mention the
phenomenon of what many Muslim scholars refer to as “Shaykh Google.” These Muslim
scholars complain that all too often Muslim masses—the awam—who are not trained in the
requisite Islamic sciences and therefore have little-to-no background knowledge to tell the
3
difference between ideas—or, more commonly, within the Islamic context, fatwas—that are
true and those that are false—resort to Googling ideas on various issues. This phenomenon,
on the one hand, may be said to lead to a certain degree of leveling, or democratization of
Islamic authority. But, as with the widespread problem of fake news, where anyone and
everyone can write and opine on issues as they see fit and without any regulation, the problem
of “Shaykh Google” is that it churns up ideas and fatwas pertaining to Islam and Muslimness
that are all too often fake, and/or harmful. On the other end of the spectrum there is the
phenomenon within Muslim circles of a radical reduction of Islam and Muslimess to memes.
To give you an example I recently came across: “Atheism: 1+1+1 = 0 / Christianity:
1+1+1 = 1 / These people need some math lessons!”. Of course a simple retort to such a
meme could be “Islam: ∞ = 1”. The point therefore is that complex socio-religious
phenomena cannot be reduced to memes (a paradigmatic example of communication in the
digital world), except that they strip them to their most basic elements, which is the logic of
fundamentalisms of all stripes, not to mention ultra-nationalisms and, indeed, fascism.
Many Muslim scholars and Islamic institutions have been responding to the
phenomenon of Shaykh Google, and digitality as such, by creating significant online
presences. Indeed, pretty much any Muslim scholar of note conducts a significant portion
of his (they are mostly male) dawa online. What this means, however, is that such scholars
are forced to comport their ideas about Islam and Muslimness according to the dictates of
digitality.
In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr describes how the
typewriter affected Nietzsche’s writing style (after Nietzsche took to typing as opposed to
writing longhand due to his failing eyesight), quoting the German media scholar Friedrich A.
Kittler who notes that Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from
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thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”5 As with any medium and mode of
thinking and being, digitality has its own logic and coherence, which informs the “message”
rather than the other way around, as Marshall McLuhan famously said: “The medium is the
message.” In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,6 Neil Postman observes the
radical and unpredictable ways in which new technologies reconfigure what it means to be
human and how we interact with each other. From the other end of the spectrum, Nicholas
Negroponte writes in Being Digital: “Computing is not about computers any more. It is
about living.”7 Traditional Islamic authorities have to therefore compete—whether
consciously or unconsciously—with the assumptions and logics of digitality as far as their
presentation/s of Islam and Muslimness. Some of the features of digitality are: (1)
“presentism,” which, according to Douglas Rushkoff, is an ever elusive state of being always
and forever at the peak of a digital world of being-ness that is endlessly unfolding, struck as
we all are by “present shock,” unable to formulate and follow with any depth serious
narratives8 ; (2) a tendency towards in-coherence and fragmentation; (3) assumptions
about what it means to be human, which are all increasingly incompatible with older models.
I discuss further in this article how Muslims and Islam are always already cast as
needing reform in accordance with the wider social/media landscape. As I argue in my essay
“Woolwich Terror, Surveillance, and the (Im)Possibility of Islamic Reform,” “Muslims
across the board have internalized the western discourse of the need to reform as a type of
self-surveillance and as a means of living and being in the world.”9 What I argue additionally
in this essay is that self-surveillance—and comporting oneself to western modes of being
and thinking—is significantly the product of digitality.
Thus, the very idea of Islam and Muslimness in the digital age must be seen through
a digitally-construed world, whereby it is not so much that it is impossible to be Muslim in the
5
digital era, but that Islam and Muslimness have to repackaged in a way that is appropriate for
the medium. (I argue that such repackaging is in fact part and parcel of a wider Muslim
dialectic between extremism and moderate Islam, whereby Muslims, consciously and
unconsciously, comport themselves within parameters set for them by the west.)
Concurrently (and relatedly), the idea of politics must also pass through digitality, such that
politics in the old sense of the word—which depends on informed citizenries—is no longer
possible. What follows, therefore, is an examination of the ways in which politics in the
digital age are re-configured to fit specific parameters, preordained by digitality, and,
concomitantly, ideas around Islam and Muslimness—whether according to the wider
social/media landscape or by Muslim actors themselves—are also significantly re-shaped by
digitality.
Web 2.0(X), Digitality, Politics 2.0(X)
In his important exposé of digital media and marketing, Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions Of A
Media Manipulator, Ryan Holiday writes:
“Blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters…discover and borrow the
news. This hidden cycle gives birth to the memes that become our cultural
references, the budding stars who become our celebrities, the thinkers who become
our gurus, and the news that becomes our news.”10
The emergence of Web 2.0—the shift from the static webpages of Web 1.0 to
dynamic or user-generated content and the growth of social media—has meant an
unprecedented amount of user-generated content. However, the notion that such “freedom
of information” spells “freedom of the people” is utopian. As Evgeny Morozov argues in
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,11 the net result of internet freedom is
greater authoritarian control as people, awash with bread and circus—with mindless chatter,
and entertainment, and sex on the tap—are wholly prone to manipulation.
6
Parallel with the emergence of Web 2.0 there is the emergence of what I call Web
2.0(X), which is characterized by deep structural surveillance and social engineering being
conducted by the NSA and social media companies such as Facebook.12 Web 2.0(X) has
been playing a significant role in deciding for us both what we get to see on (what used to be
called) the worldwide web, and how we see it. Anyone who studies the history of
media/propaganda13 has to take into account the massive role played by media outlets in
manufacturing consent, to use Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s powerful turn of
phrase.14
Once again, it’s important to realize that digital technologies have not had an overall
democratizing effect on the way knowledge is produced and consumed. Current attempts
across the world by governments to curb internet freedom speak precisely to this problem.15
Indeed, digitality allows for the manipulation of people in rather direct ways. The Trump
presidential election campaign hired the same company used by the Brexit campaign,
Cambridge Analytica, which used Big Data and social media platforms such as Facebook to
manipulate voters.16
The question on the liberal left’s collective mind since Trump’s election to the office
of the 45th president of the United States—but not on the mind of right-wing Republicans,
for whom, as represented by the popular broadcaster Alex Jones and his millions of listeners,
Trump’s victory is nothing short of an act of God and a sign of the imminence of Christ’s
return17—has been “How? How did Trump get elected?” There is of course a certain
theory put forward: Russians interfered in the elections through a massive disinformation or
trolling campaign “through the cyber-theft of private data, the placement of propaganda
against particular candidates, and an overall effort to undermine public faith in the U.S.
democratic process.”18
7
Six years prior to Trump’s presidential victory, Noam Chomsky predicted that if a
charismatic man ran for president—on a platform of making illegal immigrants and Blacks
the enemy, while also turning white males into a persecuted minority—he would sweep the
elections.19 A key element that Chomsky’s astute prediction left out was the Muslim
question. Muslims—that is, the demonization of Muslims—have been a significant part of
Trump’s rise to power, just as it was a key element in Brexit earlier in 2016.
Ralph Schroeder argues in Social Theory After the Internet: Media, Technology, and
Globalization20 that digitality has radically transformed society in the last twenty-five years—
from how people interact with one another to how they conceive of themselves, from how
knowledge is produced and consumed to affecting the extent to which we can learn in the
first place, from the ways in which people participate in the political process to the very
reconfiguration of the political landscape. On the last point, Schroeder argues that Brexit
and Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential elections were in fact made possible by the
internet.
The politics that emerges as a result of Web 2.0(X) may therefore be called Politics
2.0(X), where Politics 2.0(X) is not only actively shaped by powerbrokers behind Web
2.0(X), it is also characterized by a digital media political landscape where political news
stories vie with other forms of entertainment for viewers’ attention. This role of “the
spectacle” in fashioning today’s political landscape is summed-up by a Wisecrack video:
“According to Guy Debord, this is emblematic of a larger problem. Debord’s The
Society of Spectacle21 warns of a culture driven entirely by image, where people are more
concerned with how they are perceived than how they actually are. And if we are
primed to love spectacle, then why not go with the most spectacular [political]
candidate? The thing that sells best in the spectacle driven society is the
distraction.”22
In other words, the nature of the spectacle—and we are all embroiled in the
spectacle, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not—is such, and it has such
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hegemonic power, that it shapes what we do or do not do in our everyday lives, so much so
that the ways in which people perform Islam and Muslimness is significantly shaped by the
idea of the spectacle. In “Woolwich Terror, Surveillance, and the (Im)Possibility of Islamic
Reform,” I argue that Muslims comport themselves—whether physically, sartorially,
ideologically, or what have you—in relation to dominant western modes of being and
thinking.23 To continue this line of thinking, it is my contention that Muslims always already
conform themselves—whether consciously or unconsciously—to the dominant modes of
being mediated to them through digitality, whose omnipresence, and whose western
normative modes of being and thinking, cannot but influence not only Muslims but people
of all types and religious and political persuasions.
Surface has won over substance. Emotionalism has won over facts and discussion.
Tariq Ramadan and the (Re)Configuration of Islamic Authority on Web 2.0
Tariq Ramadan’s 2014 article “Why I will not attend the ISNA and RIS conferences”24
caused a considerable amount of consternation within North American Muslim circles.
Ramadan wrote that he would not attend the ISNA and RIS conferences in 2014—the two
largest Islamic conferences in North America—because of the silence of ISNA’s leadership
before unconscionable US foreign and domestic policies, as well as because of an RIS
leadership that supports dictators in the Middle East.
In his piece Ramadan mentioned that year’s White House iftar (Trump of course no
longer holds the White House iftar), where Obama spoke of “Israel’s […] right to defend
itself against what I consider to be inexcusable attacks from Hamas,”25 while Muslim leaders
attending the iftar remained silent. Ramadan contended that ISNA and RIS are run by
supposedly Sufi-inspired men who say “Yes sir!” to power, whether in the US or in the
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Middle East. With regard to the Middle East, Ramadan was immediately referencing Habib
Ali al-Jifri—an influential Islamic scholar based in Abu Dhabi, with 6 million followers on
Facebook—and his “prayer of tawfiq” for Egyptian president Sisi.26
Discussions on Tariq Ramadan’s piece occurred in a few Listservs and Facebook discussion
groups, falling on the sides of “for” and “against,” as well as trying to see “both sides of the
argument.” It is particularly interesting to examine how Islamic authority itself is configured
and reconfigured in these discussions. MEISGS (Middle East and Islamic Studies Graduate
Students) is a Listserv populated by Muslims academics at various levels in their careers,
from full professors to graduate students. An illuminating thread of the discussion emerged
from an implicit positionality whereby academics see themselves as set apart from and possessing
greater intellectual tools than traditional ‘ulema.
One of the discussants on MEISGS—Mohammad Fadel, who is associate professor
at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto—described al-Jifri’s position as a rather
typical, premodern juristic position. Fadel thus placed al-Jifri in the position of a premodern
subject. This in itself is of course a significant move, not least because this automatically
places Fadel in the position of modern subject, and, as such, as being (more) in line with the
west, while al-Jifri is ipso facto less so. All of this locates the Muslim subject—both Fadel
and al-Jifri—within the politics of Islamophobia, as David Tyrer argues,27 as far as the
dialectic of extremist and moderate, whereby the Muslim subject is always seeking to argue
that s/he is more or less moderate (in line with the west), or extreme (opposed to the west).
Sociologist Saskia Sassen points out how knowledge within the digital realm is
reconstituted and reassembled as another kind of knowledge: “[T]he body of knowledge
gets distributed and spliced-up in different ways so that you lose the packaging, and in losing
that packaging all sorts of possibilities open up.”28 What I want to draw attention to is the
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way in which al-Jifri and his authority (where authority and power are co-constitutive of the
power/knowledge dyad) was reconfigured, dissected, and re-appropriated such that the
discussants on MEISGS assume their own, individual domains of authority. This is part and
parcel of the formation of the modern (Muslim) self, and how she appropriates for herself
interpretive right and authority, which is in contrast to the ijazas (licenses to teach) circulated
within traditional Islamic circles.
For Ramadan, being authentically Islamic entails critical voices amongst Muslims
living in the West who are able to express their opinions in a manner, and with a freedom,
that is denied Muslims in other parts of the world. For Ramadan, such critical voices call to
and are guided by the values of Islam. Such analyses show us the complexity with which the
“social digital ecology” (Sassen) takes on its shape, formation, and growth within the
interactive spaces of Web 2.0. Islamic authority/knowledge is dissected, reconfigured, and
reassembled. In the face of such complexity Sassen argues crucially for “recurrence as a
critical element for recapturing a sense of the complex system.” So what is recurring in these
examples?
There is the issue of what is considered “correctly Islamic.” In a subsequent
interview Ramadan spoke of the necessity of being courageous at the same time as being
wise.29 Ramadan was responding to Sherman Jackson and his letter urging Ramadan to
reconsider his decision not to participate at ISNA, because of the damage it would do to the
“unity” of the American Muslim community. While Jackson applauded Ramadan’s courage,
he suggested it would be wiser for Ramadan to reconsider his decision not to attend ISNA.
Ramadan retorted that “his absence would certainly be the most powerful speech [he] has
ever given at ISNA,” and that the importance of courage and wisdom in the face of
injustices, no matter where they are suffered, is part and parcel of a correct Islamic ethos.
11
The “critical element” (to benefit from Sassen) that is recurring in all of the above is
a reconfigured, reconstituted, and reassembled notion of Islamic authority, of knowledge, of
the performativity of Islamic knowledge, and of one’s “Islamic” credentials. Sassen remarks
that “in informalizing knowledge [we] are also reassembling.” Digitality informalizes and
reassembles Islamic knowledge and authority.
All this being said, the re-shaping of Islamic discourse—by Muslims—is not
separable from the wider media-political environment within which we all—whether Muslim
or otherwise—live and breathe. As Ryan Holiday argues, as mentioned earlier, digital media
shape the offline world in ways that we do not initially realize. Muslims are always seeking to
fashion themselves in response to western modes of being and thinking (meaning, they
necessarily contain significant aspects of western paradigms),30 and digitality is creating a
hegemonic mode of being whose logic is inescapable.
Related to all this, it is not insignificant that new kinds of Islamic authority are
emerging through the academy that has its own mode of thinking and being, which, as Wael
Hallaq argues in Restating Orientalism, is mired in Orientalism. As such, the very projects of
people such as Ramadan and others—whether or not they are directly connected with the
academy—to a lesser or greater degree conform to western paradigms.
“Humanity” and the End of Political Correctness
In a Big Think video—titled “How Political Correctness Actually Elected Donald
Trump”31—Slavoj Žižek contends that political correctness does not work when it is used as
a means of regulating what people are allowed to say or not to say at a time when public
mores (“the unwritten rules”) have broken down. An extreme example of this is what Žižek
calls “administration political correctness,” where “waterboarding” was described by former
12
US President George W. Bush as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”32 On the other
hand, there is a type of political correctness that is emphasized by what Žižek calls the “old
Cold War establishment,” as represented by Hillary Clinton (given that people such as Paul
Wolfowitz spoke in her favor). For Žižek, the old guard—with its entrenched history of
“manufacturing consent,” who “spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a
condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class [as Chris Hedges
puts it]”33—had to give way to “one moment of truth…the traditional machine of
manufacturing consent no longer works.”34
In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr35 examines how
the internet is re-shaping our brains, and also that people are unable to follow long
discussions on the web. Similarly, I think digitality is responsible for rendering
incomprehensible more nuanced policies and arguments as far as the complexity of national
identity and belonging. And while media/propaganda has arguably always tended towards
simplification, which has always tended towards binary propositions, which has always
tended towards populism, digitality is now taking those tendencies to their logical extremes.
The rise of the far-right in Europe and America is not coincidental as far as the rise
of digitality. Digitality necessitates opinions that are more fanciful than they are true, for the
fundamental reason that the economy of the digital realm depends on clickable content
which needs to be more and more slanted towards falsehood. Truth in the digital sphere is
less click-worthy. As Ryan Holiday points out, the nature of print newspapers with their
limited space was such that by featuring someone in their daily edition they were doing that
person a favor. In the digital domain, where space is unlimited and the key concern is page
views, people providing the news item/s are doing the blog a favor. Within this metric, as
Holiday points out further, emotion is always the deciding factor as far as “clickability.” And
13
the emotion that attracts the most attention is anger, which often goes hand in hand with
fear.
Trump’s election campaign was rooted significantly in fostering anger and fear vis-àvis the Other—Mexicans, Muslims, liberals selling out the country to an Islamic agenda. It’s
not coincidental that Trump’s platform was heavily slanted against Islam and Muslims. A
report published by CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and UC Berkeley in
2016 reveals that 200 million dollars were provided to 33 Islamophobic groups nationwide
to fund what Nathan Lean calls the Islamophobia industry.36
In this connection here are a few observations: Digitality is Eurocentric, it is partial
to whites and males,37 and it is therefore—at its core—Islamophobic.38 This is not really that
large a claim to make when we observe that modern western civilization emerges to a
significant degree out of a demonization of Islam and Muslims. Added to that we should
consider that the provenance of digitality is a west rooted in assumptions about its own
superiority, and, if anything, it is re-doubling its efforts in asserting its identity in opposition
to “the rest” of the world, most notably “the Muslim world.”
It is for this reason that the far-right both in the US and in Europe has made it a
major rallying cry to be hostile towards Islam and Muslims, arguing that there is a conspiracy
to Islamize the west which the left has been colluding in by refusing to criticize Islam and
Muslims. As a result of this characterization of Islam and Muslims—as being harbingers of
all that is anti-human, from jihad, to depriving women of their rights, to sharia, and
terrorism—the current political climate in Europe and in the US is increasingly intolerant,
and is showing in stark terms the limits of western democracy.
As a final observation, Talal Asad examines the genealogy of the idea of
“humanity”—its Christian roots, and how it was originally constructed as a means of
14
demarcating between people, as opposed to including everyone.39 In the age of digitality
Muslims are increasingly marginalized. As an indicator—and, being the world’s largest
platform for people to socialize and share news stories Facebook is a barometer of some
measure—Muslims have been complaining for some years that terrorist attacks in Muslim
countries do not provoke the creation of Facebook “filters” as the “we are all Paris” filter
following the Paris attacks on November 13, 2015, for example, and other similar filters.
The reason for this is a simple one. Digitality is geared towards the creation of people who
belong to “humanity” as opposed to those who do not.
And Muslims—as far as digitality writ large—are considered less and less human.
1
Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian idealism is universalistic in its scope. This is in keeping
with the universalism that characterizes secular liberal ideals, and which are assumed to
constitute the standard against which the rest of the world’s modes of being and thinking are
measured. Over the decades, Talal Asad has sought to uncover the assumptions that go into
making western ideals, notions such as “secularism,” “religion,” “agency,”
“humanitarianism,” to name a few. It is my contention, therefore, that digitality emerges
genealogically from the same epistemological sources, and, as such, its conscious and
unconscious motives are very similar: to extend a Eurocentric, hegemonic discourse about
what it means to be human throughout the rest of the world.
2
Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowedge (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018 [forthcoming]).
3
Wael Hallaq, “Orientalism After Edward Said,” TRTWorld, January 20, 2018, (accessed
January 22, 2018) https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/orientalism-after-edward-said-14254
4
Society today is not only inconceivable without reference to social media, its very
parameters and content—its limits and topics of discussion—are re-configured through the
social media landscapes (whether Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and so
on).
5
Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July/August 2008
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-usstupid/306868/
6
Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books,
1993)
7
Nicholas P. Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 4.
8
Douglas Rushkoff argues brilliantly in Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New
York, NY: Current, 2014) that as a result of the dissonance between our digital selves—
which is endlessly updating itself and being re-imagined—and our analog bodies, we have
been thrown into a new state of anxiety: present shock.
15
9
Hasan Azad, “Woolwich Terror, Surveillance, and the (Im)Possibility of Islamic Reform,”
Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, 102.
10
Ryan Holiday, Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (New York:
Portfolio/Penguin, 2017), 14.
11
Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York:
PublicAffairs, 2011).
12
Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014);
“The Manipulators: Facebook’s Social Engineering Project,” LA Review of Books,
September 14, 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/manipulators-facebooks-socialengineering-project
13
The dyad media/propaganda points to the mutually constitutive relationship between
media and propaganda that has been around for nearly a hundred years.
14
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manfacturing Consent: The Political Ecomony of the
Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
15
“Chris Hedges, David North Discuss How to Defend Internet Freedom,” Truthdig,
January 16, 2018 https://www.truthdig.com/videos/watch-chris-hedges-david-northdiscuss-defend-internet-freedom/
16
“The Data That Turned the World Upside Down,” Motherboard,
Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, January 28, 2017
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump
17
“Alex Jones prayerfully reflects on the victory of President Trump,” November 9, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVp7XTsBXx4
18
Angie Frobnic Holan, “2017 Lie of the Year: Russian election interference is a ‘made-up
story’,”Politifact, December 12, 2017 http://www.politifact.com/truth-ometer/essay/2017/dec/12/2017-lie-year-russian-election-interference-made-s/
19
Chris Hedges, “Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This,” Truthdig,
Apr 19, 2010
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/noam_chomsky_has_never_seen_anything_like_thi
s_20100419
20
Ralph Schroeder, Social Theory After the Internet: Media, Technology, and Globalization (London:
UCL Press, 2018 [forthcoming]).
21
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Kalamazoo, MI: Black
& Red Books, 1967).
22
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25
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30
To consider the Taoist symbol taijitu, it reveals not only the containing within the black
teardrop an eye of white or within the white teardrop an eye of black, but also the black’s
desire to encompass the white as its tail extends and elongates and disappears into
nothingness, as does also the white.
31
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of_american_fascism_20160302
34 Slavoj Žižek
35
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37
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38
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39
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17