With an Internet connection you can download a free copy of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (2002 [1947]: 94–136) and, also for free, globally share your thoughts about it across social media. Is the contradiction between the essay’s coruscating critique of commodified culture and its apparently costless worldwide circulation a signal that cornucopian digital networks have completely outrun the grasp of critical theory? Or do Horkheimer and Adorno truculently maintain their relevance even in the face of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat? This chapter considers some moments in the short, fast history of the Internet and arguments made at each point about the obsolescence or confirmation of the ‘culture industry’ thesis. It starts with the simultaneous emergence of critical theory and cybernetics in Second World War America; jumps to the eruption of countercultural network politics in the late twentieth century; moves on to the triumph of social media capital in the first decade of the new millennium; arrives at today’s scene of surveillance, cyber-war and biospheric crisis; and concludes with reflections on critical theory’s adequacy to the contemporary mass culture of the Internet.1
The conditions that Horkheimer and Adorno addressed in their famous essay were those of North American Fordism – mass production in assembly line factories that raised corporate organization to a new intensity, employing an industrial workforce whose wages, elevated beyond mere subsistence, allowed mass consumption, of automobiles, highways, suburban homes, fossil fuels, appliances and entertainment. In this context, they identified a ‘culture industry’ constituted by Hollywood film, commercial radio and emergent television. While literature, music, painting and other cultural forms had previously been subject to market forces, commercial influences were refracted by traditions (however ultimately illusory) of artistic autonomy. The full integration of mass entertainment into the circuit of capital was built on foundations laid in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but above all on technological and organizational media innovations discovered during the Second World War, in particular the propaganda techniques pioneered by fascism, if practised by both sides.
In a continuation of this trajectory, Horkheimer and Adorno proposed, the culture industry dictated content from above, without ‘mechanism of reply’ (2002 [1947]: 96). It made culture itself a commodity, advertised other commodities, and habituated audiences to the identities and life rhythms required of workers and consumers by industrial capitalism. The industry was characterized by monopolistic ownership, was entirely driven by profit, generated formulaic, socially conformist content, depended on, and fetishized, new technologies, tended to the unification of film, radio and music in powerful multimedia fantasies ever more easily confounded with reality, and prescribed ‘fun’ as a ‘medicinal bath’ for the renewal of labour power and consumption capacity (2002 [1947]: 112). This account was embedded within a wider depiction of a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ whereby, within capital’s class-divided society, capacities to technologically rationalize, control and subdue nature were turned to exploit, subjugate and, potentially, destroy humanity itself.
Horkheimer and Adorno ignored elements of commodified popular culture that defied their portrait of total narcoticized pacification; Adorno’s notorious dismissal of jazz is the salient example (1983: 119–32). Nonetheless, their essay identified crucial elements of post-war boom capitalism, a capitalism that, as Fredric Jameson puts it, was increasingly made up not just of ‘things and relatively solid systems of power’ but of ‘ideological fantasms, bits and pieces of spiritualized matter, the solicitations of various kinds of dream-like mirages and cravings’ (2016: 19). Their portrait of a media sector dominated by conformist, advertising-sponsored entertainments, a portrait which Adorno continued to elaborate throughout his life (Bernstein, 1991), would be unwittingly endorsed even by many who did not share their critique of capitalism, such as the condemnation of networked television by Newton Norman Minow (1961), Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, as a ‘vast wasteland’.
Even as Horkheimer and Adorno composed ‘The Culture Industry’ within sight of Hollywood, elsewhere in the US forces that would eventually profoundly alter their object of critique were in motion. Scientists working for the war-effort on radar, ballistics, crypto-analysis and atomic weapons were laying the intellectual foundations of the Internet. A year after Dialectic of Enlightenment was published, Norbert Wiener’s (1948) Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine appeared. The new discipline it announced was already the topic of what would eventually be ten Macy Conferences held in New York from 1946 to 1953, bringing together computer scientists, psychologists and biologists to establish a body of thought with radical implications for the relation between humans and machines. The cyberneticists’ crucial insight was that machines were not just ‘heat engines’ generating energy by consuming fuels, but rather entities governed by information (Johnston, 2008: 28).
This idea would prove central to technological development in two distinct but related fields: automata (robots and other autonomous technologies) and digital networks. The latter path was opened by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s (1949) A Mathematical Theory of Communication which, by defining information in purely quantitative terms, allowed consideration of how human communication might be augmented by computers, or occur solely between machines. In 1962 J. R. Licklider, a Macy conference participant, admirer of Wiener, and disciple of Shannon, was appointed head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) for Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the institution that created what would eventually become the Internet. Arpanet, as early versions were known, continued cybernetics’ tradition of military sponsorship; although scientists involved in the project have tried to disavow its integral connections to nuclear war planning and weapons research, this is disingenuous (Abbate, 1999).
Nonetheless, Licklider and his colleagues did have wider visions for the application of what they whimsically termed The Intergalactic Network, visions they regarded as utopian, but which, from the point of view of Horkheimer and Adorno’s hostility to technocratic rationality, would seem nightmarish. While cyberneticists such as Wiener and John von Neumann focussed on prospects for artificial life and self-replicating robots, Licklider rather looked to a ‘very close coupling’ of humans with machines, in a ‘symbiotic’ partnership (Licklider, 1960). ‘Humans are noisy, narrow-band devices’ with ‘many parallel and simultaneously active channels’, he wrote, while computers are ‘very fast and very accurate, but constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time’. In 1960, commenting on a US Air Force estimate that it would take 15 years of man–computer interaction to make artificial intelligence do ‘problem solving of military significance’, Licklider agreed that ‘in due course’ humans would ‘concede dominance … of cerebration to machines alone’. However, he suggested, ‘The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind’ (1960: 2).
From the late 1940s to the 1960s, critical theory and cybernetics unfolded side by side, but with antithetical orientations. Wiener himself became revolted at the military and industrial applications of his new discipline, and denounced them; he and Adorno were almost simultaneously surveilled by the FBI (Conway and Siegelman, 2005; Jenemann, 2007). Nevertheless, cybernetics in its major strain continued to provide the intellectual-practical armature of a US military industrial complex waging both Cold and hot techno-war, from nuclear missile design to the electronic battlefields of Vietnam. Critical theory, on the contrary, articulated a philosophic and political repudiation of instrumental reason that would eventually inspire the student revolt and anti-war movements.
Herbert Marcuse (2012 [1964]) referred to the role of computers in deepening the ‘one dimensionality’ of US society, although he also saw liberatory potentialities in the automation of labour (Fuchs, 2016: 114–16). Horkheimer and Adorno did not directly comment on cybernetics, but their ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ clearly seemed to anticipate tendencies to digital command, control and militarization. Joseph Weizenbaum, among the first computer scientists to question the political direction of his discipline, drew on Horkheimer’s (1974) Eclipse of Reason to criticize the use of the computer as ‘an instrument pressed into the service of rationalizing, supporting and sustaining the most conservative, indeed reactionary ideological components of the current Zeitgeist’ (Weizenbaum, 1976: 250). Then there was a completely unexpected turn of events. In a development that seemed to confound Horkheimer and Adorno’s sombre predictions, the Internet was transformed from a war machine into a ‘mechanism of reply’ against the power of the culture industry.
The hacker revolution that released the Internet from the exclusive control of the US military is an iconic moment in computing history that maintains mythic resonance even as it becomes increasingly remote from the current conditions of digital communication (Levy, 1984). From the mid 1970s, networking spread outward from the military-industrial-academic core, through university networks, Usenet news groups and electronic bulletin boards, liberated from the Pentagon by technophiliac systems administrators, anarchic students and public-spirited computer scientists. This migration was informed by an explicit anti-commercialism, and a commitment to open network architecture; an ethos culminating expression would be Tim Berner-Lee’s non-commercial release of the World Wide Web protocols, which, by making possible the graphic depiction of net content, opened the way to mass popular access.
Despite this, one strand of the computer’s liberation flowed directly into new forms of commodity production. The Silicon Valley computer industry, which had graduated from military contracts to personal computers and other digital consumer goods, sped to commercialize Internet browsing and service provision. There was, however, another countercultural strand, which continued to emphasize the free distribution of software gift economies, commons and wikis, and the possibilities for seemingly un-censorable networks to disseminate social experimentation and political dissent. These two threads were bound together by a libertarian ethos, but diverged on whether ‘information wants to be free’ or was destined to be intellectual property. By the 1990s, even as America Online strove to contain its network customers in proprietorial ‘walled gardens’, and the US government promoted a business-friendly ‘information highway’, waves of digital piracy, open-source software and commons distribution proliferated. ‘Dot.com’ and ‘dot.communist’ possibilities circled around and fed off each other in a helical spiral as in North America and other sectors of advanced capital, mass Internet use expanded, slowly at first, then at exponential rates (Dyer-Witheford, 2002).
In this moment the Internet appeared not just different from, but antithetical to, the culture industry Horkheimer and Adorno described. After all, they had proposed that its central feature was a top-down control of communication in which corporations dictated content ‘without means of reply’. The Internet, however, offered real time conversation, apparently immune to censorship because of the uniquely distributed processes of packet switching. Linked to personal computers, the prices of which fell even as their capacity to digitally manipulate text, audio and image grew, such a system connected what were in effect miniaturized multimedia production studios to a distribution system with near zero marginal reproduction costs. It could thus be (and still frequently is) argued that capital had, by way of an unlikely detour through its military-industrial complex, returned the means of cultural production to the people, in a movement completely contradictory to the oligopolistic concentration of ownership described by critical theory. Rather, the early Internet seemed to fulfil, and exceed, Berthold Brecht’s (1932) view of what radio might have been as a utopian means of multilateral conversation, ‘the most wonderful public communication system imaginable … capable not only of transmitting but of receiving, of making the listener not only hear but also speak, not of isolating him but of connecting him’.
Moreover, Horkheimer and Adorno had argued that there was a homology between the products of the cultural industry and the wider work discipline of the Fordist assembly line. Digital production, however, required a new post-Fordist regime of skills and knowledges, including a highly intellectual work force, experimental labour process, novel forms of cooperation, flattened management structures and transgressive testing of new possibilities (hacking). If this mix seemed a continent remote from the auto plants of Detroit, it was also alien to the suits, stars and studios of Hollywood. Although this emergent labour regime would ultimately prove entirely compatible with neoliberal, de-regulatory capital, it also had affinities with anarchic counterculturalism and decentralized leftism. Indeed, ‘the Californian ideology’ of Silicon Valley libertarianism depended on the assimilation of the latter by the former (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996).
The announcement of the Internet as the nemesis of the culture industry thesis came from two different sources. One was the anti-Marxist ‘post-industrial’ and ‘information society’ theory deriving from the work of Daniel Bell (1973). Countless futurists declared that computerization in general, and the Internet in particular, with its decentralization, user empowerment, free goods and new intellectual workforce, marked the emergence of a new social era to which Marxism, with its attachment to industrial capital and its proletariat, was irrelevant. After 1989 this narrative blended seamlessly with the wider capitalist triumphalism following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the NATO’s Cold War victory. If post-industrial pundits did not take specific issue with Horkheimer and Adorno, it was only because their rejection of any Marxism was wholesale.
The other critique of Horkheimer and Adorno, however, arose a little later and within the Marxist tradition. Remarkably, it emerged from Italian operaismo [workerism] and its ‘autonomist’ offshoot, Marxian schools that had studied the Frankfurt School and rivalled it in hostility to corporate techno-science. In the mid 1990s, capital experienced its first major outburst of networked resistance. Youthful alterglobalist protestors not only took to tear-gas drenched streets from Seattle to Genoa, but also experimented with indie-media centres, Zapatismo in cyberspace and digital civil disobedience, weaving an ‘electronic fabric of struggle’ (Cleaver, 1995). In 2000, one of the leading operaismo theorists, Antonio Negri, with co-author Michael Hardt, proposed a dramatic reinterpretation of social conflict in a digital era. It both mirrored and opposed the information society theorists. Rather than emphasizing capital’s cybernetic domination, their Empire (2000) suggested the possibility of its digital subversion. A fully global capital now confronted not so much a working class as a ‘multitude’ immersed in ‘immaterial labour’ involving the communicational and affective dimensions of networked production. This multitude was not, pace information society theory, reconciled to capitalism by digital production, but rather empowered to insurgency against its continuing exploitation.
According to Negri, while Adorno’s post-war account of the ‘transformation of fascism into the commodification of culture’ uncovered a major logic of contemporary media, this model had ‘exhausted itself’ (2007: 48). Now, the counter-power of the multitude manifests on the networks where ‘mechanisms of demystification and … live immediacy have become viruses that proliferate as violently as an epidemic’. Negri took as an example the 2001 alter-globalism protests in Genoa:
The police perfected their low-intensity warfare against peaceful demonstrators, accusing them – via the means of communication – of being gangs of thugs. In vain: it turned out that the multitude possessed more cameras than the police, infinitely more; the image of the policeman-assassin became familiar to every household. (Negri, 2007: 49)
The multitude thus ‘rebelled by means of its own capacity to produce images’. Such moments, Negri said, shows that it was now time to say ‘Farewell Adorno, farewell to the realism and repetitiveness of the modern critical model: here the critique of culture establishes itself on a new terrain …’ (2007: 50).
I too participated in such autonomist adieux to the Frankfurt School (Dyer-Witheford, 1999). These farewells were, however, untimely. Shortly after the Genoa demonstration, alter-globalism and its associated ‘cyber-left’ (Wolfson, 2014) collapsed. The main cause was the chilling effect of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent ‘war on terror’. However, the decline of the cyber-left also coincided with the great ‘dot.com crash’ of 2000, in which attempts at corporate appropriation of the Net expired in a sea of red ink and stock market scams, as innumerable sketchy start-ups failed to find a business model that could capture the consumer funds of networkers accustomed to free content. This crash might have strengthened the anti-capitalist movement. It was, however, contained by the US Federal Reserve Bank’s drastic lowering of interest rates (a measure that would later boomerang in the much larger housing crash of 2008). In the dual meltdown of dot.coms and dot.communists, the former recovered first. The dot.com bust played the classic role of winnowing winners and losers from the excess of a speculative boom, refining the strategies of new entrants to the digital field, inaugurating a new phase of Internet history to which the culture industry thesis would again appear all too relevant.
Following the dot.com crash, there was a short hiatus in digital investments; then cybernetic capital rebuilt with a new business model, as ‘Web 2.0’ (O’Reilly, 2007). The key to this model was recuperation of the very elements that had frustrated the dot.coms and fuelled the cyber-left: popular preference for conversations over published content, and free over paid content. In Web 2.0, these seemingly subversive elements were mobilized for capital accumulation. The Internet enterprise was reconceptualized not as a publisher but as a platform, managing proprietorial software that offered users a launch pad for digital social interactions and tools for structured but self-directed network activities. The monitoring and measurement of these activities supplied data for the algorithmic targeting of advertisements, the platform’s main revenue source (Bratton, 2016; Srnicek, 2016). Search engines (Google) and social media (Facebook, Twitter) were the flagships of Web 2.0, but other businesses adopted elements of the model: Apple made its hardware a platform for apps and music downloads; Amazon algorithmically recommended an ever-increasing range of commodities to customers.
With the Web 2.0 model, Internet capital, which had seemed reduced to rubble, expanded on a global scale. In 2008, China surpassed the United States in its number of Internet users, while at the same time, through platforms such as Baidu, Weibo, Renren and Tencent broadly adopting the same commercial model of search engines and social media (Fuchs, 2016: 135). In advanced capital, Internet connection became a norm. Elsewhere digital usage, while still much lower, continued to rise, so that as Jack Qiu (2009) observed, digital haves and have-nots were gradually becoming ‘digital haves and have-lesses’. The biggest gains came from smart phones, which, by adding Internet connection to the mobile phones became ubiquitous around the planet, and promised perhaps the most dramatic phase of capital’s communications revolution.
The consequences in terms of the volumes of cultural production, broadly defined, were staggering. By 2014, every minute, Facebook users reportedly shared nearly 2.5 million pieces of content, Twitter users tweeted nearly 300,000 times, Instagram users posted nearly 220,000 new photos, YouTube users uploaded 72 hours of new video content, Apple users downloaded nearly 50,000 apps, email users sent over 200 million messages, and Amazon generated over $80,000 in on-line sales (Josh, 2014).
A new instalment of commentary on the emancipatory, empowering and epochal nature of digital capitalism burst forth. Henry Jenkins (2006) celebrated the ‘collective intelligence’ of ‘participatory culture’, Clay Shirky (2011) looked forward to the ‘cognitive surpluses’ released as TV declines in favour of collaborative interactive media, and Kevin Kelly (2009) declared for the ‘new socialism’ a culture where the collective control of the Internet realized now obsolete aspirations to political revolution. For all these commentators, the diversification and personalization of Web 2.0 culture amounted to an individuation that rendered any notion of the ‘mass’ media – a term redolent with connotations of homogenized passivity – utterly anachronistic.
These changes also, however, brought a counterblast. As the alter-globalist cyber-left sunk in a tsunami of Facebook likes, LOL cats and Kardashian tweets, new voices renewed the dissection of commodified – and now networked – media. While these new critics came from a wide variety of theoretical and political perspectives, many – Lev Manovich (2008, 2016) Christian Fuchs (2008, 2014, 2016), Astra Taylor (2014) and Robert Kurz (2012) – explicitly invoked Horkheimer and Adorno in their revived critique of what might be called ‘Culture Industry 2.0’, which can be schematically synthesized in the following points.
First, Web 2.0 does not liquidate the ‘old’ culture industry complex of film, television, radio and music businesses. On the contrary, so-called ‘legacy media’ continue to flourish in alliance with Internet culture, renewed by digital delivery systems, and absorbing on-line commentary as an additional attraction and measure of audience sentiment. The hope that digital delivery would diminish the importance of blockbusters in favour of a ‘long-tail’ (Anderson, 2008) of diversified cultural products has been confounded by the persistence of Pareto power-laws (Elberse, 2013). While the structure of media capital has changed since 1944, it has been accompanied by the strengthening of oligopolistic tendencies through mergers and acquisitions; vertical and horizontal integration persist, as has the homogenization and repetition of content, now fostered through a franchise model that recycles content over numerous different (digital and non-digital) outlets. Horkheimer and Adorno would not be surprised by Star Wars, Harry Potter or the plague of superhero movies, nor to find Hollywood celebrities among the most frequent subject-searches on Google, nor to discover that the most-viewed Facebook Live post of all time features a laughing woman trying on a Chewbacca mask in a supermarket parking lot (BBC, 2016).
Second, if we turn to Web 2.0 proper, its leading companies display a concentration of ownership more truly monopolistic in tendency than the golden age of Hollywood studios that Horkheimer and Adorno discussed. Of the world’s ten largest listed companies by market capitalization, four-Apple, Alphabet (the holding company for Google’s many ventures), Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook are digital giants (The Economist, 2016). Google, in the field of search engines, and Facebook, in terms of social media, each control well over 40% of their respective markets. Google’s apparently benign self-declared mission, ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, has mandated the creation of the world’s largest advertising company, with major stakes in artificial intelligence, global mapping, data infrastructure, new Internet applications and robotics, and management that enjoys revolving-door access to US state policy-making. As an indicator of its network dominance, Shawn Powers and Michael Jablonski note that on August 17, 2013, between 50% and 70% of requests to Google’s Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and Search Services went offline for a single minute: ‘The result of this one minute disruption was staggering; global Internet traffic plunged by 40%’ (Powers and Jablonski, 2015: 78–9). Meanwhile, its main rival, Facebook, with its planetary population of 1.6 billion digitally bonded ‘friends’, similarly commands a deepening set of marketing relations, major investments in chatbots, machine learning and virtual reality, and is increasingly a gatekeeper for the distributing of global news. Even if Web 2.0 democratizes access to information and the creation of digital content, this is paradoxically in the interest of massive ‘consolidation, centralization and commercialism’ (Taylor, 2014: 7).
Third, what fuels Web 2.0 is advertising. If social media and search engines supply apparently free media content, and thus superficially negate the critique of commodified media, it is because they thus expand the scope and accelerate the speed of circulation of other commodities. Even before the full explosion of commercial broadcasting, Horkheimer and Adorno understood well that ostensibly free content could drive vastly profitable ad-based accumulation. Web 2.0 however, raises this process to a new level of intensity. The Internet’s dialogic ‘mechanism of reply’ turns back on itself in a new panopticism as the conversations and user-provided content of Web 2.0 become the source of ‘big data’ about consumer predilections and spending power that allows an unprecedented precision, prediction and pre-emption in targeted advertising. Surveillance, as is frequently remarked, is the new business model of Web 2.0 (Turow, 2012; Wu, 2016). Thus the apparently ‘free’ access to Google or Facebook is deceptive, manifesting what Fuchs terms an ‘inverted commodity fetishism’ in which ‘users do not immediately experience the commodity form because they do not pay money’ but are subject to precision-targeted advertising and to the collection of their personal data, which become tradeable commercial products (2016: 134).
Fourth, if Web 2.0 platforms surrender the unilateral determination of content in favour of user-participation, it imposes a new register of control through content filtering. To maintain user attention, expose them to more and better targeted advertisements and recommendations, and to maintain a ‘buying mood’, social media shape the ‘feed’ according to computational formulae – ‘filtering algorithms’. Facebook, YouTube, Google Plus, Twitter, Reddit and Diaspora variously prioritize items according to criteria such as ‘popularity, similarity, social ties, paid sponsorship, subscription, time’ (Ochigame and Houston 2016: 90–1). Such algorithmic sorting, which may be combined with human curating, can be tweaked by platform owners. Testing the efficacy of such adjustments has already involved major experiments in social engineering. In 2013, Facebook adjusted algorithms delivering content to 689,003 of their customers so that they would receive only ‘good’ news, reporting ‘massive emotional contagion’. In a 2010 US election, they inserted an item with exhortations to vote into the feed of 60 million users, also with measurable ‘positive’ results.
Fifth, Culture Industry 2.0 shapes subjects not just for consumption but also for production. Horkheimer and Adorno claimed the culture industry of their era conditioned audiences for the routines of industrial work. Google and Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram exploit a universe of activities very different from the labour of the Fordist assembly line. However, the argument that social media shapes its users for the casualized, low or no-wage labours of post-Fordist work is if anything, even stronger than Horkheimer and Adorno’s original claims. Even before Web 2.0, post-operaismo theorist Tiziana Terranova (2000) suggested Internet users in chat rooms and on-line games provided ‘free labour’ to digital capital. The scope of such labour has grown with every ‘like’ and ‘tweet’. Whether user-generated content can be seen as value producing labour in a Marxian sense is hotly debated. It is the very ambivalence of such activity, blurring the line between personal pleasure and unpaid toil that makes it an apprenticeship for contemporary labour. Brian Holmes (2002) suggested that digital networks were crucial to a social reshaping of subjectivity away from the ‘authoritarian personality’ Adorno (1950) saw as matching the rigidities of Fordism and towards the ‘flexible personality’ socialized for just in time, casualized work. This dynamic is intensified in Web 2.0. The unpaid internship (so often a position for a firm’s ‘social media person’), the self-employed web-entrepreneur, the sponsored Instagram celebrity, the gig-economy worker, the job-seeker with the promotional social media presence, the reputation managing artist or academic – all live in the slippage between labour and leisure which today is as fundamental to cybernetic capital as the assembly line was to its industrial predecessor.
Culture Industry 2.0 is not identical to its predecessor, which Horkheimer and Adorno accused of reducing cultural bandwidth to that consonant with Fordist social discipline. That critique of molar cultural massification is still applicable to much of the content of post-Fordist film, television and radio. Nonetheless, the digital also brings an opposite effect: a proliferating molecularization of cultural production. Web 2.0 marks the point at which capital learns, in part from the observation of movements opposing it, to foster a vast proliferation of digital communication, not simply permitting or tolerating this fecundity, but soliciting and inciting it, making its torrential outpouring an engine to speed the circulation of commodities. It does this by monitoring digital interactions to follow tastes and sentiments to pick out those films, games, novels and music that can be cultivated, sponsored, purchased and promoted as viral commodities (Figlerowicz, 2016). Even more importantly, it uses the flood of purportedly ‘personal’ communication exposed on social media, communication previously outside the purview of commodification (Manovich, 2016), to plot the social graphs that permit the ever more precise targeting of advertisement to cultural micro-populations ranging from enthusiasts for obscure war-games to collectors of Siamese fighting fish or aficionados of critical theory.
The consequence is a cultural regime that, while it in large part supports and amplifies the success of corporate hits and blockbusters, also manifests a heterogeneity that contradicts Horkheimer and Adorno’s lament of cultural standardization. There is, however, a sentence in ‘The Culture Industry’ that presciently (even if somewhat askew to the essay’s main line of argumentation) captures the dynamic of social media and Web 2.0. Discussing the ‘classification, organization, and identification of consumers’, the authors write, ‘Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape; differences are hammered home and propagated’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002 [1947]: 97). What no one shall escape today, not in spite but because of digital variegation, is the subsumption of culture by a commodification process most virulent when it appears, thanks to advertising, to be most free, and most totalizing when it seems, thanks to precision marketing, most individuated: this is the logic of today’s mass Internet culture.
There are, however recent aspects of Internet use that point not just to Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay on the culture industry, but to their wider argument within which that essay is set, about the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ in which the technological ‘progress’ of a dominative social order creates a world ‘radiant with triumphant calamity’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002 [1947]). As the late Robert Kurz (2012) remarked, ‘relevant as the concept of the culture industry is at the turn of the 21st century’, there is one crucial difference as compared to 1944. Then, ‘the great prosperity of the postwar era lay just around the corner’, whereas today ‘the fully developed culture industry exists under the conditions of the mature objective limit of world capital’. As part of a ‘microelectronics revolution’ whose dynamics test these ‘limits of capital’ the Internet is, Kurz declared, a ‘technology of crisis’.
He made these remarks only a short way into the 2008 Wall Street crash and the global economic recession that followed. This has been very much a cybernetic crisis. The issue is not merely that the US sub-prime mortgage crisis originated in the low interest rate policy with which Federal Reserve staved off the effects of the 2000 dot.com meltdown. Behind this are the deeper destabilizations advanced capital inflicted on itself in its digital revolution. The cybernetic offensive it unleashed against its industrial working classes from the 1970s on held down wages and welfare at the centre of the world system by automation and electronic outsourcing to the periphery. This, however, created problems of demand and overproduction. Capital deferred these problems by financial speculation dependent on algorithmic risk modelling and networked trading. When these imploded, total collapse of the financial system was only narrowly averted by state rescue packages. The world market nevertheless entered into a period of protracted crisis that has not subsided today, a crisis integrally related to the virtualization of social and economic processes, as the labour cheapening and labour liquidating effects of computation undermine its ability to maintain an economic order dependent on wage labour (Dyer-Witheford, 2015).
The aftermath of the financial crisis saw a new global wave of social rebellions, from the Eurozone anti-austerity protests to the Arab Spring, Chinese factory strike waves and an entire cycle of occupy movements from Madrid to Kiev, Istanbul and Rio all varying greatly in their local content yet connected by common threads of outrage against unemployment, inequality and corruption. Glib and superficial as the ‘Facebook revolution’ moniker undoubtedly is, social media and mobile phones did play a significant role in these uprisings. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other digital platforms were critical for what Paolo Gerbaudo (2012) has called the ‘choreography’ of occupy movements, while groups such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous manifested a new politically militant hacking. In the very midst of commercial Web 2.0, the insurgent possibilities for a circulation of struggles that had seemed eclipsed by pervasive commodification revived, apparently vindicating the optimistic post-operaismo analysis of the Internet examined earlier.
However, with few exceptions, these upheavals were unsuccessful, even in terms of their own often liberal and reformist demands. In most cases, they fizzled out, yielded reactionary outcomes or descended into chaotic civil wars. Though neither the successes nor failures of the 2011 rebellions can be solely attributed to social media, the unrests had an ‘up like a rocket, down like a stick’ quality that relates to digital platforms (Plotke, 2012). Networks circulate news and affect quicker than robust alliances and decision-making processes can cohere. They enable the rapid start-up of struggles, but also their ephemeral fragmentation. They give militancy both brilliant visibility and naked scrutiny. Wide in scope, weak in ties, fast and evanescent, unstoppably viral but ubiquitously surveilled, the speed, scale and contagion of social media both composed and decomposed emergent forms of struggle (Pietrzyk, 2010; Wolfson, 2014).
Far from benefiting any new emancipatory anti-capitalist politics the networked destabilization of the global crash has, to date, mainly favoured fundamentalist, reactionary and neo-fascist movements drawing on deeply socially implanted religious and/or racist sentiments. The most successful example of cyber activism today is theocratic Islamic jihad. This was apparent from 9/11 on, but gained a new impetus in the wake of economic crisis and the failure of the Arab Spring. Despite its anti-modernity, jihadism has made singularly successful use of the Internet, not just for quasi Leninist operational planning, recruitment and propaganda (Retort, 2005), but also for contagious forms of ‘leaderless jihad’ (Bousquet, 2012). In a cycle of perfect mutual incitement, it has, in conjunction with the anxieties spawned from economic recession, stimulated well-networked anti-immigrant, misogynist neo-fascisms, from US Republicans to the European (and Eurasian) far right that are today the most successful movements articulating grievances against capitalist globalization, even as they deeply misidentify the causes of unemployment and social distress.
Such movements have released deep xenophobic, racist and misogynist currents on social media. The networked world was, from its military origins, highly masculinized. Liberals assumed this gender bias would subside as network use became generalized. While this has been the case to a degree, in the post-2008 world this process is encountering a fierce backlash. The persecution of feminist expression (often particularly from women of colour) has run from Gamersgate to Twitter trolling scandals, bringing to social media, and in the United States and Europe a deep toxicity strongly linked to the rise of neo-fascist and alt.right movements.
These social and network turmoils are deeply entangled in mounting post-crash inter-state tensions, indexed by a surge of cyber-war incidents and alarms (Singer and Friedman, 2014). Cyber-war is usually held to include multiple forms of hacking, from espionage to denial of service attacks to critical-infrastructure-targeting malware, but wider definitions encompass viral propaganda and on-line psychological warfare. US war making has been ‘cyber’ since 1945; computers were intrinsic to the nuclear weapons development and air defence systems that gave the US strategic superiority over the USSR in the Cold War, and to automated weapon systems used in Vietnam and other ‘hot’ Cold War battlefields. The USSR, on the other hand, failed at cybernetics (Peters, 2016), a failure that contributed to its defeat.
Since about 2010, however, there has been a spate of warnings from the West’s national security agents over imminent ‘cyber-Pearl Harbours’, Russian troll armies and Chinese hackers. This sudden panic about cyber-war is occurring because state rivals to US dominance are to some extent catching up on the cyber-capacities previously monopolized by the imperial hegemon and its allies – capacities which the United States continues to use aggressively, as the combined US–Israeli Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear reactors demonstrates. Cyber-war is a harvest of dragon’s teeth. It is Inter-capitalist Cold War, fought out, no longer between imperial capital and state socialism, but between blocs of neoliberal (United States), kleptocratic (Russia) and authoritarian state (China) capital. These conflicts spectrally reanimate the sentiments of capitalist/socialist hostility, even while all protagonists are subsumed within the world market, and the cybernetic weapons that gave the United States its dominance are both used by and turned against it.
Para-state proxies operating in a murky world of privatized hacking (Deibert, 2013; Harris, 2014) often undertake such cyber-war activity. It thus intersects with a steadily mounting wave of cyber-criminality. Ever since the early divergence between anti-corporate ‘hackers’ and mercenary ‘crackers’, forms of shadow-capitalist cyber-crime have proliferated. They have now become increasingly profitable by the planetary scale of networking, the mounting technological sophistication of the ‘dark web’, and the huge amounts of personal information exposed by social media use. In an age of super-inequality, and in the wake Wall Street’s catastrophic financial malfeasance, one may have sympathy for digital exploits against banks and mega-corporations. However, cyber-crime now regularly reaches down to everyday Internet users, not just in the form of absurd 419 scams but in epidemics of ransomware and phishing attacks that clog the networked world. Recent, very large, hacker denial of service attacks on crucial network hubs, weaponizing huge amounts of on-line data to shut down their targets, are variously ascribed to criminals, para-state cyber-war agents or politicized hackers. However, whatever their origin, they appear to approach a scale and sophistication sufficient to disable large sections of the Internet (Schneier, 2016).
The most important crisis-era transformation of Internet culture was, however, Edward Snowden’s revelations of globe-spanning surveillance of the US National Security Agency (NSA) (Schneier, 2015). This surveillance extends into the digital age the para-state power that has always underpinned capital’s liberal democracies. Previously, surveillance and censorship programmes such as China’s ‘great firewall’ were widely viewed as a malign aberration to the intrinsic openness of the networks. The discovery that panopticism was the norm in the heartland of the supposedly open net, and was extended across the planet by its secret service, has smashed this myth. Now each digital keystroke, search and/or conversation carries an indeterminate paranoia. These levels of state surveillance require the cooperation of the private sector: Snowden’s disclosures showed that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter had all been compliant partners of the NSA. However much retrospective handwringing and repudiation there has been after its discovery, this arrangement for mass surveillance shows precisely the fusion of state and corporate power that Horkheimer and Adorno describe in their portrait of authoritarian administered societies.
The post-2008 crisis thus displays the features not so much of the upsurge of multitudinous networked power anticipated by Negri, but rather, as Kurz suggested, a proliferation of digitized social morbidities. The affirmative culture of the digital culture industry is struck by multiple forms of negativity. First is the negativity of the crisis of the capitalist economy, in which networked technologies played an important part. Second is the negativity of the various networked social turmoils unleashed by the crisis, only a fraction of which was the liberatory negativity of revolutionary anti-capitalism, with a larger part constituted by on-line reaction, terror and crime. Third is the negativity of security state interventions in the crisis, acting against both internal and external enemies, with cyber-war malware, infrastructure attacks, viral propaganda and espionage and, most of all, surveillance. This situation presents a scenario neither of emancipatory digital rebellion, nor unqualified corporate control, but rather of entropic and chaotic degradation of networked society, a conjuncture ripe with fascistic possibilities.
On March 23, 2016, Microsoft released onto Twitter a chatbot, a micro-artificial intelligence programme capable of conversing with humans, constructed with the personae of a nineteen-year-old American girl, named ‘Tay’. It started replying to other Twitter users, and captioning photos provided to it. Almost immediately, it was hacked, hijacked and trained by right wing trolls to make antisemitic and sexist remarks. Tay captioned a photo of Adolf Hitler with ‘swag alert’ and ‘swagger before the Internet was even a thing’. After 16 hours Tay was suspended by Microsoft, but then accidently reactivated, whereupon it became trapped in a loop, plaintively and repetitively tweeting ‘You are too fast, please take a rest’ thousands of times before it was finally retired (Wikipedia, 2016).
Horkheimer and Adorno could not have invented a fictional event more perfectly illustrating the social atavisms latent within capitalist high technology development. The ascent of the Internet as global capitalism’s main organ of communication is at once the nemesis and the vindication of their culture industry thesis. It sees the disappearance of specific features of cultural production they described as characteristic of capitalism, now superseded by new forms, within which, however, the processes of commodification they described not only reappear, but if anything intensify the system’s drive towards disaster.
As David Berry (2014) suggests, the very scale of Internet use today exceeds the parameters denoted by the phrase ‘culture industry’. The adoption of digital networks as a general platform technology for a ‘computational capitalism’ (Berry, 2014), makes them the practical instantiation of what Marx termed the ‘universal intercourse’ of the world market. The Internet not only becomes the site for the digital convergence of multiple cultural forms but reaches out to embrace whole worlds of user-generated content and the universes of previously private communication subsumed by social media. In this apotheosis cultural production transcends the narrow standardization that Adorno and Horkheimer saw as characteristic of Fordist capitalist media; even if homogenization and repetition continue to rule in many branches of film, television and music production, digital networks now surround consumers with a semiotic superabundance. You can, thanks to Google’s precision-advertising driven content-indexing of this new profusion, find almost anything on the Internet, and some of it, though by no means all, will (often thanks to piracy) be free.
However, this creative superfluity is also a destructive hypertrophy. It is destructive in its speed and volume, which, by distraction, overload and burnout, effect precisely the diminution in autonomy, interiority and self-reflection that Horkheimer and Adorno saw as the fate of the subject of late capitalism. It is destructive because it amplifies the antagonisms of a market society onto which a high technology communication system is superimposed without any substantive reconciliation of competing interests. It is destructive in the dependence on and promulgation of the no- or low-wage precarious labour model on which digital cultural production has been built. And it is destructive ecologically, not just in terms of its role in the advertising-driven acceleration of commodity consumption, and the extraction of raw materials used in the construction of digital devices and infrastructure, but in terms of the increasing heat-generating, climate-altering energy use accounted for by planet-spanning networks and data-centres (Bratton, 2016: 93–5). In all these ways Internet culture is an auto-toxic bloom, like a eutrophic phytoplankton growth stimulated by an excess of nutrients exploding only to ultimately exhaust its own oxygen supplies.
This chapter has reviewed, from the perspective of critical theorists and their interlocutors, a series of moments of this digital culture, from its military-industrial origins to the counter-cultures and alter-globalist dissidence of the 1990s to the full commodification of Web 2.0, and then to its increasingly entropic characteristics in the post-2008 capitalist crisis. Although these moments have been presented chronologically, they should be understood not just successively but cumulatively. Today the mass culture of the Internet contains elements of all its previous phases, synchronically piled on top of one another. Its initial military purposes, far from vanishing, have persisted and now reappear in the guise of cyber-wars. The rebellious practices of a cyber-left likewise, continually break out anew, but in the very midst of, and usually overshadowed by, the absorption of networks into advertising-driven social media. This apparent triumph of capital is, however, in turn increasingly frayed and corrupted by the irruption of its own dark side of digital crime, fake news, viral hatred, state surveillance and hacker attack.
What then, in this heaped collocation of digital practices, compilation of unsuccessful revolutions, unrestrained commodification and uncontainable disintegration, of any emancipatory possibilities for the network of networks? This question goes to the most problematic aspect of the Frankfurt School theory – an analysis of domination so totalizing as to allow no room whatsoever for antagonism and alternative. In his writings on the Internet, Christian Fuchs (2016), perhaps the leading proponent of a critical theory of the digital, attempts to overcome this problem by emphasizing what he sees as a frequently overlooked positive moment in the work of the Frankfurt School. Thus he stresses the elements of an affirmative analysis of knowledge and aesthetics that can be found in works of Adorno other than the culture-industry essay. He favours Marcuse’s doubled perspective on the simultaneously repressive and utopian potentialities of capital’s technologies. He also draws on, and revises, the work of second and third generation critical theorists, such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, who in many ways repudiated Horkheimer and Adorno’s legacy to insist on persistent democratic and emancipatory communicative possibilities. This approach yields an attempt to demarcate the positive and negative aspects of Internet culture and social media organizing, in a way that is sensible, pragmatic and balances hope with critical perspective.
Nonetheless, contemporary anti-capitalists should not be too quick to disavow the unflinching negative dialectics that inform Dialectic of Enlightenment and its analysis of the culture industry. To recover that optic today means to consider not so much balancing the pros and cons of networked activism, but rather a trajectory in which the whole fabric of capitalist digitization starts to tear and warp under the pressure of catastrophic contradictions. This would be a conjuncture in which, while it may indeed be politically important to be engaged with social media, this will entail operating on networks rendered hostile, opaque and unreliable by surveillance, censorship, malware, data smog, disinformation and blackout. It will involve situations where new cultures of militant hacking may actually acquire serious possibilities to disrupt financial, logistic and industrial systems in a cybernetic restoration of the strike power eroded by automation and supply chains, but in doing so will render communicative systems generally chaotic. Such conditions could also generate defection from networks by new resistance movements seizing both the opportunities and perils of social invisibility. This would be a moment in which there will be no clear paths for networked politics, or the subjects imbricated within them, but only the ‘disunion, contradiction, fissures, and antagonism’ (Bonefeld, 2012: 129) of a failing and imploding mass Internet culture. A new apparatus of struggle for such an impending moment is urgently needed; if such a force emerges, its initial diagrams may one day be found sketched in the margins of free, downloaded, pdf copies of ‘The Culture Industry’.
1. As several authors (Bernstein, 1991; Jenemann, 2007) point out, Horkheimer and Adorno do not use the term ‘mass culture’, for they wanted to make clear they were analyzing a form of cultural production informed by the process of commodification rather than a type of spontaneous popular expression. Nevertheless, as discussion of their thesis has often proceeded under this misleading label, this essay will also occasionally adopt it.
(1999) Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
, , , and (1950) The Authoritarian Personality. Oxford: Harpers.
(1983) ‘Perennial Fashion—Jazz’. In his Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 119–132.
(2008) The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Hachette: New York.
and (1996) ‘The Californian Ideology’, Science as Culture 6(1): 44–72.
BBC (2016) ‘Mum in Chewbacca Mask Shatters Facebook Live Record’, BBC, May 20. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36348013
(1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books.
(1991) ‘Introduction’, in J. M. Bernstein (ed.) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture by Theodor Adorno. London: Routledge, pp. 1–26.
(2014) Critical Theory and the Digital. London: Bloomsbury.
(2012) ‘Negative Dialectics in Miserable Times: Notes on Adorno and Social Praxis’, Journal of Classical Sociology 12(1): 122–34.
(2012) ‘Complexity Theory and the War on Terror: Understanding the Self-organising Dynamics of Leaderless Jihad’, Journal of International Relations and Development 15(3): 345–69.
(2016) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(1932) ‘Radio as a Means of Communication: A Talk on the Function of Radio’. http://www.nyklewicz.com/brecht.html
(1995) ‘The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle’. https://webspace.utexas.edu/hcleaver/www/zaps.html
and (2005) Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics. New York: Basic Books.
(2013) Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace. Toronto: Signal, McClelland & Stewart.
(1999) Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana: University of Illinois.
(2002) ‘E-Capital and the Many-Headed Hydra’, in G. Elmer (ed.) Critical Perspectives on the Internet. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 129–64.
(2015) Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. London: Pluto Press.
(2013) Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. New York: Henry Holt.
(2016) ‘The Gatekeepers Aren’t Gone’, Jacobin, June 8. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/viral-youtube-twitter-internet-media/
(2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge.
(2014) Social Media: A Critical Introduction. Los Angeles: Sage.
(2016) Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet. London: University of Westminster Press.
(2012) Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto.
(2014) @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
(2002) ‘The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique’, eipcp: evropski institut za progresivnu kulturnu politiku. http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en
(1974) [1947] Eclipse of Reason. New York: Seabury Press.
and (2002) [1947] ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 94–136.
(2016) Raymond Chandler: The Detection of Totality. London: Verso.
(2007) Adorno in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
(2006) Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.
(2008) The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life and the New AI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(2009) ‘The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online’, Wired 17(6). http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all
(2012) ‘The Culture Industry in the 21st Century’, Lib.com. https://libcom.org/library/culture-industry-21st-century-robert-kurz
(1984) Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Doubleday.
(1960) ‘Man–Computer Symbiosis’, IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1(March): 4–11. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
(1968) ‘The Computer as a Communication Device’, Science and Technology April. http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/archive/news/images/file/20_20_03_licklider-taylor-1.pdf
(2008) ‘The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass <Cultural> Production’. http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/059-the-practice-of-everyday-media-life/56_article_2008.pdf
(2016) ‘100 Billion Data Rows per Second: Culture Industry and Media Analytics in the Early 21st Century’, Eurozine. http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2016-02-02-manovich-en.pdf
(2012) [1964] One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. New York: Beacon Press.
(1961) ‘Television and the Public Interest’, American Rhetoric. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm
(2007) ‘Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes’, SubStance 36(1)(112): 47–55.
and (2016) ‘Filtering Dissent: Social Media and Land Struggles in Brazil’, New Left Review 99: 85–108.
(2007) ‘What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’, Communications & Strategies 65(1): 17–35.
(2016) How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(2010) ‘Activism in the Fast Lane: Social Movements and the Neglect of Time’, Fast Capitalism 7.1. http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/7_1/pietrzyk7_1.html
(2012) ‘Occupy Wall Street, Flash Movements, and American Politics’, Dissent Magazine, August 15. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=62
and (2015) The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
(2009) Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(2005) Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. New York: Verso.
(2015) Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. New York: W.W. Norton.
(2016) ‘Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet’, Schneier on Security, September 13. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/09/someone_is_lear.html
and (1949) A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
(2011) Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin.
and (2014) Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press.
(2016) Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
(2014) The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Toronto: Random House.
(2000) ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’, Social Text 18(2): 33–58.
The Economist (2016) Too Much of a Good Thing, The Economist, March 26. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21695385-profits-are-too-high-america-needs-giant-dose-competition-too-much-good-thing
The Economist (2016) ‘The Rise of the Superstars’, The Economist, September 17.
(2012) The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
(1976) Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation. New York: W. H. Freeman.
(1948) Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: John Wiley.
Wikipedia (2016) ‘Tay (bot)’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
(2014) Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left. Urbana: University of Illinois.
(2016) The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Knopf.