Jim Messina in 2015. Gregor Fischer/PA Images. All rights reserved. Many were shocked that right-wing causes such as those associated with the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump could garner decisive support via social media. These campaigns mobilised memes and fake news bots, but also highly sophisticated targeted advertising based on data analytics, to brainwash and manipulate voting populations – or so the argument goes.
We need an appreciation of the ‘libidinal’ nature of politics online.
While many moderate liberals have responded to this with an increased suspicion of social media and new technologies, we argue that the left needs not to resist algorithms, but to create new algorithms of resistance in place of those being used by the corporate state and those on the right. To do this it needs an appreciation of what we call the ‘libidinal’ nature of politics online. The surprise result of the 2017 General Election in the UK has shown that digital media can be just as congenial to left-wing causes as it has been to right-wing ones over the past few years, but in order to put this potential to use we need a better understanding of how such processes work. This needs to start with the revision of a number of assumptions about how social media affects people in the way it does.
