Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare

Abstract

‘‘above all the name for an art of living and dying with others in a tremorous cosmos . . . spinning our tales otherwise in appreciation of the precarious fragility both subtending and upending a divergent plurality of worlds’’ (p. 97). Pragmatism is a useful framework for Savransky because it approaches ‘‘metaphysics as a radically practical affair’’ (p. 111). Savransky evades conclusions. He argues that the pluriverse is not a story of conclusions, but beginnings and openings, again embracing an experimental and pragmatic approach to living with and understanding any worlds, while also undermining the monism of colonial thought. In doing so, Savransky builds on recent scholarship, particularly in the field of anthropology, that has sought to inquire into the anthropological foundations of ‘‘reality,’’ while also making a philosophical intervention into the meaning of decoloniality. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds ultimately provides a fresh take on the meaning of decoloniality. Yet by recasting decoloniality as a pragmatic project divorced from Land, reparations, and neocolonialism—that which has been at the core of decolonial activism and scholarship—Savransky also evades that which has been at the very core of recent calls for decolonization: power. Though critical of Latin American decoloniality theorists for ignoring questions of realism and reality, his experimental approach is also deeply vulnerable to the powerful forces of coloniality and capitalism that have worked to eliminate pluriverses through centuries of epistemicide. Still, with its elegant prose and its thoughtful introduction of metaphysics into the debates over epistemology, ontology, and how to think other worlds, it is likely to offer an important conceptual resource to struggles for decoloniality. Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare, by David L. Sloss. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 352 pp. $28.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781503628441.