{"title":"The Socialist Project on Social Media Platforms: Anticapitalist Organization in Platform Capitalism","authors":"Tanner Mirrlees","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10779451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779451","url":null,"abstract":"This article is a self-reflexive case study of the Socialist Project's (SP) tactical uses of Meta's Facebook and Google's YouTube platforms. Formed in early 2003 by Leo Panitch (1945–2020), Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, Herman Rosenfeld, and others, the SP is a small Toronto-based democratic socialist organization that for nearly two decades has contributed to wider efforts to build and sustain an anticapitalist “infrastructure of dissent” and “radical imagination.” While Facebook's and YouTube's ownership structures, business models, and datafication and commodification mechanisms limit the SP's tactical uses of these platforms, the SP's agency to use these to try to make history in digital conditions not of its own choosing is significant. This article argues that the SP's tactical use of social media platforms exists between structure and agency, at the interface of top-down platform capitalist business models, mechanisms, and logics and bottom-up anticapitalist organization building, public pedagogy, and alternative media making.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136093057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Echo Chambers, or “The Will of the People”: The Case of Alimony Contesters and Antifeminist Countermovement in Turkey","authors":"Duru Su Kadıoğlu, Ceren Sözeri Özdal","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10779478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779478","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the alimony contesters in Turkey, who are a part of the online antifeminist countermovement. The alimony contesters’ movement is significant because, even though they are small in numbers, they successfully leveraged support from pro-government media organizations and journalists in the broader context of the authoritarian media atmosphere in Turkey. The media support, and the fact that their discourse is in parallel with Turkey's authoritarian government's policies on women and gender, helped them break the walls of their echo chambers and shape the public discourse. The aim of the study is to use a three-step methodology to figure out alimony contesters’ hybrid media strategy to stimulate the public debate and influence news framing and editorial choices by building relationships with pro-government journalists and news outlets. The study demonstrates that the demands of a small group that is organized on social media and has limited followers can be presented as the public will if it receives sufficient support from politics and the media.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"125 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136093346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Police Whistleblowers, the Lamplighter Project, and Twitter: Exposing Misconduct and Corruption in American Law Enforcement","authors":"Rhon Teruelle","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10779469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779469","url":null,"abstract":"As a result of George Floyd's senseless killing, countless individuals took to the streets to protest. Coinciding with the protests, a number of police whistleblowers utilized social media to speak out about the transgressions and brutality that they had witnessed firsthand. For these individuals, social media provides a space to voice their concerns with law enforcement in America and is a place to tell their stories and critique the police. Moreover, social media empowers whistleblowers by allowing anonymity while affording a safe space for effective community building. This article is a case study involving seven whistleblowers interviewed by the author. Social media has become the primary communication tool they use to expose malfeasance and corruption in policing. The pervasive culture of law enforcement condemns any kind of vocal critique of policing, so social media functions in strong juxtaposition to the silencing of complaints, placing it in direct opposition to the thin blue line and the blue wall of silence. This article highlights the Lamplighter Project and Twitter as resources that assist police whistleblowers who speak out against wrongdoings perpetrated by other members of law enforcement.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136159957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Right-Wing Leninism in Brazil: Reflections on O Movimento Brasil Livre","authors":"Stuart Davis","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10779415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779415","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on the case of O Movimento Brasil Livre (The Free Brazil Movement), or MBL, this article interrogates key assumptions about the nature of networked digital activism. The MBL, formed in the early 2010s by a Koch-funded network of libertarian student groups, utilized a combination of activist training and strategic media engagement to organize a series of mass mobilizations in 2015 against supposed corruption within the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) administration under President Dilma Rousseff. Organized through MBL Facebook pages and promoted via YouTube and television appearances by movement leaders, these protests brought millions of Brazilian citizens to the streets in a wave of protests that eventually sparked Dilma's impeachment in May 2016. Deploying the conceptual framework of right-wing Leninism, this article argues that conservative groups like the MBL are able to construct digital protest movements with revolutionary political ramifications due to their embrace of strategies originally formulated by Lenin, including the training of groups of ideologically coherent and committed cadres and the pursuit of dual power formation where the current political order is ruptured from the inside. Understanding how right-wing activists mobilize digital media is of paramount importance for both countering their influence and developing strategies for the Left.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"131 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136093059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet","authors":"Michael Truscello","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10747811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10747811","url":null,"abstract":"The solution to the accumulation of authoritarian power enhanced by the Internet will not emerge from within the Internet itself; rather, the only radical and enduring response to the kind of networked authoritarianism that is becoming pervasive globally must regard attacking the extractivist foundation of Internet materiality as the primary and most effective antifascist tactic. Far from being a recent emergence of authoritarian infrastructure, however, the Internet was developed by the US military-industrial complex and has always carried the imprint of authoritarian utility. The Internet is now a pervasive infrastructural feature of global capitalism and its state accomplices, and the deliberate temporary stoppage of Internet functioning by state actors, a so-called Internet “shutdown” or “kill switch,” illustrates the primary purpose of this infrastructure is to defend state power and capitalist commerce. Liberal attempts to reform the Internet are misguided, and anti-authoritarians should adopt an abolitionist position regarding the Internet as infrastructure. The primary strategy for such a form of abolitionism should focus its efforts on shutting down the extractive industries that provide the material substrate of the Internet.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136093061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vitrina Dystópica","authors":"Patricio Azócar Donoso, Hugo Sir Retamales","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10779487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779487","url":null,"abstract":"The result of the 2022 plebiscite in Chile indicates a new stage of the Chilean neoconservative and oligarchic reaction, as well as of the mood of the social forces that developed with the 2019 revolt. Drawing on political research collective Vitrina Dystópica's archive of dialogues, interviews, and interventions, this article proposes an analytical exercise that seeks to challenge the ongoing totalitarian coup of the political imagination. This exploration of the memory of struggles allows for gathering techniques, strategies, and moments of vitalization to affirm the affective defeat and recompose collective forces in new questions for the future, joy, and dignity. The reflections shared here take place in a concrete practice of political reorganization that we call espacio.tierra, which argues that the revolt does not start on October 18, 2019 nor does it end with the plebiscite on September 4, 2022, but rather it exists in the affective infrastructures over which collective questions and practices are raised for the reproduction and multiplication of life.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"164 2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86685251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Book of Revolt and the House of Rejection: On Neoliberalism and the Constitutional Process in Chile, 2019–22","authors":"Jorge Pavez Ojeda","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10779460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779460","url":null,"abstract":"As an introductory framework to the dossier, this essay analyzes the Chilean political process based on the images that (re)emerged with the 2019 revolt and that were deployed in the constitutional process channeled into a Constitutional Convention (2020–22). It shows how the old ghosts of class, gender, and the nation appear in these “mental images,” the same ghosts that have historically operated in the defeat of transformative projects and contributed to the reproduction of an authoritarian and elitist society, whose neoconservative/neoliberal oligarchy has managed to restore the conditions of its domination. The essay proposes these observations to stimulate the reading of the essays that make up this dossier, which problematize different aspects of the political process under discussion: the aporetic relationship between revolt, violence, and law; the citizenry's turn from a desire of community and transformation expressed in the revolt to a feeling of fear and attachment to private property; writing as a practice, support, and challenge of the people's critical expression; the tension between the performance of the revolt as a failure and as a reset of neoliberal performativity; and the territorial and deterritorializing wagers in relation to affective infrastructures that became revolt and that continue through other means.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"144 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77931876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rosario Fernández Ossandón, Isabel Aguilera, Antonieta Vera
{"title":"The Nación, Otredad, Deseo [Nation, Otherness, Desire] Collective","authors":"Rosario Fernández Ossandón, Isabel Aguilera, Antonieta Vera","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10779397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779397","url":null,"abstract":"The revolt and constituent process remain an open question, phenomena that permeate everyday life and refuse to show a final truth about themselves. In an attempt to interrupt reflections that fracture thinking, rather than seeking answers, we raise some questions inspired by writings in three moments: the revolt, the constituent process, and the “exit plebiscite.” Three types and foundations of writing—the street, the Peace Accord, and the proposal of a New Constitution (the Little Blue Book)—will be our material objects for asking about recording and writing, and thinking about, how does a people record and write? These writings circulate in archives of words in and with affects such as attachment and rejection, desire and terror, clamor and the rejection of something that seems to be writing itself.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88923442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revolt/Performance. The Performative Pause.","authors":"W. Thayer","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10779379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779379","url":null,"abstract":"In posthumous speculation, the 2019 Chilean revolt, rather than suggesting a limit to the neoliberal trace, seems to constitute a reset that is conducive to its deployment. This text develops a “second degree” reading in which it is no longer a matter of the antagonism between revolt and neoliberalism, but rather a sort of revolt/neoliberalism fold that shifts from stabilizing in institutional functionings to convulsing in revolt. Along with the revolt's character of “neoliberal reset,” a possible additional force within it, a mutant, performáncia (pure performance) residue, irreducible to neoliberal performativity, is taken into account.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78671720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The October Revolt in Chile: From “Now That We Have Found Each Other We Won't Let Go” to “Not with My Money!,” or Generalized Fear of the Other","authors":"Jaime Donoso Espinosa","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10779433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779433","url":null,"abstract":"This text seeks to describe the process of a form of relationality of the images that, at least in their glimmer, are seen in the immanence of the October 2019 revolt in Chile, which is expressed as an affective response to the promise opened by the revolt, in contrast to separation and distrust, which interrupts friendship. This reverse is expressed as a threat that interrupts the time to come of the revolt; it is also an interruption in the temporality of the images, which are now expressed in a more urgent and oppressive way, and that, in their absolute presence, flood any type of common destiny.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"102 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83621197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}