Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)

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This is his description of an ‘interregnum’, the gap between powers, or crisis of authority, that occurs when belief in the status quo has been shaken and doesn’t quite hold in the way it did. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology—Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century. Alex Williams is a political theorist and lecturer in digital media and society currently based at the University of East Anglia. In the process of clarifying and updating the often misunderstood (and occasionally maligned) concept of hegemony, Gilbert and Williams also provide us with a valuable analysis of the ‘long 1990s’: an account of its constitution, a diagnosis of its crisis and a map for its overcoming. These initiatives have attempted to link local electoral platforms with social movements and have been somewhat successful in challenging platform tech giants like Uber and Airbnb.

Hegemony Now is split into three parts, the first outlining the securing of neoliberal hegemony in the 20th century by big tech and financial capital, going back to the end of the post-war settlement and 1968 in particular as the ‘most intense phase’ of a longer conflict (13). The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. They suggest a viral campaign or mass global boycott, although they don’t see this happening any time soon.If updated to accommodate the complexity of the contemporary world, as Gilbert and Wiliams do, they could be crucial for analysing power relations in the current conjuncture. Furthermore, while there is quite extensive discussion of The World Transformed (TWT) and Momentum as the main grassroots movements in the UK, the book doesn’t acknowledge the many activists who came from Occupy and the student movement to grow Momentum and TWT, putting energy into the electoral hope of a victory for the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn. Growing job insecurity and anxiety mean individuals are compelled to find private strategies to survive and have less time and capacity for political organisation. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.

And while they embrace Rodrigo Nunes’ perspective of complexity ( Neither Vertical nor Horizontal) in a section on organisational ecologies, this doesn’t imbue the rest of the book as it could. To recap: its complicated, you have to know your enemy well and every situation ought to be analysed carefully. K. But what makes Hegemony Now uniquely impressive is how seamlessly their politics emerges from their sophisticated analysis of the conditions and actualities of the present. He is the author of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism , Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics and Twenty-First Century Socialism .

Through upgrading the concept of hegemony-understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology-Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century.