This volume explores activism, research and critique in the age of digital subjects and objects and Big Data capitalism after a digital turn said to have radically transformed our political futures. Optimists assert that the ‘digital’ promises: new forms of community and ways of knowing and sensing, innovation, participatory culture, networked activism, and distributed democracy. Pessimists argue that digital technologies have extended domination via new forms of control, networked authoritarianism and exploitation, dehumanization and the surveillance society. Leading international scholars present varied interdisciplinary assessments of such claims – in theory and via dialogue – and of the digital’s impact on society and the potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies, of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication lead to digital positivism that threatens critical research or lead to new horizons in theory and society.

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David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, and edits the journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses. His most recent monograph is Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (2018).

Christian Fuchs is Professor of Social Media Research and Director of CAMRI (Communications and Media Research Institute) and WIAS (Westminster Institute of Advanced Studies) at the University of Westminster. He is co-editor of the journal tripleC and the author of Critical Theory of Communication (2016) and most recently, of Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter (2018).