The Birth of Digital Populism: Crowd, Power and Postdemocracy in the 21st Century (2015) [EN, IT]

“The Five Star Movement led by Grillo & Casaleggio had an unexpected success in the Italian general elections of February 2013, deeply disrupting the panorama of Italian politics. This book seeks to explore some of the features characterising the emergence of a new political phenomenon: digital populism. We asked Italian and English thinkers from different political and disciplinary backgrounds to contribute to an analysis of some fundamental points behind the rise of populism and the digital relations between masses, power and democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The book features nine interviews carried out between May 2013 and February 2014 with Luciana Parisi, Tiziana Terranova, Lapo Berti, Simon Choat, Godani Paul, Saul Newman, Jussi Parikka, Tony D. Sampson and Alberto Toscano.”

Published in January 2015
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
84 pages

Five Star Movement on Wikipedia
Editors

PDF: English, Italian
Issuu: English, Italian

Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (1988)

A collection of essays based on a faculty seminar conducted and organised by the University of Vermont in the autumn of 1982. Contains an interview with Foucault made in October 1982, his six seminar presentations, a public lecture entitled “The Political Technology of Individuals”, and five presentations by members of the seminar.

Foucault’s presentations provide a concise overview of the conceptual and methodological shift that guided his “turn to the Greeks” in The History of Sexuality and his later seminars.

Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton
Publisher University of Massachusetts Press, 1988
ISBN 0870235931, 9780870235931
166 pages

Review (Montanus C. Milanzi, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2001)

PDF

Metahaven: Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics (2013)

“These are serious times, or so our governments keep telling us. Strangling economies with their austerity policies, they assure us that they have no choice. In a world where “there is no alternative”, how do you dissent? Once upon a time, graphic designers would have made political posters and typeset manifestos. Today, protest has new strategies. Enter the internet meme. With its Darwinian survival skills and its viral potential, the meme is a way of scaling up protest. Hackers and activists have learned to unleash the destructive force of a Rick Astley video. They have let slip the Lolcats of war. Pranks have become a resistance strategy. As the rise of Beppe Grillo in Italy testifies, this may be the hour to fight nonsense with nonsense. Jokes are an open-source weapon of politics, and it is time to tap their power.”

Publisher Strelka Press, 2013
ISBN 9785906264077

Review (Shumi Bose, Blueprint)

Publisher
Authors (in an interview with Aaron Peters)

EPUB