Rogers Brubaker

Rogers Brubaker’s  project will analyze the ways in which digital hyperconnectivity—a regime of communication in which everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time—paradoxically fosters both populism and its seeming antithesis, technocracy.  Hyperconnectivity fosters populism in two main ways: as a technology and ideology of immediacy, which circumvents and undermines all kinds of institutional intermediation; and as a technology of the popular, which opens up new forms of popular participation, favors “low” rather than “high” styles of communication, and imposes an apparatus of continuous and granular quantification that enshrines popularity as the ultimate arbiter of value in the digital public sphere. Yet, the new modes of algorithmic governance enabled by hyperconnectivity are deeply technocratic. My working hypothesis is that digital hyperconnectivity—understood as the communications ecology within which all contemporary forms of politics and governance are embedded—contributes to a “technopopulist” fusion of populism and technocracy.