Dear friends,
My latest paper, ‘Conceptualising Broligarchy’, is now available as a preprint. The paper explores the broligarchy, or the tech billionaires we all know and love, as a historically specific gendered formation. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter and Achille Mbembe, I read this tech super-elite as a possible Man3. Man3, I argue, is characterised by the combination of extraordinary wealth with infrastructural and communicative control, and appears to be a hybrid technobiological figure grounded in myths of super-intelligence, transhumanist futurity and elite transcendence. I also describe how the imaginary of Man3 recodes and combines colonial and feudal logic, which allows consent to be manufactured partly through offering up networked misogyny as a compensatory form of power to ‘lesser’ men. The platform, in other worse, is the site of a war of all-against-all that supports technofeudal data extraction, suppresses resistance, and consolidates the broligarchy at the expense of the rest of us.
I hope the paper is of interest, and I’ll keep you posted on publication.
Alison Phipps 