Abstract
A defining legacy of the Trump insurgency and the journalistic and political preoccupation with Russiagate has been a transformation of web 2.0 platform governance. The digital teleologies of openness and self-correcting networks have faced a significant “techlash” and the looming threat of regulation. The heightened awareness of misinformation, cyberwar and far-right extremism have been responded to with a patchwork regulatory structure that explicitly enlists new media companies into the geopolitics of communicative technology. A technocratic apparatus of disinformation experts, academic research centres and tech-lobbyists, adjacent to the national security state, have emerged to bolster national myths of an epistemic consensus imperilled by geopolitical rivals. This patchwork is sustained by a technocratic class habitus in which the defence of truth is inseparable from geopolitics and weaponized communication. This alliance of the state, capital and cyber-warriors, in the place of robust anti-monopoly and public-interest regulation of platforms, is demonstrative of platform imperialism (Yong Jin, 2015); that is the centrality of the internet to American cultural and economic hegemony.