Michael Brooks - Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right

CULTURE, SOCIETY & POLITICS

The modern world is at an impasse. Disasters scroll across our smartphone screens and were invited to like, follow or upvote, but critical thinking is harder and harder to find. Rather than connecting us in common struggle and debate, the internet has sped up and deepened a long-standing process of alienation and atomization. Zer0 Books wants to work against this trend. With critical theory as our jumping off point, we aim to publish books that make our readers uncomfortable. We want to move beyond received opinions.

Zer0 Books is on the left and wants to reinvent the left. We are sick of the injustice, the suffering and the stupidity that defines both our political and cultural world, and we aim to find a new foundation for a new struggle.

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Everyone is preoccupied by how the online world is shaping politics. The left and many liberals have been deeply concerned with the rights fluency on platforms ranging from YouTube to Instagram to Twitter, and their ability to use these platforms to push their messages and create an overall political narrative. With authoritarian right-wing governments holding power from the United States to Brazil and Hungary to India, the need to understand and overcome these forces is urgent. This book focuses on the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), a group exercise in collective self-branding that may already be by the wayside. However, the tactics, ideologies, and arguments used by this group remain relevant for understanding the broader center-right and right-wing ecosystem, and the absolutely necessary changes that the left must make to tell its own more appealing and dynamic story.