I felt this was a really important book but there’s a risk it could be misconstrued. A core element of the argument is far from new: complex socioeconomic forces are prone to coalesce into the figure of enemies who then organise the free-floating anxiety. My reference points for this idea are, in different ways, Arendt, Zizek and Butler. Seymour’s reference points are the political sociology and social psychology of fascism. It’s an idea we should be attending to closely at the moment, but it’s not a new argument.
I can see how some readers might come away feeling Seymour is reinventing the wheel here and missing the real contribution he’s making. What I think is novel and timely is how Seymour combines this familiar argument with three other factors:
- The role of social platforms in organising this demonology, as well as creating incentives for people to profit off the process.
- The sociology of disasters as well as the particular energy it lends to demonology, as an attempt to cope with something overwhelming.
- The spiralling proliferation of such disasters on a dying planet, as well as what this means for those first two mechanisms.
I want to better understand how he sees the connections between slow motion disasters like austerity and immediate catastrophes such as devastating wild fires. In essence I think he’s saying that the platformisation of social life organises the anxiety which emerges from these disasters, as well as enabling people to profit from it at all levels from local true believers through to grifter influencers and aspiring despots. The really terrifying thing is the feedback loops this opens up, which as he points out are not new when you crack open the shell of historical totalitarian societies, as well as what this means for the possibility of constraining spiralling diasters.
Mark Carrigan 