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ABSTRACT
Following Elon Musk's acquisition of the Twitter in 2022, the platform has been characterized by an uptick in the trolling and disinformation that are critical tools for illiberal and undemocratic political movements. In The Politics of Small Things, Jeffrey Goldfarb emphasises the importance, not simply of the public sphere, but of the potential and transformative power of the conversations that occur there. Clearly, free speech, as it occurs on social media, may or may not promote democracy. This leads us to what Goldfarb did not predict: that the same technology that helped grassroots movements overthrow authoritarianism would put the politics of small things to the purpose of undemocratic politics. Goldfarb was correct that public conversation leads to action and power. What we all missed, however, was that social media could turn a central tool of democracy, free and fair elections, to bringing about an undemocratic world.
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Notes
1 For white supremacist and militia early adoption of networked computers, see Belew (Citation2018); for conservative networking and iconic progressive movements that formed on and functioned through social media, see Potter (Citation2020).
2 You can still read Ann Althouse at https://althouse.blogspot.com; Durham-In-Wonderland has been dormant since 2014, and can be accessed here: https://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com.
3 The notion of intentional writing to be overheard by the powerful comes from Philip Brian Harper’s essay on Baraka’s poetry in Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity (Citation1998).