Whose world are we living in? The clear answer is the tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and the sections of finance capital most closely allied to them. In Hegemony Now, Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams ask: How did this historic bloc of Wall Street and Silicon Valley establish their control over contemporary global culture?
Hegemony Now considers the political means by which finance capital - greatly assisted by emergent digital technologies - re-established pre-eminence within the capitalist class and across wider society in the 1980s and 1990s. Digital technology corporations such as Apple, Facebook and Google have established virtual monopolies both on the distribution of information and on key infrastructures of everyday life, communication, and entertainment. Digital platforms, Hegemony Now makes clear, are a key mechanism of institutionalised power, and the contemporary state can increasingly be understood as itself a form of platform.
What can be done, and by whom? What alliances and coalitions might have the potential to challenge the hegemony of the techno-financial elite? What programme might they coalesce around? And what technical and institutional infrastructures would we need to build in order to realise their political potential? The authors present a range of possible outcomes, from the utopic to the dystopian. Hegemony Now is at once a theory of power and hegemony in the twenty-first century and a road-map for the fights ahead.
