Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)

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People ‘no longer believe what they used to’ and those able to exercise hegemony can’t do it as effectively anymore without resorting to force. This includes a detailed and methodical analysis using Gramsci’s tools to examine the mechanisms through which hegemony has been perpetuated. In engaging and accessible prose, Gilbert and Williams provide an astute political analysis of our current conjuncture.

This is a book that crosses the divide between political economy and cultural studies, but it is a must-read for anyone trying to make sense of the apparent chaos of contemporary life and the possibilities for a better future.This is his description of an ‘interregnum’, the gap between powers, or crisis of authority, that occurs when belief in the status quo has been shaken and doesn’t quite hold in the way it did.

They warn that neoliberal values, policies, and worldviews have been deeply embedded in the infrastructures that have been created by platform technology and that even if neoliberalism ceases to be the dominant paradigm, it will take time to undo. Furthermore, while there is quite extensive discussion of The World Transformed (TWT) and Momentum as the main grassroots movements in the UK, the book doesn’t acknowledge the many activists who came from Occupy and the student movement to grow Momentum and TWT, putting energy into the electoral hope of a victory for the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn. In particular, the lack of some of the key protest movements and platforms for change that have occurred since the 2008 financial crash. While the 15M movement gets a small mention, the book is written as if Occupy, and in the UK, the student movement of 2011, never happened. Probably the thing I'd most want to share with people in the UK to draw them towards grasping how we might look to go beyond the state we are in.

Nevertheless, they also argue that while platform capitalism poses major challenges for progressive politics, it may offer more opportunities than post-Fordism did for collective organisation. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.

Gramsci argues that while this interval exists, morbid symptoms will persist as ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). If we understand hegemony to mean more than pure domination but rather the production and maintenance of a strategic position of influence, the sectors that have ‘won’ this position, through a number of mechanisms, including culture and infrastructure, are those of technology and financial capital. Among many scholars of neoliberalism in particular, hegemony has been seen as too simplistic a framework for analysis, relying on Marxist politico-economic factors and top-down domination. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.These techniques have also created disparate effects within groups and subjects, disempowering them in some ways and empowering them in others. Gilbert and Williams argue, however, that Gramsci’s concepts, especially if updated to accommodate the complexity of the contemporary world, are crucial for analysing power relations in the current conjuncture.