A review by noodles123
The twittering machine by Richard Seymour

1.0

Extremely disappointing. I am not sure if this even qualifies as a book or would it be better described as a bibliography, so often does Seymour start a sentence with "in the words of ....". The book is a directory of people who have discussed the issues of data, society and social media better than Seymour has and much of his analysis are tired, milquetoast takes read in the voice of a very annoying first year philosophy student. Using the word hegemony or ontology frequently does not elevate this book above what it is, which is basically a Guardian article from 2012. The book does little to analyse the political context from which it draws its conclusions and simplifies many parts of the left/right divide beyond recognition. One in particular is calling Tommy Robinson part of the "Intellectual Dark Web", an affiliation i have never seen before given Robinson is a white supremacist and the defining feature of most of the Intellectual Dark Web is that they are at heart, leftists. A google search reveals that this book and one tweet are the source for this comment.


To boot, several sections of this book honestly verge on plagiarism. Significant parts of the chapter on trolling are pulled directly from John Ronson's "So you've been publicly shamed" or in other sections, from James Bindle's "New Dark Age", which are both far superior books to this one. Read one of those, don't waste your time on this.