Abstract:

Starting from an assessment of Mazzarella’s (2019) claim that anthropology is uniquely positioned to study populism because of its commitment to understanding “the common sense of the common people”, I will explore the limits of such methodological populism when tackling the thorny issue of political manipulation via algorithmic tools and social media platforms – as was the case with the now-defunct political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which used data-driven political marketing in support of the 2016 Trump campaign in the US.
According to the available evidence from whistleblowers, journalistic investigations, and commissions of inquiry, Cambridge Analytica allegedly ran a real-time simulation of the US electorate, where digital doubles of US voters were targeted with highly customised political messages through multiple platforms.

There is a gap emerging here between what one can gather from fieldwork with voters who might have potentially fallen for these kinds of propaganda tactics, and the theories of subjectivity employed by the propagandists themselves to achieve their goals. Through a closer look at ethnographic research on social and political movements, daily use of social media, and virtual worlds, I will productively explore this gap and outline a meta-theory of what I call the analogue-digital divide – where the analogue is what precedes or eludes algorithmic digitalisation (and can be physical or immaterial), while the digital aims to datafy analogue forms of life and to transform the latter into algorithmic ones.

I argue that, by creating digital doubles of analogue voters, propagandists can deeply shape and influence people’s political “common sense” through manipulation rather than persuasion. The new digital subjects produced effectively compete with and have the potential to capture the analogue selves to whom they are intimately linked.

Bio:

Vito Laterza is an anthropologist and political analyst. He is an associate professor in the Department of Global Development and Planning at the University of Agder, Norway, and a visiting fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) in Uppsala. Laterza is work package leader in the Horizon Europe project ReMeD – Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age. He is the editor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications thematic collection “Mediated Populism” and a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

Laterza’s approach involves the systemic integration of ethnography, macro-level structural analysis, and epistemological and reflexive inquiry, in the tradition of “big ideas” social science and social and political theory. His academic career started with ethnographic fieldwork on human-machine relations, the body, and protest politics among forestry workers in eSwatini, a southern African kingdom. The main empirical focus of current research is on political communication, digital media, and new forms of social and political mobilisation in South Africa, Italy, and the US, including student protests, right-wing populism, and environmental activism.