The New Patriarchs Of Digital Capitalism

This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their celebrity, influence and ideology, their group dynamics and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and political formations of digital capitalism. Interrogating not only the founders' political and economic ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in our everyday lives, the authors provide robust evidence that a specific kind of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism's mode of command. The 'New Patriarchs' examined over the course of the book include: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, serial investor Peter Thiel as well as Sheryl Sandberg. The book analyses how these people legitimate their rapidly acquired power, tying a novel kind of socially awkward but 'visionary' masculinity to near complete dominance of their companies. Drawing on a ten million word digital concordance, the authors intervene in feminist debates on patriarchy, masculinity and postfeminism, locating the authority of these founders as emanating from a specifically racialised structure of power tied to imaginaries of the American Frontier, the patriarchal household and settler-colonialism. This is an important interdisciplinary contribution suitable for researchers and students across Digital Media, Media and Communication, Gender and Cultural Studies.

• | Author: Ben Little, Alison Winch
• | Publisher: Routledge
• | Publication Date: June 24, 2021
• | Number of Pages: 244 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0367260158
• | ISBN-13: 9780367260156