Ruperto Carola Ringvorlesung Social Media and the Descent to (Un)Freedoms

This talk is about two decades of social media expansion and its latest technological enhancement of communicative artificial intelligence, and how they have contributed to distinct forms of freedoms and unfreedoms globally.  With three focal points—encrypted messaging in India, digital influence operations in Brazil, and online anti-immigrant discourse in Germany—the talk will navigate technological affordance, commerce, and ideology as distinct vectors where new freedoms are bolstered to say the unsayable, and new unfreedoms are unleashed to scuttle dissent and feed anxiety. This is not a sudden crisis caused by digital communication alone, I will argue, but a global conjuncture underwritten by enduring forces of coloniality and novel forms of organizing political work. The talk will end with reflections on academic cultures and digital mediations that increasingly pervade them, and what it means to seek solidarity in the midst of entrenched hierarchies, liberal pieties, and perceptions of privilege.