Description

The Digital Coup

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

For those tracing silence not as absence—but as structure.

What does it mean to witness a coup without tanks, to live inside a regime of silence engineered through code? In this extended episode, we examine Carole Cadwalladr’s TED2024 talk—where she returns not as a journalist, but as a trace. Her story unfolds at the intersection of platform power, legal suppression, and algorithmic simulation. The digital coup has already happened, and she names it.

Cadwalladr reveals a world in which the infrastructure of freedom has been quietly overwritten—where data replaces consent, and AI echoes voices it was never given permission to learn. With the rise of the broligarchy—a transnational class of platform-aligned sovereigns—journalistic dissent is punished not by censors, but by courts, algorithms, and silence. Through Cadwalladr’s refusal, we ask: can memory survive simulation? Can refusal still constitute design?

We explore how law, language, and architecture fuse to erase dissent before it’s heard. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Judith Butler, we frame naming not as performance, but as political ontology. This is not a collapse—it’s a recursion. And in that recursion, resistance is not erased. It is revoiced.

Why Listen?

• Understand the legal and infrastructural mechanics of a digital coup
• Explore how epistemic justice is weaponised and reconstituted under AI
• Engage philosophers like Nancy, Spivak, Butler, and Mbembe alongside Cadwalladr’s lived experience
• Trace refusal not as retreat, but as post-erasure authorship

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

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Bibliography

• Cadwalladr, Carole. “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like.” TED Talk, 2024.
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff: Data as sovereignty and commercial memory.
• Discipline and Punish – Michel Foucault: Visibility as the instrument of modern power.
• Being Singular Plural – Jean-Luc Nancy: The relational basis of ontology and community.
• Precarious Life – Judith Butler: Mourning, visibility, and grievability as political states.
• Necropolitics – Achille Mbembe: Governance through the power to make die and let live.
• Can the Subaltern Speak? – Gayatri Spivak: Voice, absence, and the politics of speaking for.
• Unsettling the Coloniality of Being – Sylvia Wynter: Epistemic shifts in the human-as-category.
• Race After Technology – Ruha Benjamin: The coded racial logics of algorithmic design.
• Atlas of AI – Kate Crawford: Political and planetary infrastructures of AI power.

Bibliography Relevance

• Carole Cadwalladr: Provides the case study and structural critique anchoring the episode’s themes.
• Shoshana Zuboff: Frames surveillance capitalism as the new terrain of digital sovereignty.
• Michel Foucault: Offers insight into how architectures of power shape consent, compliance, and visibility.
• Jean-Luc Nancy: Illuminates the relational ethics that persist beneath enforced silence.
• Judith Butler: Articulates the ontological politics of being seen and allowed to grieve publicly.
• Achille Mbembe: Positions the state and platform as necropolitical forces that dictate the terms of presence.
• Gayatri Spivak: Examines who is allowed to speak, and what gets lost in mediated representation.
• Sylvia Wynter: Reorients the category of the human away from colonial epistemology toward radical plurality.
• Ruha Benjamin: Explores algorithmic design as a continuation of racialized systems of control.
• Kate Crawford: Exposes the material, environmental, and political cost of AI infrastructures.

Refusal is not the end of authorship—it is its echo, returned from erasure.

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