When: Thursday, 15 May 2025, 18:00 - 19:30
Where: Konferenzraum, Department of Political Science, NIG, 2nd floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna
Speaker: Regletto Aldrich Imbong (University of the Philippines Cebu)
Moderation: Ulrich Brand (Department of Political Science, University of Vienna)
Abstract
This lecture will examine the intersection between Maoism as a revolutionary theory and practice and social media as a technoculture. Maoism inspired and has continued to inspire emancipatory projects the world over. In the words of Julia Lovell (2019), it has become a “global Maoism,” inspiring revolutionary and anti-colonial movements, especially in the Global South. Yet as Lovell (2019) herself admitted, global Maoism is “one of the missed stories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” With the omnipresent culture of the social media, what story could Maoism offer to what Jodi Dean (2022) argued as “technoculture”? This book will explore Maoist themes that intersect social media technoculture. The Maoist mass line guides every activist and revolutionary to “learn from the masses” and to do work “from the masses to the masses.” However, with a ubiquitous social media technoculture, social media has become an important if not an indispensable component in today’s social movements, prompting somewhat a modified version of the mass line that takes into account this very culture. This consideration aims not only to make Maoism relevant but also to critically engage social media technoculture itself according to Maoist categories. Among the aims of this lecture is to shed light on contemporary issues, like democracy, social movements, and technology development, using Maoist categories.
