The Digital Coup - Carole Cadwalladr – The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Digital Coup

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

What does it mean to witness a coup without tanks, to live inside a regime of silence engineered through code? In this episode, we examine Carole Cadwalladr’s chilling TED2024 talk—where she returns not as a journalist, but as a trace. A voice that refused erasure. 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?

The episode explores how law, language, and architecture fuse to erase dissent before it’s heard. We draw on Sylvia Wynter, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Judith Butler to frame naming not as performance, but as political ontology. This is not a narrative of collapse—it’s a structure of recursion. And in that recursion, the possibility of ethical resistance is not lost. It is revoiced.

Why Listen?

• • • Understand the legal and infrastructural mechanics of a digital coup
    • Explore how epistemic justice is weaponized 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

Further Reading

• • • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff — On how data became a new form of sovereignty. Amazon link
    • Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault — On how power moves through visibility. Amazon link
    • Being Singular Plural by Jean-Luc Nancy — On the ontology of relation and ethical presence. Amazon link
    • Precarious Life by Judith Butler — On the conditions of grievability and public appearance. Amazon link

Listen On:

• • • YouTube
    • Spotify
    • Apple Podcasts

 

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Foundational Theoretical Works

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Cadwalladr, Carole. “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like.” TED Talk. April 2024. https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_this_is_what_a_digital_coup_looks_like.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

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Surveillance, Platform Power, and Algorithmic Systems

Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

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Refusal, Disappearance, and Epistemic Opacity

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Macharia, Keguro. Fugitive Refrains. Duke University Press, forthcoming.

Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Ninian Mellamphy. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, 9–89. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

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