On the topic of social media, Richard Seymour, the Marxist blogger and author of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, knows whereof he writes. Like so many others, he has been chewed up in its electronic maw — in his case, for a couple of comments he incautiously made on Facebook in 2015. As he ruefully noted a year later, after the shitstorm erupted, “The potential audience for anything posted on the internet, is the entire internet, plus the audience of any print or broadcast media that takes it up.”
Seymour has been reading, thinking, and writing about social media for a while now, an interest possibly precipitated by that experience. He describes his new book, published in Europe but not yet in North America, as a “horror story.” Its germs can be found in his popular but now abandoned blog, Lenin’s Tomb, specifically with such pieces as “We Are All Trolls,” from December 2016, and the last post he wrote there, over two years ago, “On...
John Baglow reads and writes in Ottawa. His latest poetry collection is Murmuration: Marianne’s Book.
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