In surrealist artist Paul Klee’s The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour, author of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media.Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into.This is a story about desire and violence, as well as writing. It is also a story about what we might be writing ourselves into, culturally and politically. It is not an authoritative accout: that is impossible this early in the evolution of a radically new technopolitical system. This book is an attempt, as much as anything else, to work out a new langauge for thinking about what is coming into being . . . 'Richard Seymour has a brilliant mind and a compelling style. Everything he writes is worth reading.' – Gary Younge, Editor-at-Large, Guardian 'A brilliant, urgent, game-changing intervention.' – China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution 'A brilliant and provocative reassessment of a technology that has become apparently indispensable to modern life.' – Daniel Trilling, editor of New Humanist and author of Lights in the Distance 'If you really want to set yourself free you should read a book - preferably this one.' – Observer, Book of the Week 'A thrilling demonstration of what [resistance] can look like ... everyone should read it.' – Guardian 'Clever, and alarming ... a first tentative vision of what a neo-luddite response to our predicament might look like.' – Spectator 'Seymour's compulsively argued book may just be the intervention we all need.' – Tatler.comRichard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster and the author of numerous books about politics, including The Liberal Defence of Murder (Verso, 2008), Against Austerity (2014), Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2016) and The Twittering Machine (The Indigo Press, 2019). His writing appears in the Guardian, Jacobin, the London Review of Books, the New York Times and Prospect. He lives in London.

Up-to-date analysis of how Corbyn rose to the head of the labour party, and his prospects for staying there Jeremy Corbyn, the "dark horse" candidate for the Labour leadership, won and won big. With a landslide in the first round, this unassuming antiwar socialist crushed the opposition, particularly the Blairite opposition. For the first time in decades, socialism is back on the agenda—and for the first time in Labour's history, it controls the leadership. The party machine couldn't stop him. An almost unanimous media campaign couldn't stop him. It is as if their power, like that of the Wizard of Oz, was always mostly illusion. Now Corbyn has one chance to convince the public to support his reforming ambitions. Where did he come from, and what chance does he have? This book tells the story of how Corbyn's rise was made possible by the long decline of Labour and a deep crisis of British democracy. It surveys the makeshift coalition of trade unionists,...