CTSJ 115 Revolt, Terror, and Technologies of Social Networking in the Middle East and North Africa
This course will examine the highly ambivalent effects of the adoption of Western digital, networked technologies (with their underlying modes of understanding the world and human life) in the modern Middle East and North Africa. In particular, in the context of the Middle East, the course will seek to identify and understand both (1) the new forms of popular liberatory action — revolt, protest, social organizing — that are made possible or impossible by the widespread adoption of new technological modes of life, and (2) the new forms of state and para-state, surveillance, control, suppression, and disinformation that this technology makes available or encourages by its very structure and embedded premises. Beginning with an analysis of the inner logic and possibilities of modern digital communication technologies as these have been formed in their Western conditions of emergence, the course will then set out to understand how the reception of these new Western technologies in the Middle East (1) give rise to new possibilities for liberatory action via a digital public sphere (for example, the events of the 2009 Iranian uprising and the on-going political movements associated with the 2011 Arab Spring); (2) foster and globally spread new modes of dangerous reactionary politics that include violent, socially destructive forms (for example, ISIS, violent sectarianism and anti-Semitism); and (3) give authoritarian and repressive Middle Eastern regimes new tools and strategies for the surveillance, suppression and social control of their populations (for example, Turkish, Egyptian responses to social movements, and the Iranian governments access to Western mobile phone companies' location information of its citizens to round up protestors, to the use of wide-spread facial recognition technologies and the capacity to quickly spread disinformation or control elections results). The course will bring together a study of critical theoretical work from both Western and Middle Eastern thinkers (for example, of Foucault, Tufekci and Deleuze, Soroush, and Sardar) with the scholarly and vocational writing of technologists in both the West and the Middle East, the accessible operating documents of digital information companies who have played important roles in both making possible and repressing political and social liberation movements in the regions, and the legal and policy documents that both structure and deploy these technologies for and against us.