[Commlist] new book: The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power

Alison Winch and Ben Little are delighted to announce the publication of 
their book on celebrity tech founders such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and 
Mark Zuckerberg.

Please see below for summary, contents, endorsements and biographies. A 
link to the launch event held on the 25^th June is here: 
https://youtu.be/9BeaZ5iB7yY <https://youtu.be/9BeaZ5iB7yY>

+++

*The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity Tech Founders and 
Networks of Power*

This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US 
West Coast tech companies, addressing their celebrity, influence and 
ideology, their group dynamics and the role they play in the wider 
sociocultural and political formations of digital capitalism.

  Interrogating not only the founders’ political and economic 
ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in our 
everyday lives, the authors provide robust evidence that a specific kind 
of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism’s mode of 
command. The ‘New Patriarchs’ examined over the course of the book 
include: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff 
Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, serial investor Peter 
Thiel as well as Sheryl Sandberg. The book analyses how these people 
legitimate their rapidly acquired power, tying a novel kind of socially 
awkward but ‘visionary’ masculinity to near complete dominance of their 
companies. Drawing on a ten million word digital concordance, the 
authors intervene in feminist debates on patriarchy, masculinity and 
postfeminism, locating the authority of these founders as emanating from 
a specifically racialised structure of power tied to imaginaries of the 
American Frontier, the patriarchal household and settler-colonialism.

This is an important interdisciplinary contribution suitable for 
researchers and students across Digital Media, Media and Communication, 
Gender and Cultural Studies.

*
*

*CONTENTS*

Introduction: The new patriarchs 1

1 Theorising the patriarchal network

2 Elon Musk: Geek masculinity and marketing the celebrity founder

3 Jeff Bezos: Beyond the American frontier

4 Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate household

5 Peter Thiel’s technological frontiers

6 Endorsed by Sandberg: Resilience not resistance

7 The limits of liberalism: Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Conclusion

Appendix: A concordance of popular books on digital capitalism

*Endorsements*

‘This is a much-needed field guide to the apex predators of tech. Little 
and Winch reveal the ideological terrain, the cult of celebrity, and the 
dominant features of patriarchal capitalism that have shaped Silicon 
Valley and far beyond.’

Kate Crawford, author of /Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the 
Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence/

//

‘Written at a cultural moment when people around the globe are 
necessarily engaging with technologies in everyday life, /The New 
Patriarchs /is an incredibly timely and brilliant analysis of the deep 
interrelations between and within gender, technology, and capitalism. 
Resisting a simplistic analysis of the founders of tech companies, Winch 
and Little offer us an astute framing that positions these founders 
within the landscapes of patriarchy, celebrity, the household, and myths 
of the Western frontier. A true interdisciplinary project, the book 
engages with feminist theory, science and technology studies, political 
science, and cultural studies, and thus offers us complex 
conceptualizations of not only the role of technology in society, but 
also the ways in which patriarchies structure the way we use and 
understand technologies, and it clearly theorizes the ideologies, 
histories, and values of the people who run and organize the dominant 
media platforms in the world.’

Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor of Media and Communications, London School 
of Economics

‘For some time now, media scholars, political scientists and public 
commentators have been working to make sense of the manifold 
implications of data capitalism, surveillance culture and Big Tech 
ownership on democracy, the state and the future of society more 
generally. This book stands out as one of the most exciting and original 
interventions in this space. Organised as a series of case studies 
critiquing the world’s richest and most powerful tech oligarchs, it 
provides a rich and meticulous account of digital capitalism’s reliance 
on the construction of mythic celebrity personae in its pursuit of a new 
– and frankly terrifying – global social order. Little and Winch 
demonstrate how this new breed of founding fathers engage in 
stage-managed acts of philanthropy, environmentalism and progressive 
rhetoric to legitimate new forms of power and avoid scrutiny. Inspired 
by paradigms from celebrity studies, they deftly expose the 
selfmythologising of the capitalist super-elite as foundational to the 
complex political economy of data colonialism. Methodologically sharp 
and deeply compelling, this is a searing conjunctural analysis of the 
dynamics that shape the new networked monopoly of patriarchs that drives 
technocapitalism. A comprehensive, enlightening and deeply unsettling 
analysis of the tech industry’s inordinate power over all aspects of 
human life.’

Debbie Ging, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Dublin City University

*Author biographies*

*Ben Little *is a lecturer in Media and Cultural Politics and Associate 
Dean of Engagement and Innovation in the faculty of Arts and Humanities 
at the University of East Anglia. He works on celebrity, activism, 
generation, and digital culture. His last book (with Jane Arthurs) was 
/Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics /(2016). He is part of the 
editorial collective of /Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture/, 
series editor of generational politics series Radical Future and a 
director of Lawrence and Wishart.

*Alison Winch *is a lecturer in media studies at the University of East 
Anglia. Her books include /Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood 
/(2013) and the poetry collection /Darling, It’s Me /(2019). She is part 
of the editorial collective for /Soundings: A Journal of Politics and 
Culture/.

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