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Research article
First published online March 25, 2026

After After the Internet: On technoliberalism, the neo-reactionary turn and the oppositional network social

Abstract

This response engages with critical reviews of After the Internet to advance three central theses. First, it refines technoliberalism as the Foucauldian political rationality of the Corporate Platform Complex, arguing we are now witnessing a neoreactionary turn where tech capital repurposes this infrastructure for illiberal ends. Second, it examines the platform-driven reconfiguration of the social, where neoliberal epistemologies reduce sociality to networks of individuals, attacking social reproduction-yet collective and oppositional forms of the social persist. Finally, the article posits that our conjuncture is defined by ambivalence, bifurcation, and superposition: the coexistence of incompossible worlds like Capital/Common and exploitation/solidarity. Rejecting both technosolutionism and pessimism, it argues for embracing this irreducible complexity as the ground for a speculative politics that must organise to foreclose the worst possible futures while navigating an open and volatile field of potentiality.

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