The Rise of Algorithm Populism

This chapter scrutinizes the political career of comedian-cum-politician Beppe Grillo, who founded the Five Star Movement, an algorithm party that currently co-rules Italy. It explores how Italy shifted from the glossy prepackaged world of Silvio Berlusconi toward a grassroots, Internet-driven, and algorithmic political movement. It also describes the Five Star Movement as a protest movement on populism, antipolitics, and anarchism. The chapter discusses Grillo's deployment of supernatural humor and political suspicion, as well as his otherworldly humor and cynical hypotheses that speak to brewing cultural and economic anxieties. It refers to Grillo's theories that offer citizens a scapegoat or an alternative explanation for Italy's socioeconomic crises and the labor of the supernatural.

Introduction

This chapter establishes television and print media as foundational to Silvio Berlusconi's antiestablishment politics to its many aftermaths. It explains that the immediate aftermath is about how science became seen as worth saving and a rallying cry to mobilize to the streets. It also recounts the rise of Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement as a consequential outcome that forms a new kind of digital populism through the Internet and algorithmic processes. The chapter examines why Italy was one of the first countries to attempt to hold disinformation and “fake news” legally accountable, and how social actors hyperinvest in scientific thinking. It refers to how the current hegemonic form of knowledge and customized Internet influence forms of governance and politics.

The Soldiers of Rationality

This chapter examines the yearly demonstration organized by the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Pseudoscientific Claims (CICAP), in which the group stages a national protest against superstitious belief. It details how CICAP members identify as “soldiers of rationality” who protect Italy's credulous public, whom they see as victims of dangerously irrational and misguided beliefs. It also discusses CICAP's promotion of scientific knowledge and debunking of irrational convictions, which enables them to lump together witchcraft, 9/11 conspiracy theories, UFOs, and the Shroud of Turin. The chapter unravels the mystery of why CICAP has become urgent in contemporary Italy, a country known for its centuries-old belief in witchcraft, magic, and superstition. It cites the crisis that led to the rise and intensity of Italy's scientific skeptics that is not only economic and political but also epistemological.

Conclusion

This chapter recounts the emergence of the Five Star Movement and its dependence on algorithmic technologies. It discusses the venue of knowing the world and knowledge of the self as it is once more firmly and singularly rooted in the human corporeal self and shifted toward mathematical algorithms and computers. It describes living in a world in which knowledge is not just run through algorithms but also customized to the individual shape of what the world is about and who should rule it. The chapter speculates what the new material infrastructures of knowledge mean for democratic governance in an age dominated by highly sophisticated but indecipherable and invisible forms of intelligence. It elaborates how the mirror in the 2018 film I Exist serves as a kind of double illusion as it is considered a fake religion icon that is created for someone else's financial gain, not individual enlightenment.