Serialità e comunicazione politica. I Big 5 e l'abbraccio populista = Seriality and Political Communication: The Big Five and the Populist Embrace

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationship between seriality and political communication by focusing on the case of the Californian Ideology and the role of Big Tech in the current neopopulist phase. Building on Barbrook and Cameron's proposal, the Californian Ideology is read as a flexible narrative device, progressively "serialized" within public discourse: a format that combines libertarian countercultures, neoliberalism, technodeterminism and the cult of the entrepreneur, becoming the common sense of Silicon Valley elites. The essay reconstructs the genealogy of this ideological constellation and traces its most recent twists: from the media representation of a progressive, liberal Silicon Valley to the emergence of a tech right and a tecnodestra that intersect Trumpism, sovereigntism and "post-liberal" themes. Through the figures of Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and the "PayPal Mafia", the article shows how the serialization of myths, formats and storytelling - from techno-meritocratic self-help to the Promethean rhetoric of "techno-optimism" - fuels a political imaginary that legitimises the convergence between the techno-industrial complex and right-wing populism. The "populist embrace" between the Big Five and the Trump administration is thus interpreted not as a sudden shift to the right, but as the coherent outcome of long ideological trajectories in which the seriality of technical, managerial and salvific discourses contributes to redefining the field of political communication in the age of digital governmentality.