I pursue the case of natural technology by arguing that it is a technology at odds with political life as such. (1) Community and loneliness. I argue that we wax rosy about “community” online to the extent that we are evoking features of offline communities that we cannot have in online terms. (2) Context and information. By removing speech from social circumstances, the internet produces insoluble problems for the understanding and regulation of speech. (3) Facing and defacing. I discuss how changes in our sense of context make a difference to our conception of who we are and of where our identities are at stake. (4) Equality and authority. I scrutinize what is meant by “democracy” in digital terms and show that it is democratic in name only. (5) Ethnonationalism and cosmopolitanism. Digital communication is tending to polarize citizens throughout the Western world either toward some form of ethnic nationalism or toward cosmopolitanism beyond material borders. I consider China as a candidate for what the internet’s intrinsic “political form” might be. (6) Little men, bigly. I show how many rhetorical features of President Trump’s tenure make sense when understood in light of the imperatives of online communication.

Violence has long been a feature of the exercise and contestation of rule in Kenya. This chapter explores how publics reflect the threat and presence of public violence. In the early 2010s, violence, both online and on the streets, became increasingly frequent and present. Throughout early 2014, there were repeated clashes between Muslim youth and security forces, and between street hawkers and the county government in the city. Chapter 9 asks if and how experiences of violence either defended or threatened publics. Violence was, in many ways, silencing. Still, acts of violence and the fear of violence did not simply silence debate. Public discussion on Facebook transgressed boundaries, showing how the issues that were beyond the scope of the street parliaments were present online, bringing emotion and more intimate concerns into public discussion. At the same time, in opening up discussion to consider these acts of violence, Facebook gave rise to new threat to open and plural discussion in the form of personal insult and attacks.

Chapter 10 shifts analytical attention to the mindset of the participant as a spectator within the people’s parliaments. This chapter’s focus on the individual provides a reminder that underpinning national patterns in politics are the thoughts and decisions of the individual Kenyan. This chapter reveals particular challenges that affected the spectator’s mindset, which in turn contributed to the reproduction of established political repertoires. Challenges emerged around two states of mind: first, spectators’ unwillingness or inability to take into account diverse perspectives, and second, their inability imagine a common experience. The former was evident through the sharpening of pre-established repertoires across all of the people’s parliaments, and the latter was apparent on social media, where participants’ experiences were individualised and they lost a common object of observation.