In a time when media, social media, nations, and educational settings feed ideas to us in increasingly small sound-bites that are digested on the run, it is refreshing to find a book which takes the time to delve into ontological and epistemic questions relevant to our digitally infused world today. Stingl disentangles the meaning of digital culture and how power and inequality become manifest within digital realms with great care.... For those who can manage the work, in unpacking the implications of Digital Culture and the digital coloniality of power, Stingl’s love of language, philosophy, and ideas comes through as he revels not only in ideas, but in words and word-play. Stingl, however, does not get lost in his rhetoric but rather still has the impassioned commitment to sociology required to get fired up while practicing epistemic disobedience.

Symbolic Interaction

Today, the internet has become what Jorge Luis Borges called the “Total Library,” and with it, a Promethean promised has been loudly proclaimed: digital culture shall make you free! This incredible book, a Rabelaisian Carnival of knowledges, urges us to see through these myths. Today, the internet and its whole new digital culture has become another means to update and upgrade the hegemony of the Global North over the old and new Global South. Here disciplinary irreverence yields conceptual illumination. Henceforth, when you google you will do so with trepidation but in defiance.

Eduardo Mendieta, Pennsylvania State University

This inventive and unconventional book covers so much intellectual territory that it is at home everywhere and nowhere—a nomadic, ronin-like text. While the text is chocked-full of thoughtful and provocative tangents, Stingl's chief aim is to establish openings and platforms for theorists who want to challenge business-as-usual in the social sciences, and he does so with palpable success based on insights from the broader project of decoloniality and a serious critique of salvation by "digital" means. A comment on style: Stingl's writing is melodic and dark, but a kernel of hope underlies every sentence, every turn-of-phrase. I found the book at once disturbing and enchanting.

Nicholas Rowland, Pennsylvania State University

An erudite and intrepid book! It exposes the colonial epistemologies framing today’s digital culture and raises crucial questions about the possibilities of a decolonial sociology.

Jyoti Puri, Simmons College