Description
Digital economies play an increasingly salient role in shaping the epistemic structures of political authority. From techno-evangelist paradigms to ‘anti-woke’ discourses endorsed by Silicon Valley oligarchs, the tech industry’s influence over knowledge and truth ranges from top-down political leverage to everyday online practices. Yet we still lack a conceptual framing that links this influence with concrete political and redistributive outcomes. Existing work on epistemic politics has remained elite-centric and biased toward macro-economic registers, neglecting issues outside technocratic settings and formal economics. To address these gaps, this paper develops the concept of ‘reactionary epistemic populism’ as a mode of knowledge and truth-claiming entangled with digital capitalism, focusing on anti-feminist and anti-communist conspiracism in South Korea. The paper analyses the convergence of these two repertoires across gaming, web-cartoon and YouTube ecosystems, arguing that they function as sites of epistemic contestation fostering institutional de-legitimation. The findings highlight three major outcomes: systemic constraints on labour mobilisation and bargaining power; barriers to gender equality and progressive reforms; and the emergence of transnational epistemic coalitions aligned with global capitalist restructuring. By examining the intersection of digital epistemic conflicts with reactionary populism, the paper contributes to the integration of epistemic politics into critical IPE analysis of contemporary capitalism.