This Handbook provides the first comprehensive examination of the influence industry and how it operates worldwide across different domains. The rapid evolution of emerging technologies and data-driven persuasive practices has been linked to the spread of misleading content in domestic and foreign influence campaigns. This has prompted worldwide public and policy discussions about disinformation and how to curb its spread. However, less attention has been paid to the increasingly data-driven commercial industry taking advantage of the opportunities these new technologies afford. The handbook uses the term ‘influence’ here to include not only messaging and public relations (PR), which fell within the traditional focus of propaganda studies, but to consider the infrastructure and actors behind an advanced array of capabilities that can be used in a coordinated way to affect an audience’s emotions, ideas and behaviors in order to advance a state or non-state actor’s objectives – increasingly based on data-driven profiling. The volume fills a gap in scholarship exploring the recent technical, political and economic development of this industry, surveying the extent of different technologies and services offered to clients worldwide across multiple domains (commercial, political, national security and government). The chapters are divided into three thematic sections and evaluate Influence Industry practices, aims and effectiveness across audiences; business practices and economics; and democratic structures and human rights. They also offer advice for researchers and consider key ethical issues and new regulatory approaches. This volume will be of much interest to students of political science, propaganda studies, sociology, communication studies and journalism.

We are in the midst of a devastating takeover of our world. The Global Coup d'État shows how, why, and what we can do to stop it. The year 2020 will go down in history as the year when the global coup d'état was initiated. In a historical context, the COVID-19 crisis, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer and subsequent riots, mass protests against government lockdowns, and the 2020 election appear rather as part of a well-directed chess game, with complete control of the whole planet as the final goal. During the crescendo of this drama, the powers behind the coup emerged quite openly, offering a techno–totalitarian and very far-reaching solution to the world. This solution, which they call the Great Reset, means that mankind must be fully integrated and merged with a worldwide technological system, through the application of the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution—all for our own safety, security, and well-being. Most people probably associate the phrase “coup d'état” with a sudden, violent takeover, with tanks around government buildings, takeover of media channels, purges of dissidents, arrests, and so on. But this is not always the case. The usurpers can also seize power without violence, in a completely legal and democratic way, with the consent or even enthusiasm of the people, as evidenced in 2020. There are many “existential threats” (climate crisis, refugee crises, terrorism, pandemics, etc.) that can be used to establish a firmer and more centralized governance. This can be a gradual process, barely perceivable until it’s almost a fait accompli. In The Global Coup d'État, author and researcher Jacob Nordangård shares the history, describes the process, reveals the methods, and identifies the agents of this worldwide takeover so that we can take action before it is too late.

Edouard Roditi's critical study of Oscar Wilde, originally published in 1947 in New Directions' Makers of Modern Literature Series, was a pioneering attempt to evaluate a literary reputation long distorted by the journalistic appetite for scandal. Relegating biography to a back seat, Roditi addressed the important of Wilde's ingenious, imaginative, and dialectical thought in his own time and showed how his poetry, novels, plays, and critical writings were a key influence in the shift of English and American literature away from established and aging Romanticism toward Modernism. For this first paperbound edition of his perceptive and erudite study of Wilde, Roditi has added three additional chapters touching on new material about Wilde as well as the new public attitudes about homosexuality that have evolved since the book was first published. An American long resident in Paris, Edouard Roditi is an internationally known linguist, scholar, art critic, and author and translator of a considerable number of works of fiction and poetry, criticism and biography. A collection of his witty and exotic short stories, The Delights of Turkey, is available under the New Directions imprint.

This study explores the relationship between Wilde's treatment of sexual subject matter and the development of his literary aesthetics from the earliest volume of poetry through the social comedies which highlighted his career. In addition, the study considers the earliest critical responses to Wilde's works, since they reveal how references to sexual subject matter, particularly to homoerotic themes, were received in Wilde's own period.