“All Manners of Monsters”: Transparency and the Alt-Right in Hari Kunzru’s "Red Pill"

Red Pill (2020) is a novel by British writer Hari Kunzru. The novel explores two ongoing socio-political trends. First, it is concerned with the dominance of transparency in contemporary society, a situation which is presented as totalitarian. Then, Red Pill analyses the rise of the alt-right in Western countries. Kunzru also highlights the shortcomings of common liberal-progressive responses to modern-day far-right discourse. This article examines the novel from the point of view of Critical Transparency Studies, drawing on the work of, among other, Georg Simmel and Byung-Chul Han.