In the early twenty-first century, liberal democracies have witnessed their foundational norms of critique and deliberation being disrupted by a combination of populist and technological forces. A distinctive style of dispute has appeared, in which a speaker denounces the unfairness of all liberal and institutional systems of equivalence, including the measures of law, economics and the various other ‘tests’ which convention scholars have deemed core to organisations. The article reviews how sociologists of critique have tended to treat critical capacities as oriented towards consensus but then considers how technologies of real-time ‘control’ circumvent liberal critique altogether. In response, a different type of dispute emerges in the digital public sphere, which abandons equivalences in general, instead adopting a non-representational template of warfare. This style of post-liberal dispute is manifest in the rhetoric of populists but does not originate there.

在二十一世纪初，自由民主国家目睹了其批判和审议的基本准则被民粹主义力量和技术力量的结合所破坏。出现了一种独特的争执风格，发言者谴责所有自由主义和体制对等制度的不公平性，包括法律学者，经济学家和常规学者认为是组织核心的各种“考验”。本文回顾了批判的社会学家如何倾向于将批判能力视为朝着共识的方向发展，然后考虑了实时“控制”技术如何完全规避了自由批判。作为回应，数字公共领域出现了另一种类型的争端，该争端通常会放弃等效性，而是采用非代表性的战争模板。这种自由主义后的争端风格体现在民粹主义者的言辞中，但并非起源于那里。