21 © The Author(s) 2019 D. Ging, E. Siapera (eds.), Gender Hate Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96226-9_2 CHAPTER 2 Online Misogyny as Witch Hunt: Primitive Accumulation in the Age of Techno-capitalism Eugenia Siapera INTRODUCTION Focusing primarily on the European and “Western” context, this chapter will address the question of online misogyny and anti-feminism from a materialist perspective. To begin with, I use the term online misogyny as an umbrella term for all kinds of negative experiences that women go through online because of their gender, ranging from harassment and name calling to doxing and rape threats. I refer to anti-feminism as a posi- tion that is explicitly against gender equality. While there is a tendency to understand these phenomena in terms of the online culture wars, I want to argue here that it may be more useful to understand them in terms of their material dimensions, and especially in terms of their political func- tion. This political function is the continued exclusion of women from accessing and controlling the means of production and from full socio- economic participation in the emerging new formation, to which I refer as E. Siapera (*) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: eugenia.siapera@ucd.ie