Our second blog series will focus on the relationship between the politics and the digital. The overarching thesis to be explored can be found at the conclusion of Langdon Winner’s famous essay ‘Do Artefacts Have Politics?’: “people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accord with technological innovation at the same time they would resist similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds”.

There has been an explosion in multidisciplinary interest in the political implications of the Internet, social media, and the increasing normalizing of processes of datafication, surveillance and platform models in contemporary capitalist society. These new technologies have been sites of ideological, geopolitical, and cultural contestation, with many theorists attributing the return of political polarisation and increasing divides within societies to the invective and counter-productive discursive styles of social media bleeding into everyday life.

New social movements that would otherwise need to book public meetings rooms find themselves cultivating political communities online. Politicians can both exploit and be exploited by the whims of the algorithm. There are both opportunities and dangers in the implementation of contemporary technologies in all aspects of political and social life. There are issues of cybersecurity and cyber- conflict. How have different states, parties, political actors, and institutions adopted certain technological approaches – from surveillance, datafication, social media marketing strategies, etc.) – and what has been the impact? How should political theory understand the relationship between power and technology, between analogue and digital democracy, between networks and discourse, and between algorithms and authority? To what extent does digital technology compel us to change to suit its needs, and does this conflict with our ideas about freedom and authenticity? Is our contemporary situation worthy of being considered a “new Information Age” or merely the latest iteration of modernity?

 

/ /
A Pew Research Centre survey showed that citizens of 19 advanced economies consider social media simultaneously constructive and destructive in political life. A majority of citizens believe that social media has had a positive impact on democracy. What about frontier economies? How has social media affected politics and political interaction in African countries with rapid population growth, increasing life expectancy, and widespread poverty? Consider Nigeria. In mid-2017, Nigeria was the most populous nation on the continent. By 2050, Nigeria will be the third most populous nation in the world. This large population has increasingly adopted social media. There were approximately 33 million users in 2022, up from 18 million in 2017. Young people aged 18 to 34 make up the …

/ /
Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind generative artificial intelligence model ChatGPT, released a statement on February 24th regarding the short-term and long-term prospects of their invention. Although well-intentioned, many technologists were perturbed by its tone – it felt as though Altman expected the world to change to suit the interests of the company, rather than the company opening itself up to social and political regulation to accommodate itself to our world. But what is ChatGPT and why is it causing concern? ChatGPT is arguably the first successful generative model of artificial general intelligence. As a large-language model, it offers several advantages over its competitors and predecessors. Firstly, ChatGPT is trained on a massive amount of data, a corpus …

/ /
Marketing itself as a corrective to the monopoly of mainstream media, YouTube has reduced the barriers of access for people to create and star in their own content regardless of their economic and cultural cachet. Among those taking advantage are “political influencers” or “ideological entrepreneurs” – creators who disseminate and monetise politics as content using the techniques of brand influencers to grow audiences. In part shaped by the platform they are on, creators selling politics suffuse their discourse and performance with an anti-elite and transgressive messaging. Ultimately, this has implications for the legitimisation of conspiracies and the mainstreaming of the far right. As with any type of influencing, the creator is the central figure, performing a relatable and authentic identity …

/ /
I have had a laminated image pinned, stuck, or otherwise attached to various office walls for many years, since 2003 indeed, as I’ve moved between roles and institutions this has been one constant. The image is from the cover of Mute Magazine, Issue 26. It is a line drawing depicting a desk, on it a Macintosh PowerBook G4, Apple’s then state of the art portable computer – around it are drawn scenes from the global anti-capitalist struggles of the period. There is a picture of Sub-Commandant Marcos of the Mexican Zapatistas, in iconic balaclava, smoking a pipe and looking away into the mid-distance. There is another picture of workers in a field of GM crops, and one of a high-tech …

/ /
YouTube is a prime space for the communication of the hundreds, if not thousands, protests that have taken place around the world since mandatory measures were introduced by governments to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. From New York to Tokyo and from London to Sydney, protesting social distancing, face coverings, lockdowns and vaccines is caught up in hours of video footage by protesters themselves, passersby, and reporters, featuring as content for the YouTube channels of major international news agencies. According to a recent publication in Harvard’s Misinformation Review, such videos often serve as a backdrop for commentary out which emerge “participatory cultures of conspiracy theory knowledge production and circulation”. Here, I would like to shed light on a …

/ /
How useful is it to think about politics and power in terms of a patriarchy? What if we think about the US celebrity founders who own monopoly tech companies as a racialized patriarchal network? Patriarchy can be a blunt instrument if we don’t investigate what is particular about a patriarchal system. But if we try to understand who the patriarchs might be, what is specific about their formation, and how they legitimate and wield dominance, then this could be part of forging a resistance. In our book The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power we look at the powerful celebrity men that founded US monopoly tech companies: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry …