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?

 

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While the idea of platform governance is not new, the complex nature of its functioning and the reasons for its emergence and entrenchment still lack holistic conceptualisation. While it is impossible to develop such a perspective in a single blog post, the considerations below are intended as a sensitising tool and a call to think about platform governance as simultaneously premised upon societal developments from which it has emerged and a pervasive force shaping contemporary societies. In order to better understand the how and why of platform governance, at least two arguments are possible, although they are by no means mutually exclusive: a historico-political and an economic one. On the historico-political side – and for perhaps the most eloquent account, …

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Visual campaigning is not new to the social media era. In the US, the first political cartoon was published by Benjamin Franklin in political pamphlets in 1747. Visual symbols such as the bald eagle, stars and stripes, and the colours of red, white and blue have been used in campaign posters going back to 1828. Visual campaigning only intensified from the 1960s onwards with the proliferation of television, with the first televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy in 1964 widely hailed as being a turning point. A young and charismatic Kennedy contrasted sharply with an older Nixon, who appeared sweaty and pale (Messaris 2019), and the appearance and personalities of party leaders has played an increasingly important role in political …

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Early criticisms of clicktivism lamenting the end of real activism have poisoned the well to the extent that the image conjured is one of someone sprawled lazily in an armchair scrolling through their mobile phone, liking and sharing, but not making much difference to politics. However, clicktivism is one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary political participation that is quick, easy and can be incredibly powerful when performed individually or as a collective. It is also a means of lowering the barriers to politics that dominant power structures and processes have put in place to restrict what politics is, and where it can be performed. Political participation has various definitions and contexts of use that concentrate on traditional processes …
A businessman holding the key to a large smart phone showing a surveillant eye.

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There is a burgeoning element of social media: subscription services. One might assume that Elon Musk’s announcement of “Twitter Blue” was the spark for social media’s subscription service.  In fact, taking a step back one could have seen the writing on the wall. An early and famous (yet implicit) statement on subscription services came from Mark Zuckerberg. In April 2018, Zuckerberg was brought to the US Senate to be questioned about Facebook’s role in the 2016 US Presidential election. During his appearance, former Senator Orrin Grant Hatch asked Zuckerberg, “In 2010… you said back then that Facebook would always be free. Is that still your objective?” to which Zuckerberg responded, “Senator, yes. There will always be a version of Facebook …
An open mouth with an exposed tongue revealing a boxing glove - a metaphor for fighting talk.

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Back in November, the BBC published a report into the online abuse (or ‘toxicity’ as the report termed it) that MPs suffer on social media. The report was eight months in the making and put an AI tool that had been built by the BBC themselves at the heart of the research. However, upon the publishing of the research to much fanfare online, flaws in the report became swiftly apparent. The BBC had linked directly to the tool itself in the report, which allowed anyone to test the tool. Users began to test certain slurs, particularly those of a racialised nature. Highly offensive terms for Jewish, Black and Hispanic people went entirely unrecognised by the tool. Well known far-Right and …

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    Those that define internet standards shape our thinking and hold the key to our freedom of communication—no trivial task. Yet tech policy is seen as boring, a yawn-inducing issue offloaded to engineers, corporate lawyers, research universities, and government ministries. In the previous age of global internet governance, regulations and protocols were outsourced to technocrats (and a few “civil society” NGOs agitating on the margins). However, in this age of “techno sovereignty,” where everything from 5G to TikTok is capable of causing geopolitical conflict, there is no more consensus. In short, we demand protocols, not platforms. But who’s going to get us there? Meet the stacktivists.   What is the Stack? Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (2016) can be useful to …