1,720,973 research outputs found
Reducing the Burden of Decision in Digital Democracy Applications: A Comparative Analysis of Six Decision-making Software
Full text linkThe more digital democracy applications lower the costs of political participation, allowing ordinary citizens to propose their own policy initiatives, the more they increase the burden of decision for the very same citizens, who are required to debate and vote on many issues. Drawing from this paradox, this article considers how the designers and administrators of six popular decision-making software (DMS) have introduced software features and norms of use whose function is to reduce the aggregate burden of decision for participants in digital democracy initiatives (DDIs). Building upon Andrew Feenberg’s definition of the design code of technology as a technical stabilization of social demands, this article considers how different DMS stabilize the democratic interventions of a plurality of actors, affecting political equality along two axes of the democratic process: the relationship between the exchange of opinions and the synthesis of opinion and the relationship between agenda setting and voting. This article concludes that the design code of digital democracy software reflects an ongoing tension between the need of governing actors to make the democratic process manageable and the pressure of social actors to make it more equal and inclusive
Rethinking the digital democratic affordance and its impact on political representation: Toward a new framework
Full text linkThis article advances a new theory of the digital democratic affordance, a concept first introduced by Lincoln Dahlberg to devise a taxonomy of the democratic capacities of digital media applications. Whereas Dahlberg classifies digital media affordances on the basis of preexisting democratic positions, the article argues that the primary affordance of digital media is to abate the costs of political participation. This cost-reducing logic of digital media has diverging effects on political participation. On an institutional level, digital democracy applications allow elected representatives to monitor and consult their constituents, closing some gaps in the circuits of representation. On a societal level, digital media allow constituents to organize and represent their own interests directly. In the former case, digital affordances work instrumentally in the service of representative democracy; in the latter, digital democratic affordances provide a mobilized public with emerging tools that put pressure on the autonomy of representatives
Is Anonymous a New Form of Luddism? A Comparative Analysis of Computer Hacking, Industrial Machine-Breaking, and Related Rhetorical Strategies
No full textThis article compares industrial machine breaking and computer hacking by focusing on the English Luddites and the contemporary hacker network Anonymous. In spite of their apparent differences, the two movements share at least three remarkable features. First, both the Luddites and Anonymous target machines of a specific kind - labor-saving machines in the case of the Luddites, machines that restrict access to information and information technology in the case of Anonymous. Second, both Anonymous and Ned Ludd are collective pseudonyms, or "multiple-use names," whose wild circulation in the public domain brings previously unrelated struggles within a common discursive space. Third, industrial machine breaking and computer hacking are comparable in that they both reduce the productivity of labor and capital. The article concludes by noting that a fundamental operational difference between industrial machines and cybernetic machines sets in motion processes of subjectivation and class composition that are not reducible to one another. © 2013 by MARHO: The Radical Historians' Organization, Inc
Improper Names. Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous
No full textBridging gaps among the history of the labor movement, cinema studies, art history, media activism, and hacking, Improper Names examines the contentious politics and the struggles for the control of a shared alias from the early nineteenth century to the age of networks
The People's Mic as a Medium in Its Own Right: A Pharmacological Reading
No full textThe People's Mic-a collective amplification of individual voices in public gatherings-has become a hallmark of the Occupy movement. Because those who join the Microphone in call and response occupy simultaneously the position of medium and that of addressee, the Mic allows us to return to an ancient notion of medium as a middle ground that is associated with the public and the common. Extending a pharmacological trajectory in media theory that goes from Jacques Derrida to Neil Postman to Bernard Stiegler, the article argues that the embodied, slow-paced and choral nature of the Mic can be seen as an antidote to the speedy and fragmentary nature of online communication. In other words, even though the People's Mic does not require any technological prosthesis, its use has been popularized in a post-technological society-a society whose communication patterns are informed by information technologies even when they are not directly relying on them. In the second part, the article draws on Michel Foucault's writings on the ambivalent relationship between free speech and democracy in ancient Greece, to argue that the People's Mic allows participants to reflect on the conditions of possibility of democratic communication-of communication in an open, unscripted environment. It concludes that the challenge for contemporary media theory and media activism is to understand how media that are dependent on the messages they convey can generate their own metalanguages so as to have an impact on the information technologies that enable them. © 2013 National Communication Association
Digital movement parties: a comparative analysis of the technopolitical cultures and the participation platforms of the Movimento 5 Stelle and the Piratenpartei
Full text linkThe Pirate Party of Germany (PPG) and the Italian 5-Star Movement (5SM) are two digital movement parties that share several ideological features, including their roots in anti-establishment movements, their refusal to position themselves on the Left-Right spectrum, and their belief that the Internet increases the capacity of ordinary citizens for self-government and self-representation. To this end, both parties have adopted online participation platforms, which allow their members to contribute to the development of the party program, vote on strategic decisions, and propose policy initiatives. Given these affinities and given that both parties begun their political ascendancy in the same years, their antipodal political destinies–ascendency to power for the 5SM, downfall for the PPG–are all the more striking. This article accounts for this divergence by showing how the technopopulist orientation of both parties conceals in fact radically different conceptions of political participation and internal party democracy. To this end, it considers the role that different technopolitical cultures have played in shaping the organization of these two parties in their early stages, and how the subsequent adoption and use of online participation platforms has led to internal strife and bitter disputes within the PPG and increasing centralization within the 5SM
Hacktivism: On the Use of Botnets in Cyberattacks
Full text linkThis article offers a reading of internet-based activism or ‘hacktivism’ as a phenomenon
that cannot be confined to the instrumental use of information technologies. It
focuses on a subset of hacktivism – the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack
for political ends – that aims at making an internet host unavailable to its intended
users. Since the early 2000s these attacks have been increasingly conducted by means
of botnets – networks of infected computers that send bogus requests to a target
website without the consent of their users. The capacity of botnets to engender a
more-than-human politics is analyzed from two distinct theoretical angles. First,
drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, the hacktivist DDoS is discussed as an assemblage
of signifying and a-signifying components, voluntary and involuntary actions.
Second, Gilbert Simondon’s notions of transindividuation and transduction allow for
a conceptualization of hacktivism as a sociotechnical assemblage with a high degree of
indetermination
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