Programming the State—Digital Technology and Institutional Design (original) (raw)
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RUDN Journal of Political Science, 2022
Modern state faces the need to adapt to the changing external environment, which is characterized by intensive digital technological transformations. Thus, it is important to determine how contemporary state and its power institutions adapt to digital technological transformations and identify the key risks, threats, and challenges associated with such adaptation. To do so, the authors of the article conducted a corresponding international expert study, which allowed them to determine the degree of digital technological transformations' influence on the functioning of traditional states and their power institutions. Also, based on the integration of expert assessments, the authors identified the essential characteristics of digital technological transformations' effect on contemporary institutions of state power. The study results concluded that the digitalization of contemporary states and their adaptation to current technological transformations is a complex and largely ambiguous set of processes. These include both political opportunities and the associated risks, threats, and challenges for both the state and its institutions, as well as directly for the civil society, which is rapidly increasing its complexity and diversity through intensive digitalization. This brings to a wide range of scenarios for forming state and political management models in the context of a rapidly emerging digital technological reality of a new type. The article proves that the adaptation of the traditional state as a management system to the technologically more complex environment is necessary to ensure the effective viability of both the state itself and its institutions.
Political Theory of the Digital Constellation
Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft
The introductory contribution to this special issue on “Political Theory of the Digital Constellation” addresses the conditions and possibilities of political theory’s engagement with digital developments. The motivation for this inquiry is the growing interest in questions of political theory arising from the digital transformation, as well as the acknowledgement that digitalisation not only changes politics, but conversely that politics also shapes digitalisation. The article identifies three pitfalls of previous engagement: The narrowing of the subject of “digitalisation” to the topic of the “internet” and, thereby, to the aspect of communication, the disregard for the technicality of the digital, and the insufficient recognition that (digital) technology is political. To avoid these pitfalls, the research perspective of the digital constellation is presented. The digital constellation serves as an epistemological guide that helps to structure theoretical reflection on the interr...
Introduction: The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty
The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty, 2019
We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Its basis for existence is becoming fully subordinated to the software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations entailed in making up what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with the algorithms and other software processes that accelerate and intensify the possibility of its obsolescence in order to allow for a profound upgrade to our own ontological understanding to take precedent. Through a partial attunement to what is always already non-human in its form of mediation to a higher intelligence, we are able to rediscover the actual inner logic of the age of intelligent machines, as at once the reason of trauma and the instrument of catastrophe for a humanity still beholden to a linear process of rationality. Humanity now finds itself captive to pervasive institutionalised forms of violence whose force has everything to do with the aggressive pattern of economics in a neoliberal age, bound with an internet that has taken on a fourth dimension to generate consequence in the material world. This has allowed the internet to become thingly insofar as it will soon be understood not as an interface but as an environment. It thus takes on the ability to shape conditions beyond the imaginary and embed itself into materiality in a variety of ways that benefit from the demise of state parameters and the enlivenment of a fluidity of information able to migrate across time and space. All previous forms of media suffered from imprisonment within a screen, which limited their ability to function as the foundation for alternative networks, or as nodes of multilayered connectivity. The promise of a universal connectivity through a perpetual 2 The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty summons of our inclinations brings forth nothing less than a new form of imperialism able to transform space into a sphere of liquidity, and complexity into a condition of movement. As labour precarity and labour migration becomes the normative situation of a disenfranchised humanity, so too does its acquiescence to a universal accessibility where individuals are continuously subject to digital interpolation, and as such their behaviours and movements are made available to generating exploitable forms of interest. The data created is thus credited to others and interpreted to advance the interests of others; all in order to finance the states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. The prospect of a future that has the capacity to come to an end prompts us to apprehend an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonisation, navigational warfare, mercantilism and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over some five centuries. Its task is to animate an understanding of the twenty-first century as an era where the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, and as a consequence has allowed an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up at this point in history, and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of a now atomised political power whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and thus, digital media now serves to legitimise and promote a customised micropolitics of identity management. On this new apostolate plane, it is possible to conceive a world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical means, and for factual material to be manipulated in the interest of advancing the means of control. This pathway towards understanding the significance of the digital travels a wide course between Elizabethan England, North American slavery, German fascism, Cold War cybernetic social engineering and counterinsurgency, and the (neo)libertarianism of Silicon Valley in order to arrive at a place where a cool organising intelligence that started from Introduction: Life on the Algorithmic Estate 3 an ambition to resourcefully manipulate bodies, ends with their profound neutralisation. The digital in this sense is made to denude its relationship to historical political economies, and to relate to ecologies of culture and media production spanning centuries as opposed to mere decades. In that time span, it has emerged variously as the quintessence of political representation, the essence of public perception and the immaterial layer through which the impacts on everyday life might be felt. The digital has managed to relate collective values to individual identities, and in so doing draw up an inventive terrain all its own in which these positionings are now given the power to become operational and indeed operative when it comes to our understanding of subjectivity itself. The digital has become essential to humanity's self-understanding through its ability to implicate itself within a pattern of changing societal and perceptual hierarchies that exists everywhere around it and from which it is now possible to conclude have assumed their own 'digital consciousness'. Over time, the digital comes to be tied to an understanding of emerging institutional protocols and new forms of non-representational visualities as they emerge in various guises within the algorithmic estate. It is possible to witness this through the evolution of various public spheres whose spatial coordinates now encompass the dynamic realities of both a material and digital world. A diversity of critical perspectives including those drawn from visual culture, media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, ethnography, cultural theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and sociology together provide a compendium through which to grasp the historical consequence of data. These critical perspectives when brought together present a compelling new narrative around data as a technology of public truth and private architectures, aesthetically produced through new practices of capitalism. Within this challenging terrain, modes of information can be placed in further context and situated in conjunction with new and emerging regions of power. Here contemporary perception and cultural history can be joined together in various guises to generate a cogent understanding of data as both a vehicle for political agency, as well as its repression and, therefore, as an elemental 4 The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty force that figures crucially within any analysis of the turbulent realities of our time. Such times and indeed the notion of time itself has become radically altered by the rise of digitisation so that memory itself has become the stuff of cheap storage and facile retrieval. We believe in a mode of recall now that is at once universal and progressively omniscient. The softness of software as we have come to know it presents humanity with the tantalising prospect of our bodies being subject to interiorised programmability as a means of optimising their functionality. It is by no means a coincidence that this is happening at a time humanity is grappling with its own biological finitude in this world. The human bodies that exist amidst that anxiety are now further burdened in their effort to conserve their resources by a body of information that, by contrast, has no looming expiry date. As such the algorithm's solutions-based thinking may well be on a collision course with our best interests and its capacity for overtaking our authority positioned well beyond our current scope of projection. In a tangible sense, 'programmability' already fuels the current organization of the contemporary neoliberal state. Moreover, in many respects, computer code now functions as its own mechanism of causality and sovereignty. Similarly, the social, political, and economic coding embedded within our societies, now increasingly is materialised in the software and hardware that render us as conscious subjects, rather than the other way around. What we perceive has become the effect of technologies that are becoming increasingly adept not only in the prediction of our behaviour but in subtly influencing it. These technologies persuade us to accept a concept of the future that is very much furnished to us on the basis of past data. Our interface with the algorithm over time could easily become shorthand for everything we believe in, performing as a medium of interpretation of our lived reality. It is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, and this holds vast implication for our perception of everything from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture. A faith in the algorithm, more generally, is providing an esoteric bridge to an understanding between theoretical concepts and pragmatic reality. Data has generated a capacity of invocation that permits it to not merely describe the world, but to recast it in its own image. The Introduction: Life on the Algorithmic Estate 5
In this article we seek to revisit what the term ‘technopolitical’ means for democratic politics in our age. We begin by tracing how the term was used and then transformed through various and conflicting adaptations of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) in governmental and civil organizations and grassroots movements. Two main streams can be distinguished in academic literature: studies about internet-enhanced politics (labelled as e- government) and politics 2.0 that imply the facilitation of existing practices such as e-voting, e-campaigning and e-petitioning. The second stream of the internet-enabled perspective builds on the idea that ICTs are essential for the organization of transformative, contentious politics, citizen participation and deliberative processes. Under a range of labels, studies have often used ideas of the technopolitical in an undefined or underspecified manner for describing the influence of digital technologies on their scope of investigation. After critically reviewing and categorizing the main concepts used in the literature to describe ICT-based political performances, we construct a conceptual model of technopolitics oriented at two contra-rotating developments: Centralization vs. Decentralization. Within a schema consisting of the five dimensions of context, scale and direction, purpose, synchronization and actors we will clarify these developments and structure informal and formal ways of political practices. We explain the dimensions using real-world examples to illustrate the unique characteristics of each technopolitical action field and the power dynamics that influence them.
Politische Theorie und Digitalisierung
Politische Theorie und Digitalisierung, 2017
Die seit den neunziger Jahren rasant um sich greifende Digitalisierung hat die Art und Weise, wie wir miteinander kommunizieren, wie wir uns organisieren und wie wir wirtschaften tiefgreifend und wahrscheinlich irreversibel verändert. Auch auf Demokratie, Souveränität und andere Bereiche des Politischen hat sie einen nachhaltigen, womöglich revolutionären Einfluss ausgeübt.
Politics and 'the digital': From singularity to specificity
European Journal of Social Theory, 2017
The relationship between politics and the digital has largely been characterized as one of epochal change. The respective theories understand the digital as external to politics and society, as an autonomous driver for global, unilateral transformation. Rather than supporting such singular accounts of the relationship between politics and the digital, this article argues for its specificity: the digital is best examined in terms of folds within existing socio-technical configurations, and as an artefact with a set of affordances that are shaped and filled with meaning by social practice. In conceptualizing the digital as numeric, countable, computable, material, storable, searchable, transferable, network-able and traceable, fabricated and interpreted, it becomes clear that the digital cannot be divorced from the social. These affordances of the digital are discussed in relation to specific political, digital practices that are further developed in the different contributions in this special issue, such as predictive policing (Aradau and Blanke, this issue), data protection (Bellanova, this issue), extremist recruitment videos (Leander, this issue), political acclamation (Dean, this issue), and pandemic simulations (Opitz, this issue).
The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty
The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty, 2019
This is the full manuscript of the following: The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Its basis for existence is becoming fully subordinated to the software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations entailed in making up what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with the algorithms and other software processes that accelerate and intensify the possibility of its obsolescence in order to allow for a profound upgrade our own ontological understanding to take precedent. Through a partial attunement to what is always already non-human in its form of mediation to a higher intelligence, we are able to rediscover the actual inner logic of the age of intelligent machines, as at once the reason of trauma and the instrument of catastrophe for a humanity still beholden to a linear process of rationality. Humanity now finds itself captive to pervasive institutionalised forms of violence whose force has everything to do with the aggressive pattern of economics in a neoliberal age, bound with an internet that has taken on a fourth dimension to generate consequence in the material world. This has allowed the internet to become thingly insofar as it will soon be understood not as an interface but as an environment. It thus takes on the ability to shape conditions beyond the imaginary and embed itself into materiality in a variety of ways that benefit from the demise of state parameters and the enlivenment of a fluidity of information able to migrate across time and space. All previous forms of media suffered from imprisonment within a screen, which limited their ability to function as the foundation for alternative networks, or as nodes of multilayered connectivity. The promise of a universal connectivity through a perpetual summons of our inclinations brings forth nothing less than a new form of imperialism able to transform space into a sphere of liquidity, and complexity into a condition of movement. As labour precarity and labour migration becomes the normative situation of a disenfranchised humanity, so too does its acquiescence to a universal accessibility where individuals are continuously subject to digital interpolation, and as such their behaviours and movements are made available to generating exploitable forms of interest. The data created is thus credited to others and interpreted to advance interests of others; all in order to finance the states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. The End of the Future conceives an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonisation, navigational warfare, mercantilism and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over some five centuries. Its task is to animate an understanding of the twenty-first century as an era where the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, and as a consequence has allowed an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up at this point in history, and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of a now atomised political power whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and thus, digital media now serves to legitimise and promote a customised micropolitics of identity management. On this new apostolate plane, it is possible to conceive a world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical means, and for factual material to be manipulated in the interest of advancing the means of control. This volume travels a course between Elizabethan England, North American slavery, Cybernetic Social Engineering, Cold War Counterinsurgency, and the (neo)libertarianism of Silicon Valley in order to arrive at a place where a cool organising intelligence that started from an ambition to resourcefully manipulate bodies, ends with their profound neutralization.