Digital power is created through the interplay of mobilizing and organizing. Open Social protocols bridge the gap.
Strengthening Online Communities | Rise Against Big Tech Powerbase
The Technological Construction of Social Power
This essay presents a theory of the role of technology in the distribution and exercise of social power. The paper studies how technical artefacts and systems are used to construct, maintain or st...
Digital Democracy in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations
Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) are institutional technologies that enable democratic governance innovation. They inherit key democratic principles such as procedural transparency and immutable records from being based on blockchain technology. This paper conducts a systematic literature review to examine governance mechanisms and challenges of digital democracy in DAOs. While issues like power concentration and coordination failures exist in current implementations, we argue that the concept of DAOs offers new opportunities for transparent governance and participatory decision-making. As testbeds for governance experiments, we find that DAOs have the potential to reshape democratic processes and foster innovative governance models in the digital era. Calling for interdisciplinary collaboration, further research is needed around Sybil-resistant voting mechanisms, ideological path dependencies and deliberation mechanisms.
The Digital Identity Event Horizon
A five year investigation into digital identity and its central role in creating brittle societies.
Interoperable Sovereignty: The Democratic Alternative to Digital Authoritarianism
A Democratic Architecture for the Digital Age Digital sovereignty has become a central concern for governments worldwide, yet its meaning remains contested. Too often it is framed as...
The Digital Life Collective
The Digital Life Collective is an enabler. If you think we should be doing something we're not currently doing, we're here to help you and your project make the change you want to see in the world.
Digital Degrowth: Radically Rethinking our Digital Futures
We are fast approaching the point of “peak digital”, with the continued mass production and excessive consumption of digital technologies set to become a key driver of climate crisis, ecological breakdown and ongoing societal instability.<br /> <br /><i>Digital Degrowth</i> is a call to completely rethink our digital futures in these fast-changing times. It explores how degrowth thinking and alternate forms of “radically sustainable computing” might support ambitions of sustainable, scaled-down and equitable ways of living with digital technologies. Neil Selwyn proposes a rebalancing of digital technology use: digital degrowth is not a call for simply making reduced use of the digital technologies that we already have – rather it is an argument to reimagine digital practices that maximise societal benefits with minimal environmental and social impact. Drawing on illustrative examples from across computer science, hacker and environmental activist communities, this book examines how core degrowth principles of conviviality, autonomy and care are already being used to reimagine alternate forms of digital technology.<br /> <br />Original and stimulating, this is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, sustainability studies, political ecology, computer/data sciences, and across the social sciences.
May First Movement Technology
Digital infrastructure for liberation. Member-run, movement-rooted.
Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams
I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…
Bonfire
A federated social network for individuals and communities to design, operate and control their own digital lives.
Bonfire
A federated social network for individuals and communities to design, operate and control their own digital lives.
Shaping Europe’s digital future
The Digital Strategy website provides updates and resources on EU policies key to the digital transformation.
CYBER-COMMUNISM by Richard Barbrook | Imaginary Futures
‘…is the impact of the …information revolution on capitalism not the ultimate exemplification of… Marx’s thesis that: “at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces come into conflict with the existing relations of production…”? …does the prospect of the… “global village” not signal the end of market relations… at least in the sphere of digitalised information?’ (Zizek 1998: 33-4)
Digital Topology & Economic Power
The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, relocating control toward incumbents at each stage. Enclosure succeeds not by offering users less, but by bundling genuine capability gains with topological restructuring, so that the user cannot accept the improvement without accepting the new relationship of power.
Decolonising Global Digital Transformation
Technology is Society Made Durable
Is it possible to devise a set of concepts that could replace the technology/society divide? This set of new concepts - association and substitution - might help to rephrase some of the traditional questions of social order and especially that of the durability of domination of power. However, instead of using different tools to analyse power and weakness, it is argued that power and domination are simply different values of variables that should be studied in their whole range. By reconstructing networks it is argued that a full description of power and domination may be obtained.
