Rethinking the digital democratic affordance and its impact on political representation: Toward a new framework

This 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

Digital movement parties: a comparative analysis of the technopolitical cultures and the participation platforms of the Movimento 5 Stelle and the Piratenpartei

The 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\u2013ascendency to power for the 5SM, downfall for the PPG\u2013are 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

‘I am the Donald.’ On the sound symbolism and symbolic power of powerful names

This article draws from George Lakoff’s provocative proposal to rename Donald J. Trump to discuss the sound symbolism, social recognition, and symbolic power of proper names. It focuses in particular on the relationship between the sociolinguistic and political function of proper names to advance a three-part argument. First, I argue that in denoting without connoting proper names fix the identity of a referent regardless of its changing properties—a linguistic function that is particularly useful to the governmental techniques of the modern nation state. Such rigidity is also essential to the performative capacity of political leaders to act upon the social world through the institutions that are constituted in them and by them. Second, I examine the case of collective pseudonyms such as Ned Ludd, Luther Blissett, and Anonymomus, which have been introduced at different historical turns to pursue a variety of objectives. Although they retain the formal features of a proper name, in denoting without identifying, and representing that which eludes representation, these improper names allow different social groups to exert a form of symbolic power outside the boundary of an institutional practice. Third, the article suggests a way to bring together the symbolic power of proper and improper names through a campaign to replicate and disseminate the Trump name. Besides reversing the unconscious sound symbolism of the Trump name, such campaign would reveal the tautological nature of institutional symbolic power

Reducing the Burden of Decision in Digital Democracy Applications: A Comparative Analysis of Six Decision-making Software

The 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\u2019s 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

Between Governance-Driven Democratisation and Democracy-Driven Governance: explaining changes in Participatory Governance in the Case of Barcelona

Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b) vice‐versa, the mechanisms through which bottom‐up, open spaces can be co‐opted through institutionalisation. This paper seeks to unpick dynamic interactions between different spaces of participation by looking specifically at two forms of participatory governance, or participatory forms of political decision making used to improve the quality of democracy. First, Mark Warren's concept of ‘governance‐driven democratization’ describes top‐down and technocratic participatory governance aiming to produce better policies in response to bureaucratic rationales. Second, we introduce a new concept, democracy‐driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens’ demands. The paper defines these concepts and argues that they co‐exist and interact in dynamic fashion; it draws on an analysis of case study literature on participatory governance in Barcelona to illuminate this relationship. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical framework to the case study by making propositions as to the structural and agential drivers of shifts in participatory governance

Hacktivism: On the Use of Botnets in Cyberattacks

This article offers a reading of internet-based activism or \u2018hacktivism\u2019 as a phenomenon that cannot be confined to the instrumental use of information technologies. It focuses on a subset of hacktivism \u2013 the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for political ends \u2013 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 \u2013 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\u2019s notions of transindividuation and transduction allow for a conceptualization of hacktivism as a sociotechnical assemblage with a high degree of indetermination

The General, the Watchman and the Engineer of Control: The Relationship between Cooperation, Communication, and Command in the Society of Control

Taking cue from the Marxian analysis of the relationship between cooperation and capitalist command in Capital and the Grundrisse, the article reviews how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have addressed this matter. Drawing from the notorious fragment of the Grundrisse on the general intellect, Hardt and Negri argue that in post-industrial societies the production of value tends to coincide with the ensemble of social activities. Hardt and Negri maintain that since any social activity is potentially a value-generating practice, the capitalist organization of labor is increasingly parasitical and external to the social bios. From this flows that labor can no longer be measured in abstract units of time and the exploitation of living labor leaves way to the expropriation of the common. The second part of the article challenges Hardt and Negri\u2019s idealized view of the common by arguing that in the society of control communication and cooperation are always affected and tinged by the media that enable them\u2014the vast majority of which are owned by private corporations. Neither the general in Marx\u2019s Capital who organizes the workers from above nor the watchman and regulator of the Grundrisse, the contemporary engineer of control deploys micro-mechanisms of control inside the digital networks that modulate social cooperation. Drawing from Andrejevic\u2019s notion of the \u201cdigital enclosure\u201d and Terranova\u2019s analysis of subjectification in the societies of control, the article concludes with a reflection on post-consensual forms of cooperation that cannot be integrated without igniting a catastrophic transformation of the system