Technology, Politics and Post-politics

The Journal Revista de Estudios Globales. Análisis Histórico y Cambio Social calls for papers for a monographic issue dedicated to exploring the impact of new technologies, such as data science and artificial intelligence, on the socio-political sphere. The objective is, on the one hand, to analyze how the quantification of society and the social mediation of technical systems lead to new socio-political and post-political practices, understanding post-politics as the growing role of technocracies and expert systems in the constitution of the common world (Crawford, 2020). On the other hand, it also seeks to explore how democracy should be transformed as a political system to adapt to new sociotechnical environments (Coeckelbergh, 2024).

Contemporary societies are characterized by growing technological mediation, through which they have been transformed into panoptic cultures, serving surveillance and control, driven by the transformation of reality into data (Zuboff, 2019; Couldry & Mejías, 2024; Lyon, 2018). On the one hand, it is true that this mediation provides certain benefits, eliminating the imposition of reality in the face of our desires, making life easier and more comfortable. In countless ways, this is a form of progress compared to the limitations of past ways of life. However, from a political point of view, technical changes bring the risk that our lives are subject to bureaucracies and technocracies that manipulate and control us, resulting in new forms of biopolitical domination (Ayala-Colqui, 2023) and a loss of agency over our circumstances (Crawford, 2016). The ubiquity of technologies and the constant collection of data lead to the creation of predictable and manipulable political subjects. This calls into question who we are as individuals, transforming us into "informational" (Koopman, 2019) and "subatomic" (Kehlenbach, 2022) people, as our digital identities emerge from data that define us on their own terms according to "measurable types" (Cheney-Lippold, 2017).

Wong (2023), for instance, stresses that datafication is fundamentally different from other technological changes because it alters humanity on both an individual and collective level by recording the totality of our daily activities. Big Tech companies and governments have transformed political subjects from citizens to "data holders" by collecting, aggregating, and analyzing data. This is accompanied by a loss of agency, as participation in law-making related to data, or in its production and handling, is restricted or denied. In this context, democracy as a political system is challenged when data-driven algorithmic management, theoretically free from human prejudices and biases, becomes possible (Coeckelbergh, 2022). Citizens can then disengage from politics and focus on their private lives, delegating decisions about the common world to algorithms and technical systems (Berkowitz, 2020). As a result, democratic deliberation becomes superfluous to the extent that technocratic regimes can manage society in a scientific and technical manner, leading to post-political forms of social organization (cf. Beraja et al., 2023).

In this framework, this issue aims to interrogate the relationship between technology and politics, analyzing the possible consequences of their intertwining. Below is a non-exhaustive list of the topics covered:

 

• Theorization of post-political regimes;

 

• The political impact of surveillance culture and its resistance;

 

• The socio-political consequences of datafication;

 

• The role of technology in local and global decision-making;

 

• The technological challenges to democracy;

 

• Liquid technology in a liquid world and culture;

 

- The dangers of addiction to new technologies and their community impact.

References

Ayala Colqui, J. (2023). El nacimiento del “ciberalismo”. Una genealogía crítica de la gubernamentalidad de Silicon Valley. Bajo Palabra, (32), 221-254. https://doi.org/10.15366/bp2023.32.012

Beraja, M., Kao, A., Yang, D. Y., & Yuchtman, N. (2023). AI-tocracy. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 138(3), 1349-1402. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjad012

Berkowitz, R. (Ed.) (2022). The perils of invention: lying, technology, and the human condition. Black Rose Books.

Crawford, M. B. (2016). World beyond your head: On becoming an individual in an age of distraction. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Crawford, M. (2023). The Rise of Antihumanism. First Things, Agosto 2023, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/08/the-rise-of -antihumanism.

Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017). We are data: Algorithms and the making of our digital selves. New York University Press. 

Coeckelbergh, M. (2024). Why AI undermines democracy and what to do about it. John Wiley & Sons.

Coeckelbergh, M. (2022). The political philosophy of AI: an introduction. John Wiley & Sons.

Kehlenbach, E. S. (2022). The subatomic person: A new ontology of big data. Theory & Event, 25(4), 851-872. https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0044

Koopman, C. (2019). How we became our data: A genealogy of the informational person. The University of Chicago Press.

Lyon, D. (2018). The culture of surveillance. Polity Press.

Mejías, U. A., & Couldry, N. (2024). Data grab: The new colonialism of big tech and how to fight back. University of Chicago Press.

Wong, W. H. (2023). We, the data: Human rights in the digital age. The MIT Press. 

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Public Affairs.