#NetworkDemocracy

Miguel Afonso Caetanoremixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2024-12-09

"If we’re all working away in the citizen assemblies of the digital economy, shouldn’t we go one step further and start demanding a meaningful share of its spoils?

It can be difficult to imagine the real viability of deepening the practices of democracy online in a world that feels more divided than ever. It’s even harder when one considers the multiple ways in which the current Big Tech model — the need for an incessant upward march of tech valuations, the constant creation of new hype cycles — has become systemically important for the ongoing viability of the global economy. Nonetheless, such intellectual work remains a vital long-term goal, more crucial today than ever. We should not shy away from the potentially utopian project of meaningfully governable computational “stacks,” even if, as James Muldoon has written, the odds are against us, and “it has become easier for us to imagine humans living forever in colonies on Mars than exercising meaningful democratic control over digital platforms.”

Through organizing, advocacy, and, yes, new and imaginative sociotechnical institutional forms, we might one day be able to finally escape the sharp gravitational pull of the internet’s implicit hierarchies."

jacobin.com/2024/12/internet-d

#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #Decentralization #CommunityNetworks #NetworkDemocracy #ContentModeration

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