Edited by Sasha Costanza-Chock
Designed by Una Lee, Victoria Barnett, Taylor Stewart
Published: June 2017
“All aspects of politics have undeniably been reshaped
by digital technologies. Digital technologies have
transformed both electoral campaigns and everyday
interactions between the populace and the State; democratic
deliberation and service delivery; highly mediated mass
protest events and the unglamorous, daily work of community
organizing. Unfortunately, the processes through which we
currently develop, deploy, and control digital technologies
all but ensure that they will, on balance, reproduce existing
forms of structural power inequality. Because of this, digital
technologies currently pose little threat to politics as usual
under neoliberal democracy, or even, as we are increasingly
and uncomfortably aware, under authoritarian rule. Indeed,
as digital media platforms mature, both authoritarian states
and resurgent hard-right political formations within advanced
democracies have learned how to use them quite effectively
to surveil social movements and dissidents, sow fear and
doubt through the deployment of paid trolls and botnets,
and amplify their own power. There is, however, cause for
optimism. If we take ‘politics’ in a broader sense to include
not only statecraft and governance from above, but also
intersectional, bottom-up social movements and contentious
politics, then there is still hope that digital technologies
can serve as key tools for our collective liberation. Those
communities most targeted within what Patricia Hill Collins
calls the matrix of domination (the intersecting structures
of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and
settler colonialism) already use digital technologies as
tools to facilitate the formation of new political identities,
organizations, networks, and movements. These movements
have, in many cases, leveraged digital technologies to
mobilize adherents and allies, advance specific policy goals,
and transform culture at large. Yet if we are to realize the
promise of these tools, then we must fundamentally transform
the ways that they are designed.”
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