Professor, Dept. of Technology, Management and Economics, Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
The digitalised state embeds different discourses and situations in which its citizens are inscribed as agents. As is the case with states, the digitalised state is both totalising and depends on citizen cooperation. This keynote asks: How does research on digital citizens matter for wider shaping of technology and democracy?
Through examples from digitalization of the public sector and the arrival of the datacentre industry in Denmark, my talk will emphasise how digitalisation complicates the material relationship with the state, even as the digital state is ostensibly ‘dematerialised’ through black-boxing. I propose material analytics as an approach for examining the relationship between citizens and the state through making material objects and the embodied experience of them the locus of attention for knowing digital citizenship. I will argue that a core responsibility of digital citizen research is to both elicit citizen experiences of and politically expand the possibilities for citizen participation in shaping future societies.
Professor, Social Sciences Institute, Maynooth University, Ireland
This paper argues that the use of digital infrastructures and technologies, and the role of digital technology companies, are key facilitators of third wave autocratization and its associated (geo)political reorderings, providing the means to shift public perceptions, to recraft the operations of governance and governmentality, and to re-make and dominate the (geo)political landscape. The paper details how the digital mediates autocratization, organised into four sections: illiberal and authoritarian control of socio-spatial relations enacted through the digital; autocratic control of the digital and collaborations with digital technology companies; the geopolitical exporting and scaling of digital authoritarianism globally; and resisting digital authoritarianism.
Key words: authoritarianism, illiberalism, autocratization, democracy, digital technologies, geopolitics
