- Digital Democracy, e-Democracy, Media and Cultural Studies, Hacktivism, Media Activism, Social Movements (Political Science), and 21 moreMedia Theory, Political communication, Critical Theory, Social Movements, Transnational Social Movements, Anonymous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mediology, Networked and Social Learning, Autonomia, Social Media, Digital Culture, Autonomist Marxism, Affect Studies and Affective Labour, New readings of Marx, Spinoza, Deleuze, Digital Art, Language and Power, Subjectivity, and Posthumanismedit
- Associate Professor in the Faculty of Poltical and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy.edit
Bridging gaps among the history of the labor movement, cinema studies, art history, media activism, and hacking, Improper Names examines the contentious politics and the struggles for the control of a shared alias from the early... more
Bridging gaps among the history of the labor movement, cinema studies, art history, media activism, and hacking, Improper Names examines the contentious politics and the struggles for the control of a shared alias from the early nineteenth century to the age of networks.
Research Interests: Social Movements, Hacktivism, Jacques Derrida, Anonymity, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and 17 moreMail Art, Authorship, Anonymous, Cinema Studies, Autonomist Marxism, Luddism, Naming, Pseudonymity, Naming Practices, Authoriality and Authorship, Anonymous Movement, Luther Blissett, Pseudonyms, Collective Pseudonyms, Networked Art, Luddites, and Improper
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Although political scientists and political theorists rarely recognize liquid democracy (LD) as a distinct model of democracy, LD has its own history, theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. The article fills this gap by... more
Although political scientists and political theorists rarely recognize liquid democracy (LD) as a distinct model of democracy, LD has its own history, theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. The article fills this gap by conceptualizing LD as an original decision-making procedure and a mode of political representation based on mechanisms of authorization and accountability that are fundamentally different from parliamentary representation. Yet the first practical applications of LD have occurred within representative institutions such as the German Federal Parliament and political organizations such as the Pirate Party Germany. These have experimented with two different LD software, Adhocracy and Liquidfeedback, whose design enables two variants of LD, the former aimed at assessing the quality of opinions and the latter aimed at transforming experts into decision-makers. After examining the impact of the adoption of Liquidfeedback on the internal organization of the Pirate Party, the article identifies two challenges that have emerged through the use of LD software: the conflict between the participants' right to privacy and the transparency of delegated decisions; and the concentration of power in the hands of few delegates. The article concludes by noting that only the variant of LD oriented toward assessing the quality of opinions is fully compatible with representative democracy.
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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... more
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's 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 demo-cratic process: the relationship between the exchange of opinions and thesynthesis of opinion and the relationship between agenda setting and voting.This article concludes that the design code of digital democracy softwarereflects an ongoing tension between the need of governing actors to makethe democratic process manageable and the pressure of social actors tomake it more equal and inclusive.
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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... more
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.
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This article focuses on the impact of online participation platforms on the internal organization and democracy of a set of emerging political parties such as the Five Star Movement, Podemos, France Insoumise, the Pirate Parties and... more
This article focuses on the impact of online participation platforms on the internal organization and democracy of a set of emerging political parties such as the Five Star Movement, Podemos, France Insoumise, the Pirate Parties and Barcelona en Comu. Taking cue from the recent publication of Paolo Gerbaudo's book The Digital Party, the article argues that digital parties can be divided in two ideal party types: the platform party and the networked party. Whereas the platform party is highly centralized, led by a charismatic leader, and strictly focused on the electoral competition, the networked party is a more decentralized ideal party type, which allows policy proposals and leadership positions emerge from the network itself. The article concludes by noting that while it would be easy to cast these two variants of the digital party as an alternative between political realism and political idealism, both types of parties face symmetrical challenges such as how to move beyond plebiscitarian consultations and how to scale deliberation from the local level to the national level.
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This introduction provides an overview of the special issue on digital activism and digital democracy. In particular, it focuses on the most recent empirical and theoretical development in the field. It argues that, albeit similar, the... more
This introduction provides an overview of the special issue on digital activism and digital democracy. In particular, it focuses on the most recent empirical and theoretical development in the field. It argues that, albeit similar, the logic between online and offline mobilizations is different; more important, it argues that digital platforms do not organize movements’ demands neutrally. In reviewing the content of the six contributions of the special issues, it highlights the strengths and the shortcomings of both digital mobilizations and digital platforms. Overall, it presents a multifaceted representation of the implications of platform politics, advancing the debate on digital politics on several productive avenues of inquiry.
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The article examines the impact of two online participation platforms on the internal party democracy (IPD) of the Five Star Movement (5SM) in Italy and Podemos in Spain. The article considers whether the frequent use of the platforms for... more
The article examines the impact of two online participation platforms on the internal party democracy (IPD) of the Five Star Movement (5SM) in Italy and Podemos in Spain. The article considers whether the frequent use of the platforms for internal consultations automatically translates into a higher quality of IPD. The conclusion is that the impact of the participation platforms on the quality of IPD is modest insofar as the leadership of both parties controls the subject, framing, and timing of the consultations to strengthen its own position. From this angle, statutory regulations, technological affordances, and high-frequency consultations function as a series of interlocking constraints on the capacity of ordinary members to participate on a regular basis, to influence the party agenda, and to make decisions based on alternative viewpoints.
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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... more
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 – ascendency to power for the
5SM, downfall for the PPG – are 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.
(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 – ascendency to power for the
5SM, downfall for the PPG – are 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.
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This article contends that technopopulism is a discursive formation that emerges from the convergence of two preexisting discourses: populism and technolibertarianism. Whereas these discourses are historically distinct the 2008 financial... more
This article contends that technopopulism is a discursive formation that emerges from the convergence of two preexisting discourses: populism and technolibertarianism. Whereas these discourses are historically distinct the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 wave of struggles precipitated the political conditions for their intersection. Such convergence produces both tensions and possibilities. On the one hand, technopopulism engenders a radically participatory model of democracy, which is ultimately anti-institutional as citizens cooperate and engage in sophisticated decision-making without the mediation of professional politicians. On the other hand, the more electorally successful technopopulist parties are led by charismatic leaders who synthesize the positions that emerge from the netroots to mobilize them against the establishment. These two seemingly contradictory aspects precipitate in two variants of technopopulism: a leaderless-technocratic variant, which is derived from the open source mode of governance and from early experiments of the Global Justice Movement in networked self-government; and a leaderist-populist variant, which is more strictly focused on the electoral competition as an intrinsically hegemonic practice. The article concludes with a reflection on the discursive complementarity of these two variants.
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This article focuses on the technological affordances and use of Rousseau, the decision-making platform of the second largest Italian political party, the Five Star Movement. Crossing an empirical observation of the platform’s... more
This article focuses on the technological affordances and use of Rousseau, the decision-making platform of the second largest Italian political party, the Five Star Movement. Crossing an empirical observation of the platform’s functionalities with data regarding its use and qualitative data collected during the 2016 and 2017 national meetings of the Five Star Movement, the essay argues that Rousseau supports an emerging “direct parliamentarianism,” which allows party members to entertain an ostensibly direct relationship with the party in public office, at the expense, however, of deliberative processes that may allow them to influence the party agenda. Thus Rousseau leaves the deliberative, and strictly parliamentary moment in the hands of elected representatives and party leaders, leaving to the party base the task of choosing between options that have been defined elsewhere.
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This article offers a reading of internet-based activism or 'hacktivism' as a phenomenon that cannot be confined to the instrumental use of information technologies. It focuses on a subset of hacktivism – the distributed-denial-of-service... more
This article offers a reading of internet-based activism or 'hacktivism' as a phenomenon that cannot be confined to the instrumental use of information technologies. It focuses on a subset of hacktivism – the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for political ends – 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 – 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's notions of transindividuation and transduction allow for a conceptualization of hacktivism as a sociotechnical assemblage with a high degree of indetermination.
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The People’s Mic--a collective amplification of individual voices in public gatherings--has become a hallmark of the Occupy movement. Because those who join the Microphone in call and response occupy simultaneously the position of medium... more
The People’s Mic--a collective amplification of individual voices in public gatherings--has become a hallmark of the Occupy movement. Because those who join the Microphone in call and response occupy simultaneously the position of medium and that of addressee, the Mic allows us to return to an ancient notion of medium as a middle ground that is associated with the public and the common. Extending a pharmacological trajectory in media theory that goes from Jacques Derrida to Neil Postman to Bernard Stiegler, the article argues that the embodied, slow-paced and choral nature of the Mic can be seen as an antidote to the speedy and fragmentary nature of online communication. In other words, even though the People’s Mic does not require any technological prosthesis, its use has been popularized in a post-technological society*a society whose communication patterns are informed by information technologies even when they are not directly relying on them. In the second part, the article draws on Michel Foucault’s writings on the ambivalent relationship between free speech and democracy in ancient Greece, to argue that the People’s Mic allows participants to reflect on the conditions of possibility of democratic communication--of communication in an open, unscripted environment. It concludes that the challenge for contemporary media theory and media activism is to understand how media that are dependent on the messages they convey can generate their own metalanguages so as to have an impact on the information technologies that enable them.
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This article compares industrial machine breaking and computer hacking by focusing on the English Luddites and the contemporary hacker network Anonymous. In spite of their apparent differences, the two movements share at least three... more
This article compares industrial machine breaking and computer hacking by focusing on the English Luddites and the contemporary hacker network Anonymous. In spite of their apparent differences, the two movements share at least three remarkable features. First, both the Luddites and Anonymous target machines of a specific kind — labor-saving machines in the case of the Luddites, machines that restrict access to information and information technology in the case of Anonymous. Second, both Anonymous and Ned Ludd are collective pseudonyms, or “multiple-use names,” whose wild circulation in the public domain brings previously unrelated struggles within a common discursive space. Third, industrial machine breaking and computer hacking are comparable in that they both reduce the productivity of labor and capital. The article concludes by noting that a fundamental operational difference between industrial machines and cybernetic machines sets in motion processes of subjectivation and class composition that are not reducible to one another.
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By analyzing Franco Berardi’s reflections on irony as an extension of his political praxis, the article first examines the multifaceted functions of this rhetorical device in the contexts of the late-1960s social struggles against factory... more
By analyzing Franco Berardi’s reflections on irony as an extension of his political praxis, the article first examines the multifaceted functions of this rhetorical device in the contexts of the late-1960s social struggles against factory work in Italy, the communication experiments of the Autonomia movement, and the information overload of the contemporary mediascape. In the second part, the text addresses Berardi’s attempt to reconcile Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of desire to end with a reflection on how his distinction between irony and cynicism may offer a counterpoint to Slavoj Žižek’s critique of ideology.
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This article presents a brief genealogy and a theory of the ‘improper name’, defined as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups and individual authors. On the one hand, improper names provide... more
This article presents a brief genealogy and a theory of the ‘improper
name’, defined as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups and individual authors. On the one hand, improper names provide anonymity and a medium for identification and mutual recognition to a subaltern social group. On the other hand, they enable those who do not have a voice of their own to acquire a symbolic power outside the boundaries of an institutional
practice. By expressing a multiplicity of pragmatic and semiotic usages, improper names are collective assemblages of enunciation characterized by the proliferation of difference. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the minor and the major mode, the article suggests that the improper should be thought of as a movement of deterritorialization of the proper. Kripke’s anti-descriptivist theory of rigid designation has shown how proper names have the function of fixing a referent in all its possible universes through an initial baptism recognized by a community of speakers.
name’, defined as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups and individual authors. On the one hand, improper names provide anonymity and a medium for identification and mutual recognition to a subaltern social group. On the other hand, they enable those who do not have a voice of their own to acquire a symbolic power outside the boundaries of an institutional
practice. By expressing a multiplicity of pragmatic and semiotic usages, improper names are collective assemblages of enunciation characterized by the proliferation of difference. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the minor and the major mode, the article suggests that the improper should be thought of as a movement of deterritorialization of the proper. Kripke’s anti-descriptivist theory of rigid designation has shown how proper names have the function of fixing a referent in all its possible universes through an initial baptism recognized by a community of speakers.
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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... more
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’s 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—the vast majority of which are owned by private corporations. Neither the general in Marx’s 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’s notion of the “digital enclosure” and Terranova’s 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.
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Chapter published in Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance, edited by Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink (New York: New York University Press).
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Review essay of Gerald Raunig, Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution, vol. 1, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2016.
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Review of Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014).
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Review of N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (eds.), Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
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If the media have always been “social,” it is no accident that they acquire this qualifier when their socialness becomes economically valuable. As if capital could recognize the social life of media only when it was finally able to... more
If the media have always been “social,” it is no accident that they acquire this qualifier when their socialness becomes economically valuable. As if capital could recognize the social life of media only when it was finally able to quantify it—to make it speak, in metrics, its own language. Curiously, however, while the social media user is still subjectified qua individual, the algorithmic governance of social media breaks down each user’s profile on the basis of discrete actions she performs vis-à-vis other users. These dividual electronic transactions, as Gilles Deleuze famously termed them, are the basic unit of informational capital, which recombines the data we leave behind in a potentially infinite variety of data sets.
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Until today, particular decisions within parties and organizations had to be decided by privileged people. LiquidFeedback can democratize the decision-making process. An interview with Jan Behrens, Axel Kistner, Andreas Nitsche, Björn... more
Until today, particular decisions within parties and organizations had to be decided by privileged people. LiquidFeedback can democratize the decision-making process. An interview with Jan Behrens, Axel Kistner, Andreas Nitsche, Björn Swierczek, co-developers of LiquidFeedback.
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Running for office means engaging in an operation that is intrinsically reductive and hegemonic, whether we like it or not.