Pathogens, Precarity, and Digital Politics of Exclusion

The global COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged communities and exposed the inadequacies of social and political infrastructures. The flight of the virus and protocols of shelter have reopened the question of how digital infrastructures are complicit with processes of precaritization and elide bodies already at risk. This essay discusses the need to locate the study of media and technology in the materialities of the precaritized body in order to theorize the politics of systemic exclusion.

Digital Democracy: Big Technology and the Regulation of Politics

The legal regulation of politics has, at its core, the aim of preserving three fundamental democratic values: liberty, equality and deliberative political participation. Yet, the reference point for examining these values is rooted in 19th and 20th century practices: where political campaigning and mobilisation follow terrestrial principles of organisation and regulation is undertaken by the state. Using the most recent empirical evidence drawn from political science on the changing nature of political participation and organisation, this article analyses the challenges of regulating digital politics. It argues that while the major focus of current interventions centres on political disinformation, this obscures more fundamental regulatory concerns such as capturing the diversity of new modes of participation and reconceptualising equality. While a model of co-regulation holds promise by institutionalising communities and individuals within technology companies’ policy decision-making processes, firms’ ultimate authority to define and control their user base presents challenges for effective participation.

Technopolitics from Below: A Framework for the Analysis of Digital Politics of Production

This article develops a multi-level framework for the analysis of a bottom-up politics of technology at the workplace. It draws on a multi-case study on algorithmic management of manual labor in manufacturing and delivery platforms in Germany. In researching how workers influenced the use of algorithmic management systems, the concept of technopolitics is developed to refer to three different arenas of negotiation: (1) the arena of regulation, where institutional framings of technologies in production are negotiated, typically between state actors, employers’ associations, and unions. (2) The arena of implementation, where strategies of technology deployment are negotiated—in the German production model typically between management and works council. (3) The arena of appropriation, in which different organizational technocultures offer contesting schemes for the actual use of technology at work. Whereas most recent research on digitalization of work conceptualizes workers as mere objects of digitalization processes, this paper focuses on worker agency as a “technopolitics from below.” It thus demonstrates how workers influence the concrete outcome of digitalization projects.

Conditions and technologies for minimization of protest activity of the Russian youth in the context of modern media discourse in digital environment

This article is dedicated to the analysis of protest activity of the Russian youth in the context of the institutionalization of the global digital politics. The contradictions existing in the Russian political system are viewed in the form of conflict, which determines the specificity of the reproduction of protest activity of the representatives of youth cohort. The ambiguities in implementation of state policy manifest as the trigger for the formation of protest activity, including mobilization of social activity of youth in constructive / destructive behavioral practices. Research methodology is comprised of the concept of social action in interpretation of M. Weber, T. Parsons, J. Habermas, as well as the theory of social changes developed by P. Sztompka, which allows relying on the thesis of the mutual interaction of structures in relation to the actors in terms of analysis of youth protest. Interpretation is given to the results of discourse analysis of political media texts on the Internet that was conducted by the authors. The scientific novelty consists in determination of the existing expert opinions on the conditions necessary for minimizing protest activity of the youth, as well as most widespread technologies used for their implementation. Of particular importance are the results of the original empirical study that allow interpreting the two positions, which reflect the opinion within the professional environment on the role of youth in protest movement of the Russian Federation, forming the so-called “ideological foundation” for further reasoning on the state and social activity related to protesting youth.