Discussant: Susanne Bauer, Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Making Data Democratic
Keynote speaker: Hannah Knox, University College London (UCL)
Can data make infrastructures more democratic? In this talk I tackle this question through an exploration of the work of the UK based Beyond Individual Persuasion project. BIP is an interdisciplinary collaboration between computer science, anthropology, energy social science and information design. The central aim of the project is to galvanise social collectives that can participate in and lead energy transitions in the face of climate change. It aims to do so by creating and using environmental sensors, data visualisations, data physicalisations, design workshops and prototypes. Like many such projects it approaches a political problem (energy democracy) through the development of technical tools. Whilst it can be tempting to dismiss such projects as deploying a narrow technological solutionism rather than eliciting more complex understandings of political participation, this paper chooses not to critique. Instead it delves into the details of the project to explore the specific ways such data driven work serves to trace the contours of the political. Here, situated techniques of data collection, analysis and presentation invite social collectives to configure themselves in terms of resource sharing, coordination and exchange. Reflecting on these configurations, I ask what this might mean for our understanding of how democratic ideals are being (re)made as they are approached through techniques of digital monitoring and display.
Making rights claims through acts of digital commoning
Keynote speaker: Evelyn Ruppert, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Grand pronouncements that democracies are under threat limit possibilities of dissent and action. This is what critical scholarship on digital and data politics often express: that totalizing narratives about what the internet means for societies conceal the ways subjects perform effective and creative politics. Rather than passive, we know that subjects struggle to revolt, subvert and evade digital assemblages that track, troll, visualize, control, discipline, and surveil their acts and actions. How then might we conceptualise such acts of resistance as digital rights claims that subjects make when they act in or through the internet? I will approach this question by considering decentralised and open-source social networking and filesharing platforms and how they constitute acts of digital commoning. I will suggest that through a complex assemblage of legal, performative, and imaginary forces such platforms perform ‘I, we, they have a right to’ and simultaneously disrupt and repair digital political spaces.