Democracy, Freedom, and Pluralism in the Digital Age

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Digital technology seems to have a two-faced relationship to political life: it appears to simultaneously advance and threaten basic values such as democracy, freedom, and pluralism. On the one hand, artificial intelligence, big data, and internet platforms promise to expand the spaces for human agency, to promote diversity, and to ease our everyday existence. Online spaces have allowed a semblance of normalcy otherwise unthinkable in the context of a global pandemic. And they offer shelter for society’s most vulnerable as well as forums for challenging entrenched power. Yet these technological means threaten both human agency and diversity. Social media serves as a megaphone for the powerful to promote their interests and squash dissent. Internet surveillance becomes a tool of social control. Online echo chambers homogenize and radicalize their participants. Both for better and for worse, digital technology has significantly affected our political life.

This panel relies on the history of political thought to theorize the impact of technology on politics. At first glance, political theory and philosophy might appear to be ill-suited to analyse today’s technological developments, as most political thought predates the invention of the internet. Yet, when taken in historical perspective, the political and social challenges that follow the expansion of digital technology reveal themselves to be perennial: domination and oppression, the commodification of human life, the blurring of the distinction between the private and the public spheres, radical evil, radical scepticism and the distrust of science, conspiracy, radicalization and populism. Although these problems are often associated with the pathologies of technology today, they are hardly new. Technology, in its current form, seems only to create new opportunities for them to emerge.

This panel uses ideas from the history of political thought to understand how technology has impacted these enduring problems. By drawing on perspectives from the past, this panel contributes to the ongoing interdisciplinary and methodologically plural interrogation of the effects of digital technology. In doing so, this panel hopes to provide guidance on how to maximize the positive potential of technology while minimizing its harms.


Kiran Bannerjee’s paper explores how political theory can help us appreciate the relevance and implications of algorithmic systems and big data for our understandings of politics and agency. Using the work of Arendt, Foucault, Hacking, and Polanyi, Banerjee frames data-driven approaches to public policy within the broader context of the “rise of the social.” In so doing, he shows how the growing application of algorithmic systems represents a considerable intensification of the fundamental challenges to politics that have been developing over the past century.

Ben Schupmann’s paper analyses thoughtlessness in the context of “third screens and 5G.” Thoughtlessness, according to Arendt, is a novel form of Kant’s radical evil. It allows abhorrent acts to be committed without conscious violation of any moral law. Schupmann argues that the ubiquity of high-speed internet access exacerbates thoughtlessness in two ways. It deepens the forms of thoughtlessness that Arendt diagnosed in the mid-twentieth century. And it creates uniquely twenty-first century forms. Schupmann concludes by discussing how both erode intentionality, plurality, and freedom.

Luise Papcke’s paper explores how hermeneutical theory sheds light on the dynamics of online civic communication, how it differs from previous forms of civic discourse, and how that difference matters for democracy. Using the work of Habermas, Gadamer, and Schleiermacher, Papcke reconstructs the structure of online discourse and discusses how online communication spaces may change the nature of communicative interaction, leading to online phenomena like conspiracism, populism, and polarization. Papcke concludes by analysing ways to address the structural problems of online communication.

Javier Burdman’s paper examines a perplexing dynamic between technology and science: as people increasingly rely on technology, they seem to become more distrustful of scientific fact. Burdman identifies two perspectives on this dynamic. The continuity perspective, in Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, and Latour, claims science and technology are aspects of a common enterprise seeking to control nature. The discontinuity perspective, in Arendt, Lyotard, and Habermas, claims science is concerned with understanding the world, technology with transforming it. Following the latter perspective, Burdman concludes that there is a tension between science and technology and that the subordination of science to technological concerns exposes science to damaging scepticism.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Cosponsor

• Division 40: Information Technology, & Politics

Individual Presentations

• Thought and Freedom in an Age of Third Screens and 5G - Benjamin A. Schupmann, Yale-NUS College

• Arendt and the Algorithm: Re-Reading the Human Condition in the Digital Age - Kiran Banerjee, University of Toronto

• Understanding Each Other Online. A Hermeneutic Approach to Online Communication - Luise Papcke, New York University

• Distrust in Science and Technology's Penetration of Life - Javier Burdman, Universidad Nacional de San Martin

Chair

• Davide Panagia UCLA

Discussants

• John Christman Pennsylvania State University

• Jennifer Forestal Loyola University, Chicago