Digital Totalitarianism: Algorithms and Society
Digital Totalitarianism: Algorithms and Society focuses on important challenges to democratic values posed by our computational regimes: policing the freedom of inquiry, risks to the personal autonomy of thought, NeoLiberal management of human creativity and the collapse of critical thinking with the social media fueled rise of conspiranoia.
Digital networks allow for a granularity and pervasiveness of surveillance by government and corporate entities. This creates power asymmetries where each citizen’s daily ‘data exhaust’ can be used for manipulative and controlling ends by powerful institutional actors. This volume explores key erosions in our fundamental human values associated with free societies by covering government surveillance of library-based activities, cognitive enhancement debates, the increasing business orientation of art schools, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories in network media.
Digital Totalitarianism is investigated in this volume through specific degrading effects on the intellectual and creative freedoms of human beings in nominally democratic societies. Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policy makers, journalists and the general reading public will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions of totalitarian tendencies encompassing research from Communication, Rhetoric, Library Sciences, Art and New Media.
Chapter 1 — “Radical Resistance: Libraries, Defiance, and Data Surveillance” by Amanda C. Roth Clark and Sophia E. Du Val — takes up the meme-image of ‘radical, militant librarians’ to highlight the new roles that libraries play with regards to safeguarding the privacy of their visitors’ search and checkout histories which government agencies increasingly impinge upon. At stake are foundational citizens’ rights of free access to information which is at the core of library science ethics.
Chapter 2 — “Urgent Ethical Issues in the Cognitive Enhancement Debate: Autonomy, Mental Privacy, and Freedom of Thought” by Ozum Ucok-Sayrak — takes up key debates of cognitive enhancement related to implantable devices and brain computer interfaces. Such technologies, installed at the neural level, do not simply enhance but also alter sensory, physical and mental capabilities, and pose new questions about traditional conceptions of the freedom and autonomy of thought and mental privacy.
Chapter 3 — “Impersonal Computing: from Art School to Business Hub in four decades” by Eleanor Dare — reviews art school trends in the Global North which, under NeoLiberal transformations and administrative models, are pushing art education away from long established teaching traditions by taking up business school approaches. At the heart of these new pedagogical pressures are the interconnections between Computer Science and Business concepts that prioritize STEM and STEAM configurations of applied creativity.
Chapter 4 — “The Plandemic and its Apostles: Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Mode” by Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz — analyzes conspiracy theories and the ‘conspiranoia’ associated with the Covid-19 pandemic as disseminated globally in social media. Building on Karl Popper’s ideas, conspiracies are understood as ‘mythologies of modernity’ which on the one hand share remarkable continuity with other conspiracies dating back centuries, but on the other hand take on new algorithm-driven potencies as part of our general information disorder.
This volume is in Routledge’s short form Focus format. As such, the series can be nimble and responsive to fast emerging issues and debates.
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