Narendra Modi with his Bharatiya Janata Party has used technology in an Indian election campaign at an unprecedented level, campaigning digitally in nine languages and changing the election process forever.
The tradeoff between the capacity to upload and the possibility to download goes to the heart of the battle between active creation and passive consumption. Today it is clear that the digital divide will be about whether access translates into sophisticated usage.
Podemos has presented itself as a party of "decent ordinary people”, who understand the needs of ordinary citizens and are open to taking their lead from them through the participatory process (as opposed to positioning themselves as the intellectual vanguard).
Despite the dramatic spread of democratic procedures in recent decades, there is a profound and growing deficit in substantive democracy everywhere. ‘They call it democracy but it isn’t’ was one of the slogans of the Spanish indignados.
In Russia the information war isn’t just being waged on television and in print. Well-funded Kremlin-linked organisations are waging a battle for hearts and minds in cyberspace.
Publishing house Lawrence & Wishart’s demand that the Marxists Internet Archive remove its digitised copy of the Marx-Engels Collected Works exposes all the contradictions of ‘radical publishing’ in the internet era
Last year, it was revealed that the Swedish state indexed all Roma living in Sweden and made its secret services actively cooperate with GCHQ and the NSA. Why has nobody drawn a connection between these two facets of mass surveillance?
FLOK stands for “Free, Libre, Open Knowledge,” and the FLOK Society is a government-sponsored project to imagine how Ecuador might make a strategic transition to a workable post-capitalist knowledge economy.
How did the Snowden saga impact Spain? How did the government and society react to the revelations about surveillance and privacy? Where do they stand almost twelve months later?
Legitimising the politics of mass surveillance wouldn’t be possible in Poland if it wasn’t successfully tested by much more influential governments – such as the UK or France – and white-washed by the EU.
The recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) Google Spain judgment profoundly challenges the current realities of freedom of expression and information online.
A discussion of European surveillance programmes cannot be reduced to the question of a balance between data protection versus national security. It has to be framed in terms of collective freedoms and democracy.
