Digital Dictatorship or Digital Democracy?

As part of the Angewandte Festival 2020 this June 23rd – 26th, our very own Jamie Allen will be speaking in the conference Digital Dictatorship Or Digital Democracy?, hosted by Dr. Gerald Bast, Dean of University of Applied Arts Vienna and Prof. Peter Weibel, Research Institute for Digital Cultures.

The session looks to unearth the pharmacological relation to the ‘digital’, as both cure and cause of societal divisiveness, control, misinformation and governmentality. Jamie’s input to the proceedings will examine the role that arbiters of climate data — its collection, transmission, distribution and analysis — play in circumscribing the future, as planetary crises digitise global change and sell this data to the highest bidder, what movements and generativities toward open, democratic and principled knowledge-power exchanges can be enabled and encouraged?

Other presenters include Hito Steyerl (Berlin University of the Arts), Sarah Spiekermann (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Yuk Hui (School of Creative Media, University of Hong Kong), Karen Kornbluh (Director, Digital Innovation & Democracy Initiative, German Marshall Fund), Jamie Susskind (Former Fellow, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University), Beth Noveck (The Governing Lab, NYU), Martin Drexler (AI-42 Market Intelligence Ltd.), Gesche Joost (Berlin University of the Arts)