Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the advocacy of media diversity by prominent actors in German’s Datenschutzszene, as expressive of a healthy and democratic socio-technical ecology.

Paper long abstract:

The past fifteen years have witnessed the emergence in Germany of a lively culture of associations, rituals, and concerned citizens, oriented around the protection of privacy and information in an era of increasing digitalisation. Advocating against ‘surveillance capitalism’ on the one hand (Zuboff 2019), and intrusive forms of state surveillance on the other, those who populate the German Datenschutzszene broadly share the philosophy that a democratic society in the twenty-first century is one which is decentralised, and offers a diversity of media options for participating in social life (Chadwick 2013). This means making the case that not every social relation needs to be digitised, and that paper in particular has an enduring role to play in the protection of individual and social autonomy (Selbstbestimmung); and further that that digital infrastructures themselves must and indeed can be built differently, with the use of encryption and other techniques to create privacy-protecting online spaces sometimes referred to as the ‘fediverse’.

Although participants often define themselves in the terms of what they oppose, namely the new forms of surveillance enabled by digitalisation, in this paper I explore what precisely it is that they are attempting to defend and nourish, namely a non-alienated relationship to technology oriented around the values and ways of relating enshrined in Germany’s constitution (Grundgesetz).