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Accepted Contribution:
The king is dead, long live the platform!
Oana Mateescu
(Babes-Bolyai University)
Focusing on the discussion of kings as “ultimate abstractions”, this intervention provokes the book into stretching the notion of sovereignty onto digital platforms. What can kings teach us about platforms? What are the levers that TDoE suggests for remaking technological sovereignty?
Contribution long abstract:
This intervention approaches TDoE by first making a detour to David Graeber’s 2014 debate with venture capitalist Peter Thiel on technology and its capacity to circumvent the future with the aim of exploring the downsizing of technology in the historical scaffolding of TDoE. Focusing on the discussion of kings as “ultimate abstractions”, it provokes the book into stretching the notion of sovereignty onto digital platforms. What are the levers that TDoE suggests for the remaking of technological sovereignty? What can kings teach us about platforms?
Platforms illustrate the (geo)political quandaries of the digital age in which citizens are users and sovereignty the cumulative effect of infrastructural stacking. In this context, it is relevant that 21st century capitalism is often recast as techno-feudalism, by retrofitting the conceptual scaffoldings of feudalism for the analysis of the unbundling of sovereignty in relation to large scale computation.