The document discusses the crisis of political participation in the digital age, particularly focusing on Spain. It explores historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding how digitalization affects social, political, and economic relations, ultimately questioning if genuine democratic participation is feasible given growing inequality and the commodification of commons under digital capitalism. The text emphasizes the complexities of globalized systems and the challenges they pose to traditional notions of democracy and participation.

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Rationale und irrationale Diskurse im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung
Instituts für Design Science, Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin, Leibniz-Sozietät Berlin, 21 Sep 2017
José María Díaz Nafría (IDS | ULE | HM)
DIE KRISE DER POLITISCHE
BETEILUNG IN ZEITALTER DER
DIGITALISIERUNG.
FALLSTUDIEN SPANIEN
THE CRISIS OF
POLITICAL
PARTICIPATION IN
THE DIGITAL AGE.
STUDY CASE: SPAIN

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The Crisis of Political Participation in the Digital Age
Study case: Spain
“If we would set up a long-lived form of government,
let us not even dream of making it eternal. If we are
to succeed, we must not attempt the impossible, or
flatter ourselves that we are endowing the work of
man with a stability of which human conditions do
not permit.” Rousseau. The Social Contract (III, 11)
Contents
1. What the digital age is about?
2. The digital age is also global and unequal
3. Is participation possible at the digital age?
1. Globalised social systems
2. Democratic participation
3. Inequality and Subsidiarity
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

3. 1. What the Digital Age is about?
• Important historical social changes > Political reflection
(Greek classical period, Zhou dynasty, emergence of
bourgueoisie): searching new ways of action (imagined,
thought, deliberated, tried, assessed) > institutionalised
action > moral & socio-political systems
• In the “digital/information age”: new social, political,
economic relations > Change of the space of possibilities.
• In the Digital Age the social information sources have
exploded… But “what is information ultimately?”
– No consensus (social, natural, technical sciences, arts).
– How to know the space of possibilities, how to think proper
action?
3The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

4. • Information: what enables the selection of changes in a (self-
organised) system/agent (physical, biological, cognitive, social)
(Díaz & Zimmermann 2012-2013; 2017).
• Energy: possibility to perform changes in the system.
• When the change is actualised: Structure / Matter: New space of
possibilities deploys
• Information drives the energy as to produce some particular change
4
Industrial society Information society
Usage of energy information
Relies on Transformation materialised in
the (stabilised) industrial
system
The selection of changes in
the socio-economical
system
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
1. What the Digital Age is about?

5. • Comparison: Industrial/Turing machine
– Industrial machine (steam engine): fixed operations
– Turing machine: action table
• The dynamicity of changes increases
• Industrial society:
1) division & serialisation of work through reliable machines
2) Management of human organization of industrial tasks : re-
adaptation of the system
• Freedom of choice in socio-economic tasks:
Liberal ethics + Democratic Participation (who partakes?)
5The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
1. What the Digital Age is about?

6. • Information Age: (costless) flexibility of the productive
relations (socio-economic system)
• Possibility of sloughing off working force > changed the
game of selling and buying work
• A new social game has to be developed as to attain:
human rights / addressing increasing inequality /
adapting to the biospherical sheltering
• Information? Socialised common asset / Property laws
• New values / New socio-economic agencies
6The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
1. What the Digital Age is about?

7. 2. The Digital Age is also
Global and Unequal
7The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

8. 2. Is the digital a common sphere?
• The digitalization has been driven by capitalist dynamics
• Capitalism is alien to the commons as organization
principle, but it feeds from the commons
– Commodification of commons values concern in the digital
capitalism the intangible ones (culture, knowledge, education,
caring) [Fleissner]
– Digital capitalism is developing a new commons as a ground for its
further development (Amazon Turk) [Negri & Hardt]
– In the market it suppose to be an structureless interaction
8The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

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2. Is the digital a common sphere?
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

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2. Is the digital a common sphere?
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

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2. Is the digital a common sphere?
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
a) Country size rescaled in proportion to population estimate for 2050
b) Country size rescaled in proportion to internet population in 2014

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2. Is the digital a common sphere?
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
The rapid spreading of digital technologies in developing countries (Source: World Bank 2016)

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2. Is the digital a common sphere?
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

14. 3. Is participation possible at the
digital age?
14The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
Highlighting most relevant on-
going eP processes and activities
Linking to
Superportal
Active
pool
Linkage to
MyUniversity
Social Media
Feeding of
MyUniversity
Social Networks’
postingOpen user
letters
News
section
eParticip.
processe
s
Open
Fora
Access
section &
user identifier
Concept, help and
ethical code
adapted
project motto
and logo
Local
institution
Logo eP Supersystem
University eP system 1
Students Scholars Staff
Faculty 1
Faculty 2
Department B
Department C
Department A
…
University eP
system 2
University eP
system N
…
External Stakeholders External Stakeholders External Stakeholders
External
Stakeholders
1) MyUniversity EU Project (2010-2013)

15. 3. Is participation possible at the
digital age?
15The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
2) Discourse
dynamics in the
left-wing
coalition: Study of
Twitter interaction
during the Spanish
electoral campaign
for 2016 general
elections

16. 3. Is participation possible at the
digital age?
16The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
Filter Bubbles

17. 3. Is participation possible at the
Digital Age?
• An straightforward way to cope with the complexity of a
system comprised by too many functional parts and
interactions (internal/external): arranging the system in a
hierarchical levelism (each level its agents follow the rules
and mandates given by upper level / interact with other
agents of the same level / manage its constituent
subsystems of the underneath level.
• Examples: feudal societies / industrial organisation
• Alien to the very concept of democracy in which agents
operate under relative equalised opportunities and make
decisions in a participatory manner (in the case of
participatory democracy) or through delegation (in the case
of representative democracy).
17The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

18. 3.1 Globalised Social Systems
• Can the concept of democracy be properly devised at
the global scale?
• Can electronic means – as considered since the 19th
century – serve as a means to deploy democracy
globally or even to implement the ideal of participatory
democracy (Bingham et al., 2005)?
• The inequality we have seen constantly growing
globally since the 18th century (Milanovic, 2009) is
actually compatible with democracy?
18The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

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3.1 Globalised Social Systems

20. 20The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.1 Globalised Social Systems

21. 21The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.1 Globalised Social Systems

22. 22The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.1 Globalised Social Systems

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1810s 1960s Today
Change the
Rules (2013)
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.1 Globalised Social Systems

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UNICEF
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.1 Globalised Social Systems

25. 25
UNICEF
University of Sheffield
Global Wealth Distribution in 2015
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.1 Globalised Social Systems
Income inequality is much stronger than connectivity inequality

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D. S. Rogers (2012): Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequality for Sustainability
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.1 Globalised Social Systems

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• The Geopolitical reality of globalisation clearly overwhelms the
cast of the democratic nation-states in which the rule-of-law is
still preserved (Dahrendorf, 2001)
• This rule-of-law was developed within the nation-states (liberal
democracies), in virtue of a continuous negotiation between the
capitalist and labour forces enabling the reproduction of the
productive relations in exchange for a power balance opposed to
the natural tendency of capitalism (Bowles, 2007)
• This reservoir of power balance, crystallised in a rule-of-law
guaranteeing social rights, has been progressively undermined
through several historical factors
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.2 Democratically seizing complexity

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(i) the introduction of automatic production processes;
(ii) the networking technologies at the service of the financial,
commercial and productive agents;
(iii) the constitution and advocacy of capitalist interests by
unobstructed international institutions;
(iv) the growing power of transnational corporations.
The development of the productive forces within the frame of the
existing productive relations (reflected and legitimized in the
property relations) leads to the contradictions between productive
forces and relations (Marx 1859).
– In the liberal democracies: while the productive forces have evolved within
capitalist economy, the productive relations and the corresponding property
legitimacy have done it in the democratic frame of the nation-states.
– Contradictions: democracy vs capitalism / equality vs. inequality /
participation vs. dominancy
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.2 Democratically seizing complexity

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• It makes sense to seek after the general will of a culturally
homogenous society, as in the case of the Greek polis, or the
political communities Rousseau may have born in mind.
• It is attached to a grounding trust and solidarity < deep normative
sense of identity (history, fate, memory, constitution and nation)
• McIntyre: “politics of self-defence for all those local societies as
aspire to achieve some relatively self-sufficient and independent
form of participation-based community”
• In a more global level: General will / Public interest? >
illegitimate neoliberal bias
• Public sphere: Habermas / Vattimo, Capurro, Fuchs
• How to articulate the addressing of issues, the agreement of
objectives?
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.2 Democratically seizing complexity

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• Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church (19th C. Social inequality,
Capital-Work)
• Principle of Participatory Democracy vs advocacy of Conservative
Liberalists (positive sense vs negative sense)
• Juridical Principle (Civil Law / Penal Law…)
• EU (since Mastrich) > General principle of European Union law
Under the principle of subsidiarity, in areas which do not fall within its
exclusive competence, the Union shall act only if and in so far as the
objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the
Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can
rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better
achieved at Union level
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.3 Inequality and Subsidiarity

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Policy making
Planning and strategy
Stability
Optimisation
3.3 Inequality and Subsidiarity
Cyber-Subsidiarity Model
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

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Nested systems:
Levels of Recursion:
Ashby’s law of requisite variety:
each level should have at least the
minimal complexity to absorbe the
complexity it is facing
3.3 Inequality and Subsidiarity
Cyber-Subsidiarity Model
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain

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Nested systems:
𝑉𝑆𝑀 ≝ S1 , 𝑀
S1 ≝ VSM;
M ≝ S2, S3, S3∗, S4, S5
3.3 Inequality and Subsidiarity
Cyber-Subsidiarity Model

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DIE KRISE DER POLITISCHE BETEILUNG IN
ZEITALTER DER DIGITALISIERUNG.
FALLSTUDIEN SPANIEN

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• Global institutions: new means to press the terms of the agreement with
the nation-states, which still legitimate the productive and property
relations
• The internationalization of productive forces and relations makes that the
productive system can flexibly adapt to one or another batch of labour
forces to keep on functioning, thus being able to bypass regulatory
constraints.
• the development of automation creates brings about a structural
unemployment that impairs even more the negotiation ability of the
working forces at the level of the nation-states in which such regulations
are kept.
• Noble: “There is a war on, but only one side is armed: this is the essence
of the technology question today. On the one side is private capital,
scientized and subsidized, mobile and global, and now heavily armed with
military spawned command, control, and communication technologies."
The Crisis of the Political Participación in the Digital Age. Study case: Spain
3.2 Democratically seizing complexity