Beyond technological sovereignty: Practising technological self-determination in platform cooperativism
本文提出技术自决概念,作为国家中心的技术主权话语的替代方案,通过研究博洛尼亚一家独立出租车合作社的50年历程,论证平台合作主义可提供经济与社会替代方案,但需摆脱主权话语。
The goal of this article is to offer the notion of technological self-determination as a concept and as a practice that is alternative to the state-centred discourse of strategic and technological sovereignty. The idea of technological sovereignty has become hegemonic amongst national and transnational technocratic elites, especially in the European Union, at a time in which what is defined here as the ‘state-urban-corporate complex’ has come to dominate the economic-political landscape, particularly in the technology sector. Learning from the empirical investigation of the five-decade long trajectory of an independent, currently platform-based taxi cooperative in Bologna, the paper puts forth the argument that platform cooperativism and larger municipalist movements can provide an economic and societal alternative to the state-urban-corporate complex, but in order to do so they have to get rid of the lexicon and the related economic-political imaginary that are hegemonic in globalised techno-capitalism, such as those associated with the state-centred discourse of technological sovereignty and of sovereignty in general with its geopolitical implications. In doing so, the paper assesses the ideas of technological self-determination and algorithmic democracy as constitutive components of an alternative politico-economic imaginary within the contemporary landscape dominated by the state-urban-corporate complex and the global rise of exclusionary sovereigntism.