Digital Democracy from Below: Resisting AI and Techno-solutionism

AI is becoming pervasive in everyday life, appearing as a visible and constant presence in many aspects of work, education, and personal relationships. It restructures job markets, creates new slop aesthetics, and is forcibly incorporated into almost all digital services with promises of economic growth and efficiency, without any serious reflection on the social and political consequences. But we believe that the situation is not hopeless or settled, no matter how powerful the corporations or systems profiting from AI may appear. The trick is to recognize that democratic levers for change are not given in advance, but must be actively and creatively reimagined. This collection of essays is a survey of where such handles are hiding in the digital age, in places considerably less obvious than a county hearing. In procurement, in a watershed boundary, in a tax treaty almost nobody knows exists, in a benchmark written by users rather than engineers, or in a legal assumption about how technology “works” that is ripe for challenging. None of these were designed as democratic instruments, which is precisely the point. Democracy is presented not as a form of government but a way of living, and as a skill that can be practiced. The authors reflect on an emergent, collective argument about the different meanings and possibilities of “digital democracy from below.” They go beyond the U.S. context to explore distinct but interdependent dynamics of technological politics in places around the world. The collection has five sections: (1) Seeing through the fog; (2) Recognizing the limits of infrastructure; (3) Fighting erasure; (4) Practicing everyday democracy; and (5) Resisting, organizing and re-building. It also offers a roadmap for organizing participatory workshops that can adapted and reused.

Contributors (alphabetical order by last name): Rafael C. Alvarado, Brianne Anderson, Nicole West Bassoff, Luã Cruz, Aashka Dave, Nancy L. Deutsch, Laurent Dubois, Joshua Earle, MC Forelle, Matthew Gillikin, Sergio Guillen Grillo, Yujia He, Mar Hicks, Steven L. Johnson, Mona Kasra, Tamara Kneese, Andre Vinicius Leal Sobral, Aaron Martin, Andrew Mondschein, David Nemer, Roya Pakzad, Pedro Augusto P. Francisco, Spencer Phillips, Jess Reia, Karina Ripley, Andrea Roberts, Fernanda R. Rosa, Dhanaraj Thakur, Quito Tsui, Michael Tyrala, Jonathan van Geuns, Yingchong Wang, Megan Wiessner, Rebecca Williams, Bianca Wylie, Caitlin D. Wylie.