Postpandemic technopolitical democracy: algorithmic nations, data sovereignty, digital rights, and data cooperatives

COVID-19 has hit citizens dramatically during 2020, not only creating a general risk-driven environment encompassing a wide array of economic vulnerabilities but also exposing them to pervasive digital risks, such as biosurveillance, misinformation, and e-democracy algorithmic threats. Over the course of the pandemic, a debate has emerged about the appropriate democratic and techno-political response when governments use disease surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of COVID-19, pointing out the dichotomy between state-Leviathan cybercontrol and civil liberties. The COVID-19 pandemic has inevitably raised the need to resiliently and techno-politically respond to democratic threats that hyper-connected and highly virialised societies produce. In order to shed light on this debate, amidst this volume on “democratic deepening”, this chapter introduces the new term “postpandemic technopolitical democracy” as a way to figure out emerging forms and scales for developing democracy and citizen participation in hyper-connected and highly virialised postpandemic societies. Insofar as the digital layer cannot be detached from the current democratic challenges of the XXI including neoliberalism, scales, civic engagement, and action research driven-co-production methodologies; this chapter suggests a toolbox encompassing four intertwined terms including (i) the context chracterised by the algorithmic nations, (ii) challenges stemming from data sovereignty, (iii) mobilisation seen from the digital rights perspective, and (iv) grassroots innovation embodied through data co-operatives. This chapter elucidates that in the absence of coordinated and inter-dependent strategies to claim digital rights and data sovereignty by algorithmic nations, on the one hand, Big Tech data-opolies, and on the other hand, the GDPR led by the European Commission, might bound and expand respectively, algorithmic nations’ capacity to mitigate the negative side effects of the algorithmic disruption in Western democracies