Are Emerging Digital Citizenship Regimes Rescaling Nation-States? Datafied States and Algorithmic Nations at Stake

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Authors: 

Igor Calzada  Principal Research Fellow / Reader at Cardiff University - School of Social Sciences - WISERD/SPARK

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Abstract

State institutions might have already monopolized contemporary practices around citizenship. Actually, so far, traditional approaches around citizenship have framed it only at the scale of the territorial state. Nonetheless, over the last decade, the flagship Big Tech firms of surveillance capitalism, such as Google and Facebook, have already assumed many functions and concentrated excessive technopolitical power previously associated with the nation-state, from cartography to citizen surveillance, which has datafied citizenship. As a counter-reaction, at the city-regional level, emancipatory trends have emerged by claiming a say around matters covering demands for not only data privacy, ownership, sovereignty, donation, co-operation, self-determination, trust, access, and ethics but also digital rights, AI transparency, algorithmic automatization, and ultimately, democratic accountability for digital citizenship, which may inevitably transform the current interpretation of the nation state. Alongside this forces and trends, overall, datafication processes have resulted in nation-state rescaling, undermining its heretofore privilege position, so far, the only natural platform and geographical expression for the monopoly of sensory power. Despite a wide literature covering state rescaling, there are scarce attempts to explore further interpretations to the nation-states amid datafied societies. This paper encourages further research on this topic by coining two new terms: Datafied States and Algorithmic Nations. Consequently, this paper aims to: (i) present findings of the new/recent published book ‘Emerging Digital Citizenship Regimes: Postpandemic Technopolitical Democracies’; (ii) interrogate whether the emerging digital citizenship regimes are actually rescaling nation-states by presenting several case studies; and (iii) open new research avenues around Datafied States and Algorithmic Nations.