Timon Beyes

The pandemic-induced digitalization of local and global relations is accelerating the ways we organize communally, characteristic of networked publics. Now more than ever, collectivity is forming based on the possibilities and conditions of technological connectivity. As as result, newly emerging communities are reliant on the inaccessible and unreadable mechanisms of platform economies and surveillance capitalism, the stakeholders of which are profiting off of the pandemic. How do contemporary forms of meeting relate to these mechanisms? Do these calculated publics need to be dependent on the algorithms, echo chambers and modes of control of Twitter, Facebook, Clubhouse, etc.? Which arising practices of disruption, obfuscation and de-networking can act against the programming of the general public in online infrastructures? Even the bourgeois public sphere emerged via secret societies. Can a similar dialectic be found today that can, beyond rampant conspiracy theories, usher in new communities of solidarity?

Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organisation and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg and at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is a director of Lüneburg’s Centre for Digital Cultures and affiliated with the Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.