How can we think about democracy in terms of emerging socio-technical lifestyles? How abstract do these debates need to be to account for all the global human-machine dynamics?

The influence of digital platform media has had two effects: users have started to suppress their own voting rights within the otherwise regulated participatory process, while the return of a politics of regressive and identitarian fantasies can also be observed. This is a critical point in history.

What led us here is the apolitical manner in which we have engaged with almost all design and user debates surrounding developments in data and information technology since the 1980s. Any political criticism was only ever directed at institutional shortcomings of the organized classic-modern democracy. Key issues were always the institutional lethargy and sclerotization of agencies, departments, administrations. They were ill-equipped to reinvent or 'apply' the representative democratic participation processes to the development, programming and user configuration of data/information networks. At the same time, many micro generations of programmers, developers, artists and designers also regarded data technologies to be independent of social and political debates.