Conference Agenda

I will explore the implications for a political theory of technology (as called for by Carl Mitcham, 2022) and innovation concerning contemporary calls for ‘Technological Sovereignty. The concepts of technological and innovation sovereignty open a pathway to address existing gaps in the governance of technology and innovation. Both responsible innovation and technological sovereignty aim to embed socio-political objectives within the development of technology and innovation, affecting economic governance and providing directionality of technological capacities.

Responsible innovation operates within a deliberative democratic framework, encouraging societal actors to be mutually responsive and collaborate toward addressing societal challenges. It relies on a process that balances stakeholder interests and promotes an inclusive dialogue on the societal impacts of technology. This approach incentivizes collaboration and shared responsibility among public, private, and civil sectors, aligning innovation with socially desirable outcomes.

In contrast, technological sovereignty suggests a more politically guided approach to technological development. It emphasizes the importance of reducing external dependencies and securing critical technological capacities through governance and policy intervention. This implies a more top-down direction for innovation, aiming to safeguard a degree of national or regional autonomy over essential technologies. The focus on sovereignty introduces a political dimension to innovation, where the state's role in shaping technology becomes more pronounced, potentially limiting market-led decision-making.

Taken together, these frameworks may signal a shift towards a more politically engaged governance model for technology, where innovation is not just a market-driven process but is actively shaped by socio-political priorities. Exploring how these concepts interact could help develop a political theory of technology that recognizes both the collaborative potential of responsible innovation and the protective, sovereignty-oriented dimensions necessary for resilient technological systems. This convergence could support a comprehensive approach to innovation governance, ensuring that technological progress aligns more closely with societal and democratic values.

References

Mitcham, C. Political Philosophy of Technology: After Leo Strauss (A Question of Sovereignty). Nanoethics 16, 331–338 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-022-00428-9

The paper analyses the impacts of digital technologies on social sustainability, and proposes methods to mentor that impact constructive. The multi pillar approach to sustainable development has gathered momentum in the past decade, so as discourses on social sustainability, that was overshadowed by economic and environmental sustainability before. Contextually, the World Bank has come up with a breakthrough publication in the light of the bank’s theoretical and practical expertise in the field, and identifies four defining elements of social sustainability: social cohesion, inclusion, resilience, and process legitimacy. The fast pace growth of digital technologies since the past two decades has impacted both constructively and destructively those defining elements of social sustainability. Digital technologies, which currently manifest in the form of AI, social media, or other digital services, seem not to halt in the near future given their ‘omnipresence’ in both public and private life of individual persons. Such growing ‘intimate’ rapport between digital technologies and individuals will have decisive implications on the nature of the social fabric which the latter constitute. Therefore, sustainable research and development of digital technologies is an essential component in determining sustainable societies. This paper seeks to realise the ambition of making digital technologies sustainable by means of proposing principles and methods for responsible digital data management, since digit data plays key role in the research and development of digital technologies.

Apart from an introduction and a conclusion, the paper contains three sections. The first section surveys on the constructive and destructive impacts of digital technologies on the society. It includes the positive effects of digital technologies in the field of education, economy, and civic engagement that nourished social capital on one hand, and the negative impacts resulted by dint of misinformation, biased algorithms, proliferation of illicit activities on the web etc.. on the other. Both kinds of impacts are evaluated using the framework of social sustainability proposed by the World Bank, while at the same time borrowing concepts from other scholars in social sustainability where necessary. The second section seeks to furnish a philosophy of digital data by virtue of its sociological implication, drawing inspiration from the field of critical data studies, with special attention to the scholars: Mireille Hildebrandt, Maurizio Ferraris, Shannon Vallor, Antoinette Rouvroy. It describes digital data as a social object or a social good rather than a private or public good because the private/public good conception make data governance less democratic. The third section proposes principles and methods of digital data management that are sustainable for both digital technologies and society where they exist. People feel ‘at home’ or ‘intimate’ with digital technologies because they are built on the data of people. However, the nature of digital technologies is not determined by the same people, but by a small group of stakeholders in a profit oriented, less democratic or a liberal paternalistic way. Currently, there are entities like data cooperatives, personal data stores (PDS), Data Commons, Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAOs) etc… that give individual persons a say in deciding the nature of digital technologies for which their data will be used. However, lack of clarity in the definition and philosophy of digital data in its sociological context hurdles the functioning of such entities. This section outlines the way through which philosophy of digital data can be used for making data governance adaptable for developing digital technologies that does not ruin, but nurture social sustainability.

The introduction and adoption of new technologies continually transforms informal and formal political institutions, and perhaps nowhere has this happened faster than digital technologies, which have transformed how and with whom we communicate, argue, and act, i.e., our processes of political opinion and will formation. The rapid digital technological transformations put stress on the political practices, concepts, and beliefs that have developed historically in tandem with their technology. This paper focuses on the concept of sovereignty, which has taken on different meanings over time and often works as fuzzy concept, and how it has been, and perhaps should be, transformed by digital technologies.

The concept of sovereignty has taken on several different forms: as what arises when an association of households agrees to act together; as the ultimate and absolute authority, obtained voluntarily or through force; or as the expression of general will. In modern times, it also has developed an attitude of deference for states for self-rule or self-determination. Similarly, how formal political processes legitimately confer sovereignty to select individuals has been theorized differently over time in different forms of government. These variations have taken place even in the presence of one important element of stability: it has nearly always arisen among people who live in the same area who share at least some interests and concerns.

This research traces three main historical senses – Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt – and its pluralist and political expressions after World War II. Technological transformations, especially those arising from digital technologies, weaken the social bonds among those residing in the same place: networks that bridge distance and cultures are formed, actors increasingly are mediated by technology and commodified, and the geopolitical space more active and varied than ever before. Politics, internal and geopolitical, is increasingly complex, in flux, and confusing. Put in Dewey’s terms, digital technologies generate expansive and multiple networks, and within them domains and subdomains, that have led to a multitude of “publics” motivated by different “problems.”

This recognition of a new sociotechnical reality leads to understanding sovereignty between nation-states as necessary but substantially weaker than what was present in a world governed by mechanical technology, with increased difficulty determining the degree to which citizens support their government’s geopolitical acts. The nature of sovereignty in internal affairs seems to demand an embrace of subsidiarity, allowing self-determination on appropriate items, and perhaps the formation of new forms of publics that do not depend on geography, which already aligns with recent changes in the “public sphere” as theorized by Jürgen Habermas that do not have a formal connection to the formal political system.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography.” in Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 40–58.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. 2002. Translated by Joe Sachs. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing.

Aristotle. Politics. 2012. Translated by Joe Sachs. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing.

Borgmann, Albert. 1984. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bratton, Benjamin H. 2015. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Brown, Chris. 2009. “From International to Global Justice?” In the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, edited by John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, Anne Phillips, pp. 621–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cole, G. D. H. 1916. Symposium on “The Nature of the State In View of Its Internal Relations.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 16, 310–25.

Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. New York: Holt.

Lloyd, Howell A. 1991. “Sovereignty: Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 45, no. 179 (4): 353–79.

Osiender, Andreas. 2001. “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth.” International Organization 55, no. 2: 251–87.

Schmitt, Carl. 1966. The Concept of the Political. Expanded edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strauss, Leo. 1959. “What Is Political Philosophy?” In What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.