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In the Ruins of Broken Promises
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The concept of smart cities holds environmental promises: that digital technologies will reduce carbon emissions, air pollution and waste, and help address climate change.

Drawing on academic scholarship and two case studies from Manchester and Helsinki, this timely and accessible book examines what happens when these promises are broken, as they prioritise technological innovation rather than environmental care. The book reveals that smart cities’ vision of sustainable digital future obfuscates the environmental harms and social injustices that digitisation inflicts. The framework of “broken promises”, coined by the authors, centres environmental questions in analysing imaginaries and practices of smart cities.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the connections between digital technologies and environment justice.

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Techno-Human Evolution and Advanced Capitalism

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence

Transhumanism is a philosophy which advocates for the use of technology to radically enhance human capacities.

This book interrogates the promises of transhumanism, arguing that it is deeply entwined with capitalist ideology. In an era of escalating crisis and soaring inequality, it casts doubt on a utopian techno-capitalist narrative of unending progress. In critiquing the transhumanist project, the book offers an alternative ethical framework for the future of life on the planet.

As the debates around the advancement of AI and corporate-led digital technologies intensify, this is an important read for academics as well as policy makers.

Open access
The Powers and Perils of Imagining Future Borders

This book offers an in-depth investigation into the digitization processes of Europe’s border regime. It shows how sociotechnical imaginations of future borders drive forward the expansion of databases in the European governance of mobility.

With a focus on the European Union Agency eu-LISA, one of the most significant and rapidly advancing actors in the digital border regime, the book serves as a gateway to understanding the key agents, visions, technologies and practices at work.

Asking broader questions about exclusion, discrimination, violence and mobility rights, this is an original contribution to our understanding of future borders in Europe.

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The Practices of Daily Grassroots Politics in Southern Europe

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence

This book pulls back the curtain on the link between activism, media and technology in the quiet times of politics when people are not protesting.

Introducing the novel concept of the ‘data stream', it explores the intricate ways in which activists interact daily with various types of data and how they navigate the impact of digitalization and datafication on today’s grassroots politics.

Through rich, empirical data from Greece, Spain and Italy, Activists in the Data Stream makes a nuanced contribution to our understanding of activists’ daily political engagement in an ever-changing media and political landscape.

Open access
Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence

Drawing on the study of different cities in the Global South, this book explores how the intensive use of data changes politics, power relations and everyday life in contemporary cities.

Across the volume, expert contributors show how urban actors, from the state to activists, are increasingly using data as a resource to empower their actions and support their claims and shows how times of crisis are moments when the power of data is made visible.

Focusing on the different dimensions of data power and politics in the urban realm, this is an important contribution to our understanding of how datafication transforms the places in which we live and how we experience them.

Open access
How Surveillance Technologies Are Used Against Migrants

In recent years, UN agencies, global tech corporations, states and humanitarian NGOs have invested in advanced technologies from smart borders to digital identities to manage migratory movements. These are surveillance technologies that have intensified the militarization of borders and became a testing ground for surveillance capitalism.

This book shows how these technologies reproduce structural inequalities and discriminative policies. Korkmaz reveals the way in which they grant extensive powers to states and big tech corporations to control communities.

Unpacking the effects of surveillance capitalism on vulnerable populations, this is a much-needed intervention that will be of interest to readers in a range of fields.

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How Technology Discourses Quantify, Extract and Legitimize Inequalities

We are often expected to trust technologies, and how they are used, even if we have good reason not to. There is no room to mistrust.

Exploring relations between trust and mistrust in the context of data, AI and technology at large, this book defines a process of ‘trustification’ used by governments, corporations, researchers and the media to legitimise exploitation and increase inequalities.

Aimed at social scientists, computer scientists and public policy, the book aptly reveals how trust is operationalised and converted into a metric in order to extract legitimacy from populations and support the furthering of technology to manage society.

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The Construction of Publics in Datafied Democracies

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence

This book addresses new challenges to the formation of publics in datafied democracies. It proposes a fresh, complex and nuanced approach to understand ‘datapublics’, by considering datafication and public formation in the context of audience, journalism and infrastructure studies.

The tightly woven chapters shed new light on how platforms, algorithms and their data infrastructure are embedded in journalistic values, discourses and practices, opening up new conditions for publics to display agency, mobilise and achieve legitimacy.

This is a seminal contribution to the debates about the future of media, journalism and civic practices.

Open access
COVID-19, Digital Justice and the Politics of Refusal

How can we achieve digital justice in the age of COVID-19? This book explores how the pandemic has transformed our use and perception of digital technologies in various settings. It also examines the right to resist or reject these technologies and the politics of refusal in different contexts and scenarios. The book offers a timely and original analysis of the new realities and challenges of digital technologies, paving the way for a post-COVID-19 future.

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Political hackers, like the infamous Anonymous collective, have demonstrated their willingness to use political violence to further their agendas. However, many of their causes – targeting terrorist groups, fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, and protecting people’s freedom of expression, autonomy and privacy – are intuitively good things to fight for.

This book will create a new framework that argues that when the state fails to protect people, hackers can intervene and evaluates the hacking based on the political or social circumstances. It highlights the space for hackers to operate as legitimate actors; guides hacker activity by detailing what actions are justified toward what end; outlines mechanisms to aid hackers in reaching ethically justified decisions; and directs the political community on how to react to these political hackers.

Applying this framework to the most pivotal hacking operations within the last two decades, including the Arab Spring, police brutality in the USA and the Nigerian and Ugandan governments’ announcements of homophobic legislation, it offers a unique contribution to conceptualising hacking as a contemporary political activity

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