Beyond technological sovereignty: Practising technological self-determination in platform cooperativism

Abstract

The goal of this article is to offer the notion of technological self-determination as a concept and as a practice that is alternative to the state-centred discourse of strategic and technological sovereignty. The idea of technological sovereignty has become hegemonic amongst national and transnational technocratic elites, especially in the European Union, at a time in which what is defined here as the ‘state-urban-corporate complex’ has come to dominate the economic-political landscape, particularly in the technology sector. Learning from the empirical investigation of the five-decade long trajectory of an independent, currently platform-based taxi cooperative in Bologna, the paper puts forth the argument that platform cooperativism and larger municipalist movements can provide an economic and societal alternative to the state-urban-corporate complex, but in order to do so they have to get rid of the lexicon and the related economic-political imaginary that are hegemonic in globalised techno-capitalism, such as those associated with the state-centred discourse of technological sovereignty and of sovereignty in general with its geopolitical implications. In doing so, the paper assesses the ideas of technological self-determination and algorithmic democracy as constitutive components of an alternative politico-economic imaginary within the contemporary landscape dominated by the state-urban-corporate complex and the global rise of exclusionary sovereigntism.