Zapatista murals in Chiapas, Mexico, November 2008. License: Alamy.

Gene Ray: Could you give us a little background on your intellectual and political formation and how you came to a focus on commoning? Your conjunture of commoning and Antonio Gramsci's strategic concept of counter-hegemony is an exciting one; how did you arrive at bringing these two areas of research together?

Alexandros Kioupkiolis: Although I am now by profession an academic political theorist, whose main field of action is the university, what brought me to contemporary political theory in the first place and has shaped my concerns and questions is a profound, ongoing preoccupation with politics – a  particular kind of politics: the politics of freedom, equality, social justice and ecology. The springs for this attachment to radical democratic politics were originally biographical. I was born and brought up right after the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Greece (1974-1975), in a deeply politicised era suffused with progressive democratic aspirations. My father took up a high position in local administration (with the ruling party at the beginning), and most of our family friends had a militant leftist-communist past, having spent many years in exile as political prisoners. Our family house is located in Exarchia, a hub of radical leftist and anarchist activism from the ‘70s till the ‘90s, where I was brought up and I lived until my graduation from the University of Athens.

Democracy as a regime of freedom and equality for the many has been the political oxygen I have been breathing since I remember myself. But even at the age of six and seven, when the PASOK party came to power in 1981, as the first socialist government in modern Greek history, I have been always very critical towards both formal party politics and institutions and the most prevalent activist and radical alternatives – small political groupings on the left, street protests and fights, etc. I came to be anti-authoritarian to the bone. For me, radical autonomy and egalitarianism make up the antiauthoritarian soul of democracy. But my take on this politics could not find any adequate expression in most existing modes of political mobilization and engagement. Hence my turn to political theory from a very young age, at the beginning of high school.

Theory became gradually my main refuge in the face of actually existing politics and my deep disenchantment with it. I became politically active, but mainly in grassroots mobilizations without leaders. But I have been always on the lookout for something larger and more effective, which could bring about social change towards a world of many worlds with equal freedom, solidarity, openness, plurality, good and sustainable lives for humans, the planet and nonhuman beings.

This is the critical, formative background which eventually propelled my engagement with political thought on counter-hegemonic strategy and the commons. Until I reached this point – the conjunction that now marks my research and thinking – more than fifteen years ago, several of the particular routes and the landmarks driving my intellectual trajectory were partly accidental. But I stuck to them because they spoke to my deepest concerns and questions: how to effectively transform our world to make it a place of freedom, equality and well-being for all, including earth and nonhuman life. My encounter with the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, his idea of the “self-institution of society” through the collective instituting imaginary, and the “project of autonomy” as he envisaged it – a society reflectively instituting itself in an open and direct democratic manner, through the equal participation of its members – were a first landmark at a very early age. This ushered me towards political and philosophical directions which reached a point of culmination and fulfilment with my PhD thesis on antiessentialist freedom in the thought of Castoriadis and Michel Foucault.

However, neither Castoriadis – nor Foucault, for that matter – provided for me adequate answers to the question of how we can instigate radical democratic change here and now. Castoriadis advanced this vision of an autonomous, consciously self-instituting society. But he offered no clue on how this can come about in our times, other than noting the creative potentials of all societies and voicing the hope that societies will alter themselves in the same way as they had done in the past.

This is not a question of contemporary political theory in the abstract; it is an urgent matter of political strategy, with which I have sought to grapple through the politics of hegemony as construed by Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,[note]Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985[/note] and commoning. My acquaintance with the theory of hegemony was again partly a matter of good fortune. When I was looking for a graduate program in contemporary political theory in the UK, a family acquaintance recommended to me the Essex program in which Laclau was still teaching. I came to contend with the theory of hegemony itself, as I reckoned that this is a powerful scheme of strategic politics but it retains too much centralization and top-down direction, even in Laclau and Mouffe’s more “radical democratic” and non-essentialist reformulation of Gramsci’s reflections on hegemony.

The commons, on the other hand, tend to constitute grassroots real-life processes governed by communities which enact egalitarian ideas of autonomy. Τhey make up cells of collective power partly independent from the logics of state and capital. They can serve in pragmatic terms to initiate broader historical transitions if they get diffused and they coalesce with each other to build wider social fields informed by the principles of collective self-government, promoting the common good on terms of equal freedom and sustainability. From the traditional commons of forests, water supplies and land managed by local communities to Wikipedia, communities of open-source programming and new democratic-ecological cooperatives, the commons are actual, pragmatic alternatives to the dominant regimes of dramatic inequalities and injustices, centralized top-down power, competitive individualism and ecological devastation. They can provide thus the really existing examples, lines of force, resources and bridges to other, better worlds of equal freedom, justice and good life on the planet for all.

Although such real-life alternatives have been always present and sparsely diffused across the world, even in the era of global neoliberal rule, they rarely used the vocabulary of the “commons” and “commoning” in the sense of collective activity creating more or less equal communities of care for common goods, grounded in collective decision-making. I was introduced to the vocabulary and the theoretical framing of the commons through the work, first, of Elinor Ostrom,[note]Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015[/note] which was not animated by strong transformative aspirations and, later on, through the works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, starting with Multitude and mainly Commonwealth.[note]Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009[/note] These were infused with grand revolutionary ambitions pivoting around the commons and the “absolute democracy of the multitude,” which would establish federations of commons-based communities and societies, eventually overshooting the power of states and capital.

Unconvinced by the grandiose speculative narrative of Hardt and Negri, I embarked on a protracted and deeper exploration of research and theoretical reflection on commons and commoning, in the literature of “peer-to-peer” production and digital commons, the contributions of autonomist Marxists (Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Massimo De Angelis)[note]Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Oakland: PM Press, 2019. See also the interview with Massimo De Angelis in this Arts of Commoning dossier.[/note], and others. They were all impelled by existential anxieties about the state of the world we are in, and they were animated by desires for system change that I broadly share. Βut I quickly realized that the same deficit of strategic thought which marred the political mythology of Hardt and Negri beset their own understanding of commons-based historical transformation in our times. The bottom line is a profoundly Marxist assumption that the socio-economic “foundation” – technological advances furthering commons-based peer production and/or the gradual diffusion of commoning across social fields – is what really drives historical change. The field of the political – institutions, organizations, political struggles etc. – comes to manifest the underlying developments at a later stage, and it is fundamentally conditioned by them. Hence, in all these diverse modes of thinking and envisioning commons-oriented renewal, the key strategic question of collective subject formation, the building of a wider social agent of transformation, was either disregarded or downplayed or superficially addressed.

Advancing a counter-hegemonic strategy that will drastically reorder the current balance of forces, and constructing a mass subject for system change on all scales remains for me the main historical predicament of our age of unsustainable inequalities, terror, death and ecocide. The straightforward reason is that in our conjuncture, despite the recent and ongoing waves of social mobilizations and unrest, the diffuse politics of egalitarian and ecological struggle lacks the organizational clout and the cohesive agency to “boost and spread the spontaneous and creative energy of the masses from below,” to put it in the words of Sahan Karatasli. The hold of the neoliberal imaginary and affects on present-day commoners, the dispersion of commoning initiatives and drives, their limited force and impact in the face of the concerted global power of capitalist elites and militarized states make it highly unlikely to rely on spontaneous and non-coordinated commoning to overthrow the planetary dominance of neoliberal capital. Hence, my endeavor to revisit the strategy of hegemony and counter-hegemony in the thought of Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, who sought to tackle in theory this precise strategic challenge.

For Gramsci, in a nutshell, the formation of a mass-based collective will and “intellectual and moral reform” are the “two basic points […that] should structure the entire work”[note]Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1971, p. 57[/note] of actors aiming at structural change. Both tasks, which aim at building the collective identity and desire to bring together a multiplicity of actors in a common project of social reconstruction, require essentially an engagement with common sense and political organization. Work with the common sense seeks to win over popular majorities by integrating its more progressive values and demands into a transformative identity, political program and horizon of expectation. An appropriate political organization should assume this task in order to weld together disparate forces into a broad-based alliance, to coordinate the common struggle against the status quo, to gain traction in established institutions but also to help craft new institutions of counterpower and socio-economic innovation: of commoning and a new welfare state sponsoring the commons.

Counter-hegemonic strategy as fleshed out by Gramsci and by Laclau and Mouffe in the 1980s is, however, unfit in crucial respects for the purposes of eco-social regeneration today. Most notably, the homogeneity implied in their conception of popular unity/identity runs counter to the libertarian pluralism driving contemporary progressive movements and visions. The concentration of power at the top which defines their take on counter-hegemonic leadership and organization is deeply at odds with the egalitarian horizontalism, the questioning of personal leadership and vertical hierarchies, that informs contemporary democratic action and emancipatory drives, which tend to distribute power more evenly and widely. Finally, the top-down, directive and personalist model of political representation favored in their counter-hegemonic politics has been repeatedly challenged and dismissed in radical democratic mobilizations and collectives, from the Zapatistas onwards.

In my view, these discrepancies and conflicts should not entail a full and flat rejection of Gramscian and Laclauian counter-hegemony. The strategic predicament to which it seeks to respond is still dramatically ours in the present, and many of their political insights remain pertinent and pivotal to any effective strategizing. What needs to be done on this level is, rather, to rethink and refigure leadership, unity and representation in counter-hegemonic action. This is a challenge to which several contemporary movements and modes of collective action have faced up and creatively responded by practicing collective distributed leadership and representation, and by constructing unity around inclusionary plurality and openness. These gestures radically democratize counter-hegemonic strategy. In effect, they common hegemony by making it an affair of the many on a footing of equality, aligning with the political logic of commoning: co-decision and action in concert on terms of equality, autonomy, diversity and open participation. The main “attractor” of my research and theorising in the last fifteen years has been this diverse and diffuse grassroots ferment of rethinking and remodelling counter-hegemonic action to face up to, and face down, the dominant thanatopolitics of national and global elites.

G. R.: This is a great overview of the political stasis and strategic deficit on the Left that have so far characterized oppositional planetary politics. It is true that social movements since the 1990s have been characterized by horizontal structures, but a different reading of the same history might locate the strategic deficit at precisely that point. Commoning can unproblematically be horizontal in its organization, but I wonder if the strategic project of a counter-hegemonic challenge to capitalism does not require a mix of horizontal and vertical structures. Insofar as the organization of counter-hegemony presumes coherent, coordinated and continuous action over many years, some verticality seems unavoidable. Some contemporary balance sheets of the social movements – Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn, for example[note]Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, New York: Public Affairs, 2023[/note] – conclude that horizontality by itself is a great form for mobilizing popular action from below but lacks the strategic follow-through to consolidate victories or prevail against the capitalist state. Gramsci’s notion of a revolutionary party as a “collective intellectual” focused strategically on the organization of a moral and cultural revolution – a new common sense, as you note – and on preparing popular forces for taking power seems to be what is missing now. Can you discuss your own position with regard to such a party, as the locus and mediator of collective counter-hegemonic strategy? Are you opposed to it because social movements seem to have abandoned this historic form? But isn’t the strategic deficit linked to this abandonment? Perhaps the rejection of the party was premature and too undiscriminating? In any case, there is a large learning process underway. Do you rule out a return to a vertical strategic party, that would interact with horizontal commons and social movements? Can hegemony itself really be organized as a commons?

A. K.: My short answer is that I rule out a return to a vertical strategic party, simply because we don’t need to return to what we already have or what has very recently vanished. Vertical parties still exist in almost all countries across the world. I don’t think it is a coincidence that most of them on the left have either forsaken their transformative strategic ambitions or have failed dismally to advance any substantial progressive change at the age of the neoliberal empire, or they have just fallen apart. We definitely need to further pursue the “large learning process” from the recent and older history of the 21st and the 20th centuries. And this history provides overwhelming evidence to the effect that parties can win political victories and gain power, but they are not the appropriate vehicle of radical collective emancipation. I will confine my discussion to the last two decades and our present condition.

What makes contemporary critiques of “horizontalism” and renewed defences of “verticalism” quite appealing and convincing among radical circles today is precisely the failure of progressive mobilizations against neoliberal capital over the last decades to bring about meaningful and wide-ranging political change by sustaining and organizing themselves over time, by exerting powerful influence on dominant institutions, and so on. But we still had and have parties that have tried and have dramatically failed, with a few limited exceptions, particularly in Latin America and Spain. Let’s learn from these failures, too, and let’s consider in some depth the structural deficiencies of the historical party-form and the challenges faced by horizontalist pro-commons movements.

To clear the ground for a strategic reflection that does not fall too easily back on the certitudes and idées fixes of the 19th and the 20th centuries, certain conceptual clarifications are in order. Following most late social movements and thought, horizontalism should be understood as a political logic, practice and orientation that seeks to minimize power asymmetries, rigid top-down hierarchies and centralized leadership, aiming at an equal distribution of power among all people who act politically in concert. Verticalism designates the opposite tendency. The conflation of verticalism with sustained organization and activity, cohesion, effective co-ordination, coalition-making and convergence of forces is untenable and misleading, unless one has already demonstrated that these strategic objectives can be attained only through hierarchical, asymmetrical modes of organization. Once we have disentangled the strategic goals of effective organization from both verticalism and horizontalism, we can raise the strategic question which can be answered only in a conjectural and conjunctural manner - whether horizontalist or vertical forms of collective action are the most apposite to pursue the foregoing objectives under specific, variable circumstances, when the ultimate aim is an eco-socially viable, just and equally free society.

In principle, I would answer that this is an open political question that calls for collective judgment in tune with the circumstances at hand. I would add that today historical lessons provide strong pointers in the direction of horizontalism on both principled/structural and conjunctural grounds.

In the most fundamental sense, if the historical objective is the emergence of a plurality of eco-sustainable worlds of equal freedom, people need to learn to be equally self-governing on both the individual and the collective level. They need to acquire the modes of thinking and the habits - the subjectivity - of autonomy. This can hardly be achieved through a hierarchical organization directed from the top, in which the rank-and-file and the “masses” supporting the Party learn to follow the directives of the leadership, delegate the main responsibilities to leaders and expect from leaders to show them the way. If the political organization aiming at transformation is to fulfil the pedagogical function of “moral and intellectual reform” that Gramsci attributes to it, it should be organized and should operate in ways through which all political actors educate themselves in equal freedom.

In our times, in particular, the traditional 20th century idea of a vertical party directed by charismatic leaders is also deeply anachronistic. It made sense when the vast majority of the people, even in richer and technologically advanced western societies, were illiterate. But in a period in which most younger generations are highly educated and have continuous direct access to scientific knowledge and information through the Internet and other means, the notion that e.g. a thirty-year old person should follow the enlightened leadership of few people or a single person at the top - of any person - appears ridiculous. No doubt, particular kinds of expertise and organizational, rhetorical or other skills are still unevenly distributed. However, they are widely distributed and need to be complemented with the diverse skills and knowledges of many others; crucially, also, with the insights of collective intelligence.

Equally significant: Ours is an era of civilizational, existential crisis, in which many fundamental decisions need to be taken between conflicting options for which there is no general consensus, obvious solution or objective criteria. If a society in the Global North were to resolve today to exit the global “growth” economy, such a decision would considerably impact its current lifestyles, social hierarchies and the balance of forces in it. Such decisions would need to be made autonomously by the vast majority, otherwise they would call for a measure of force and a kind of authoritarianism incompatible with any emancipatory politics.

To offer a more specific illustration from recent political history in my country, the left-wing party SYRIZA confirmed a typical experience of the 20th century. Vertical organizations, governed by a central leadership in a top-down way, may achieve electoral gains and even accede to state power. However, they will fail to overhaul the status quo and to initiate radical democratic changes if they are not backed up by a broad-based and self-motivated popular engagement in the making of key political decisions and their realization. It is such a popular agency and “ownership” of a counter-hegemonic project which can empower popular democratic governments to face up to and outweigh the international forces of neoliberal hegemony. In the Greek case, when SYRIZA bowed to the concerted pressures of the European Union and International Monetary Fund, an alternative “Plan B” could have been drawn up and implemented only if it were collectively owned by broader sectors of Greek society. A popular majority could transform itself through the active transformation of its material circumstances, assuming responsibility for the alternative project, taking part in shaping and executing it, shouldering the burden and the risks, and coping with the consequences.

To tackle head-on the strategic question of political organization struggling for commons-based societies, a counter-hegemonic agency for such historical re-generation will materialise in a diverse ecology of variable modes of action, organisation and structure. These range from spontaneous uprisings, grassroots activities, neighbourhood assemblies and community organisations, to trade unions, civil society associations, political platforms of “ordinary” citizens, cooperatives, and political parties involved in state politics and the existing state. This multifaceted and broad ecosystem of actors will vary according to context and tactical considerations. From a non-doctrinaire political standpoint, no set organisational form stands out as the universal and optimal vector of historical transformation. Enhanced cohesion and efficacy can be attained by a plural and shifting assemblage of actors if they mobilise around a common vision and a collective strategic plan which speaks to a comprehensive agenda of change, while maintaining a division of labour and distributing functions - from street protest and building counterpowers to entering dominant institutions - according to their different capacities and inclinations.

To prevent the reassertion of vertical hierarchies, centralization and closure in such a plural and shifting web, any decisive locus of power that surges forth in the counter-hegemonic ecosystem of actors and practices should be structured in appropriate ways to secure that the main directive power flows from the bottom and it is widely distributed. Such centres of influence would comprise, first, “core” organisations to keep up political activity over time, beyond the ebb and flow of street politics and mass insurrections, which are often highly energy- and resource-intensive and thus inherently transient; and, second, political bodies that can act as protagonists. The latter can be established in order to coordinate the different interventions from within the counter-hegemonic network; to orient its varied constituency in a common direction; and to pursue counter-hegemonic politics within society at large. This last task involves appealing to social majorities, intervening in the battleground οf common sense, planning strategies, and framing common narratives which integrate widespread demands and the progressive values of target audiences. Counter-hegemonic politics also requires the recruitment of new allies among pre-established organisations and social groups (labour unions, students, identity groups, etc.), as a way of interacting with existing social networks, and of generating meaningful opportunities for a multitude of new actors, from different walks of life, to join the movement.

A third locus/source of power within the wider bloc of social contestation lies in political agencies that target existing institutions and strive to take positions of power within them, to propel the process of reinventing the state and the economy. Such actors, which are most frequently political parties, tend to concentrate power in their own hands as they gain public eminence, and come to be seen and to act as the general representative of the entire counter-hegemonic alignment. Moreover, they very often enter the state apparatus, thereby gaining a grip on state power. As a result, this “institutional branch” of the multi-form ecology of agencies striving for democratic change comes high on the list of potential vectors of centralization. Political parties have an in-built tendency to congeal into a top-down, centralized structure. They may further gravitate towards this direction when they inhabit institutions, under the pressures of the hierarchical design of the state apparatus.

These nodal points of structure - along with many other enduring organisations within the complex ecosystem of agencies which brew democratic other politics - are bound to display various asymmetries. Over time, distinctions will arise between an experienced group of initiators and newcomers, or between committed members and sympathisers who devote less time, energy and skills, and these will have consequences for who holds power. Core-base dualities are thus bound to crystallise. But this does not necessarily legitimise or verify the “Iron Law” of hierarchy in lasting functional organisations. Any motion must be launched by a specific group of agents before reaching a critical mass and spreading to larger swathes of society. Moreover, a democratic challenger movement needs to lower the bar of entry, and to accommodate variable levels of participation and commitment. To grow and to scale up, while also respecting the fundamental democratic freedom of everyone to participate in action and decision-making as they see fit, a mass, democratic, contender must embrace all interested people, regardless of the intensity of their involvement.

The core-base distinction and the existence of the various tiers of participants between these extremes are not in themselves oligarchic and undemocratic. Rather, it is the specific ways in which the lines are drawn and the relationships between different layers of participation played out, as well as the particular modes in which the directive power is laid out, that beget - or do not beget - standing divisions, rigid hierarchies, top-down command and the concentration of power in the hands of few. This is the nub, then, of the organisational predicament for emancipatory transformative politics today: will the scales tip in favour of elitism or horizontalist hegemony? And there are a number of ways to flatten emergent hierarchies, circulate power widely, and anchor the directive function in the grassroots. These include rotation; distributed leadership; revocability; accountability; vesting the general assembly with the supreme authority; multiple open opportunities to take part and lead the way; and “servant” democratic leadership, which empowers new and ordinary members.

G. R.: I wish we had more space to go further with this. These are some great points. Still, the history of horizontally organized mass social uprisings over the last fifteen years – from Tunisia and Egypt on – remains open to divergent interpretations and assessments, as you also note. It will be vital to have the fullest possible debate and critical reflections on all of this.

Let’s move on to another pressing contemporary issue about which you have written: the possibilities and prospects of a digital commons and, more broadly, the problem of capitalist technology. In a 2022 article for Ephemera, you criticized the techno-optimism and technological determinism of early discourses advocating the digital commons. But you also sought to rescue certain aspects of digital commoning. Today, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), with all its inherent accelerationism, raises further the stakes of the technology debates. To quickly summarize the main problems: the material requirements and infrastructures of digital technologies and AI data centers are ecologically ruinous; socially, they concentrate economic and political power in Big Tech transnationals and oligarchs, exacerbating inequality and further isolating individuals behind the pseudo-relations and collectivities of social media; and politically they subvert democracy, empower surveillance capitalism, and are inseparably entangled with war and weapons systems. In all these senses, digital technologies seem problematic as tools and platforms for commoning – especially insofar as the means should consistently reflect the desired social and political ends. Could you summarize your critique and clarify for this context when and how commoners could justifiably engage with digital social media and other networked technologies? Do you have a position on AI and its relation to commoning?

A. K.: I would start by adding to this whole avalanche of dystopic shifts how digital technologies have nurtured cyber-fascism and the global rise of the hard right, while also turbocharging neoliberal capitalism and its circuits, generating not only a higher concentration of power in the hands of neoliberal elites and authoritarian states but also more CO2 emissions and higher levels of extraction. The ecological impact comes about both directly, due to the development of digital infrastructures and through their use, and indirectly, in the overall accelerated economy. These sinister trends highlight how deeply political digital technologies - and any technologies - are, calling for appropriate political responses by the forces of common freedom and sustainable life for all.

In this historical conjuncture, disconnection could not be the primary and general political answer for progressives on two main grounds. First, currently our lives - our economy, culture, politics, social interaction - are so densely and intensely digitized that the simple withdrawal of democratic and “commonist” actors from the digital sphere would amount to the full surrender not only of the digital realm but of most social structures to the forces of neoliberal ruin and death. Today, all effective political mobilizations and campaigning take place in the streets and on squares. But they also invade the Internet and social media, without which they would lose significant visibility and impact. If progressive actors withdrew from this sphere, they would simply further reinforce the communicative power and ideological resonance of the reactionaries.

Second, cybernetic technologies have been deployed and can be further deployed in ways that foster commons-based practices, politics and economies. No doubt, the techno-determinism or, more mildly, the techno-optimism of the advocates of peer-to-peer production in the first decade of the 21st century has been spectacularly refuted. Instead of a technologically driven march to a commons-based society we have experienced the rise of Big Tech capitalist superpower, far-right authoritarianism and digital surveillance apparatuses.

Βut this hegemonic hijacking of digital tech does not, and should not, eclipse from view the affordances they have furnished for online commoning, community-building and massive counter-hegemonic action. Open-source communities constructing software, Wikipedia or other collective projects have indeed renovated and spread anew the principles and the practices of commoning in and through the digital sphere. Software and the internet have enabled the emergence of new forms of cooperative labour, such as “open platform cooperatives.” These provide real alternatives to the precarity and overexploitation of labour in the “gig economy.” But they also renew historical co-operativism by enabling the combination of collective decision-making and solidarity with individual autonomy and creativity. The example of the Belgian SmartCoop, among others, is telling in this respect. Fablabs and hackerspaces have pursued a grassroots democratization of the use, design and production of technology, often in close connection with social movements for social justice and ecological care.[note]See for example Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020[/note] 

Last but not least, over the last two decades the Internet has facilitated massive self-organization and autonomous action against authoritarian politics and neoliberal capitalism, often inspired by radical democratic visions.

Digital technologies can be harnessed and reconfigured by pro-commons forces to further social justice, common freedom and ecology. Open platforms already indicate how computers and networks underpin the effective sharing of resources and the planning of production on the basis of collective decision-making. Digital infrastructures could supply the technical means of fair and sustainable resource allocation systems on larger societal scales, even on a global level, in ways that will make a difference for the planet. The use of software and the internet to communicate and deliberate in small communities and on massive scales, if appropriately institutionalized and combined with adequate analogue participation, could advance radical democratization processes, massively expanding meaningful civic participation on an everyday basis. The international digital platform and political project Decidim, an open-source initiative rooted from the outset in grassroots democratic mobilizations in Catalonia and beyond, has built not only the digital infrastructure to promote these ends but has also cultivated critical political reflection and organization around effective democratic technopolitics.

A counter-hegemonic growth of eco-democratic configurations that would counter and eventually overpower the authoritarian, destructive force of the state capitalist apparatus calls for a multi-modal and multi-scalar counter-hegemonic contention, both online and analogue. Between the two spheres of being there is no sharp dividing line as they are now not simply intertwined but complexly co-constituting each other. The call to rethink and reconfigure broad-based counter-hegemonic politics along radical democratic and ecological lines entails thus now intrinsically a call to build robust counter-hegemonic action on the internet and through key digital media. To bear fruit, online counter-hegemonic interventions should be attuned to the specific affordances, logics, technics, communicative practices and imaginaries of the digital environment, heeding the pressures of the “attention economy,” the need to reach out to diverse massive audiences, etc., while also nurturing committed communities of action and reflection.

Crucially, eco-socially repurposed networks would factor in the environmental and social impacts in a self-limiting ordinance aligned with a post-growth worldview, which would curtail technological developments and uses that are energy-intensive, contribute to fossil fuel and rare earth extraction, reproduce injustices, and so on. The eco-political perspective of Alessandra Mularoni and Nick Dyer-Witheford in Cybernetic Circulation Complex is worth contemplating in this respect.[note]Alessandra Mularoni and Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis, London / New York: Verso, 2025[/note] A “biocommunist” digital system, as they envision it, would set limits to energy use and environmental destruction, applying these limits to its own circulation apparatus, inscribing cybernetically the imperatives of rationing, selection and prioritization. The digital domain would expand in some directions while retreating in others.

An eco-democratic politics of digital transformations would be techno-critical or techno-sceptical, although the latter term has stronger negative connotations. This terminology conveys the idea that we should always collectively assess, debate and decide the directions and effects of technological change in accord with ecological social justice and emancipation priorities, rather than pre-empt them in a dogmatic way. The same holds for artificial intelligence. Extended mass data processing machines may exponentially and uncontrollably accelerate a global collapse into an anarcho-capitalist hellish dystopia. Or they may mediate and underpin the most sophisticated and intersectionally fair systems of sustainable resource allocation and democratic decision-making. Or they may “disalign” themselves out of control, in completely unpredictable directions. Working our way through these alternative routes depends fundamentally on power relations and struggles. But it turns also on existential judgements and discernment that we should prudently make and remake in the most egalitarian and ecological key. There are no techno-fixes or dogmatic certainties about the eco-democratic potentials of AI and digital technologies.

Hence, my proposal is to not only to “stay with the trouble” but to “dance with the trouble” and turn a variety of dances towards our desired futures to the extent possible, deeply assimilating the sense that we are not in sovereign control; the decisions we make and policies we implement have no certain outcome. AI and the overall course of digital tech in the present and the near future raise thus anew the question “who controls the means of production” in the most urgent terms. But with a twist. We should be aware that we can never be in full control. In the best scenario, we will be co-creators, collaborators, companions, repairers, cultivators, curators, reflexive and evolving planners, dancers. The creative complexities of intertwined techno-socio-cultural-natural circuits vastly exceed our capacities to determine and control. And, perhaps, fortunately so.

In the end, some disconnection is also in order, in the interests not only of post-growth economies but also of richer lives. If we see “digital tech” as an active component of interlaced complexities - biological, cultural, sociopolitical, earthbound - we can realize that a life fully absorbed into the digital sphere is substantially impoverished. The full range of our sensorial, reflective, affective, imaginary and creative interactions with human and non-human existence cannot be captured in the digital web. We could go on and on analysing this narrowing effect, which is coupled with life-enhancing effects in other respects. I will confine myself to one dimension: love.

The late Erik Olin Wright farewelled the last meeting of his postgraduate seminar, which I was fortunate to attend, by stating that the moving force of his socialist and ecological commitments had always been love for life. For other humans and all life. Digital life cannot encompass the wealth and the deficiencies of all life. In digital networks and communication, we cannot love other human or nonhuman beings with all our forces, capacities, weaknesses and potentials. To attend to and nurture the creative powers, mysteries and silences of life - our life, the life of other beings, the planet, the universe - we need to also disconnect from the digital and cultivate our connections with what lies outside and beyond it.

This interview was conducted by email in October 2025.