Join Matías Bianchi for a timely conversation on his new book State vs Algorithm? Explore how digital corporations, concentrated wealth, and algorithmic power are reshaping democracy, weakening the state, and shifting public decision-making. Drawing on lessons from the global South, Bianchi offers a bold roadmap for reclaiming democratic power.
Democracy is not only in crisis, it is powerless. Elections continue to take place, but their promise is broken. The symptoms, polarization, authoritarian governments, citizen disaffection, stem from deep and global causes. The link between state, market, and citizenry has unravelled. An increasingly extractive capitalism, articulated with giant digital corporations, has emptied the state of power and displaced decision-making to infrastructures and algorithms: what we call technofeudalism.
In this seminar, Matías Bianchi analyzes how the alliance between the financial aristocracy of Silicon Valley and the new international reaction, from Trump to Milei and from Orbán to Kast, is redesigning the world in the image of their privileges. The proposal is novel in one key aspect: the crisis of the nation-state as a guarantor of democracy. Therein lies the depth of the crisis.
This is not just another diagnosis. It is a roadmap for reimagining democratic resilience, and for positioning the global South as a laboratory of resistance and innovation. To this end, it challenges us to move beyond thinking solely in terms of the “nation-state” and instead consider “statehood.” That is, the collective capacity to produce and guarantee the commons—data sovereignty, digital public infrastructures, effective taxation, rules, and care—at multiple scales (local, regional, transnational) and with mixed governance models (public, social, and technological) suited to a networked world. Its scope is broad: Mat offers conceptual frameworks, an analysis of the present and its politics, and operational historical keys for those involved—from governments, movements, media, or technopolitics—in these turbulent times.
Speaker
Dr Matias Bianchi, Director, Asuntos del Sur (Argentina)
Discussant
Dr Anabel Marin, Research Fellow, IDS
Chair
Dr Shandana Mohmand, Research Fellow, IDS
Accessiblity
This event will take place in the IDS Convening Space which is on the 1st floor of the IDS Building. If you need to use the lift then press floor 1A.
If you have any accessibility requrements, then email [email protected] or visit this page.
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