Platform Citizenship: Between Consumerism and Citizen Power

Paolo Cardullo
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Paolo Cardullo: IN3

No r42yq_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: As software has been slipping into everyday life of citizens, digital-enabled relations have become normalised, typically through mobile apps and their platforms. Moreover, this change is happening within a neoliberal framework where citizenship itself is measured and shaped through market imperatives of consumerism, data-extraction, and individual responsibility. Citizenship itself is therefore a multiple concept expressed through the occurrences of digitally mediated encounters which I try to capture in this chapter focusing on the deployment of platforms for collaborative governance. This is one emerging aspect of the journey of ‘platform citizenship’ which is perceived as both innovative and necessary vis-a-vis declining traditional political and civic participation. One of these platforms is Decidim, the case-study presented here: this has been conceived by ethical hackers and activists in Barcelona and has become an internationally awarded and replicated project. In order to analyse the relationship between places and technologies, and to radically contextualise software relations further, I use the Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019a). I conclude that since citizen power cannot be routed through platform capitalism, we need to look away from mainstream big tech for meaningful examples of civic technologies for the common good, democratic governance and citizens’ meaningful participation. Remain to be asked if such endeavours would extend traditional political citizenship, re-politicising the smart city by producing collaborative forms of governance, or would these be new forms of ethics-washing and tokenistic tactics?

Date: 2025-11-11
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:r42yq_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/r42yq_v1

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