Dr Darin Barney is a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His work examines the future of digital technologies in democratic life, [1] the state of citizenship is a digitally integrated society, [2] and the infrastructure of network societies. [3] Our discussion revolved around concerns of digital governance over social and political life, [4] algorithmic fragmentation of social reality, [5] and the commercialization of data as treating users as standing-reserve. [6]

[1] Darin David Barney, Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000).

[2] Darin David Barney, One Nation under Google: Citizenship in the Technological Republic (Toronto: Hart House Lecture Committee, 2007).

[3] Darin David Barney, The Network Society, Key Concepts (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010).

[4] Yu-Che Chen, Managing Digital Governance: Issues, Challenges, and Solutions.(Boca Raton: Taylor and Francis, 2017), https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4921790; Just and Latzer, 245.

[5] Dean DeChiaro, “Social Media Algorithms Threaten Democracy, Experts Tell Senators,” Roll Call, April 21, 2021, https://www.rollcall.com/2021/04/27/social-media-algorithms-threaten-democracy-experts-tell-senators/; Susan Morgan, “Fake News, Disinformation, Manipulation and Online Tactics to Undermine Democracy,” Journal of Cyber Policy 3, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 39–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/23738871.2018.1462395; Ünver, 127–46.

[6] Martin Heidegger and William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).