CommentStreams:62bb4c745ccbc24968daba7b0e089b29

I think this is a really important and beautifully traced problem and look forward to reading more of this! It was very pleasant to read. I think that the project to bring back questions of sovereignties into a global conception of private messaging apps is refreshing, and balances some of the totalizing narratives we hear about messaging platforms as somehow lacking locality and contextual variations.

 The first thing that came to my mind when reading about this “democratic subject” within a web of power relations, is the dark forest theory of the internet (Yancey Strickler, https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/ ) which sort of addresses the resort of users to privacy in messenger apps to “escape” more curtailed or toxic forms of communication on social media platforms.

  I think the one thread that lacks for me to understand the full extrent of the argument about resituating the global outside of Braton’s stack would be the question of how privacy settings relate to the question of the “democratic subject” or the “individual”.

If privacy settings are mostly framed through the lens of opaque conditions of use determined by the messenger operator, and then the regulation or coercion of encrypted global messengers by state powers, the figure of the democratic agent” does remain undefined and thus difficult to understand. I think it would have been useful to situate the “individual” inside of this triangle of privacy for the messenger operators, privacy for state operators and privacy for “individuals” with examples of how their democratic potential is undermined by power relations (a negative example of this) or overlooked by existing theory (a positive example of dissensus within this environment). 

Also, and I think the word limit probably makes this impossible, but my understanding would have benefited from clarifying how data privacy, rule of law and democratic agency are interlinked. These are quite wide concept with different meanings depending on their context (is this a global one or a localized one, is this on a specific app, intergovernmental regulation or state boundaries).

Look forward to chatting about this!