Code, Culture, and Concrete: Self-Driving Vehicles and the Rules of the Road

Behaviour on the road is ordered by a range of norms, rules, laws, and infrastructures. The introduction of self-driving vehicles onto the road opens a debate about the rules that should govern their actions and how these should be integrated with, or lead to the modification of, existing road rules. In this paper, we analyse the current rules of the road, with a particular focus on the UK's Highway Code, in order to inform future rulemaking. We consider the full range of laws, norms, infrastructures, and technologies that govern interactions on the road and where these came from. The rules have a long history and they contribute to a social order that privileges some modes of mobility over others, reinforcing a culture of automobility that shapes lives, livelihoods and places. The introduction of self-driving vehicles, and the digital code on which they depend, could reorder the culture and concrete of our roads, by flattening the multidimensional rules of the road, hardening rules that are currently soft and standardising across diverse contexts. Future rule changes to accommodate self-driving vehicles may enable increases in safety and accessibility, but the trade-offs demand democratic debate.

Reforming the Institutions of Eurozone Governance

The Eurozone has faced repeated crises and has experienced profound transformations in the past years. This thematic issue seeks to address the questions arising from the changing governance structure of the Eurozone. First, how have the negotiations, pressures of the crises and reforms impacted the relationships between key actors like EU institutions and Member States? Second, where did national positions come from and what role did domestic politics play in the negotiations? And finally, to what extent has the evolution of Eurozone governance left room for adequate control mechanisms and democratic debate? The articles in this issue highlight the developing role of Member States, domestic politics and democratic and legal control mechanisms.

Beyond Bias

“Bias” is a term that circulates frequently in the contemporary landscape of political media, a term intended to diagnose a failure when media outlets fail to maintain journalistic objectivity. Beyond Bias interrogates what would seem, at first glance, to be examples of utterly biased political media—contemporary conservative documentary films. However, rather than dismiss such cases of political representation as exemplars of ideological nonsense, reactionary propaganda, and so on, Beyond Bias locates in conservative media a mode of discourse central to contemporary democratic debate in the United States. Specifically, this book identifies conservative media as a mode of hysterical discourse. As the book makes clear, hysterical political discourse occurs when debate is simulated as a means to avoid a more substantive exchange. Drawing from psychoanalytic theories of hysteria and aesthetic politics, and likewise by placing conservative documentaries in the context of many concerns central to Documentary Studies (participation, observation, representation, the archive, etc.), Beyond Bias views conservative documentary, and conservative media and politics more generally, not as the biased excesses of the contemporary political landscape but rather as texts central to understanding the implicit, though sometimes affectively traumatic, antagonisms inevitable in democracy and constitutive of democratic debate.

Framing The Greek Memoranda (2010-2015): A Polarised yet Hollow Debate

This study examines the contribution of media frames to democratic debate. Focusing on Greece, the article investigates how the press frames the Greek memoranda (2010-2015) and the contribution of these frames to the construction of democratic debate. Relying on an in-depth qualitative framing analysis of the coverage of the three memoranda and combining insights from framing theory and political economy, the major frames that shaped debates on the issue and the boundaries of discourse that they set are identified. The findings illustrate that, while the application of frames might differ across outlets, a rather uniform debate around the memoranda is promoted through the press. These results raise doubts about the performance of the media in the coverage of the most significant political issue in Greece’s recent history, and reveal the silencing of alternative voices that could have challenged the dominant frames of the debate.

Habla el policía: Polifonia novelesca y debate democrático en algunas novelas españolas sobre el franquismo y la Transición

The Policeman Speaks: Novel Polyphony and Democratic Debate in Some Spanish Novels about Francoism and the Transition In recent years a new orientation in the Spanish political memory (a shift from the tendency towards forgetting conflicts to the claims for recognition for all victims) can also be noticed in a significant number of literary works. Many novels offer a broad coverage of social discourses and engage in the process of negotiations over a critical period in the 20th century history of Spain, namely the “Transition” from the late francoism era to democracy. This paper analyses fragments of three contemporary novels (La caída de Madrid by Rafael Chirbes, El vano ayer by Isaac Rosa, and El día de mañana by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón) whose authors give voice to an ambiguous character -- a policeman from the Francoist period. He makes attempts to justify his work and his support for the regime. These fictional utterances are studied from the perspective of certain theories of literary dialogism and literary poliphonic devices. The final question is whether it is reasonable to expect any social impact of such literary representations of “democratic” dialogues.

New digital threats to media pluralism in the information age

The proliferation of news and information has reached unprecedented levels. Notwithstanding this apparent richness, increasing doubts about the quality and diversity of online news have grown for many years. The article arguments that the threats to quality information and media pluralism essentially come from two sources: the increasing concentration of economic resources into just a few gigantic online platforms/media and the spreading of the disinformation that is favored by the available technological instruments. After having analyzed these threats also in terms of their consequences for the public and democratic debate, the article focuses on the available responses, exploring the necessity of explicit and multidimensional public policies to preserve quality news and media pluralism as public goods that are indispensable to democracy.

'FASCISM IS THE NEW HIP': ONLINE ANTI-PUBLICS AND POST-NORMATIVE DEMOCRACY

In this paper I draw connections between two emergent phenomena of the recent past: the growing influence of online ‘anti-publics’ on democratic debate and the emergence of ‘post-normative democracy’. The paper draws on work by McKenzie Wark (1997) and Bart Cammaerts (2007) to further theorise the rise of online anti-publics. It demonstrates how groups such as white supremacist groups, ‘men’s rights’ groups, anti-climate science groups, and ‘neoreactionary’ or ‘Dark Enlightenment’ groups, among others, can be understood as belonging to a loose-knit, diverse online ‘anti-public sphere’. This is a heterogenous space of often fractious social interaction where discourse routinely flouts traditional democratic norms, such as normative ‘public sphere’ conventions of rational-critical deliberation, rules of evidence and argumentation, and requirements for truthfulness, reciprocity, mutuality, and so on, over and above the ways in which democratic debate is properly passionate (Papacharissi, 2016). The paper uses a case studies approach based in discourse analysis of five different groups to theorise their activities in light of their influence on the emergence of a post-normative democratic politics. This includes the normalisation of race politics across the west, attacks on human rights conventions, attempts to undermine legal processes, attacks on the media and journalists, attempts to shore up subvert gains made by marginalised groups, and systematic attempts to undermine trust in institutions. The paper will show how, to advance their cause, right groups have sought to flip established political logic and to reposition fascism as ‘the new hip’.