Abstract
The objective of this chapter is to analyze the type of community that is characteristic of technological societies. To achieve a correct understanding of these (4.0) communities and the political antagonism that occurs in them, the recursive and non-trivial nature of social relations must be addressed. It will be shown in this work that these communities, as argued by Marx, are not equatable to the romantic concept of Gemeinschaft. For this reason, the new interpretations of the urban commons developed as a result of the publication of Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990) will be critiqued. These interpretations of the common have promoted a recovery of the forms of community criticized by Marx and Engels, and have fostered an incorrect vision of political antagonism.
Vis-à-vis these interpretations, this chapter intersects cybernetic systems theory with commons theory to describe the type of recursive, heterarchical, and non-trivial functioning typical of the communities that inhabit our current technologically complex societies. Specifically, it focuses on the socio-symbolic effects generated by the recursive functioning of social mobility, thereby showing the loss of hierarchical sovereignty of the rule of law in favor of a new type of heterarchical sovereignty, typical of public-private governance. Lastly, the way in which the current 4.0 communities are capable of generating an anti-system antagonism by taking advantage of their heterarchical and non-trivial nature is explained. This antagonism is exercised through strategies of translation and anti-identity circulation of information taken from post-colonial theory.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Agamben, G. (2020, February, 20). L’invenzione di un’epidemia, quodlibet. Retrieved from https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia
Almaguer-Kalixto, P. E., & Giglietto, F. (2019). Steering the world from where we are: An introduction to the sociocybernetics perspective. Current Sociology, 67(4), 479–494. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392119837573
Ashby, W. R. (1957). An introduction to cybernetics. Chapman and Hall.
Bahn, W. L., Baird, L. C., III, & Collins, M. D. (2007). Impediments to systems thinking: Communities separated by a common language, international conference on cybernetics and information technologies, systems and applications and international conference on computing, communications and control technologies. Proceedings, 3, 122–127.
Bauwens, M., & Ramos, J. (2018). Re-imagining the left through an ecology of the commons: Towards a post-capitalist commons transition. Global Discourse, 8(2), 325–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2018.1461442
Bazzul, J. (2020). Solidarity with nonhumans as an ontological struggle. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54, 946. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1804360. (Online first).
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks. How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
Blackstone, W. (1765). Commentaries on the Laws of England. Book. 2. Claredon.
Bratton, B. (2016). The Stack: On software and sovereignity. The MIT Press.
Castells, M. (1989). The informational city: Information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban regional process. Blackwell.
Chatterton, P., & Pusey, A. (2020). Beyond capitalist enclosure, commodification and alienation: Postcapitalist praxis as commons, social production and useful doing. Progress in Human Geography, 44(1), 27–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518821173
Cockshott, P., & Cottrell, A. (1993). Towards a new socialism. Spokesman.
Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums (Vol. 23, p. 6). Verso.
Derrida, J. (1989). Writing and difference. University of Chicago Press.
Dupuy, J. P. (1991). La panique. Laboratoires Delagrange.
Foerster, H. (2003). Understanding understanding: Essays on cybernetics and cognition. Springer-Verlag.
Forsthoff, E. (1966). Problemas actuales del Estado social de Derecho en Alemania. Publicaciones del Centro de Formación y Perfeccionamiento de Funcionarios.
Forte, A., Larco, V., & Bruckman, A. (2009). Decentralization in wikipedia governance. Journal of Management Information Systems, 26(1), 49–72. https://doi.org/10.2753/MIS0742-1222260103
Giddens, A. (1998). The third way: The renewal of social democracy. Polity Press.
Goertzel, B., Goertzel, T., & Goertzel, Z. (2017). The global brain and the emerging economy of abundance: Mutualism, open collaboration, exchange networks and the automated commons. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114, 65–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.03.022
Gunther, G. (1965). Cybernetics and the transition from classical to trans-classical logic. University Biological Computer Laboratory.
Guo, K., & Liu, S. (2020). Basic structures of systems. In Error systems: Concepts, theory and applications. Studies in systems, decision and control (Vol. 275). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40760-5_3
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2005). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. Penguin.
Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Harvard University Prees.
Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2017). Assembly. Oxford University Press.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. Routledge.
Harvey, D. (2011). The future of the commons. Radical History Review, 109, 101–107.
Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities. From the right to the City to the urban revolution. Verso.
Hong, Y. L., & Zhang, Q. S. (2017). Research on affinity propagation algorithm based on common neighbours. In 2016 IEEE international conference on systems, man, and cybernetics (pp. 3504–3509). https://doi.org/10.1109/SMC.2016.7844776
Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Radom House.
Lacan, J. (1983). Psicoanálisis y cibernética, o la naturaleza del lenguaje. In Lacan, Seminario 2. El yo en la teoría de Freud (pp. 435–454). Paidós.
Laval, C., & Dardot, P. (2019). Common. On revolution in the 21st century. Bloomsbury.
Lee, R. (1979). The kung san: Men, women and work in a foraging society. Cambridge University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (2009). La comuna de París. SOV Baix.
Lenin, V. I. (1974). In memory of the commune. In Lenin collected works (Vol. 17). Progress Publishers.
León Casero, J., & Cámara, C. (2020). La precariedad de los communes urbanos frente al derecho europeo. ACME. An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 19(3), 726–743. Retrieved from https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/2002/1551
Lipnack, J., & Stamps, J. (1997). Virtual teams: Reaching across space, time, and organizations with technology. Wiley.
Luhmann, N. (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Suhrkamp.
Macano Fernandes, B., & Stédile, J. P. (2002). Brava gente. El MST y la lucha por la tierra en Brasil. Virus.
Mandelbrot, B. (2006). The misbehavior of markets: A fractal view of financial turbulence. Basic Books.
Marx, K. (2005). The Paris commune. Socialist Labor Party of America.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. Springer.
McCulloch, W. (1945). A Heterarchy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets. The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 7, 89–93.
Morin, E. (1990). Introduction à la pensée complexe. ESF.
Nakamura, L. (1999). Race in/for cyberspace: Identity tourism and racial passing on the internet. Allyn and Bacon.
Negri, A., & Hardt, M. (2005). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. Penguin.
Negri, A., & Hardt, M. (2009). Commonwealth. Harvard University Press.
Negri, A., & Hardt, M. (2017). Assembly. Oxford University Press.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons. The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.
Painter, C. (2016). Non-human animals within contemporary capitalism: A Marxist account of non-human animal liberation. Capital and Class, 40(2), 327–345. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816816653884
Plant, S. (1997). Zeros + ones: Digital women and the new Technoculture. Doubleday.
Prigogine, I. (2000). The birth of time and eternity. Shambhala Publications.
Rheingold, H. (2000). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. The MIT Press.
Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology. University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, C. (2006). The nomos of the earth in the international law of the jus Publicum Europaeum. Telos Press Publishing.
Schwab, K. (2017). The fourth industrial revolution. Crown Publishing Group.
Simmel, G. (2019). The sociology of secrecy and of secret societies. Blurb.
Sloterdijk, P. (2020). Las epidemias políticas. Godot.
Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform Capitalism. Polity Press.
Tiqqun. (2001). L’hypothese cybernétique. Tiqqun, 2, 223–339. Retrieved from https://translationcollective.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/cybernetique.pdf
Wiener, N. (1945). Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine. The MIT Press.
Williams, A. (2015). Control societies and platform logic. New Formations, 84(85), 209–227. https://doi.org/10.3898/neWf:84/85.10.2015
Zerzan, J. (2008). Twilight of the machines. Feral House.
Zibechi, R. (2008). Territorios en resistencia. Cartografía política de las periferias urbanas latinoamericanas. Baladre-CGT.
Žižek, S. (1993). Tarrying with the negative. Duke University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
León Casero, J., Urabayen, J. (2023). 4.0 Communities. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_382-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_382-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87624-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-87624-1
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Social SciencesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences