Attending the IGF ’25 in Lillestrøm

I’m currently attending the Internet Governance Forum in Lillestrøm Norway and am having a blast. This is the playground for Internet policy geeks and this year we are celebrating the 20 year anniversary of the IGF so there are a lot of extra curricular activities to attend.

For those of you who are visiting my site after meeting me in person at the IGF forum I’m happy to provide more information on my research in hope that you might be able to give me points on resources and people to engage with.

There is info on my research in previous posts but the tl;dr version is here:

I’m using Mark Warrens 3×7 functional democratic framework to systemically analyze how Very Large Online Platforms and search engines (VLOPS+VLOSE) are undermining democracy. For this I’m first mapping out democratic functions and practices according to Warren and then seeking out measurables on the robustness or health of democracy. This I’m doing to test claims by Shoshanna Zuboff and other prominent theorists about surveillance capitalism and systemic failures that pit platforms against democracy (not just the usual neo-liberal attacks, specific digital-systems attacks or failures).

While political science would traditionally have me theorize and seek proof for my hypothesis my goal is to utilize my experience in tech to create an interactive interface on the matrix and do mass-data scraping and define indicators, which we can then infer from. My goal is to use data-science to back up political science in order to make it easier for policymakers and civic organizations to conceptualize how democracy works in relation to Cyberspace.

Here I briefly explain Warren’s democratic framework and my approach

Here I gathered the most relevant documents, you do not have to read Zuboff’s 500 page book, her 56 page 2022 article about the Death March of Institutions says it all.

p.s. I do not have copyright of this article, I’ve entered it into the public domain because this information belongs in the public domain. Knowledge is power and knowledge about how democracy works should not be locked up behind a paywall while the author gets nothing -so ‘public good piracy’ it is.