Surveillance City. Digital Transformation of Urban Governance in Autocratic Regimes Alexandr A. Balayan, Leonid V. Tomin Proceedings of the 2021 Communication Strategies in Digital Society Seminar Comsds 2021, 2021 A new sociotechnical governance model "digital autocracy", has appeared and started to spread throughout the world in the recent years. Its appearance became possible by reason of structural transformation of neoliberalism: a formation of platform economy based on digital infrastructure and big data. The emergence of digital autocracies was not a result of the governing class’s initial plan to use the internet politically. This is a constellation of many factors that formed in the process of adaptation of political regimes in a number of countries to external (global economic competition, external political conflicts) and internal (political destabilization) challenges. The article is devoted to studying the place and role of smart cities in the sociotechnical governance model of digital autocracies. The smart city functioning specifics in an institutional landscape of political regimes that use a digital infrastructure as a tool to control society have been analyzed on a number of examples. Separately, the article analyzes problems related to the use of data in urban governance: excessive data extraction and non-transparency of state information systems.
The Transformation of the Advertising Industry in the Age of 'Platform Capitalism' Alexandr A. Balayan, Leonid V. Tomin Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE Communication Strategies in Digital Society Seminar Comsds 2020, 2020 In the period after the global financial crisis of 2008, a new economic model have emerged - “platform capitalism”. Platform companies attracted huge ammount of money, allowing for a while to solve the problem of investment and supporting the financial market. The basis of this economic model is network effects produced by the integrated digital infrastructure, which contribute to monopolization and the constant expansion of platform companies in new areas. The principle of functioning of this infrastructure is the constant collection and further monetization of data extracted from the interactions of individuals with each other or with one of the elements of a digital economy or governance structures. This paper is devoted to the analysis of the logic of the emergence of “platform capitalism” as an effect of structural contradictions of neoliberalism (financialization, permanent market instability). The paper focuses on the transformation of the advertising market under the influence of platform companies, using the US example, to show the mechanism of digital disruption in print media business model. The development of digital infrastructure has allowed platform companies to collect and monetize data, deliver personalized ads to users throughout the internet. A structural shift has occurred - traditional media have ceased to be the main channels for transmitting advertising messages to certain social groups, advertising platforms are able to find them and deliver them ads on their own. In the framework of “platform capitalism”, many print media in order to survive try to transform themselves in accordance with the logic of the economic platform model (developing their website, data collection and monetization, integration into the logic of social networks).
