Today, November 7, 2020, is the final day of the week that, if in person in Venice, I would be blogging about Platform Urbanism in the Austrian Pavilion. It is also the day that we, US and world citizens alike, heard that Donald Trump has been voted out of office. So many competing thoughts: hard to write on a complex subject when we are experiencing, ever so briefly, pure affect (read: elation); hard to separate the tragedy of the last four years from neoliberalism, the gig economy, the discourse of genius and competition, and winner-take-all ethics.

As a place holder until thoughts return to a discursive mode, I put forward, as a contrast to our American market-driven politics, the Digital Democracy program of Jeremy Corbyn, ex-leader of the Labour party in the UK.

8 points:

Universal Service Network: We will deliver high speed broadband and mobile connectivity for every household, company and organisation in Britain from the inner city neighbourhoods to the remotest rural community.

Open Knowledge Library: We will create a free-to-use on-line hub of learning resources for the National Education Ser-vice.

Community Media Freedom: We will ensure that British citizens are able both to express their own views and to receive the widest possible diversity of opinions over high speed digital networks.

Platform Cooperatives: We will foster the cooperative ownership of digital platforms for distributing labour and selling services.

Digital Citizen Passport: We will develop a voluntary scheme that provides British citizens with a secure and portable identity for their on-line activities.

Programming for everyone: We will encourage publicly funded software and hardware to be released under an Open Source licence.

The People’s Charter of Digital Liberties: We will launch a public consultation with people and parties across the political spectrum to draw up a digital bill of rights.

Massive Multi-Person On-line Deliberation: We will utilise information technologies to make popular participation in the democratic process easy and inclusive.

It is a model we can learn from. It recognises that data-propelled technology is central to capitalism. It knows that the state is better than the market in delivering and handling digital technology. But is it the best? Where does activism, let alone architectural activism, reside in such a state? Should or could it reside in a 'the state'? The following blogs will pick these questions up as they examine the possibilities and limitations of platforms to operate in a present capitalism, and a future post-capitalism.