The utility of timeless thoughts: Hannah Arendt's conceptions of power and violence in the age of cyberization

Abstract

This chapter links power relations in the technologically dominated context of cyberspace to Hannah Arendt's theoretical considerations of power and violence. Even if her work is often marked by skepticism on the technological domination of the human world, some of Arendt's most important works provide a surprisingly rich framework to conceptualize the structure and character of cyberspace. It is argued here that the structure of power and violence in cyberspace can abstractly be captured by dividing cyberspace into two parts that refer to Arendt's conceptions of power as power to and violence as power over. Cyberspace is thus both, a modern space of appearance and political freedom and an unexplored context for Arendt's conception of power as well as an anti-space of appearance, a space filled with Arendt's conception of violence that denies the positive attributes of a space of appearance when filtering and control techniques are implemented. The empirical cases of the Arab Spring protests, Weibo and the Fifty Cent Party as well as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks during elections or inter-state conflicts will underline this argumentation.