The Political Imaginary of User Democracy

Abstract Does digital media revitalize or undermine democracy? This essay makes the case that this popular debate obscures another crucial development: tech corporations design and promote their own normative understanding of democracy through the services they oversee. The result is the political imaginary of user democracy. User democracy is a technocratic understanding of politics, valorizing data, automation, predictability, and systematization. Under this paradigm, digital public–political life is imagined as operational and thus potentially programmable. Democracy becomes popularly framed as a project of technological optimization and management by a technocratic elite. By contrast, this essay argues for an emancipatory understanding of democracy, which emphasizes that popular sovereignty is not an object to be facilitated by unaccountable tech monopolies from above, but a continuous struggle to build collectivity from below. This essay situates user democracy amid a change in the self-;understanding of tech corporations, as they move away from presenting themselves as mere facilitators to increasingly embrace the role of governing powers. The author analyzes public speeches and leaked internal memos from the tech sector together with tech-;corporate social-;responsibility campaigns, such as YouTube's efforts to diversify the results of its search algorithm and Meta's decision to downrank content labeled “political” altogether.