Decidim Book is out!

I am proud to announce the Decidim Book:

Barandiaran, X. E., Calleja-López, A., Monterde, A., & Romero, C. (2024). Decidim, a Technopolitical Network for Participatory Democracy. Philosophy, Practice and Autonomy of a Collective Platform in the age of Digital Intelligence. Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/9783031507830

It has taken almost 6 years since we started writing what, at the time, we called Decidim’s White Paper. Some drafts of the early book have been circulating ever since, but we never completed the story. We were very busy doing Decidim. Years past, the project settled, and we took the time (thanks Antonio for offering us the great opportunity to push the book forward in Arantzazu!) to finally write it.

The table of contents of the book makes for a good summary:

1. Decidim: A Brief Overview
   • Here we summarize the nature of the project, its current impact, its history and why the project was born in the context of cognitive capitalism and the decline of neoliberal «democracies» on the one hand, and the dawn of digital commons and radical democracy on the other.
2. The Political Plane: Decidim and the Vision of a Radically Democratic Society
   • This part is the most theoretical, we review contemporary social and democratic theory to explain the type of democratic vision that Decidim is aimed to achieve.
3. The Technopolitical Plane: Decidim as a Democratic Software Paradigm
   • This chapter covers perhaps the most original aspect of the project, its careful technopolitical crafting, the way in which technical details are assembled to produce specific types of political effects and how the community embodies recursively those technical and political mechanism on its own constitution.
4. The Technical Plane: The Fabric of an Infrastructure
   • As the title anticipates, this is the most technical description of how the software, the community, the legal framework and the
5. A Technopolitical Network for Participatory Democracy: The Future of a Collective Platform
   • This is perhaps the most philosophical and speculative of all chapters. Recapitulating the content of the entire book, we project past, present and future challenges and provide a reading of what Decidim is and could be.

As an academic publication the book own much to the work of IAS-Research Group, and its decades of study of the autonomy of the living, now transposed to the autonomy of sociotechnical hybrids like this project: the democratic autonomous assemblage of the organic and the inorganic. The project Outonomy partially financed the publication with Open Access CreativeCommons By-SA licence.

I leave you with two quotes of the conclusions (chapter 5):

At the beginning of this book, we made clear that a project like Decidim might be necessary, but is certainly not sufficient for advancing democracy. There is no future for Decidim or for democracy without a deep transformation of the material living conditions, the social (and global) inequalities and the myriad of oppressive structures that are reproduced every day. Decidim should leave no room for techno-solutionism (the idea that social or political problems have technological solutions). It should equally debunk techno-fatalism. It already has. Decidim is an example of how it is possible to create and deploy a large-scale, radically transformative software project out of the platform capitalist model. An important challenge to any radical democratization process (particularly when addressing struggles) is the problem of coordination of collective action. This is where Decidim should be ready to become a valuable infrastructure, which may then contribute to address the challenges of complexity and conflictuality of society. (p. 124-5)

As a coagulation of hundreds of Metadecidim debates, the movement recursivity includes this very text; and so recrafts thinking, action, and, crucially, the frequently forgotten (re)production. We began suggesting that this book aims to think through Decidim after we did take part in it. Actually, we were thinking through Decidim as we were doing it, and Decidim keeps making and thinking itself today. With this book we came to recapitulate and throw out several lines of flight that show how Decidim has aimed to retie technology, politics, economics, ecology and beyond, and that flight has the form of a living animal: it is the flight of a cyborg owl. The cyborg owl can be taken as an imaginary ode to our animal and our technical, increasingly post-natural and allegedly post-humanist condition. Yet this owl is not the symbol of a Hegelian self-reflective movement that satisfies itself in contemplation, but the owl that flies in the evening to bring, back to the nest, the provision to sustain a new day. It is reflective action and active reflection aimed at producing and reproducing flourishing forms of life. (p.130-1)