Screenshot of Citizen Ex. James Bridle. Some rights reserved.On November 2 the Berliner Gazette‘s Friendly Fire conference asks: are digital non-/citizens the status quo? Two prolific speakers will look for answers: the artist James Bridle, whose visionary project "Citizen Ex" reflects digital citizenship and the political thinker Eleanor Saitta, whose work explores the potential of radical democracy and consistently challenges the blind spots of the digital avantgardes. Opening the three-day conference, this public talk will reflect the politics of citizenship with regard to the rampant digitalization of people's lives – be they citizens or not. Here, James Bridle reflects on algorithmic citizenship and digital statelessness.
Historically, and for those lucky enough to be born under the aegis of stable governments and national regimes, there have been two ways in which citizenship is acquired at birth. Jus soli – the right of soil – confers citizenship upon those born within the territory of a state regardless of their parentage. This right is common in the Americas, but less so elsewhere (and, since 2004, is to be found nowhere in Europe). More frequently, Jus sanguinis – the right of blood – determines a person’s citizenship based on the rights held by their parents. One might be denied citizenship in the place of one’s birth, but obtain it elsewhere.
Citizenship law is strange and complex, with rafts of exceptions and omissions, which undercut the commonly-accepted view of citizenship in the Global North as something stable and absolute. In the United Kingdom, citizenship has only been defined in law since the early twentieth century, and the history of its definition is primarily one of exclusion and revocation, as the British state sought first to strengthen its borders, then to exclude its former subjects from the mainland, and finally to renounce those of its citizens who are deemed to have acted in such outrageous fashion that they should be denied due process of law. As Hannah Arendt famously wrote, citizenship is “the right to have rights”: the guarantee from which all other protections flow; and so citizenship law and how it is applied are worth watching, as litmus tests for wider democratic freedoms.
