"All of this is an argument for systems literacy." Flickr/Gergely Schmidt. CC-BY-2.0.On its opening day, the Friendly Fire conference asked: are digital non-/citizens the status quo? Two prolific speakers were looking for answers: the artist James Bridle, whose visionary project, Citizen Ex, reflects digital citizenship; and the coder/thinker Eleanor Saitta, whose work explores the potential of radical democracy and consistently challenges the blindspots of digital avant-gardes. Here Saitta reflects the politics of citizenship with regards to the rampant digitalisation of people's lives – be they citizens or not.
Krystian Woznicki (KW): Our offline and online lives have become inseparable, hence citizenship nowadays is inseparable from digital citizenship. Following the Snowden disclosures, there has been a growing awareness of the workings of the governmental-corporate power nexus – the backend of citizenship, so to speak. From your point of view, what are the most important implications of this trend when it comes to conceptualizing the neoliberal state in the "post-Snowden world" (as you have once termed the states of affairs)?
Eleanor Saitta (ES): The inseparability you point at is the single most important thing to understand about the impact of the internet on political life – that the internet does not exist as a separate entity from a political perspective. There is only life and power, not digital and non-digital life and power.
