Two new research projects at the university are examining digital monopolies and their impact on democracy. Both are funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
Technical infrastructures such as cloud platforms, AI chatbots and social networks are increasingly shaping our everyday lives – whilst control over these influential infrastructures lies with a handful of corporations, most of which are based in the US. “The rise of these new forms of power is closely linked to the profound crisis of democracy we are currently experiencing,” explains Prof. Dr Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Assistant Professor of Ethics of Digitalisation at the University of Oldenburg.
The researcher from the Institute of Philosophy is leading two new research projects funded by the Volkswagen Foundation that examine digital monopolies, the phenomenon of tech authoritarianism and their impact on democracy; the first of these is being conducted jointly with Prof. Dr. Marius Sältzer from the Institute of Social Sciences. In this project, the two researchers are investigating how the anti-liberal, techno-optimistic worldview of the ‘Tech Right’ has developed. This group of investors and founders from Silicon Valley – often referred to by this name – and their ideology are the focus of their project ‘Mapping the Ideological Online Dynamics of the Tech Right: Tracing the Evolution, Influence, and Normalisation of Silicon Valley’s Neo-Reactionary Thought’. The second research project, ‘INFRADEM – Reconfiguring Digital Infrastructure as a Site of Democratic Transformation’, explores how digital infrastructures can be made more democratic.
How the ideology of tech billionaires has spread
In their project, Nosthoff and Sältzer aim to investigate how the key ideologies within the group often referred to as the “Tech Right” or “technofascists” emerged and how its leading figures have been able to normalise their extremist, at times contradictory and anti-democratic ideas – and thus exert influence in the real world. To this end, the researchers will combine various approaches, drawing on fields such as political theory, ideology theory and empirical social sciences. “These complex currents of thought partly defy conventional ideological categorisation and are highly dynamic. They pose challenges for ideology research, which is why we chose a multi-perspective approach,” explains Nosthoff, Assistant Professor of Ethics of Digitalisation and Co-Director of the Critical Data Lab, which is based in Berlin and Oldenburg.
To demonstrate how tech ideologies have spread across digital spaces, the Oldenburg-based researchers plan to employ both AI language models and interpretative theoretical methods to analyse large volumes of text taken from online media platforms such as Reddit, 4chan, Telegram and X semi-automatically. “Because online text sources contain comments, quotes and links, this approach will allow us to uncover network structures and ideological interconnections,” explains Sältzer, Junior Professor for Digital Social Science at the University of Oldenburg. The researchers’ main goal will be to trace the development dynamics of tech ideologies over time as closely as possible.
The Volkswagen Foundation is funding the project as part of the ‘Aufbruch – New Research Spaces for the Humanities and Cultural Studies’ initiative with 320,000 euros over 18 months.
Digital infrastructure as a space for democratic change
The second project, INFRADEM, focuses on the question of how digital infrastructures can be reconfigured to promote democracy rather than jeopardising it. “Digital technologies increasingly shape how we communicate, organise and engage in political action – but often in ways that bypass democratic processes,” explains Nosthoff, who is Junior Professor of Ethics of Digitalisation at the University of Oldenburg. The goal of the project partners is to develop concrete alternatives to the current opaque, centralised technology systems which are controlled by a handful of private actors. Combining methods from the fields of philosophy, media studies, law, cultural analysis and democratic theory, the researchers will design concepts for public digital tools, develop citizen participation formats and formulate policy recommendations. As spokesperson for the project, Nosthoff emphasises: “Our aim is to find out how to transform digital infrastructures from tools of control into instruments of democratic renewal.”
The Volkswagen Foundation is funding the project as part of the ‘Transformational Knowledge on Democracies in Transition’ initiative for five years from January 2027, with a total of 1.4 million euros. Other project partners include the University of Luxembourg, the Waag Futurelab in the Netherlands, the Centre for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy gGmbH (CeMAS) in Berlin and the University of Paderborn.
