I’m the PI of a 4-year project (funded by the Israel Science Foundation) to study the public involvement of IT industry actors’ in contentious politics in Israel and the U.S.
If you’re a recent (or soon to be) PhD graduate with expertise in the computational social sciences, and interested in participating in this project as a post-doc fellow this Call (in Hebrew) might be for you.
Abstract:
This project will investigate the political power of the Information Technology (IT) industry. It will focus on the industry’s recent public interventions in contentious political debates deviating from the industry’s past reticence to participate in contentious politics. I will examine interventions’ mediated aspects, the ways they repurpose the networks that constitute this industry, and these interventions’ consequences – some of them unintended – not only for the political arena but also for the IT industry as an intervenor.
Recent examples of the industry’s overt political interventions in contentious political struggles include those initiated by workers to constrain IT firms’ business practices that impact, in turn, politically contentious issues. Other interventions involve various actors affiliated with the industry including workers, executives, entrepreneurs, and executives to oppose government policy. In Israel, such interventions emerged around the 2023 attempted judicial reform (or coup) initiated by the government and opposed by various IT industry actors, while in the U.S., IT industry interventions occurred around Donald Trump’s first presidency in relation to law enforcement, the military and surveillance as well as immigration policy. I intend to examine additional potential interventions emerging in 2024-2027.
In this project, I propose studying the nature of collective action in the general civic arena by actors related to an industry that celebrates individual action in pursuit of economic success. I will analyze the discourse and practices of full-time employees of IT firms, executives and investors in Israel and the U.S. as they repurpose mediated networks that are often designed for individual promotion rather than collective action, as well as the inter-personal networks in which they are embedded within the IT industry. I wish to ask how technology workers and employees perceive these forms of action and the consequences they have for the networks in which they are embedded – virtual, interpersonal, and organizational. I will consider these interventions’ symbolic dimension as messages circulate inter-textually and transmedially across platforms, physical spaces, and legislatures. I will consider not only how such industrial interventions shape politics but also how intervention re-shapes the industry itself – the intervenor – in unintentional ways deepening our understanding of public interventions. To analyze these phenomena, I will interview IT industry personnel occupying varied positions within the industry and in relation to the interventions, for and against them. I will triangulate these interviews with an interpretive – dramaturgical and critically discursive – analysis of intervention-affiliated social media discourse, public statements, official testimony, and computationally analyze these texts, as a means of better understanding the ways the industry maintains and projects its power in unstable democracies. Preliminary data collection and analysis identified the prominence of the entrepreneur as a heroic political figure and the possibility that interventions strain internal organizational networks.
Roei Davidson 