ON DEMOCRACY AND WIDERSTÄNDIGKEIT

emocracy is under attack. Driven by a longing for authoritarian order and the irrational belief in their supposed supremacy, far-right forces intent to replace democracy with ‘illiberal’ regimes.

Corporate interests have consistently supported such perversions of rights and freedoms, often in the name of free markets. But the recent alliance between the far-right and technocapitalists marks a new frontier of capitalist extraction: with black box AI in the hands of power-mad manipulators, we witness a shift from AI gamification to AI weaponization: instead of empowering and emancipating individuals and populations, their goal is to control, constrain and exploit us.

The fate of the city is closely linked with democracy. Not only because the latter is borne from the former but also because both are based on multiplicity, inclusion, and diversity – ideas the reactionary right abhors and is openly hostile to. Democracy and Widerständigkeit therefore explores what it needs to strengthen democracy and the city.

ur reflection starts from the thesis that democracy is not only compromised by anti-democratic forces. Its vulnerability lies equally in the fact that democracies have failed to deepen it. In other words, “we” – those entitled to benefit from democratic participation and accountability – have hollowed it out through our inaction.

To think is a form of resistance. But this can only be a beginning. The question is, what can be done? HOTHOUSE proposes a reorientation of resistance from critique and dissent to disclosure and betrayal. It is time to abandon loyalty and compliance to those who weaponize AI and resist the waves of manipulation, persecution and even annihilation they are constantly generating.

This echoes in the German Widerständigkeit, a word that connects resistance with resilience and implies a relentless civil force that can turn dissent into new forms of insurrection. As digital renegades, we can demonstrate, undermine and maybe even resolve the production of reactionary imagination and its coercive rearrangement of desires.

By valuing exposure and betrayal as acts of self-defence in solidarity, we gain a powerful tool to counteract abuses of technology, law and nature. We call it renegade activism, and it calls for solidarity in a broader sense: if democracy has a future, it will be through a re-entanglement with all beings – in other words, democracy must leave behind its humanistic limitation to our species. Its future depends on our ability, generosity and intelligence to share the demos and the agency and power it holds with other living beings.