Ignas Kalpokas – författare

There is an inherent tension between popular and establishment powers in political communities. With anti-establishment sentiment on the rise across Western democracies, exploring the underpinnings of this dualism and rethinking theories of political life within states is of paramount importance. By combining the theories of Carl Schmitt and Benedict Spinoza, this book develops a framework of continuous reproduction, whereby the two powers simultaneously hold one another in tension and supersede one another. In the same vein, political communities are shown to be perpetually caught in a cycle of creativity/contestation, derived primarily from Schmitt (the tragic groundlessness of politics) and limitation (derived primarily from Spinoza as a quasi-theological belief in the status quo). Providing a novel theoretical framework explaining the workings of democratic politics, this book also offers a non-traditional reading of Spinoza and Schmitt. Whereas traditionally both have been treated as almost polar opposites, here they are held in creative tension, providing equally important building blocks for the proposed theory. By furthering their analysis, the author creates a new theory of political action.

The metaverse seems to be on everybody’s lips – and yet, very few people can actually explain what it means or why it is important. This book aims to fill the gap from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by law and media and communications studies. Going beyond the optimism emanating from technology companies and venture capitalists, the authors critically evaluate the antecedents and the building blocks of the metaverse, the design and regulatory challenges that need to be solved, and commercial opportunities that are yet to be fully realised. While the metaverse is poised to open new possibilities and perspectives, it will also be a dangerous place – one ripe with threats ranging from disinformation to intellectual property theft to sexual harassment. Hence, the book offers a useful guide to the legal and political governance issues ahead while also contextualising them within the broader domain of governance and regulation of digital technologies.

The metaverse seems to be on everybody’s lips – and yet, very few people can actually explain what it means or why it is important. This book aims to fill the gap from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by law and media and communications studies. Going beyond the optimism emanating from technology companies and venture capitalists, the authors critically evaluate the antecedents and the building blocks of the metaverse, the design and regulatory challenges that need to be solved, and commercial opportunities that are yet to be fully realised. While the metaverse is poised to open new possibilities and perspectives, it will also be a dangerous place – one ripe with threats ranging from disinformation to intellectual property theft to sexual harassment. Hence, the book offers a useful guide to the legal and political governance issues ahead while also contextualising them within the broader domain of governance and regulation of digital technologies.

This book highlights some of the crucial crossroads – moments in which choices as to the future relationship between humans and digital technologies have to be made – that societies face in light of the growing development and adoption of AI.As contemporary societies undergo profound transformations driven by artificial intelligence and related technologies, a unilinear vision of inevitable ‘progress’ and development increasingly dominates public discourse. This book offers a counterpoint, challenging such deterministic narratives by mapping out the complex crossroads where futures ought to be shaped rather than passively received. Exploring a multiplicity of domains as diverse as education, heritage, creativity, the biological and technological boundaries of humans, work, war, and space colonialism, both the dominant (typically progressivist) and alternative (critical) ways of framing the present and the future are outlined, identifying choices to be made. The book teases out the underlying tendencies and underscores a recurring necessity to make value choices as to our further development, not only as societies but also as humanity, and in terms of regulatory choices. It reveals how decisions in these domains are shaped by ingrained intellectual, ideological, political, value-based, and economic assumptions, often hidden beneath the rhetoric of inevitability. These crossroads are not just technical or economic choices, but moral and societal: Between maximising efficiency and safeguarding plurality; between treating technological possibilities as imperatives and critically evaluating their desirability; between moral blindness and care. By illuminating the options available, the book invites readers to take an active role in choosing the future shape of societies and of humanity itself.This interdisciplinary and creative text will benefit all graduate-level and scholarly readers working on AI within the fields of media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.The publication is a part of the project "Strengthening the R&D activities of the Vytautas Kavolis Transdisciplinary Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (SOCMTEP)". The project is funded by the Research Council of Lithuania and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Lithuania, Contract No S-A-UEI-23-13 (2023-12-27).

There is an inherent tension between popular and establishment powers in political communities. With anti-establishment sentiment on the rise across Western democracies, exploring the underpinnings of this dualism and rethinking theories of political life within states is of paramount importance. By combining the theories of Carl Schmitt and Benedict Spinoza, this book develops a framework of continuous reproduction, whereby the two powers simultaneously hold one another in tension and supersede one another. In the same vein, political communities are shown to be perpetually caught in a cycle of creativity/contestation, derived primarily from Schmitt (the tragic groundlessness of politics) and limitation (derived primarily from Spinoza as a quasi-theological belief in the status quo). Providing a novel theoretical framework explaining the workings of democratic politics, this book also offers a non-traditional reading of Spinoza and Schmitt. Whereas traditionally both have been treated as almost polar opposites, here they are held in creative tension, providing equally important building blocks for the proposed theory. By furthering their analysis, the author creates a new theory of political action.

The world we live in is increasingly malleable and fluid, especially in regards to being human - rendering the self into a permanent beta version, co-constituted within agglomerations of platforms, devices, physical infrastructures, entities pertaining to physical and biological nature. This book proposes a posthumanist research methodology for future research in this area, providing a novel explanatory and methodological framework for studying today's world.Malleable, Digital, and Posthuman studies four areas: the economy, the human self, politics, and research ethics and methodology. In the economic domain, Kalpokas focuses on the emergence of the attention economy and the ensuing shift towards personalisation and experience, shaping the (digital) environment for optimised user interaction. Consequently, the datafication and algorithmisation of the social world necessitates an art and craft of the self, establishing a co-constitutive interaction between the self and digital infrastructures. These changes also strongly affect politics, primarily through datafied management of the political and employment of predictive analytics in preparing ground for political action, thereby rendering collective identities and political leadership malleable and open to relentless beta testing.With unique insights and an innovative framework, this book is essential reading for researchers in the areas of media and communication studies, politics and social theory.

This book analyses the changes to the regulation of everyday life that have taken place as a result of datafication, the ever-growing analytical, predictive, and structuring role of algorithms, and the prominence of the platform economy.

This book examines the use and potential impact of deepfakes, a type of synthetic computer-generated media, primarily images and videos, capable of both creating artificial representations of non-existent individuals and showing actual individuals doing things they did not do.

Drawing on post-humanist theory and critical disability studies, the book also assesses how escapism should not be viewed as an unavoidable reaction to technological change, and develops a model for an ethically equitable relationship between humans and technology.

Drawing on post-humanist theory and critical disability studies, the book also assesses how escapism should not be viewed as an unavoidable reaction to technological change, and develops a model for an ethically equitable relationship between humans and technology.

This book combines political theory with media and communications studies in order to formulate a theory of post-truth, concentrating on the latter’s preconditions, context, and functions in today’s societies.