Foucault and digital technologies of power: studying resistance as decentralization

Abstract

This thesis aims to leverage Foucault’s relational understanding of power to study digital technologies of power. Can we leverage Foucault’s theoretical framework to study digital technologies of power as centralized/decentralized network systems? We connect the concepts of centralization and decentralization with Foucault understanding of power as networks of relations. In particular, we will seek to relate knowledge and power, discourse, disciplinary technologies and biopolitics with modern information technologies in the XXI century. In the second part of this thesis, we identify resistance with technological decentralization as a mechanism to oppose and transform power. We will again inspire in Foucault to propose decentralized relational technologies that resist power and provoke social positive outcomes by impacting in the micro-physics of power relations.