Abstract
ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of the digital blender to comprehensively address the extent to which digital technologies further authoritarian practices and power beyond the state. By focusing on the primarily commercial nature of digital technologies, and their reciprocal transformational political economic embeddedness, the digital blender allows to highlight the role of private companies in enabling practices that are detrimental to democratic values and processes, irrespective of the formal regime-type context of a given polity, and less confined by national borders. While previous discussions primarily focus on digital technologies as mere tools at the discretion of their master, this relational perspective allows for the incorporation of transnational non-state actors and dynamics in constituting and contesting manifestations of authoritarian power beyond the state. These dynamics will be illustrated and discussed in light of insights into recent incidents involving companies such as Cambridge Analytica, Meta Platforms Inc., and the NSO Group.
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