The Pirate Party of Germany (PPG) and the Italian 5-Star Movement (5SM) are two digital movement parties that share several ideological features, including their roots in anti-establishment movements, their refusal to position themselves on the Left-Right spectrum, and their belief that the Internet increases the capacity of ordinary citizens for self-government and self-representation. To this end, both parties have adopted online participation platforms, which allow their members to contribute to the development of the party program, vote on strategic decisions, and propose policy initiatives. Given these affinities and given that both parties begun their political ascendancy in the same years, their antipodal political destinies-ascendency to power for the 5SM, downfall for the PPG-are all the more striking. This article accounts for this divergence by showing how the technopopulist orientation of both parties conceals in fact radically different conceptions of political participation and internal party democracy. To this end, it considers the role that different technopolitical cultures have played in shaping the organization of these two parties in their early stages, and how the subsequent adoption and use of online participation platforms has led to internal strife and bitter disputes within the PPG and increasing centralization within the 5SM.

This article focuses on the technological affordances and use of Rousseau, the decision-making platform of the second largest Italian political party, the Five Star Movement. Crossing an empirical observation of the platform’s functionalities with data regarding its use and qualitative data collected during the 2016 and 2017 national meetings of the Five Star Movement, the essay argues that Rousseau supports an emerging “direct parliamentarianism,” which allows party members to entertain an ostensibly direct relationship with the party in public office, at the expense, however, of deliberative processes that may allow them to influence the party agenda. Thus Rousseau leaves the deliberative, and strictly parliamentary moment in the hands of elected representatives and party leaders, leaving to the party base the task of choosing between options that have been defined elsewhere.

This article advances a new theory of the digital democratic affordance, a concept first introduced by Lincoln Dahlberg to devise a taxonomy of the democratic capacities of digital media applications. Whereas Dahlberg classifies digital media affordances on the basis of preexisting democratic positions, the article argues that the primary affordance of digital media is to abate the costs of political participation. This cost-reducing logic of digital media has diverging effects on political participation. On an institutional level, digital democracy applications allow elected representatives to monitor and consult their constituents, closing some gaps in the circuits of representation. On a societal level, digital media allow constituents to organize and represent their own interests directly. In the former case, digital affordances work instrumentally in the service of representative democracy; in the latter, digital democratic affordances provide a mobilized public with emerging tools that put pressure on the autonomy of representatives.

This article presents a brief genealogy and a theory of the 'improper name', defined as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups and individual authors. On the one hand, improper names provide anonymity and a medium for identification and mutual recognition to a subaltern social group. On the other hand, they enable those who do not have a voice of their own to acquire a symbolic power outside the boundaries of an institutional practice. By expressing a multiplicity of pragmatic and semiotic usages, improper names are collective assemblages of enunciation characterized by the proliferation of difference. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between the minor and the major mode, the article suggests that the improper should be thought of as a movement of deterritorialization of the proper. Kripke's anti-descriptivist theory of rigid designation has shown how proper names have the function of fixing a referent in all its possible universes through an initial baptism recognized by a community of speakers. Yet multiple appropriations of the same pseudonym show that proper names may also designate subjects that are not fully individuated. The article concludes by linking the notion of the improper to Gilbert Simondon's theory of subjectification as trans-individuation.