Violence in the Digital Age

The digital age transformed the traditional forms of violence but also caused new ones. The hopes to overcome the negative sides of the human community in the age of Internet and social networks have come true only to a certain degree. New 'weaker' and more democratic communication modes reproduce the system of control and overall oppressing structure of victimization, but in an even more inclusive sense. At the same time, there is a number of other pressing issues: those of property, data protection and users' safety; they all should be dealt with both by state institutions, non-governmental organizations and common content holders on the one hand, and by Internet providers and big e-commerce businesses' owners on the other. From this perspective, we would like to re-define violence problematics without reducing it to state-legal legitimization and ethical strategies of nonviolence, its moral condemnation and negative representation.

The discussion will be focusing on the interpretation of "positive" understanding of violence clarifying the meaning of Walter Benjamin's "pure violence" in the digital age, and considering it in a broad interdisciplinary field of social, humanitarian, medical, biological, cognitive and neuroscience, legal and digital culture, media art and a new philosophy. By deconstructing the traditional ontological, theological, legal, biological-anthropological and social justification of violence, explained by the "evil" nature of man, we expect to bridge the gap between the longing of humankind for individual justice and even deeper nostalgia for times when the establishment of justice did not result collective violence.