Ugur Aytac’s research while affiliated with Utrecht University and other places

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Publications (10)

What is the Point of Social Media? Corporate Purpose and Digital Democratization
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February 2025

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77 Reads

Philosophy & Technology

Ugur Aytac

This paper proposes a new normative framework to think about Big Tech reform. Focusing on the case of digital communication, I argue that rethinking the corporate purpose of social media companies is a distinctive entry point to the debate on how to render the powers of tech corporations democratically legitimate. I contend that we need to strive for a reform that redefines the corporate purpose of social media companies. In this view, their purpose should be to create and maintain a free, egalitarian, and democratic public sphere rather than profit seeking. This political reform democratically contains corporate power in two ways: first, the legally enforceable fiduciary duties of corporate boards are reconceptualized in relation to democratic purposes rather than shareholder interests. Second, corporate governance structures should be redesigned to ensure that the abstract purpose is realized through representatives whose incentives align with the existence of a democratic public sphere. My argument complements radical proposals such as platform socialism by drawing a connection between democratizing social media governance and identifying the proper purpose of social media companies.

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In Defense of Shirking in Capitalist Firms: Worker Resistance vs. Managerial Power

November 2023

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3 Reads

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2 Citations

Political Theory

Ugur Aytac

Shirking, the act of avoiding the demands of one’s job, is generally seen as unethical. Drawing on empirical evidence from the sociology of work, I develop a normative conception of shirking as a form of worker resistance against illegitimate managerial power. In doing so, I present a new approach to the political theory of the firm, which is more adversarial and agent-centered than available alternatives. It is more adversarial as it recognizes the political value of counterproductive and disruptive behavior in capitalist firms. It is more agent-centered because it theorizes the firm from the perspective of workers, asking what pro tanto reasons they have to shirk. I show that shirking under the structural domination of capitalism has diagnostic, agential, and epistemic values. The paper contributes to the wider methodological ambition to tailor political theorizing to the positionality of social actors by shifting attention from the institutional design of the firm to the methods of worker resistance.

Ideology Critique without Morality: A Radical Realist Approach

December 2022

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136 Reads

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51 Citations

American Political Science Association

UGUR AYTAC

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What is the point of ideology critique? Prominent Anglo-American philosophers recently proposed novel arguments for the view that ideology critique is moral critique, and ideologies are flawed insofar as they contribute to injustice or oppression. We criticize that view and make the case for an alternative and more empirically oriented approach, grounded in epistemic rather than moral commitments. We make two related claims: (a) ideology critique can debunk beliefs and practices by uncovering how, empirically, they are produced by self-justifying power and (b) the self-justification of power should be understood as an epistemic rather than moral flaw. Drawing on the recent realist revival in political theory, we argue that this genealogical approach has more radical potential, despite being more parsimonious than morality-based approaches. We demonstrate the relative advantages of our view by discussing the results of empirical studies on the contemporary phenomenon of neopatriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Two Conceptions of Legitimacy: A Response to Fabian Wendt's Moralist Critique of Political Realism

September 2022

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63 Reads

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2 Citations

Kriterion (Austria)

Uğur Aytaç

Fabian Wendt [20] argues that political realism is not capable of explaining how the state’s moral right to rule over its subjects is generated. I believe that Wendt’s criticism is not sound because his position relies on the false implicit assumption that realism and moralism ask the same philosophical questions on state authority. I contend that it is fallacious to evaluate the realist account of legitimacy by the standards of moralism, and vice versa, as these two accounts arrive at different conceptions of legitimacy by raising different sets of philosophical questions. The two sets of philosophical questions are not reducible to each other. The realist account of legitimacy does not aim to explain what the moralist account of legitimacy aims to explain.

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Digital Domination: Social Media and Contestatory Democracy

May 2022

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51 Reads

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34 Citations

Political Studies

Ugur Aytac

This article argues that social media companies’ power to regulate communication in the public sphere illustrates a novel type of domination. The idea is that, since social media companies can partially dictate the terms of citizens’ political participation in the public sphere, they can arbitrarily interfere with the choices individuals make qua citizens. I contend that social media companies dominate citizens in two different ways. First, I focus on the cases in which social media companies exercise direct control over political speech. They exercise quasi-public power over citizens because their regulation of speech on social media platforms implies the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with citizens’ democratic contestation in the political system. Second, companies’ algorithmic governance entails the capacity to interfere with citizens’ choices about what mode of discursive engagement they endorse in their relationships with fellow citizens. By raising the cost of deliberative engagement, companies narrow citizens’ choice menu.

Citations (8)

... Reordering the economy in pursuit of greater equality and popular influence is one, built for instance on a program of wealth taxes, land taxes, new forms of public ownership, and counter-oligarchic institutions (see, e.g., Brown and O'Neill 2024;Vergara 2020). As "big tech," algorithmic governance and AI become more powerful, asserting public control over corporate actors (Aytac 2024) and exploring alternative models such as "platform socialism" (Muldoon 2022) will only become more pressing. Contesting asymmetries of political power is another pertinent cause, extending from municipal and national government to transnational institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations (Koenig-Archibugi 2024; White 2023). ...

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The Future as a Democratic Resource
Big Tech, Algorithmic Power, and Democratic Control
  • Citing Article

  • February 2024

The Journal of Politics

Ugur Aytac

... This is changing. An emerging literature is making normative prescriptions based on political realist grounds with regard to a number of issues ranging from democracy to freedom, global capital, labor market shirking, and sovereign debt (for some examples, see Arlen and Rossi 2021;Aytac 2023a;2023b;Bagg 2022;Cross and Prinz 2023;Hall and Sleat 2017). I will employ what must arguably be a specific understanding of political realism and show not only that it can generate normative statements with regard to my topic here-admitting refugees-but also that it represents a better tool to do so than those offered by moralism. ...

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Morality in the Refugee Regime? Arguing for More (Political) Realism in Admitting Refugees
In Defense of Shirking in Capitalist Firms: Worker Resistance vs. Managerial Power
  • Citing Article

  • November 2023

Political Theory

Ugur Aytac

... The surge of interest around realism in political theory (e.g. Williams, 2005;Geuss, 2008;Galston, 2010;Horton, 2010;Philp, 2010;Sleat, 2010 andRossi, 2012; see also Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, 2012;Larmore, 2013;Baderin, 2014;Aytac and Rossi, 2023) further advances the thought that there is something distinctive about the political realm, so that political philosophy and theory cannot simply be applied ethics. ...

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How should we do Political Theory? Reading Rawls on Method
Ideology Critique without Morality: A Radical Realist Approach

American Political Science Association

UGUR AYTAC

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... Political philosophers, legal scholars, and business ethicists have been arguing for some time that Big Tech corporations enjoy quasi-governmental and democratically unaccountable powers (Taylor, 2021;Sharon, 2021;Aytac, 2024a;Oldenbourg, 2024). These powers pertain to, among others, arbitrary interference with online speech (Everett, 2018;Dwyer, 2020), algorithmic curation of public opinion U. Aytac (Christiano, 2022), and undue influence on public policy-making authorities due to the problematic levels of reliance on Big Tech services (Sharon, 2021). ...

Reference:

What is the Point of Social Media? Corporate Purpose and Digital Democratization
Digital Domination: Social Media and Contestatory Democracy
  • Citing Article

  • May 2022

Political Studies

Ugur Aytac

... These theorists argue that the earlier theories are based on the erroneous assumption that the relationship between the human species and its natural environment is fundamentally stable; they analyze national security threats posed by other states, but not threats without threateners, such as climate change; and they neglect to analyze the role of the politically powerful transnational capitalist class (TCC) in relation to the climate crisis (on this last topic, see Aytac 2022 and Gajevic Sayegh 2019a). Therefore, these theorists now advocate new forms of political Realism, which they describe as "environmental" (Lieven 2020), "ecological" (Patrick 2020), "progressive" (Bisley et al. 2022), and "radical" (Aytac 2022). Different Realist political theories make different assumptions, not only about currently actual and likely future circumstances, but also about motivations and conduct (what kinds are typical and what kinds are, or are not, possible). ...

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Global Climate Change: Political Realism and the Case for a World Climate Bank
Global political legitimacy and the structural power of capital
  • Citing Article

  • March 2022

Journal of Social Philosophy

Ugur Aytac

... I will keep this excessively brief and schematic. Spelled out properly, we may be talking about a new form of ideology critique (see Aytac and Rossi 2022), or perhaps even possibly an entirely new (and yet deeply familiar, modernist) way of practising social theory. 12 In the roughest outlines: such as psychoanalysis and other great genealogical adventures, radical realism is an exercise in suspicion. ...

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On Being a Realist about Migration
Ideology Critique without Moralism: A Radical Realist Approach
  • Citing Article

  • January 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal

Ugur Aytac

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... First of all, it differs from approaches that view antagonism as a basic point of their analysis and typically hold antagonism to be a condition of possibility (e.g., "our ontological condition" (Mouffe, 2005: 16); as such a condition, it becomes a condition of political intelligibility according to Schmitt (2007) or intelligibility as such according to Laclau and Mouffe (2001). The inability to problematize and analyze this starting point causes a certain limitation of their approaches, which have been criticized for voluntarism and relativism (e.g., Kapoor, 2002;Aytac, 2021), the inability to provide a sufficient methodological basis for differentiating antagonism and its tamed agonistic manifestation (a conflict where conflictual parties can admit their defeat being bound by the shared norms of the general political setting) (Ibrahimy, 2014) and the insufficient explanation of the dynamics between antagonistic and agonistic conflicts (August, 2022). Contrary to this strategy, our Nancy-inspired approach can be seen as contributing to our understanding of the nature and the role of antagonism since it also offers an ontology of antagonism that demonstrates why and most importantly how it occurs and develops in the midst of everydayness. ...

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Sharing Antagonisms: A Reelaboration of Nancy’s Political Philosophy
On the limits of the political: The problem of overly permissive pluralism in Mouffe's agonism

Constellations

Ugur Aytac

... Traditionally, a constitution has been understood as the answer to popular sovereignty. 1 This may be called the liberal-constitutional justification of state legitimacy. 2 It is recognized that the exercise of political power is only justified by license from those over whom is being ruled. ...

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Revisiting Kumm's Cosmopolitan Constitutionalism
Two Conceptions of Legitimacy: A Response to Fabian Wendt's Moralist Critique of Political Realism

Kriterion (Austria)

Uğur Aytaç