Articoli di riviste sul tema "Reformation – Switzerland"

The article was written within the framework of a research project “Protestant Church Architecture of the 16th -18th centuries in Europe”, conducted by the Department of the Renaissance and Reformation Art History at the University of Wrocław. It is conceived as a preliminary summary of the project’s outcomes. The project’s principal research objective is to develop a synthesis of Protestant church architecture in the countries which accepted, even temporarily, the Reformation: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Island, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Sweden and The Netherlands. Particular emphasis is placed on the development of spatial and functional solutions (specifically ground plans: longitudinal, transverse rectangular, oval, circular, Latin- and Greek-cross, ground plans similar to the letters “L” and “T”) and the placement of liturgical furnishing elements within the church space (altars, pulpits, baptismal fonts and organs).

This study presents an overview of the institutions and forms of higher education in Switzerland. In addition to the University of Basel, founded in 1460, the author deals with Protestant Hohen Schulen (academies) (established in Zurich in 1525, in Bern in 1528, in Lausanne in 1537, and in Geneva in 1559) and Jesuit colleges which were founded between the last third of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth century. Apart from the Basel university, which was transformed into a Protestant university after the Reformation, Swiss Protestants had no possibility of studying law or medicine or even obtaining an academic degree in their own country. The Protestant academies were essentially training centres for the next generation of pastors and the same applied to the Jesuit colleges, which likewise granted no university privileges. Many students therefore had to seek academic training in the neighbouring countries. Both the University of Basel and the Protestant academies (though less so the Jesuit colleges) nevertheless attracted high numbers of foreign students, especially religious refugees who immigrated to Switzerland in several waves from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, initially from Italy and England, but later also from France, Savoy-Piedmont, and Hungary. As a result, all Protestant educational institutions functioned as ‘exile colleges’ until the early eighteenth century. This specific situation of institutions of higher learning remained largely in place until the end of the nineteenth century – largely in consequence of the peculiarities of Switzerland’s strong federal constitution.

Historians frequently dismiss any use of the term nationalism in the pre-modern period as conceptually illegitimate. In the early Reformation in Germany, the welter of confusing and competing terms to describe Luther’s audience—“nation,” “tongue,” “fatherland,” patria—appears to confirm that scepticism. At a regional level, however, where the descriptor Land lacks a precise English equivalent, a consciousness of local identity with undeniable “nationalist” connotations can be discerned, especially in the South-West borderlands with francophone areas. Yet this self-perception sits uneasily with comparable manifestations in Switzerland, where identity was not shaped agonistically over against “foreigners,” but was instead deployed by Zwingli and Bullinger to affirm a heroic past epitomized by valiant defence of true religion. Dans leurs études sur les périodes prémodernes, les historiens mettent le plus souvent de côté le terme « nationalisme », jugé anachronique. Dans les débuts de la Réforme en Allemagne, une panoplie d’expressions déroutantes et concurrentes décrivait le public de Luther — « nation », « langue », « patrie », « pays » —, ce qui semble confirmer cette réticence. Toutefois, au niveau régional, alors que l’Anglais ne possède pas d’équivalent précis pour le terme « Land », on discerne une veritable conscience identitaire locale, aux connotations nationalistes indéniables, en particulier pour ce qui est des régions frontalières francophones du sud-ouest. Cependant, cette auto perception se compare difficilement avec des phénomènes similaires observables en Suisse, où ce type d’identité ne s’est pas construit de façon agonistique en opposition à l’étranger, mais plutôt, sous l’égide de Zwingli et de Bullinger, afin d’établir un passé héroïque marqué par la défense de la vraie religion.

AbstractThis article examines Karl Barth's earliest engagements with Pietism, rationalism and liberal Protestantism against the backdrop of the theologies of Albrecht Ritschl and Wilhelm Herrmann. The analysis then follows Barth through his rejection of liberal theology and his development of a dialectical theology over against Wilhelm Herrmann and with particular reference to Martin Luther's theologia crucis. The article concludes by examining Barth's comments on religious experience to a group of Methodist pastors in Switzerland in 1961.

Can cultural differences affect economic change? Max Weber famously argued that ascetic Protestants’ religious commitments—specifically their work ethic—inspired them to develop capitalist economic systems conducive to rapid economic change. Yet today, scholars continue to debate the empirical validity of Weber’s claims, which address a vibrant literature in political economy on the relationship between culture and economic change. We revisit the link between religion and economic change in Reformed Europe. To do so, we leverage a quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where certain regions had Reformed Protestant beliefs imposed on them by local authorities during the Swiss Reformation, while other regions remained Catholic. Using 19th-century Swiss census data, we perform a fuzzy spatial regression discontinuity design to test Weber’s hypothesis and find that the Swiss Protestants in the Canton of Vaud industrialized faster than their Catholic neighbors in Fribourg.

One of the most challenging historical debates in early modern German history of recent years has been the ‘communalism thesis’ propounded by Peter Blickle, a German historian now teaching in Bern. The term ‘communalism’ was coined to designate attempts to achieve autonomous self-government in town and country during the Reformation period, and draws on an older historiographical tradition which stressed an inherent dualism at all levels of constitutional development between a corporate principle and one based on domination (Herrschaft). The former was founded on the equality of all members sharing common rights and obligations in a form of collective association. In late-medieval Germany the basic form of association in both town and country was the commune (Gemeinde), which possessed, or sought to possess, autochthonous rights to regulate its own affairs. This included the administration of justice, maintenance of peace within the community, economic functions such as distribution of common land or grazing, administration of church finances and church fabric, and in some places communal appointment of pastors. All these communal functions were justified by an appeal to the ideal of the ‘common good’ (gemein nutz), to which all individual self-interest (eigen nutz) was to be strictly subordinate. Thus, the commune appeared to be a fundamental building block of premodern German society.

Early sixteenth-century Germany and Switzerland witnessed, amongst their peasants, a growing dissatisfaction with economic exploitation and the increasing power of political rulers. The Protestant Reformation at the time had a profound influence on the moulding of this dissatisfaction into a right to demand the enforcement of divine justice. The Swiss reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, provided parallels for the demands of the peasants, while the German reformers, Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, criticized the rebellious methods of the peasantry. Against this background the young Swiss reformer, Heinrich Bullinger, responded more positively towards the claims of the peasants by opposing the views of the Lutheran reformers in his play ‘Lucretia and Brutus’. In this drama, Bullinger propounds the first steps towards the development of his federal theory of politics by advancing the idea of oath-taking as the mechanism for transforming the monarchy into a Christian republic. The idea of oath-taking was destined to become a most important device in early modern politics, used to combat tyranny and to promote the idea of republicanism.

The article analyses the fundamental research “Multilateralism in Transition: Challenges and Opportunities for the OSCE”, prepared by a team of Swiss experts under the leadership of the renowned Swiss diplomat Thomas Greminger (the Permanent Representative of Switzerland to the OSCE, the UN and the International Organizations in Vienna). The fact that T. Greminger served as Secretary General of the OSCE from 2017 to 2020 gives added value to the research. This created a unique opportunity to combine in the research his vast experience, personal impressions from the observance of the “internal kitchen” of the Organization and his analyses of the main directions of the work of the OSCE. The research focuses on the central problems of the OSCE’s activities- preservation of the European security, prevention and regulation of conflicts, new challenges to the European security, strategic partnership of the OSCE with major international organizations, introduction of modern technologies to the operational activities of the Organization, reformation and modernization of the OSCE’ s management system and operational functions. Special attention is payed to the revitalization of the OSCE Structured Dialogue ‒ the main platform for discussions of the most important politico-military problems and confidence-building measures, exchange of information on current perceptions of threat, military capacity, de-escalation measures, best practices for the prevention and improved management of military incidents. The book contains a positive assessment of the concept of cooperative actions aimed at a collective response to the new challenges to the European security: climate change and environment destruction, impact of technology on the societies, illegal migration, pandemics, cross- border organised crime, cyber threats, nuclear security. The authors of the book consider that the collective security initiative could stimulate trust, convergence of interests of participating states and finally would improve European security through cooperation. They also bring to attention the problems of the longstanding reform of the OSCE through presentation of the ten-point reform agenda, including management reform of the OSCE Secretariat, reform of the budget cycle, information security and automating work processes. leveraging partnerships with international and regional organizations.

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to provide proposals for improving the legal regulation ofthe competence and powers of public administration subjects involved in the implementation ofstate policy in the field of ensuring food security of Ukraine.Methodology. The methodological base of the research consists of general and special methods ofscientific knowledge, and in particular: comparative, systemic-structural, formal-logical methods.Their application made it possible to comprehensively analyze the researched issues, as well assystematically and consistently approach the disclosure of the research tasks.Results. The first section of the article provides a description of the current state of legislativeregulation of the institutional mechanism of public administration in the field of ensuring foodsecurity of the Ukrainian state, and also focuses attention on its shortcomings.The second part of the article is devoted to the study of the institutional mechanism of publicadministration in the field of ensuring food security of the state in some member states of theEuropean Union (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France). The third section of the article is devoted to proposals for strengthening the institutional mechanismof public administration in the field of food security of Ukraine.Conclusions. In the conclusions to the article it is stated that the institutional mechanism of publicadministration in the field of food security of Ukraine needs thorough reformation. A comparativelegal study of the mechanisms of institutional provision of food security in the leading memberstates of the European Union made it possible to conclude that the formation and implementationof state policy in the field of ensuring food security of Ukraine should be carried out by anextensive system of public administration entities that must ensure effective administration in thisfield at: international, national, municipal levels. This system includes: entities that carry outgeneral coordination and determine the goals and objectives of state policy in this area (Presidentof Ukraine, Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine); entities that directly form and implement statepolicy in this area: a) Ministry of Agrarian Policy of Ukraine and ministries that carry out publicadministration in related areas; b) central bodies of the executive power (State Agency, StateForestry Agency, State Production and Consumer Service); c) local state administrations; d) localself-government bodies; e) private individuals, subjects with delegated powers. The competenceand authority of the specified system of public administration entities in the field of ensuring foodsecurity of Ukraine should find its proper reflection and regulation at the level of the special lawon food security of Ukraine.

This journal examines the historical description of Ulrich Zwingli's thoughts on church reform, especially after Martin Luther. And the results of the research provide new thinking that was left behind towards the reforms at that time. Though doctrinal thought began to move away from the papal hierarchy, but there are still things that were maintained by the reformers, and until now in the modern era it seems to be running (held), namely the practice of infant baptism, and the concept of the relationship between church and state. It's just that the results of this research are not more there, because the focus is solely on searching. There are many other sources that review Zwingli's actions in his involvement in removing other groups of believers (read: Anabaptists) from the church decisions that he fought for after the reformation. Because the concrete evidence has not shown the accuracy of the event, the author only focuses on his thoughts, specifically confronting his thoughts with the previous proclaimer of reform, namely Martin Luther. In this study, the background of the character, Zwingli's movement in Switzerland in an effort to reform the church will also be described successively as an extension of the previous important figures. In another section, Zwingli's thoughts which are the reasons for the reform of the church will be presented, Zwingli is slightly different from his predecessors in post-reform theology from Luther's. This journal uses a descriptive-historical qualitative approach, it is said that because the author examines it by tracing the sources contained in the literature regarding the characters studied, and linking them to the church today. Of course there will be limitations in the study, that's why the author hopes that there will be further research on this church figure, especially in other studiesJurnal ini mengkaji uraian historis terhadap pemikiran Ulrich Zwingli mengenai reformasi gereja khususnya setelah Martin Luther. Banyak sumber yang mengulas tentang sepak terjang Zwingli dalam keterlibatannya menyingkirkan kelompok orang percaya lainnya (baca: Anabaptis) dari ketetapan gereja yang diperjuangkannya pasca reformasi. Oleh sebab bukti-bukti konkrit belum menunjukkan keakuratan terhadap pristiwa tersebut, penulis hanya menyoroti pemikiran-pemikirannya, secara khusus mengkonfrontasikan pemikirannya dengan proklamator reformasi sebelumnya, yakni Martin Luther. Dalam kajian ini juga akan dipaparkan secara berturut-turut tentang latar belakang tokoh, pergerakan Zwingli di Swiss dalam upaya pembaharuan gereja sebagai perluasan dari tokoh-tokoh penting sebelumnya. Di bagian lain pemikiran-pemikiran Zwingli yang menjadi alasan reformasi gereja akan dipaparkan, Zwingli sedikit berbeda dengan pendahulunya dalam berteologi asca reformasi. Jurnal ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif deskritif – historis, dikatakan demikian karena penulis mengkaji dengan menelusuri sumber-sumber yang terdapat di literartur mengenai tokoh yang diteliti, dan mengkaitkan kepada gereja di masa kini. Tentunya aka nada keterbatasan dalam pengkajiannya, itu sebabnya penulis berharap aka nada penelitian lanjut terhadap tokoh gereja ini, khususnya dalam kajian yang lain.

Lietuvos nacionalinė Martyno Mažvydo bibliotekaGedimino pr. 51, LT-01504 Vilnius, LietuvaEl. paštas: viktorija.vait@gmail.comStraipsnyje nagrinėjami Lietuvos nacionalinės Martyno Mažvydo bibliotekos Retų knygų ir rankraščių skyriaus paleotipai: jų leidimo vieta, spaustuvininkai, tematika bei proveniencijos, dėmesį telkiant į retesnius, Lietuvos knygos kultūrai svarbesnius leidinius. Iš šiame skyriuje saugomų daugiau kaip 800 paleotipų analizuojama tik dalis jų, nes daugiau negu 200 knygų teturi kortelinį bibliografinį aprašą ir išsamiai juos ištirti šiuo metu neįmanoma. Dalies šių paleotipų analizė papildo jau esamus tyrimus, praplečia senosios knygos kultūros vaizdą.Reikšminiai žodžiai: knygotyra, paleotipai, retos knygos, spaustuvininkai, proveniencijos.THE COLLECTION OF POST-INCUNABULA IN THE MARTYNAS MAŽVYDAS NATIONAL LIBRARY OF LITHUANIAViktorija VAITKEVIČIŪTĖ AbstractPost-incunabula or the books printed in the first half of the 16th century (from January 1, 1501 to January 1, 1551), along with incunabula, are considered to be the oldest and most valuable publications in the world. Due to their likeness to incunabula and publishing specifics, post-incunabula are considered to be historical treasures and monuments of culture. The Rare Book and Manuscript Department of the National Library of Lithuania has in its holdings more than 800 post-incunabula, not including the ones kept at the Department of the National Archival Fund of Published Documents. The exact number is still unknown, since not all the books have been included into the electronic catalogue: more than 200 of them have only a card catalogue description and are awaiting a more detailed study. This article analyses specific features of part of the post-incunabula collection in the NLL Rare Book and Manuscript Department: their place of publication, publishers, thematics and provenances. Principal attention is accorded to the books that are rarer, more interesting and more important for Lithuania’s culture and book culture in general.The most of the post-incunabula kept in the Rare Book and Manuscript Department were published in Germany, many in Switzerland, France and Italy. There also is a small number of post-incunabula published in Poland (Cracow). Of the publications produced by Cracow’s printers, the article discusses those by Jan Haller (ca. 1467–1525), Hieronim Wietor (ca. 1480–1546) and Florian Ungler (d. 1536). It is necessary to mention Aldines – the publications by one of themost famous European printers, Aldo Manuzio (Lat. Aldus Manutius; ca. 1450–1515) and by his descendants. The article also touches upon the work of such acclaimed French publishers as Henri Estienne (lat. Henricus Stephanus, ca. 1460–1520), founder of the famous dinasty of printers, and the Lyonese printer Sébastien Gryphius (ca. 1493–1556). The Rare Book and Manuscript Department also keeps quite a few post-incunabula published by Johannes Frobenof Basel (1460–1537).As to the content aspect, the collection of post-incunabula in the department is versatile. For the most part, it is made up by religious literature: sermons, bibles, theological treatises, Church Fathers’ writings. There are many works by and commentaries on classical authors, of whom Cicero, at the time of the Renaissance viewed as the greatest authority on rhetoric, is the most famous one. The post-incunabula collection illuminates the emergence of the Reformations and the related spread of new ideas in the first half of the XVIth century. The Rare Book and Manuscript Department boasts a number of works by the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther (1483–1546) and by the most acclaimed humanist of the times, Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536).The provenances in the post-incunabula (manuscript inscriptions, stamps, bookplates) provide much interesting information. Most often found are ownership marks of the establishments that since the olden times had been preserving books: various monasteries, churches and priest seminaries,. The notable representative of the post-incunabulum culture is the Bernardine Order. According to the electronic catalogue, the Rare Book and Manuscript Departmenthas in its holdings 21 post-incunabula formerly kept by the library of the Tytuvėnai Bernardine Monastery. Most provenance inscriptions are from Kaunas Priest Seminary, the library of the Samogitian Priest Seminary, the library of the Vilnius Seminary and Kražiai College. Of the XIXth century personal libraries,particularly noteworthy are the collections of Jonas Krizostomas Gintila (1788–1857), XIXth-century bibliophile, hebraist and administrator of the Samogitian Diocese, and of Friedrich August Gotthold (1778–1858), educator and music theorist. A separate, rather abundant group of provenance inscriptions consists of the books that formerly belonged to Königsberg University. An in-depth study of all the post-incunabula kept in the NLL would significantly add to the existing research and broaden the understanding of old book culture.

Teaching Writing in English as a Foreign Language: Teachers’ Cognition Formation and ReformationH. Zhao and L. J. Zhang. Springer Nature, Switzerland (2022).XXII + 178 pp., € 106.99, ISBN: 978-3-030-99991-9

Transconfessionalism, constructivism and Karel Schoeman (1939–2017) on Cape pietism. The South African historiographer Karel Schoeman’s (1939–2017) research on 17th and 18thcentury ecclesiastical life and Protestant spirituality at the Cape is embedded in the context of transconfessional and transnational pietism research. As such, Schoeman’s transconfessional approach produces important correctives to traditional constructivist pietism approaches. Schoeman’s approach enables him to study Cape Protestant spirituality of the 17th and 18th centuries within the context of pietism being the most significant devotional movement (Frommigkeitsbewegung) of Protestantism after the Reformation, manifesting pietism primarily as a religious phenomenon with astonishing spatial, temporal, social, spiritual, churchconfessional and theological complexities that arose around the turn of the 16th to the 17th century from criticism of the existing ecclesiastical and spiritual relations at nearly the same time in England, the Netherlands and Germany. From there it spread to Switzerland, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the United States. It contributed to a great extent to the worldwide Protestant mission and has remained an active movement into the present.

Theocracy: views on Calvin and the Confessio Belgica, art. 36 – a contribution to an important debate John Calvin is often seen as a supporter of theocracy and the Dutch Confession of Faith (Confessio Belgica) art. 36 as a theocratic confession. This article looks at the views of various authors on this matter and comes to the conclusion that Calvin was not a supporter of a theocracy and the Dutch Confession, art. 36 is not a theocratic confession either. The question is then asked where the views of Calvin, the Dutch Confession and various countries (inter alia Switzerland, and the Nether-lands) at the time of the Reformation on the relationship be-tween church and state came from. As an answer to this ques-tion the argument is put that, in reaction to the theocracy of the Roman Catholic Church (as can been found in the Corpus Iuris Canonici), it was a returned the historical view on church and state that had been current since the time of Constantine. These views were also applied in South Africa from 1652-1994. An attempt is also made to show what was new in Calvin’s views on church and state.

One of the avatars of the Return of the Dead occurs in Europe as their Procession. It is attributed to the so-called Birth of the Purgatory in the 12th–13th centuries, which reinvested older cohorts of “Phantom-Bodies”, say the Wild Hunt. Related to this “theoria”, motif D1825.7.1. Person sees phantom funeral procession some time before the actual procession takes place, is endowed with D1825.6.: Magic power to “see” who will die during coming year. In spite of their disbelief in the Purgatory, Protestant countries, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, England, etc., currently meet this Procession of the Dead (compare Totenprozession, in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, 13, 820, which forgot more Southern Romance Processions). As precursors of the Reformation (since the 12th-13th century), Waldensians were more efficient in wiping out revenants from their Refuge in the Piedmont Alps. As for India, except an indexing by Thompson and Balys (1958) for a pair of narratives, there was nothing else available. Present fieldwork in Hindu and shamanisic Nepal elicited new data, including ones with death divination. And the least surprising was not that Tibeto-Burman Newar tradition made of the five Hindu male Pandavas a cultural melting “theoria” of five malevolent female spirits, the Panchabhāya, which meets Tibetan Dākinīs. All these Phantom-Bodies’ Processions were not considered as deliration, but as non-delusional reports, as neurally real as phantom limbs. The BRAINCUBUS model framework offers an interface between Folkloristics and Neuroscience, a theory allowing the grounding of such over-intuitive experience-centered narratives, giving fair prevalence, worldwide, to the “4th brain state” diagnosed as sleep paralysis.

Introduction This article is a study in anxiety with regard to social online spaces (SOS) conceived of as dark. There are two possible ways to define ‘dark’ in this context. The first is that communication is dark because it either has limited distribution, is not open to all users (closed groups are a case example) or hidden. The second definition, linked as a result of the first, is the way that communication via these means is interpreted and understood. Dark social spaces disrupt the accepted top-down flow by the ‘gazing elite’ (data aggregators including social media), but anxious users might need to strain to notice what is out there, and this in turn destabilises one’s reception of the scene. In an environment where surveillance technologies are proliferating, this article examines contemporary, dark, interconnected, and interactive communications for the entangled affordances that might be brought to bear. A provocation is that resistance through counterveillance or “sousveillance” is one possibility. An alternative (or addition) is retreating to or building ‘dark’ spaces that are less surveilled and (perhaps counterintuitively) less fearful. This article considers critically the notion of dark social online spaces via four broad socio-technical concerns connected to the big social media services that have helped increase a tendency for fearful anxiety produced by surveillance and the perceived implications for personal privacy. It also shines light on the aspect of darkness where some users are spurred to actively seek alternative, dark social online spaces. Since the 1970s, public-key cryptosystems typically preserved security for websites, emails, and sensitive health, government, and military data, but this is now reduced (Williams). We have seen such systems exploited via cyberattacks and misappropriated data acquired by affiliations such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US elections. Via the notion of “parasitic strategies”, such events can be described as news/information hacks “whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies” (von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 88). In accord with Wilson and Serisier’s arguments (178), emerging technologies facilitate rapid data sharing, collection, storage, and processing wherein subsequent “outcomes are unpredictable”. This would also include the effect of acquiescence. In regard to our digital devices, for some, being watched overtly—through cameras encased in toys, computers, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) to digital street ads that determine the resonance of human emotions in public places including bus stops, malls, and train stations—is becoming normalised (McStay, Emotional AI). It might appear that consumers immersed within this Internet of Things (IoT) are themselves comfortable interacting with devices that record sound and capture images for easy analysis and distribution across the communications networks. A counter-claim is that mainstream social media corporations have cultivated a sense of digital resignation “produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper and Turow, 1824). Careful consumers’ trust in mainstream media is waning, with readers observing a strong presence of big media players in the industry and are carefully picking their publications and public intellectuals to follow (Mahmood, 6). A number now also avoid the mainstream internet in favour of alternate dark sites. This is done by users with “varying backgrounds, motivations and participation behaviours that may be idiosyncratic (as they are rooted in the respective person’s biography and circumstance)” (Quandt, 42). By way of connection with dark internet studies via Biddle et al. (1; see also Lasica), the “darknet” is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content … not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. As we note from the quote above, the “dark web” uses existing public and private networks that facilitate communication via the Internet. Gehl (1220; see also Gehl and McKelvey) has detailed that this includes “hidden sites that end in ‘.onion’ or ‘.i2p’ or other Top-Level Domain names only available through modified browsers or special software. Accessing I2P sites requires a special routing program ... . Accessing .onion sites requires Tor [The Onion Router]”. For some, this gives rise to social anxiety, read here as stemming from that which is not known, and an exaggerated sense of danger, which makes fight or flight seem the only options. This is often justified or exacerbated by the changing media and communication landscape and depicted in popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma or The Great Hack, which affect public opinion on the unknown aspects of internet spaces and the uses of personal data. The question for this article remains whether the fear of the dark is justified. Consider that most often one will choose to make one’s intimate bedroom space dark in order to have a good night’s rest. We might pleasurably escape into a cinema’s darkness for the stories told therein, or walk along a beach at night enjoying unseen breezes. Most do not avoid these experiences, choosing to actively seek them out. Drawing this thread, then, is the case made here that agency can also be found in the dark by resisting socio-political structural harms. 1. Digital Futures and Anxiety of the Dark Fear of the darkI have a constant fear that something's always nearFear of the darkFear of the darkI have a phobia that someone's always there In the lyrics to the song “Fear of the Dark” (1992) by British heavy metal group Iron Maiden is a sense that that which is unknown and unseen causes fear and anxiety. Holding a fear of the dark is not unusual and varies in degree for adults as it does for children (Fellous and Arbib). Such anxiety connected to the dark does not always concern darkness itself. It can also be a concern for the possible or imagined dangers that are concealed by the darkness itself as a result of cognitive-emotional interactions (McDonald, 16). Extending this claim is this article’s non-binary assertion that while for some technology and what it can do is frequently misunderstood and shunned as a result, for others who embrace the possibilities and actively take it on it is learning by attentively partaking. Mistakes, solecism, and frustrations are part of the process. Such conceptual theorising falls along a continuum of thinking. Global interconnectivity of communications networks has certainly led to consequent concerns (Turkle Alone Together). Much focus for anxiety has been on the impact upon social and individual inner lives, levels of media concentration, and power over and commercialisation of the internet. Of specific note is that increasing commercial media influence—such as Facebook and its acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Instagram, CRTL-labs (translating movements and neural impulses into digital signals), LiveRail (video advertising technology), Chainspace (Blockchain)—regularly changes the overall dynamics of the online environment (Turow and Kavanaugh). This provocation was born out recently when Facebook disrupted the delivery of news to Australian audiences via its service. Mainstream social online spaces (SOS) are platforms which provide more than the delivery of media alone and have been conceptualised predominantly in a binary light. On the one hand, they can be depicted as tools for the common good of society through notional widespread access and as places for civic participation and discussion, identity expression, education, and community formation (Turkle; Bruns; Cinque and Brown; Jenkins). This end of the continuum of thinking about SOS seems set hard against the view that SOS are operating as businesses with strategies that manipulate consumers to generate revenue through advertising, data, venture capital for advanced research and development, and company profit, on the other hand. In between the two polar ends of this continuum are the range of other possibilities, the shades of grey, that add contemporary nuance to understanding SOS in regard to what they facilitate, what the various implications might be, and for whom. By way of a brief summary, anxiety of the dark is steeped in the practices of privacy-invasive social media giants such as Facebook and its ancillary companies. Second are the advertising technology companies, surveillance contractors, and intelligence agencies that collect and monitor our actions and related data; as well as the increased ease of use and interoperability brought about by Web 2.0 that has seen a disconnection between technological infrastructure and social connection that acts to limit user permissions and online affordances. Third are concerns for the negative effects associated with depressed mental health and wellbeing caused by “psychologically damaging social networks”, through sleep loss, anxiety, poor body image, real world relationships, and the fear of missing out (FOMO; Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement). Here the harms are both individual and societal. Fourth is the intended acceleration toward post-quantum IoT (Fernández-Caramés), as quantum computing’s digital components are continually being miniaturised. This is coupled with advances in electrical battery capacity and interconnected telecommunications infrastructures. The result of such is that the ontogenetic capacity of the powerfully advanced network/s affords supralevel surveillance. What this means is that through devices and the services that they provide, individuals’ data is commodified (Neff and Nafus; Nissenbaum and Patterson). Personal data is enmeshed in ‘things’ requiring that the decisions that are both overt, subtle, and/or hidden (dark) are scrutinised for the various ways they shape social norms and create consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society (Gillespie). Data and personal information are retrievable from devices, sharable in SOS, and potentially exposed across networks. For these reasons, some have chosen to go dark by being “off the grid”, judiciously selecting their means of communications and their ‘friends’ carefully. 2. Is There Room for Privacy Any More When Everyone in SOS Is Watching? An interesting turn comes through counterarguments against overarching institutional surveillance that underscore the uses of technologies to watch the watchers. This involves a practice of counter-surveillance whereby technologies are tools of resistance to go ‘dark’ and are used by political activists in protest situations for both communication and avoiding surveillance. This is not new and has long existed in an increasingly dispersed media landscape (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes). For example, counter-surveillance video footage has been accessed and made available via live-streaming channels, with commentary in SOS augmenting networking possibilities for niche interest groups or micropublics (Wilson and Serisier, 178). A further example is the Wordpress site Fitwatch, appealing for an end to what the site claims are issues associated with police surveillance (fitwatch.org.uk and endpolicesurveillance.wordpress.com). Users of these sites are called to post police officers’ identity numbers and photographs in an attempt to identify “cops” that might act to “misuse” UK Anti-terrorism legislation against activists during legitimate protests. Others that might be interested in doing their own “monitoring” are invited to reach out to identified personal email addresses or other private (dark) messaging software and application services such as Telegram (freeware and cross-platform). In their work on surveillance, Mann and Ferenbok (18) propose that there is an increase in “complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies”. By way of critical definition, Mann and Ferenbok (25) clarify that “where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance, but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance”. It is the aspect of sousveillance that is empowering to those using dark SOS. One might consider that not all surveillance is “bad” nor institutionalised. It is neither overtly nor formally regulated—as yet. Like most technologies, many of the surveillant technologies are value-neutral until applied towards specific uses, according to Mann and Ferenbok (18). But this is part of the ‘grey area’ for understanding the impact of dark SOS in regard to which actors or what nations are developing tools for surveillance, where access and control lies, and with what effects into the future. 3. Big Brother Watches, So What Are the Alternatives: Whither the Gazing Elite in Dark SOS? By way of conceptual genealogy, consideration of contemporary perceptions of surveillance in a visually networked society (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes) might be usefully explored through a revisitation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, applied here as a metaphor for contemporary surveillance. Arguably, this is a foundational theoretical model for integrated methods of social control (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 192-211), realised in the “panopticon” (prison) in 1787 by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham and Božovič, 29-95) during a period of social reformation aimed at the improvement of the individual. Like the power for social control over the incarcerated in a panopticon, police power, in order that it be effectively exercised, “had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible … like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 213–4). In grappling with the impact of SOS for the individual and the collective in post-digital times, we can trace out these early ruminations on the complex documentary organisation through state-controlled apparatuses (such as inspectors and paid observers including “secret agents”) via Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 214; Subject and Power, 326-7) for comparison to commercial operators like Facebook. Today, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition technology (FRT), and closed-circuit television (CCTV) for video surveillance are used for social control of appropriate behaviours. Exemplified by governments and the private sector is the use of combined technologies to maintain social order, from ensuring citizens cross the street only on green lights, to putting rubbish in the correct recycling bin or be publicly shamed, to making cashless payments in stores. The actions see advantages for individual and collective safety, sustainability, and convenience, but also register forms of behaviour and attitudes with predictive capacities. This gives rise to suspicions about a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour over time. Returning to Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 135), the impact of this finds a dissociation of power from the individual, whereby they become unwittingly impelled into pre-existing social structures, leading to a ‘normalisation’ and acceptance of such systems. If we are talking about the dark, anxiety is key for a Ministry of SOS. Following Foucault again (Subject and Power, 326-7), there is the potential for a crawling, creeping governance that was once distinct but is itself increasingly hidden and growing. A blanket call for some form of ongoing scrutiny of such proliferating powers might be warranted, but with it comes regulation that, while offering certain rights and protections, is not without consequences. For their part, a number of SOS platforms had little to no moderation for explicit content prior to December 2018, and in terms of power, notwithstanding important anxiety connected to arguments that children and the vulnerable need protections from those that would seek to take advantage, this was a crucial aspect of community building and self-expression that resulted in this freedom of expression. In unearthing the extent that individuals are empowered arising from the capacity to post sexual self-images, Tiidenberg ("Bringing Sexy Back") considered that through dark SOS (read here as unregulated) some users could work in opposition to the mainstream consumer culture that provides select and limited representations of bodies and their sexualities. This links directly to Mondin’s exploration of the abundance of queer and feminist pornography on dark SOS as a “counterpolitics of visibility” (288). This work resulted in a reasoned claim that the technological structure of dark SOS created a highly political and affective social space that users valued. What also needs to be underscored is that many users also believed that such a space could not be replicated on other mainstream SOS because of the differences in architecture and social norms. Cho (47) worked with this theory to claim that dark SOS are modern-day examples in a history of queer individuals having to rely on “underground economies of expression and relation”. Discussions such as these complicate what dark SOS might now become in the face of ‘adult’ content moderation and emerging tracking technologies to close sites or locate individuals that transgress social norms. Further, broader questions are raised about how content moderation fits in with the public space conceptualisations of SOS more generally. Increasingly, “there is an app for that” where being able to identify the poster of an image or an author of an unknown text is seen as crucial. While there is presently no standard approach, models for combining instance-based and profile-based features such as SVM for determining authorship attribution are in development, with the result that potentially far less content will remain hidden in the future (Bacciu et al.). 4. There’s Nothing New under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For some, “[the] high hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded” (Schwarzenegger, 99). My participant observation over some years in various SOS, however, finds that critical concern has always existed. Views move along the spectrum of thinking from deep scepticisms (Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil) to wondrous techo-utopian promises (Negroponte, Being Digital). Indeed, concerns about the (then) new technologies of wireless broadcasting can be compared with today’s anxiety over the possible effects of the internet and SOS. Inglis (7) recalls, here, too, were fears that humanity was tampering with some dangerous force; might wireless wave be causing thunderstorms, droughts, floods? Sterility or strokes? Such anxieties soon evaporated; but a sense of mystery might stay longer with evangelists for broadcasting than with a laity who soon took wireless for granted and settled down to enjoy the products of a process they need not understand. As the analogy above makes clear, just as audiences came to use ‘the wireless’ and later the internet regularly, it is reasonable to argue that dark SOS will also gain widespread understanding and find greater acceptance. Dark social spaces are simply the recent development of internet connectivity and communication more broadly. The dark SOS afford choice to be connected beyond mainstream offerings, which some users avoid for their perceived manipulation of content and user both. As part of the wider array of dark web services, the resilience of dark social spaces is reinforced by the proliferation of users as opposed to decentralised replication. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used for anonymity in parallel to TOR access, but they guarantee only anonymity to the client. A VPN cannot guarantee anonymity to the server or the internet service provider (ISP). While users may use pseudonyms rather than actual names as seen on Facebook and other SOS, users continue to take to the virtual spaces they inhabit their off-line, ‘real’ foibles, problems, and idiosyncrasies (Chenault). To varying degrees, however, people also take their best intentions to their interactions in the dark. The hyper-efficient tools now deployed can intensify this, which is the great advantage attracting some users. In balance, however, in regard to online information access and dissemination, critical examination of what is in the public’s interest, and whether content should be regulated or controlled versus allowing a free flow of information where users self-regulate their online behaviour, is fraught. O’Loughlin (604) was one of the first to claim that there will be voluntary loss through negative liberty or freedom from (freedom from unwanted information or influence) and an increase in positive liberty or freedom to (freedom to read or say anything); hence, freedom from surveillance and interference is a kind of negative liberty, consistent with both libertarianism and liberalism. Conclusion The early adopters of initial iterations of SOS were hopeful and liberal (utopian) in their beliefs about universality and ‘free’ spaces of open communication between like-minded others. 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