Democracy, ecology and Big Data. Can they be combined into a 21st-century socialism?

This paper discusses the urgent need to define a socialism of the 21st century based on the achievements of the Information Revolution. Compared to the labour socialism based on the Industrial Revolution and culminating the Soviet experience, a digital socialism would broaden the revolutionary subject of a transformation to what Guy Debord called ‘the class of consciousness’ today created by linking the large mass of the population to the Internet. Although owned effectively by capital, the pressure towards transparency and Open Data is changing the balance of forces now that capitalist society remains mired in crisis, no longer able to offer a meaningful social contract. Digital planning was attempted already in the USSR but it would have to be enlarged by democratic control and be anchored in an educational cultural change conscious of the need to preserve the biosphere.