Building a Social-Democratic Information State

-- By KoljaVerhage - 12 March 2021

Introduction

As the Millennial generation matures and is steadily taking over the halls of power across the world, we must ask ourselves how we want to shape the world. As the effects of ocean acidification and loss of biodiversity are impacting the kind of world we are living in, so too are the effects of surveillance capitalism and the race to the bottom of the brainstem impacting who we are as a human civilization in fundamental ways. We are now at a crucial junction of history, where the choices we make as a generation will have more impact on the direction of humanity than the invention of the compass in early imperial China. We are the last generation where humanity has a choice. We must shape our world and our minds by operationalizing the core social-democratic principles of freedom, equality, justice and solidarity in the digital age. "The perfection of despotism is at least as likely an outcome of the adoption of digital technology as the perfection of human liberty (Moglen 2021)."

Privacy & Democracy

To protect democracy the state needs to protect the privacy of citizens. This means providing citizens the means to conduct their digital lives in secrecy, anonymity and autonomy.

To provide anonymity and secrecy the state must regulate the "surveillance economy." This starts by using the democratic rule of law to support far-reaching legislative and legal initiatives in the areas of privacy and antitrust. Secondly, a democratic information state cannot exist without the formulation of new rights that protect citizens from massive-scale invasion and theft compelled by surveillance economics. "The (...) right to know and to decide who knows about us must be codified in laws and protected by democratic institutions, if it is to exist at all (Zuboff 2020)." Third, we need laws that outlaw massive-scale commercial data collection of human behavior by tying data collection to fundamental human rights and tying data use to public services that address the needs to citizens.

To provide citizens with autonomy, the state needs to regulate the attention economy and provide an alternative to services that encourage "the race to the bottom of the brainstem (Harris 2016)." Instead of relying on market forces to create a new inequality by offering paid "luxury" services that allow the well-off to escape their behavior from being extracted and the less well-off from being subjected to it, the government must build an alternate digital economy in which nobody gets any kind of advantage from operating engagement-based structures. The only way we can shift from tech companies pursuing the infinite growth of extracted human attention is by providing services that place human autonomy at the center of the desired outcomes. Democratic processes for creating rules and regulations operate at a much slower pace than the rate of technological development that is needed to make a difference. Therefore, the answer cannot only be legal and political, we must answer in technological terms. In return for promises to avoid attention, engagement or surveilling based economic models for the delivery of services governments must provide a public cloud and data storage infrastructure for businesses and civil society of every size and kind. By letting it operate on free software and subsidizing it we ensure a frictionless digital economy at ultra-low cost with digital services that are as functional and as inexpensive as the ones that extract your behavior.

If we can also use ultra-low-cost hardware effectively, we can put the production of these services on the household, neighborhood and cooperative level, thus reducing the need for subsidy. That's what FreedomBox and other privacy-conscious self-hosting software stacks for cheap single-board computers are designed to explore.

As it is not only the shape of the human mind that hangs in the balance but also the natural environment in which it resides, the alternate digital economy, free of engagement or surveillance-based structures, will allow businesses and organizations to run their digital workloads in environmentally more efficient, cheaper and thereby more socially attractive ways.

You might want to be a little more specific here. The public cloud providers use the cheapest electricity they can. They will in the end (not so long an end as everyone else) decarbonize. But as it is they use the preponderance of their computing and storage, and accordingly of their carbon budget, not on providing the services their users consume, but on the behavior collection and analytics that productizes their users for advertising. If we move the services to federated, small-scale low cost hardware, or just provide VPSs to the public for free, we immediately remove the majority of the environmental cost of the current surveillance capitalist model. Putting actual megatons and dollars numbers to this is a research goal of mine not yet satisfactorily achieved.

Massive Online Education System

Once we have created a competing public cloud with an anti-surveillance bias that competes as a public utility with private tech companies, the mental space opens up to refocus our attention to the societal objectives that can be attained through the productive powers opened up by the Internet. The most important of which is the reimagining of the Internet as a massive online education system to educate and re-educate the citizens of the nation state.

Providing citizens with basic digital rights to education means ensuring equal access to the Internet for all, combined with the availability of ultra-low cost and unobstructed access to high-quality education platforms. These educational platforms must align with a contemporary vision for the development of the labor force. Only then can the government begin to function as a digital entity and directly contribute to the intellectual development of people.

These are the 21st century public schools, and they will have the same multi-generational effect on society that the onset of universal primary and secondary education had in the development of modern Europe and the US. Universal digital lifelong learning is the greatest improvement to human capital that a society can now make. The development of each is the development of all.

The Consensus for a Digital Social Bargain

The technology is already available to realize this reimagination. What is needed is the government to provide a new digital social bargain to bring technology, law and politics together. A bargain based on a deliberative model of digital citizenship and one that recognizes that the future of government as a digital platform is to deepen thought, increase skills and generate human capital at its endpoint.

A word or two about the technologies of such deliberation—enabling citizen assemblies and new forms of deliberative public engagement for everyone, replacing the cesspool of Twitter with truly inclusive forms of the municipal self-government integral to NL society—would be good.

Allowing citizens to becoming higher functioning and better valued and giving them more opportunities to actualize themselves in society. In exchange for this and to afford subsidizing the alternative digital economy, a new fair and progressive digital tax system needs to be implemented that further disincentivizes the fundamental economics and operations of the surveillance economy.

Providing the legal, political and technological conditions to realize the transformation of a single state will not stop at its borders. Like the ancient political formations of Southeast Asia known as mandalas, the effects of a single digital transformation will reverberate beyond its borders and create a global framework defined by its roots but composed of numerous polities that have not undergone any administrative integration with the center. This is what the social-democratic digital paradigm looks like. A global, yet federated constellation of autonomous citizens, exercising their right of education through low-cost and reliable technology.

Global considerations are implied by local achievements, so a focus on social democracy in one country can do the work of the world. Young voters need to see the D66/Pvda distinction as this one around digital culture: If you want liberal social policy and Facebook, stick with them. If you want socially-liberating technological arrangements that make new forms of prosperous work and a truly equal future, come with us. The rest of the Labour agenda is not succeeding, so this is what has to be tried. Lodewijk knew this, and knew he was too cautious about it. The next VVD-led coalition is Rutte's last and everyone is out of ammunition due to COVID. This is the moment to make a real investment in the long-term, because otherwise the day comes when Baudet isn't one seat behind, and at least the Dutch part of the human race has made its choice: the wrong one.

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