Karin Pettersson argues
that progressive politics is floundering in the waves generated by Big Data—when
it could be shaping the tide.
Karin Pettersson
It’s impossible to change
the world if you don’t understand the forces shaping it. Yet the age of data is
disrupting our economies and undermining the foundations of liberal democracy.
To comprehend these challenges of our time is thus a central task for progressive
parties and politicians.
To make change possible
they need to think hard about—and come up with solutions to—three central
problems.
Rage machine
The first problem is that
public discourse is increasingly defined by rage.
Join our growing community newsletter!
"Social
Europe publishes thought-provoking articles on the big political and
economic issues of our time analysed from a European viewpoint.
Indispensable reading!"
Polly Toynbee
Columnist for The Guardian
Politics is downstream from
culture, the right-wing propagandist Steve Bannon famously (and correctly)
argued, taking his cue from Antonio Gramsci. To set the agenda is to have real
power. Today, to take the argument one step further, politics is rather downstream
from technology.
‘Social media’ optimise for
strong emotions, promoting and amplifying content that is a perfect fit for
conspiracy theories and hatred against minorities and generally whipping up
fear and anger. The mechanisms of the rage machine ‘social media’ create have
been extensively reported but the political implications have been
underestimated.
Writing in the Guardian,
the author Suketu Mehta convincingly describes the manufactured hate against immigrants which is driving and defining European
politics. Missing is that fear-mongering at this scale and speed would have
been much more difficult—if not impossible—to do without the rage-maximising
algorithms of ‘social media’. The underlying mechanisms are described in detail
in the recent reportage by the New York Times on the effects of YouTube on Brazilian politics.
The counter-argument is that
such intolerance is not new to Europe and that there are other major forces
shaping politics, such as inequality and a backlash against globalisation. ‘Social
media’ do not create racism or the right-wing populism which has triumphed in
elections, as in Brazil, out of thin air.
Listen to the latest episode of Social Europe Podcast
Yet, as Cas Mudde and others
have pointed
out, the success of the extreme right stems not so much from increased demand for certain political ideas but rather from parties and other organisations supplying these to voters, in a context in which such ideas (‘immigration’, for instance)
have become more salient as other issues (such as income distribution) have become
less visibly contested. And a public discourse suffused by fear and hate will only
make the politics of the radical right more dominant. Indeed, it will encourage
other parties to copy their policies and frames, as some on the centre-right—and
even on the cenre-left—have already done.
The amplification effects
from ‘social media’ into politics are real and much more severe than has been
appreciated. For anyone—from left to right—who wants to mobilise people around
anything other than fear and hatred, this should be a major concern.
Winner takes all
The second problem is that monopoly
capture is threatening innovation and democracy.
Few politicians
fully appreciate that not only do a few companies control the
information space but these corporations also—by force of their sheer
size—undermine competition and crowd out innovation in vital parts of the economy.
The digital economy doesn’t
work in the manner of conventional markets. Extreme returns to scale, strong
network effects and the role of data create major advantages for incumbents.
This, combined with weak regulation and enforcement in the United States where
they are domesticated, has created the conditions for the largest and most
powerful companies in the history of mankind to continue to grow.
There is a real and
increasing risk of data monopolies depressing productivity and innovation,
contributing to a winner-takes-all economy where shareholders of the tech
giants are the only people prospering. And, as history has shown—including the
earlier phase of US ‘plutocracy’ which spurred anti-trust legislation—monopolies
and excessive corporate concentration will eventually become a threat to
democracy.
One of the few contemporary European
politicians to have grasped the political and economic implications of the rise
of monopoly is the Danish competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager. Her
work on anti-trust has been ground-breaking—and not only because of the fines
she has handed out to Google and Apple.
More important is Vestager’s
argument for a different way of thinking about the relationship between
companies and consumers, and how digital markets should be organised. This
follows a liberal (in the European sense) political tradition, where the rights
of consumers to choose should be taken into account—not just the rights of companies.
It is vital that the
argument Vestager has put forward is safeguarded in the years to come and, indeed,
that progressive parties and politicians strengthen and develop policies around
competition and anti-trust.
Survival of democracy
Thirdly, data ownership is
key to redistribution and sovereignty.
An increasing share of the
value in today’s economy is built with and on data. A large part (although not
all) of this data is extracted from human activity. Who controls this resource?
Who owns it? How should the value be distributed? Today, the tech giants
capture the wealth created as rents, having set the rules of the game. And even
if Vestager is doing a good job, competition policy and anti-trust enforcement
is not enough to tackle the challenge.
The question of data
ownership should be a central discussion point for progressives. Some argue that data
should be considered as embodied labour. In that case, the value created should
at least partly be channelled back to its source.
Another way of looking at data is as public infrastructure. The city of Barcelona has experimented with the notion of a ‘data commons’,
treating the data produced by people, sensors and devices as a shared
resource without property-rights restrictions, to be used for innovation
by all.
The question of data ownership
is central, not only to the survival of democracy but also to the prosperity
and sovereignty of Europe. The first phase of digitisation has been led almost
entirely by the US and China, and they now have a strong lead when it comes to Big
Data and artificial intelligence.
As the former German foreign
minister Joschka Fischer has pointed
out, this is one of the most
important issue facing the new European Commission. Europeans must decide who
will own the data needed to achieve digital sovereignty and what conditions
should govern its collection and use.
No simple answers
How digital markets are
organised will shape our societies in the decades to come.
The questions raised here
have no simple answers. How they should be solved depends, among other things,
on values and ideology. Yet today there is a frightening lack of political
debate around these central themes.
This is a shame, because the
age of data could instead be an opportunity for progressives to create
better conditions for redistribution and innovation, for equality and
emancipation. Politics needs to go back upstream, to shape these
conditions democratically—rather than leaving them to the monopolists to
define. This article is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal
No comments:
Post a Comment