Technology and the Global Struggle for Democracy

MADRID – The commemoration of the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump has made it clear that the extreme political polarization that led to the riots also frames how Americans interpret it. However, it would be a serious mistake to think that what happened is merely an American phenomenon with exclusively American causes. The upheavals in the peaceful transition of power that day were part of something much greater.

As part of the commemoration, President Joe Biden said there was a struggle going on for “the soul of the USA». What is becoming increasingly clear is that this is also the case in the international order: your soul is at stake. China rises, and asserts itself; populism spread across the West and large emerging economies; and chauvinistic nationalism re-emerged in parts of Europe. All signs point to the rise of illiberalism and anti-democratic sentiment around the world.

Against this background, the US has a “Summit for Democracy»(Virtually) in December, attended by hundreds of national and civil society leaders. The message of the meeting was clear: democracies must assert themselves firmly and proactively. To that end, the summit devoted numerous sessions to studying the digital revolution and its potentially damaging implications for our political systems.

Emerging technologies pose at least three major risks to democracies. The first relates to the way they structure public debate. Social media balances public discourse by segmenting users into smaller and smaller like-minded communities. Algorithm-driven soundboards make it difficult to build social consensus. Worse, social networks are not responsible for the content they distribute, which means they can spread misinformation on their platforms with impunity.

In addition, as the business models of the new digital entrants rely on advertising and compete directly with those of traditional news organizations, they have undermined the architecture that once made high-quality journalism and public debate possible. And their open, digital nature leaves them vulnerable to outside interference and abuse by ominous actors, including those who want to disrupt elections and other democratic processes.

The second of the major risks posed by new technologies is to privacy. Due to advanced monitoring and surveillance technology, both public and private actors can access detailed information on citizens and consumer behavior. With the convergence of big data and artificial intelligence, information about collective and individual behavior is becoming increasingly predictive.

Systematic violations of privacy can be the prelude to at least two different scenarios in which personal freedom will be severely curtailed. The first is supervisory capitalism: corporations use their knowledge of consumers to manipulate them and increase their profitability. The second scenario is the supervisory state: public authorities use their knowledge of the most private and intimate behavior of citizens to suppress discord.

A third major risk affects the capacity for independent political action. A democracy is basically a big information system. Freedom of expression and association, coupled with universal emancipation, allow citizens to express their views, and to offer or withhold their consent to political initiatives. However, current surveillance and data mining technologies have created the conditions for an alternative political system in which it is no longer necessary to understand the freely expressed preferences of citizens, because their preferences can be derived from monitored behavior.

In that kind of scenario, individual agency and freedom cease to be the foundations of the political system because it is replaced by data and public control. And thanks to advances in neurology and the behavioral sciences that blur the lines between knowing how a person behaves and being able to shape that behavior, it’s easy to see that an extremely oppressive political system could emerge: a technological Leviathan. It seems that China is already implementing what some call a “technology mandarin”.

While these risks are real, they do not have to become our new reality. Democracy is perfectly capable of adopting certain technological advances and limiting others. At the Democracy Summit, participants agreed to launch a major initiative to identify and support the development of technologies that promote democratic principles and values.

In close collaboration with the White House and the U.S. Department of State, IE University — where I work — and other Summit participants will host a series of competitions for beginners and start-up companies to identify entrepreneurs working on promising new “democracy-friendly” technologies. “The project will focus on five main areas: verification technologies designed to combat disinformation and strengthen public debate; privacy-sensitive data analytics tools; digital identity systems and trust networks to manage public and personal data; transparency technologies to improve public services, and bias-free AI systems.

This collaboration with diverse stakeholders is a perfect example of the unique ability of democratic societies to come together and innovate. It also reminds us that, despite the tone of our public debates, the democratic world is not helpless in the face of technological change. The countries participating in the summit represent the 70% of the world’s GDP and home to the most developed regulatory institutions in the world.

If technology is a new domain for international relations and competition, the democratic world is equipped for success. According to Freedom House, 8 of the 10 largest retail markets in “free” countries, and those same countries are home to 85 of the world’s top 100 universities. In the venture capital markets, the leadership of the democratic countries is overwhelming: they were responsible for more than 80% of the Investment activities During the past year. The democratic world dominates in terms of investigative capacity, regulatory capacity and market size, all key issues for business innovation and scalability.

The Summit for Democracy emphasized the urgency of studying both the strengths and vulnerabilities of democratic systems in the 21st century and showed that the analysis of the role of new technology should be at the center of the scene. The commemoration of the events of January 6 in Washington DC is in turn a great way to help us remember how urgent it is that we direct our innovative potential to strengthen the health of our democracies. The soul of our political systems and of the international order is at stake.

Spanish translation by Ant translation

* The author is Rector of IE University and Dean of the IE School of World and Public Affairs.

www.project-syndicate.org



Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx

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