A wise manifesto for digital democracy

The Digital Republic. By Jamie Susskind. Pegasus Books; 304 pages; $28.95. Bloomsbury; £16.99

The internet was once billed as a new electronic frontier of unbounded freedom. Nowadays it tends to offer only a manipulative, “click-to-consent” illusion of autonomy. This evolution is not surprising, argues Jamie Susskind, a British barrister who studies technology’s relationship with society. Code carries power: the power to determine what choices users get, to gather data on them and to shape their perceptions. Those who wield it—the “autocrats of information”, in a phrase borrowed from Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century coding pioneer—are mostly invisible and unaccountable. As life becomes more networked, citizens come to feel dominated by it and its overlords.

Mr Susskind wants to restrain this unaccountable power, much as 18th-century democrats did for the state and 19th-century reformers for corporations. His idea is to apply the principles of republicanism to it. Mr Susskind is no Luddite: he does not imagine tech’s power could be eliminated, even if that were desirable. Rather, he wants new rules and institutions “to expose that power, to make it answerable, to disperse it, to restrain it and to make sure it cannot be used by one group to dominate others.”

The book’s diagnosis of the threat is persuasive, if partly familiar. Rather than following Black Lives Matter activists, police can now buy their data from social-media companies, a “big brotherhood” of private surveillance. Twitter hides tweets with only the vaguest explanations and cursory due process. Polarising suggestion algorithms on YouTube and Facebook obstruct citizens’ freedom to gain an objective picture of the world. Artificial-intelligence programs that pick job candidates exacerbate the racial and gender bias in the real-world data they are trained on.

[huge_it_slider id=”15″]The reach and granularity of code are unprecedented. Thomas Hobbes wrote that regulating “all the actions, and words of men” was “a thing impossible”, Mr Susskind notes. “But it seems much more possible now—and the rules are coming from private authorities, not just public ones.”

Part of the problem, he thinks, is the philosophy of market individualism that has structured internet governance. For markets to function, consumers need information and choice. But code is invisible, and the information asymmetry between the average user and Google is titanic. (What determines which search results land in your top ten? Who knows?) Worse, people struggle to opt out of most digital systems. Scanners track the movements of Amazon workers; the owners of iPhones have no idea what is in Apple’s terms and conditions. The European Union’s gdpr data-protection law does not enhance freedom by asking you about cookies 50 times a day. In the digital world, “consent” is often meaningless.

Digital republicanism would replace this philosophy with one that prioritises society’s health and citizens’ freedom. Laws governing it should ensure that it preserves democracy, reduces the domination of some groups (including the tech industry) over others, mirrors the ethical culture of the host society and minimises government intrusion. Mr Susskind suggests a number of new institutions to help.

Online tribunals, already functioning in Canada, could provide quick due process for digital flashpoints like social-media suspensions. Taiwan has pioneered an online platform for consensus-building national deliberations. Data unions could help citizens protect and collectively market their data. Programmers could be required to take ethics courses; tech firms might be subject to government certification and a duty of openness in their code.

These reforms sound promising. But Mr Susskind’s book is a bit skimpy on how they might come about. The republican arguments of James Madison changed the world not just through force of rhetoric, but because they chimed with the interests of the new classes and industries of the dawning age of capitalism. Who might embrace the cause of digital republicanism is less clear. Generation Z frets over unaccountable power in tech, but tends to discuss it in terms of platform-denial, safe spaces, ratios and gaslighting. Initiatives such as a duty of openness may be better policy. But who will fight for them? ■