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by Francois Soulard

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The Covid-19 pandemic has put health, political, and economic systems under considerable strain, accelerating a phenomenon already at work in the digital continent and, more broadly, on the security front.

This has exposed a deeply fragmented multilateral stage, torn between geopolitical rivalries and nationalist reflexes while allowing for medium-intensity scientific cooperation. On the one hand, as with the previous health crises of the 2000s such as Ebola, MERS, and SARS, the coronavirus pandemic has created – on a whole new scale – a sense of urgency that has forced the adaptation and invention of innovative responses. On the other, it has provided alibis for certain actors to impose their will, strengthen their control, and manipulate opinions if needed to conquer economic markets, all in the name of efficiency to meet the demands of the healthcare spiral.

The cascading effects of the Covid crisis are not entirely new. Despite the many imperfections in the multilateral framework, the World Health Organization (WHO) has provided the basis for countries to develop crisis responses, with some adaptations to suit their local contexts. And yet, the current crisis remains marked by extreme operational vulnerability, irrespective of the degree of material development in societies.

While the initial sources of the pandemic may have been easily identified and secured, the absence of a steering function for risk modeling, effective response mechanisms, and a coordinated global action required in the face of a threat of this magnitude has landed us in the current debacle. In short, our international system stands bare and archaic, with the G20, the WHO, and other players unable to orchestrate any transnational efforts. As the current crisis has unfolded, it has exposed the flaws in our socio-economic systems and modes of action adopted to cope with the situation.

The absence of a globally coordinated response to the pandemic is a missed opportunity to move towards better models than the ones we are currently stranded with. Our current models, relying on a rigid vertical segmentation of productive activities, resulting in the concentration1 and optimization of economic costs in long delocalized chains, have proved to be less resilient to the crisis. Some cards have also been reshuffled in the realm of perceptions, geopolitical relations, technologies, and economics. One of the consequences of the pandemic has been a crude sketching of the world canvas in which we will operate in the decades to come, in which the traditional balance of power, the lack of cooperation, and the assertion of national interests will be the linchpins. New stress points arising from the pandemic and the acceleration of previous trends are likely to seal medium-term arrangements. The crisis has favored a wave of sovereign posturings and affirmations which were already underway at the global level. Big Tech corporations are taking the place of fossil-fuel producers in the stock market podium while clean power shares are up by 45 percent so far in 2020.2

However, unlike the global financial collapse of 2008, the pandemic is an external accident which originated outside the current economic and political matrix. This diagnosis is often challenged on the grounds that the circulation of the virus could have been facilitated by the no-holds-barred extraction of natural resources, unregulated globalization, experimental manipulation of living beings, or even by the authoritarian nature of the Chinese state. Besides, the emergence of every new climate or security risk3 increasingly forces us to re-evaluate existing notions of economic efficiency and pay attention to the long-term variables of resilience and adaptation.

Be that as it may, beyond the ideological sensitivities and despite the intensity of the global economic slowdown, we can see that current responses to the pandemic are not built on the identification of an endogenous fracture in global capitalism. For states and other actors engaged in international exchanges, there has been no real questioning of the engines of the economic status quo. Rather, attention has been focused on the imperative to manage the health contingency and promote recovery, possibly accompanied by certain corrective measures. The focus has also been on a certain strategic reorientation, in particular on the decoupling and relocation of sectors. The recovery plans have been criticized for reinforcing earlier standards of productivism and not taking into account, for example, the new climate commitments4 resulting from the Paris Agreement of 2016.

This initial diagnosis of the origins of the crisis is central because it has determined the forms taken by recovery strategies and their interactions with the digital sphere. We are at a stage where many – including sections of the global economic elite5 – are rushing to underline the contradictions exposed by the pandemic. And yet, there are few signs that it has led to a fundamental shift in the nature of recovery models.6 There is an intensified use of digital technologies to support post-pandemic recovery without any particular awareness of an endogenous crisis in the digital sphere. There are neither new insights in the governance of the digital nor a reorientation in decision-making, only an acceleration of previous tendencies. The computerization of the real economy is one of them.

In this respect, the digital continent, the primary focus of this essay, is perhaps one of the most fertile areas to explore in the present landscape. The shockwaves of the pandemic have brought to the forefront the ethos and physiognomy of “digitization”. This physiognomy needs to be approached carefully through a lens and a vocabulary that can accurately describe the processes at work. Instead of “digitization”, for instance, which only refers to the sub-process of data encoding in a binary format, I will evoke the process of “computerization”. The latter raises the idea of a transformation of the old technical system, constituted by the alloy between the human workforce and machines, into a new one based on the alloy between programmable automatons and the human brain. In this context, the question of cognitive registers is of primary importance. A new understanding is needed to grasp these manifestations in depth and see beyond the parameters defined by the spirit of the times. The difficulty in envisioning computerization as a phenomenon that goes beyond a mere technical disruption is a crucial part of the agenda. This is at the root of the current digital imbalance that exacerbates the impacts in terms of predation and threats, and reduces the potential for a social justice-oriented digital economy. Through negative and positive shocks, the pandemic is offering us a sort of radiography of the characteristics of the new digital economy. This new economy is not merely a new industrial sector, it is “upgrading” the current industrial economy and shaping a new matrix.

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(Re)imagining a Social Contract for Labor in the Digital World

(Re)imagining a Social Contract for Labor in the Digital World

Kate Lappin & Sofía Scasserra

The Digital New Deal project is as much about open debate and exchange of ideas as it is about outlining new treaties, finding new metaphors, and envisioning new regulatory frameworks for the digital. This freewheeling conversation between Kate Lappin, Regional Secretary for the Asia Pacific region at Public Services International, and Sofía Scasserra, advisor to the global presidency of UNI Global Union and the Argentine Senate, belongs to the former category. Placing the worker front and centre, its aim is to think through and imagine new articulations of labor and data rights, new trajectories for trade union movements, and a radically different social contract for labor.

Illustration by Jahnavi Koganti

Kate Lappin (KL): Across the world, digital transnational corporations (TNCs), collectively known as Big Tech, are fundamentally shifting the political, economic, and social landscapes of workers’ lives. There hasn’t been a change this big since the industrial revolution. And, like the industrial revolution, this revolution too is fundamentally shifting our ability to organise and exercise power – as workers, as rights holders, and as users of public services. In keeping with the overarching theme of this series, our conversation will assess the ways in which the dominance of digital behemoths is upending workers’ lives through constant surveillance and monitoring, incessant data capture, and algorithm-fueled inequalities. We will reflect on the need for a new social contract that centers workers’ data rights, and the role of labor unions and social movements in this regard. Finally, we will mull over new strategies and alliances that can propel us towards a better future of work. Our focus will be on the Latin American and Asia Pacific contexts since this is where much of Sofía’s and my work is based.

Let us start Sofía, with how you think the digital revolution and the growth of Big Tech corporate power has impacted workers. 

Sofía Scasserra (SS): In recent years, the growth of digital TNCs has affected how we communicate, what we buy, and how we work. The introduction of technology into the workplace has begun to subject workers, as you mentioned, to constant surveillance, absorbing data from them and ushering in a new phase of cyber capitalism. And as we know, the data thus accumulated is reconfigured into raw material for developing more technologies that will then replace or discipline the same workers. These technologies are produced largely in the Global North and imported to developing countries in the South. This is what we call digital colonialism, and it forecloses any effective digital industrialization in the Global South. Of course, this is highly dangerous, especially for public services, since the technologies that are being imported are concerned not with social benefit but corporate profit. 

The world of work in Latin America is diverse and complex. Informality is rampant and the digital divide has intensified existing inequalities. Some sectors have hyper-technological unicorns such as Argentina’s Mercado Libre, even as entire regions are stranded without internet access and knowledge of technology management. This gap affects the arena of work, since it is not easy to train workers when a new technological tool enters the workplace, often leading to job losses. That said, the state of work in the region is not rendered ‘sick’ by technology and robotics, but by labor fraud. The use of technologies to precaritize, outsource, and overload workers is common across countries in Latin America. This situation is not the fault of technology per se, but its poor implementation and the lack of regulation. And finally, the issue of ‘data as the new raw material’ is starting to ring alarm bells. UNI Global Union and Public Services International (PSI) have both done extensive work on this really important issue. In your work at PSI, Kate, how do you see the lack of regulatory oversight on data rights affecting workers?

KL: You’re right. World over, governments have largely failed to tackle fundamental questions about the value and power of our metadata, what it means for this level of intelligence and control to be in the hands of Big Tech monopolies, and what the role of democratic governments, entrusted with upholding human rights, should be in data governance. Over the past decade, discussions inspired by colleagues at IT for Change have made me consider and compare the changes that workers and communities currently face with those of communities confronted by the enclosure of lands and the introduction of industrial manufacturing in the past. 

Both the industrial and the data revolutions involve powerful private interests capturing or enclosing a resource that was previously not a financialized commodity, and consequently amassing even greater wealth and power. It is useful to think about these histories because trade unionism was born out of workers’ struggles in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It led to better wages for some organized workers and spurred further demands for public services and a more representative democracy. These past gains are quickly being dismantled, often under the guise of technological restructuring. 

Many private companies have now acquired a monopolistic hold over the metadata governments need to operate critical public services. Many governments are handing over rights to such data to companies without understanding their value or implications for effective public service delivery. Giving away rights over data to the private sector not only strips the government of potential revenue, but also undermines the capacity to govern, provide public services, and ensure decent work. 

Google Maps and Uber hold essential data on city traffic flows, genome mapping companies are collecting massive databases on DNA sequencing required to develop future medicines, and Facebook can influence election results with essentially no regulatory oversight. Global data companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alibaba and their host governments are pushing for new e-commerce rules to be adopted at the World Trade Organization (WTO). They are backing trade agreements that will constrain the capacity of governments to develop new ways to treat data as a collective social good. Already, rules that civil society has termed ‘digital colonization’ prohibit national regulations for data localization and requirements for digital companies to have a local presence, restrict access to source code, and limit the liability of Internet Service Providers.

The business model of Big Tech companies is based on their ability to effectively rewrite economic rules – they can avoid taxes by directing most of their economic activity through tax havens, they have largely avoided antitrust laws that were designed to stop monopoly power, and they have created fictions like the ‘self-employed worker’ and ‘flexible work’ to get around labor laws. 

SS: Also, these rules will weaken the terms of trade, pushing poorer countries to be only the consumers of technology, stripped of any access to data that could help develop and improve their own ecosystems and public policies. At various multistakeholder forums, we are being forced to approve rules that will determine an economy we are only just starting to understand. It is hard to imagine that poorer countries really understand what they are giving away if they sign these rules. 

These rules and the new models that are being designed come under the umbrella of platformization of work and are already affecting all employment. When we talk about platformization of work, we refer to a world of work that is mediated by digital TNCs which have legal addresses in tax havens, and act as ‘mere intermediaries’ in the data economy through web platforms. This closely aligns with the WTO’s idea of ‘servicification’ of manufacture, which classifies everything, except the final product, as services. One rather extreme version of this idea will see every worker is a micro-enterprise that provides a service to a company through the intermediation of a platform. 

This stance is being resisted in various parts of the world. Even workers who are employed by platforms are finding ways to resist the precarity to which they are subjected. Their victories have taken the form of labor laws that recognize the platform as a company and its workers as dependents, or cooperatives that organize workers in ways that give them more power to decide how to offer their work. Labor unions are also organizing and mobilizing platform workers around the world. In Latin America, platform workers are engaging in different forms of digital activism. They log into work accounts but don’t actually take on work, thus disrupting services provided through platforms. These acts of resistance offer a ray of hope in the defense of decent work. It is only a matter of time before, at least in Latin America, workers have more expansive rights and the power of these companies stands curtailed. But till that happens, Kate, do you see platformization inevitably engulfing other areas of work? 

KL: As you mentioned, Sofía, there’s nothing inevitable about the future of work. The World Bank and Big Tech might like to think that precarious, platform-based work is a natural consequence of technologies, but the future of work will be determined in the same way that it always has – through the exercise of power. 

Precarious platform work hasn’t come about because of technology – it has come about because tech companies have aggressively undermined labor laws and based their business models on the avoidance of employment obligations. And when workers build collective power, they can challenge the fictions created by Big Tech capital. Tech companies in the US are complaining that their businesses may not be viable if laws introduced in several states to recognize workers as workers, are successful. They are pouring millions of dollars into lobbying against this. 

The World Bank’s 2019 report, The Changing Nature of Work, made the case for a form of social protection that would enable platform workers and other precarious and displaced workers to continue receiving meagre, insecure income. They argued that a safety net would allow labor laws to be further deregulated. The Bank used technological determinism to emphasize what it has always advocated for – deregulation of labor and capital. These technological fictions enable the sustained attacks on wages, work conditions, and trade union rights. This will impact (and are already impacting) all workers. When the minimum wage floor is effectively meaningless, pressure mounts for all wages to go down, including public sector wages. 

So clearly, workers delivering public services are not exempt from these pressures. Governments are increasingly outsourcing public services to Big Tech. More than half of Amazon’s operating income comes from Amazon Web Services and a growing portion of AWS is hosting government data. Public postal services are being squeezed by Amazon and others who use low wages or the fiction of platform work as a competitive advantage. 

During the pandemic, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) advised governments to cut public sector wages suggesting that wages for some private sector workers are lower. As we have always said in the union movement – “touch one, touch all” – when some suffer, all eventually suffer. We know that, by driving down wages and monopolising wealth, Big Tech has played a major role in the exacerbation of various forms of inequalities. How is this playing out in the Latin American context, Sofía?

SS: I totally agree with your assessment that the techno-deterministic view of the IMF and World Bank makes us think there is no alternative than to accept precariousness, because that is the only way the model can sustain. But the truth is that if your business model is sustained by labor precariousness while you get richer and richer, that is not a business model, that is essentially fraud. 

Thinking about alternatives is hard in Latin America because governments right now don’t have the capacity to come up with new frameworks on a regional scale, and people don’t have enough digital education.

I think the biggest inequality between workers today is the digital divide. This gap operates between generations, excluding those who cannot adapt to new technologies. Many workers lose their jobs as a result. In some cases training works, but in others, the accelerated rate of change of technology means that many workers cannot keep up.

The second gap is that of access to technology. In Latin America, access is very unequal, not only with respect to the level of income and the quality of the technology that a worker can afford, but also with regard to the infrastructure of public services available in their city. Some have to work for months to be able to buy a telephone or a computer that they can use for work, or they are stuck with old devices without enough RAM memory, unable to run the applications they need to work. 

The gap in access to public services is even worse. The population distribution and demographic characteristics of the region mean that huge parts of Latin America are very thinly populated. This has repercussions on the incentives for companies to invest in better internet connections. Fiber optic technology is an essential public service that does not reach most cities and towns. What do we do with the rest, who are not in the big urban cities? The lack of quality public investment in the less populated regions means that only some workers can access better jobs through platforms and teleworking. Workers in regions that remain disconnected are stranded in the periphery of the labor market. What other inequalities do you see in your region, Kate?

KL: I think that’s very well put. To add a couple of points, data monopolies are a key driver in exacerbating existing inequalities. Data companies increase wealth inequalities by extracting and monopolizing much of the world’s wealth, aggressively avoiding taxes which diminishes public services that can actually reduce inequalities, driving down wages, and worsening work conditions. Inequalities between countries is magnified not just by the wealth accruing to billionaires in the US, China, and to some extent Europe, but also by data monopolization that centralizes much of the world’s information (or intelligence) in the US, China, and other data havens. 

Then there are inequalities fueled by algorithms. Algorithmic management sounds neutral but often draws on metadata that reflects existing inequalities and replicates it. Secretive algorithms can deepen the power imbalance between workers who don’t have access to the data, and the management which is protected by ‘commercial-in-confidence’ and trade rules that hide the source code. In the case of platform workers, for instance, small changes in algorithms can drastically reduce their incomes for reasons that may remain completely unknown to them.

Workers’ productivity trackers may appear neutral but are generally modelled on the output of a healthy, experienced worker of a particular sex, age, and stature, on an ideal day. Workplace health trackers can identify women who might be trying to get pregnant, help employers filter out workers with chronic diseases or those at higher risk of developing certain illnesses. 

Algorithms can also reinscribe discriminatory practices in the delivery of public services. An algorithm in the US, for example, allocated health funding for Covid-19 based on previous health expenditure, meaning black patients typically received less funding despite being at higher risk. Algorithms that profile suspects of crime, and those that process credit or job applications, have been revealed to be similarly discriminatory.

Overall, unions in the region need new strategies – whether they be greater web presence to amplify their message, more international alliances to meet the deficit of weak union structures, or intelligent incorporation of technology that will enable workers to adapt to a new reality and guard against labor fraud. The union challenges in the region are multiple and complex, but without a doubt, transnational unity is the most powerful tool available to them.

If workers and their unions don’t have access to algorithms, it’s almost impossible to prove discrimination. If workers can’t access information on how decisions regarding their civic life, their right to access services and social protections are being determined, the entire notion of accountable governance stands discarded. Unions have long fought for transparent mechanisms to set wages and work conditions. But the secrecy that Big Tech now enjoys poses a huge challenge to unions working to eliminate discrimination. How are trade unions in Latin America resisting such incursions, Sofía?

SS: It is almost impossible to generalize the situation of the trade unions in the region. There are countries with strong union structures, as in Uruguay, Brazil, or Argentina, and weak ones, such as in Peru or Colombia. However, what is common to all countries in the region is that the introduction of technology in the workplace has made employment more precarious. The original fear of being displaced by a robot has now been replaced by the spectre of more precarious jobs, and the lack of rights and regulatory oversight. In some countries like Argentina or Uruguay, new laws regarding the right of teleworkers and platform workers to disconnect are being discussed and approved. In Argentina, they are discussing a law that will give trade unions the power to know the criteria applied when determining the source code of the algorithm to manage platform workers. Training of workers is becoming a key issue throughout the region and in all sectors. In this, trade unions have much to contribute. 

Overall, unions in the region need new strategies – whether they be greater web presence to amplify their message, more international alliances to meet the deficit of weak union structures, or intelligent incorporation of technology that will enable workers to adapt to a new reality and guard against labor fraud. The union challenges in the region are multiple and complex, but without a doubt, transnational unity is the most powerful tool available to them.

KL: The lack of homogeneity is also true for the Asia Pacific. The issues facing trade unions are extraordinarily varied and often so huge that they can feel insurmountable. With close to two-thirds of the world’s population, the region includes both high income and least developed countries, countries with relatively strong trade unions and others where independent trade unionism is impossible. Trade unions usually have paid staff only in the higher income countries.

The trade union movement needs an ambitious agenda for the future, one that does not just restore, but also reimagines, the social contract. We need a democratic new deal – one that includes the proposals for a digital new deal and a green new deal.

The annual index of the ITUC found that workers’ rights are deteriorating faster in the Asia Pacific region than anywhere else. This means that trade unions in the region spend most of their time and energy on simply trying to survive, warding off attacks on trade union rights and members, and bargaining for improved conditions. This means they can rarely engage in research, policy work, or long-term strategizing. When the ‘future of work’ agenda is presented to unions, most think about short-term issues like job losses fueled by technological changes. These are legitimate concerns, but can lead unions to focus only on training and transitioning workers at the expense of the bigger picture. A number of union leaders can see, for example, the dangers of trade rules that cement the power of Big Tech, but it’s not easy for them to lobby for alternatives. 

Our challenge, as global union federations, is to support unions and make them realize that this is a joint struggle – platform delivery workers and public sector workers impacted by ‘efficiency measures’ are bound together as workers but also bound together with communities and users of public services. The trade union movement needs an ambitious agenda for the future, one that does not just restore, but also reimagines, the social contract. We need a democratic new deal – one that includes the proposals for a digital new deal and a green new deal. 

SS: What you say is so important, Kate! We have to include trade unions and civil society in the reconstruction of institutions that can lead to a better world. We need a new social contract and its architecture has to be tripartite – determined by the state, corporations, but most importantly, the unions. We cannot continue with digital models developed unilaterally by the state, as in China, or corporations, as in the US. The state is important, but you also have to be careful about authoritarian states. Either way, it can be the main promoter of a new world that includes all three constituents. What are your own views on the role of the state in this?

KL: One of the challenges we face is that workers and communities have become deeply cynical about the state and are often more worried about governments’ access to data rather than corporations. 

Besides, the line between the state and Big Tech is getting increasingly blurred. Big Tech has not just sought to provide services on behalf of the state, but often to displace it altogether. Smart cities, for example, have been designed to function as private cities, collecting data from every interaction. India plans to build 100 smart cities, the most famous of which is the city of Gurgaon. All services, including emergency services, street repairs, water, and energy are privatized and digitalized. But while Gurgaon boasts state-of-the-art buildings and houses, workers employed to run these services live in its many slums without access to water and sewage systems, amidst uncleared garbage and roads full of potholes. 

The influence of Big Tech is so great that governments are often too intimidated to regulate or criticize them. An Australian federal government employee published a journal article which pointed out how these companies were amongst the very few profiting during the Covid-19 pandemic. The department management alleged the article was a breach of the public service code of conduct that prohibits public employees from publicly criticizing the government. The policy, the management alleged, extended to current or potential future public-private partnerships with Big Tech. The worker was forced to resign. 

Nevertheless, the role of the state, of democratic governance, is vital to envision data as a public good. Our aim should be to restore effective governance and develop public sector architectures capable of governing the use of our collective data. We need to do more to consider options for public data governance. If e-commerce is good for local providers, why not have a public platform that doesn’t mine the data for its own monopolistic purposes? Why not have public cloud space so that public data can be kept securely without potentially being mined? If digital health diagnostics is indeed beneficial, why not make it a part of the public health system so that the metadata can help design better public health responses?

Much of the technology that Big Tech relies on was developed by the public sector. Yet, the profits and the benefits of that technology have accrued mainly to the obscenely rich. Only a democratic state response can change that. I’d be interested to know the Latin American experience in this regard, Sofía?

SS: The role of the state in Latin America is difficult to analyze, given the current political situation. In most countries, far-right governments are pushing for digital colonialism rather than digital industrialization. Most of them are not amenable to labor rights or putting limits on transnational companies. The exceptions are Argentina, Venezuela (a very controversial case), Mexico, and now we regain hope with Bolivia. In the midst of a pandemic and despite a shattered economy, Argentina introduced a cutting-edge legislation that grants workers engaged in telework the same rights as face-to-face workers. The legislation includes the right to disconnect and weaves in a gender perspective by allowing the reconciliation of working hours with care responsibilities. 

The state is, without question, a fundamental actor in the defense of labor rights. But when it is absent, trade unionism is workers’ only hope. The resistance in the region is remarkable. Trade unions in various countries are primarily responsible for resisting the attack of neoliberalism and ushering in labor reforms, even as governments try to push for adjustment policies to be paid for by workers. In Uruguay, for instance, the pandemic is being used as an excuse to promote labor laws that will ‘flexibilize’ the market and take away social benefits that were gained in the last decade. In Brazil, Peru, and Colombia the situation is even worse and workers have to decide whether to stay at home and lose their jobs or go to work and get sick. There is no social protection or unemployment insurance. 

All these measures are promoted by the US government and corporations. On Twitter, Elon Musk said about Bolivia, “We will coup whoever we want.” Governments in the region are financed and propped up by the US to maintain dominance over the region, promote their technologies, and push back against China. Another example of this was the recent election of the president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Historically headed by a Latin American, it is now led by a North American, Mauricio Claver-Carone, for the first time in history. In his first speech, he said he will actively work to kick China out of the region. Governments and Big Tech interests are connected together in ways never imagined. You mentioned the blurring lines between the state and Big Tech, Kate. In what ways are unions engaging with international rules that cement the power of data companies?

KL: Unions have played a leading role in campaigns against unfair trade rules at the WTO and in trade agreements. But these struggles have primarily focused on the impact of tariff reductions and rules that make national industries and local jobs less viable. We have worked with affiliates to understand the broader dangers of trade rules: services chapters that turn public services into commodities and promote privatization, intellectual property rights that make medicines unaffordable, and the power accorded to corporations to sue governments for laws or practices that undermine their capacity to make money. 

But the e-commerce trade rules included in the rather Orwellian Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement were a new challenge. Since the agreement was signed and released, we’ve worked with affiliates to understand how the rules give even greater powers to Big Tech – source code is protected and governments cannot demand that it be made available to the public, or even to the government, governments cannot require source code to be stored locally, corporates cannot be required to have a local presence, e-commerce transactions cannot be subject to tariffs. We have analyzed how the e-commerce chapter impacts health, local government, and energy workers. 

The problem remains that this is one of many, many challenges facing unions. The best way to campaign on these rules is to show that they are all part of the bigger threat facing unions – unbridled corporate power. Of course, the form that our campaigns and activism take have to be reimagined in the post-Covid world. The pandemic has forced us to think more about digital activism. In general, there is a renewed emphasis on cyberactivism within the union movement as people increasingly turn to varied forms of social media for information. Would you agree Sofía?

SS: Absolutely! I also think that recent experiences of cyberactivism by TikTok users in general, and K-pop fans in particular, has important lessons for trade unions. A generation of teenagers are outwitting algorithms to make their voices heard. More recently, they even managed to affect the turnout at the US president’s campaign. This mode of activism is remarkable because these teens understand how to take coordinated action and achieve concrete results. And to achieve this, they deploy technologically very strategically. 

I think trade unions should take a leaf out of this book. They need to pay attention to the causes that move the younger generation of workers and incorporate them into their demands. This is critical to mobilize a generation of young workers who are not only concerned about job insecurity but also about leaving their fingerprints on the web. That said, unions have been engaging in cyberactivism well before the pandemic, with some very positive results.

KL: I think cyberactivism is critical to foster international solidarity, particularly if there’s a sensitive global brand in the picture. A great example is the campaign led by the Kodaikanal Workers’ Association to secure justice for workers suffering from mercury poisoning caused by a Unilever-owned thermometer factory in Tamil Nadu, India. Unilever ignored them for 15 years until they partnered with the Vettiver Collective and a young woman rapper Sofia Ashraf produced the song ‘Kodaikanal Won’t’ that went viral and forced Unilever into a settlement with the workers. Of course, there are many constraints. Few unions have widespread access to the technologies and skills that a well-developed digital strategy needs. Language differences across the region are always a challenge. And so, online activism always has to work in tandem with other forms of trade union responses. 

SS: Certainly, cyberactivism has to be one more tool in the social struggle. It is necessary to understand how it works and incorporate it into current union strategies. But at the same time, the traditional forms of union organization must continue. Technology brings new ways of communicating but empathy and community are irreplaceable. The first trade unionists of the post-industrial era ‘walked the factories’ to get more members, and greater union representation is still the main force. The factory, the workplace has now changed. The new generation of union delegates are not only present on social media networks, but are willing to go further and visit workers at home when they allow it. 

It is also essential to have meeting places in the union premises to foster a sense of fellowship. A sports day, a picnic, a training workshop, a talk in the afternoon – these small steps will ensure that workers in general, including teleworkers and those who have had to develop new modes of working as a result of the pandemic, manage to find ways to connect, so that working in isolation does not become a barrier to union organization. In your own work Kate, what other ways are you using to respond to the current crisis?

KL: Right now, I think we need to reimagine our social, economic and political lives. If we start by acknowledging that our societies should be organized around the capacity to care and stand in solidarity with all, and that the point of digital data should be to aid that process, we can develop new proposals for governing data, societies, and work. At PSI, we are trying to find ways to build union knowledge on issues relating to data governance, identify advocacy opportunities, and shape possible government responses. At the same time, we are working on issues like corporate tax avoidance, particularly by Big Tech. We hope unions can help campaign for digital profit taxes as a step toward global tax reforms. Finally, we want to emphasize the ideas of data as a public good and data commons. We have to start by introducing producer rights over data – if workers produce data, they have a right to the benefits that accrue from that data. In the same way that unions have negotiated copyright entitlements for journalists, we have to campaign for data ownership rights to sit with the producer of the data and be licensed for use only where appropriate. 

These changes won’t happen overnight. But building strong, well-organized alliances between workers and unions across countries and sectors is a necessary first step. In the last 40 years, corporations have secured rights to move capital freely across borders while prohibiting cross-border solidarity. They have fed us the convenient fiction that subsidiaries are separate entities. This is not just a strategy to escape taxes and accountability but also thwart workers’ efforts to organize.

We have to start by introducing producer rights over data – if workers produce data, they have a right to the benefits that accrue from that data. In the same way that unions have negotiated copyright entitlements for journalists, we have to campaign for data ownership rights to sit with the producer of the data and be licensed for use only where appropriate.

Despite such unbridled corporate power, it is now possible to imagine a global strike of Amazon workers, for example. Polish Amazon workers went on strike in solidarity with German Amazon workers earlier this year. It would be even better if, along with these strikes, we could imagine global solidarity actions that demand structural change. What other strategies, alliances, and labor rights do you think need to be achieved in the present context, Sofía?

SS: I think the union movement is definitely getting stronger with new alliances. Going forward, we need to think about joint struggles not only between unions within the same sector, but also across sectors as production processes become more interlinked. As I mentioned earlier, there is a strong lobby in the WTO that sees each part of a production process as a service. With the advancement of the digital economy and internet of things, everything is potentially a digital service, with strong linkages between sectors. In the commerce sector, for example, a strong alliance between the banking and logistics sectors is unavoidable thanks to e-commerce. This makes multisectoral alliances on the part of unions an imperative. 

The right to disconnect was conceived as a new right not only in the interest of workers’ mental health but also as a powerful tool for gender equality. It is the right of every worker not to be contacted outside of working hours by their employer. This not only allows you to enjoy your free time, give your mind a rest from daily tasks, but also helps you regain sovereignty over time so that families can better distribute household chores. Being contacted after work hours should be seen as a lack of respect for the worker. In Argentina, we successfully pushed for teleworkers’ right to disconnect but it needs to be extended to every worker in the country, and throughout the region.

Finally, we also need to limit what information companies can collect on their workers and what they can do with it. Workplaces must seek express and prior consent from workers before collecting such data. Workers need to be aware of what information is being circulated about them and they must have the opportunity to request that this information be eliminated once the employment relationship ends.

I really do not see much awareness among unions in Latin American about the implications of mass surveillance. Workers are subjected to surveillance through facial recognition systems, specific softwares installed on their computers, ‘intelligent buildings’ which have sensors and cameras everywhere. The general population seems to be asking for more surveillance to cope with crime in large cities, an ‘I-have-nothing-to-hide’ attitude prevails in workplaces, and unions are not yet aware of the dangers of the constant monitoring by companies and governments. And ironically, trade unions themselves are at the risk of being surveilled and persecuted through these technologies. The resurgence of far-right governments, as in Brazil, suggests that if more such governments come to power in the future, with surveillance technologies already installed, social movements will face their worst fight. So it is worrying to see that social movements do not take this demand as a direct attack on democracy and freedom.

KL: As grim as that is, do you think there is ‘hope’ for the social movements in general, and the trade union movement in particular?

SS: There’s always hope. That is never lost. Trade union movements in the Americas have survived military dictatorships and plans to dismantle governments. They have always come out of these disruptions renewed and strengthened. The region’s tradition of struggle, protest, and solidarity are an invaluable asset.

The solidarity that social movements across Latin America have demonstrated is remarkable. The feminist movement in particular spread like wildfire and there is a strong sense of sisterhood, especially among the youth, who are no longer willing to tolerate patriarchal outrage.

Trade union movements in the Americas have survived military dictatorships and plans to dismantle governments. They have always come out of these disruptions renewed and strengthened. The region’s tradition of struggle, protest, and solidarity are an invaluable asset.

The trade union movement thrives on these struggles in the region. Political resistance creates a common enemy. Resisting neoliberalism and neoimperialist attacks from the US has helped us join forces against a common cause and achieve a united Latin America.

Hope for the future lies in the region learning from young people. With the strength of the institutional framework that it has created over the years, these lessons can transform Latin America into a new sovereign digital economy, with rights for all workers.

KL: Yes, I agree, there’s always hope. The pandemic has exposed the deep flaws in the current economic and political order. But it has also brought about a renewed respect for public services and the workers who deliver them. This has perhaps opened up a space for discussions about the risks of precarious work and privatized services and potential alternatives.

But it’s really important that we also recognize that corporations see all crises as opportunities for profitmaking and influencing policy. Big Tech has made the greatest gains in the pandemic – what Naomi Klein has called the Screen New Deal. 

Trade unions represent the largest democratic membership movement in the world. We can point to many wins. We know that trade unionism delivers better wages, better societies, and greater equality. We know that power cannot be shifted without a fight. We know that Big Tech companies have amassed so much profit that their wealth dwarfs most government budgets. Yet, I am hopeful every time I look at other historical movements that sprung up against capital amassed by a tiny few and delivered unprecedented changes for the benefit of all.

Kate Lappin is the Asia Pacific Regional Secretary for Public Services International – the Global Union Federation that represents 30 million workers and their unions who deliver public services in more than 150 countries.

Sofía Scasserra is an economist, has a Master’s in international relations, and is currently a PhD candidate in epistemology. She is an advisor to the global presidency of UNI Global Union and the Argentine Senate. She is also a professor and researcher at the Julio Godio World of Work Institute of the National University of Tres de Febrero.

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A New Convention for Data and Cyberspace

A New Convention for Data and Cyberspace

Richard Hill

This essay argues that the time has come for the international community to negotiate and agree to a new treaty – a Convention for Data and Cyberspace – which would contain explicit principles for extending well-established offline legal frameworks and principles to the online world, particularly with respect to certain key domains. There would appear to be wide support for such a treaty, given that many countries have come together, in the context of trade negotiations, to constitute treaty provisions covering specific areas. However, the essay argues that trade negotiations are an inherently inappropriate forum to develop such provisions, given their secretive, undemocratic nature and their susceptibility to lobbying by large private companies. Deliberations on such a new treaty need not be a prolonged process, since the goal is merely to transpose to the online world principles that are already well accepted offline. There is a regular treaty-making mechanism, the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, that takes place every four years. This forum could conveniently be used for the process of negotiating the kind of treaty being proposed here.

Illustration by Kevin Ilango

1. Introduction

Just as the proliferation of steam power and mechanization inaugurated the industrial age three centuries ago, the growing centrality of data and associated technologies are poised to dramatically revolutionize the nature of social and economic life today. As in the early years of industrialization, we once again find ourselves in the midst of a frenzied race to capitalize on these new technologies, and the frameworks that will organize and control them. The issue of international governance is thus of paramount importance. As Roger Brownsword puts it:

“… what happened to us over the last 20 years is that, both publicly and privately, we have become increasingly reliant on information technologies (creating new kinds of vulnerability, both collective and personal), we have migrated many routine activities to on-line environments in ways that are deeply disruptive (we live for many hours each day in our on-line worlds), and we have begun to appreciate that the technological management of our activities has major regulatory implications. If we want to retain a degree of control over our futures, then we need to exert some influence over the spheres of regulatory significance – which is to say, we need to work on creating the right kind of regulatory environment not only for information technologies but also for a raft of other technologies that are enabled by information technology and that are converging to shape our futures.”

While numerous efforts have been made to achieve such a regulatory environment in the national context, the nature of the internet and information technology, as well as the economic activities built around them, require more broad-based interventions. This, unfortunately, has been made difficult by the vested interests of hegemonic powers, as well as the contested terrain of international law. Indeed, as I have noted before1, the current order of global governance is arguably similar to that of feudal Europe, where multiple arrangements of decision-making including the Church, cities ruled by merchant-citizens, kingdoms, empires, and guilds co-existed with little agreement on who held charge over a given territory or subject.

Within this tangled system, internet governance has evolved under the rubric of what is called ‘the multistakeholder model’. Couched in a discourse that promotes egalitarian values and greater participation, this model2 has, in reality, been employed as a means to circumscribe the power of national governments (and intergovernmental organizations) vis-à-vis private transnational corporations. It has fostered not only a strikingly undemocratic regime, but also one that has been dominated by the geopolitical and economic interests of the United States. Be it for the vast unilateral surveillance apparatus that it has built, or the added advantage of its Silicon Valley behemoths, the US has continually worked to ensure that the governance of internet-based technologies remains firmly in its control even as it has postured towards allowing others – but not other governments – to take charge. Furthermore, recent developments in international negotiations point towards accelerated efforts to have large parts of the international community ‘locked in’ to agreements that mandate a liberalized regime involving little regulatory oversight and free flow of data across borders.

This essay argues that the international community needs to not accede to these prevailing trends. There is ample scholarship produced over the years that explores alternative modes of internet governance which may be built upon to craft a democratic and thoughtful regulatory framework that addresses the needs and concerns of a wide variety of actors.

Many in the international community are beginning to realize the importance of regulatory provisions for the digital sphere, and are more open to discussing them in the context of trade negotiations. While the recognition that such issues must be discussed in an intergovernmental forum is a positive sign, trade negotiations are an inherently inappropriate forum for such talks given their secretive, undemocratic nature and their susceptibility to lobbying by large private companies. Of course, there is likely to be inertia and pushback from the powers that be. But this is precisely because they have a lot to lose from any ‘fragmentation’ of the internet that shuts them out from access to large markets and sources of data. If the rest of the international community can come together, it is possible to force them into a reasonable agreement.

The time has come to initiate negotiations for a new treaty – let us call it a Convention for Data and Cyberspace – as a first step towards ushering in a rational and equitable global internet governance regime. It will contain explicit principles for extending well-accepted offline law to the online world, with specific emphasis on key domains. Given the current international environment, there ought to be considerable support for such an initiative. Moreover, there is sufficient consensus on fundamental legal principles in offline law to have them form a foundation for ordering the governance of the digital world.

The essay will begin by outlining fifteen key areas (sections 1.1 to 1.15) of well-established offline law that are undeveloped or not deployed at all in the digital realm, briefly touching upon the key points that need to be considered when developing and transposing these legal frameworks. Section 2 will argue for a new treaty and make concrete proposals for what it may look like. Finally, drawing on the pioneering work of the Just Net Coalition (a network of civil society organizations from around the world), sections 3.1 to 3.11 will set out the principles and provisions that could constitute this treaty and form the bedrock for a new epoch in internet governance.

The fifteen key areas mentioned above are:

1. Democratic control over key online issues and decisions

2. Infrastructure, such as access to the internet, email, and directories

3. Freedom from unwarranted restrictions on freedom of speech (censorship is delegated to unaccountable private companies)

4. Provision of reliable information and protection against defamation

5. Privacy of communications

6. Protection of personal data

7. Security standards required to correct market failures due to information asymmetries and externalities

8. Curbing abuse of dominant market power that arises because of network effects and economies of scale

9. Refraining from producing, procuring, and/or stockpiling dangerous technologies that will inevitably fall into the hands of ill-intentioned actors

10. Equitable taxation of digital services

11. Equitable distribution of the value-added of a newly-discovered natural resource: Data

12. Equitable application of labor laws for online work

13. Equitable application of consumer protection laws for online transactions

14. Equitable distribution of the value of intellectual property rights

15. Efficacy and safety of new technologies such as artificial intelligence

1.1 Democratic control over key online issues and decisions

The importance of democratic control over internet governance at the national level was recognized more than 20 years ago. As Zoe Baird notes:

“In the early years of internet development, the prevailing view was that government should stay out of internet governance; market forces and self-regulation would suffice to create order and enforce standards of behavior. But this view has proven inadequate as the internet has become mainstream. A reliance on markets and self-policing has failed to address adequately the important interests of internet users such as privacy protection, security, and access to diverse content. And as the number of users has grown worldwide, so have calls for protection of these important public and consumer interests. It is time we accept this emerging reality and recognize the need for a significant role for government on key internet policy issues.”

Similar considerations hold at the international level too. Indeed, as the UK Conservative Party put the matter in its 2017 Manifesto:

“The internet is a global network and it is only by concerted global action that we can make true progress.

We believe that the United Kingdom can lead the world in providing answers. So we will open discussions with the leading tech companies and other like-minded democracies about the global rules of the digital economy, to develop an international legal framework that we have for so long benefited from in other areas like banking and trade. We recognize the complexity of this task and that this will be the beginning of a process, but it is a task which we believe is necessary and which we intend to lead.

By doing these things – a digital charter, a framework for data ethics, and a new international agreement – we will put our great country at the head of this new revolution; we will choose how technology forms our future; and we will demonstrate, even in the face of unprecedented change, the good that government can do.”

These statements implicitly recognize that current arrangements for the governance of the internet (the so-called multistakeholder model) are not adequate.3 Unfortunately, there has been little progress to date with respect to establishing democratic control.4

1.2 Infrastructure, such as access to the internet, email, and directories

The state has always been implicated in the creation of large scale social and economic infrastructure. Many nations and empires, for instance, have built and maintained roads in order to facilitate communication networks such as the postal service. The early development of the internet was funded by governments as well.5

It is thus surprising that most governments do not mandate, by law or regulation, that affordable internet access, including email and basic directory services, be made available to all. Given that all governments ensure (or strive to ensure) affordable access to roads, water, electricity, sewage disposal, physical mail, etc., why shouldn’t they ensure (or strive to ensure) affordable access to the internet and email? Indeed, a 2018 United Nations (UN) resolution implicitly urges states to ensure universal and affordable access.6

We can also question why states should implicitly, and without democratic control, delegate the rollout of affordable internet access infrastructure to private companies, particularly dominant social media platforms. No justification is forthcoming on this point. Yet, this is a worrisome and growing trend. Indeed, as one researcher puts it, “That corporations which are already gatekeepers of internet content are increasingly becoming caretakers of its backbone infrastructures raises questions of transparency, accountability, and undemocratic concentration of power.”7 

1.3 Freedom from unwarranted restrictions on freedom of speech (censorship is delegated to unaccountable private companies)

It is universally accepted that freedom of speech is a basic right, and that the right applies equally online.8 There is also universal “concern about the spread of disinformation and propaganda on the internet, which can be designed and implemented so as to mislead, violate human rights and privacy, and incite violence, hatred, discrimination, or hostility”.9

It has long been understood that, in a democratic society, restrictions on freedom of speech can only be imposed by law, and that government actions to restrict freedom of speech must be subject to review by impartial and independent tribunals.10

However, dominant social media platforms exercise de facto censorship based on unilaterally imposed “standards of conduct”. Since platforms are private entities, they can publish – or not – what they see fit, without any judicial oversight (except for allegations of copyright infringement, defamation, or other illegal activities).11

The current regime, particularly in the US, is perceived as giving too much power to social platforms to control what is or is not published, in effect restricting freedom of speech.12

1.4 Provision of reliable information and protection against defamation

As noted above, the current regime results in the publication of a great deal of misleading or downright incorrect information. Further, the limited liability of intermediaries makes it difficult to remove defamatory material: since the dominant platforms are based in the US, a “victim” must file a lawsuit in the US in order to force a platform to remove such material. This is not consistent with offline law, according to which victims of defamation can, under certain conditions, file lawsuits in their own country.

1.5 Privacy of communications

It is universally accepted that online privacy is important and that technical solutions such as encryption can be a critical means to ensure such privacy.13 There is also universal concern about “the arbitrary or unlawful collection, retention, processing, and use or disclosure of personal data on the internet”.14

Existing international law is out of date and does not provide sufficient protection for the privacy of communications.15

1.6 Protection of personal data

It is universally recognized that unlawful or arbitrary collection of personal data is a highly intrusive act, which may violate the right to privacy.16 There is also a universal concern about “the negative impact that surveillance and/or interception of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance and/or interception of communications, as well as the collection of personal data, in particular when carried out on a mass scale, may have on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights.”17 That surveillance is carried out not just by governments (in the interest of national security) but also by private companies for commercial purposes,18 and such private surveillance may have negative national security implications.19

Members of the Council of Europe, and some other states, have addressed this issue by adopting the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data. The European Union has gone further, adopting the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

But apart from these regional instruments, existing international law is out of date and does not provide sufficient protection for data privacy.20

1.7 Security standards required to correct market failures due to information asymmetries and externalities

Security experts have long recognized that the lack of information and communication technology (ICT) security creates a negative externality.21 For example, if an electronic commerce service is hacked and credit card information is disclosed, the users of the service will have to change their credit cards. This is a cost both for the end user and the credit card company. However, that cost is not visible to the e-commerce service. Consequently, the service does not have an incentive to invest in greater security measures. Furthermore, users do not have the information or the technical expertise required to determine whether any particular product or service has adequate security. That is, there is an asymmetry of information in which the supplier knows more than the customer.22

Such market failures can only be corrected by regulatory action, specifically, by imposing liability on suppliers of insecure devices and/or mandating minimum security standards. This is the case for airplanes, automobiles, electrical appliances, pharmaceuticals, etc. Why should it not be the case for ICTs?23

1.8 Curbing abuse of dominant market power that arises because of network effects and economies of scale

It is an observed fact that, for certain services (for example, internet searches, social networks, online book sales, online hotel reservations, etc.) one particular provider becomes dominant.24 If the dominance is on account of better services, then market forces are at work and there is no need for regulatory intervention.

However, if the dominance is due to economies of scale and network effects,25 then a situation akin to a natural monopoly might arise, leading to abuse of dominant market power.26 For example, platforms might abusively use personal data to set high prices of goods for certain customers,27 a dominant national provider might impede the operation of an international competitor,28 a dominant company may excessively influence governments,29 or a dominant search engine might provide search results that favor certain retail sites.30

In such cases, regulatory intervention is certainly required. Yet, enforcement of national competition law is inadequate,31 particularly in the US,32 and there is no international competition law.33

1.9 Refraining from producing, procuring, and/or stockpiling dangerous technologies that will inevitably fall into the hands of ill-intentioned actors

Some recent, and very dangerous, cyberattacks were based on malware that was stockpiled by a government (for its own potential cyberwarfare), but fell into criminal hands.34 This is not acceptable. As stated in 2017 by the Microsoft president:35

“The time has come to call on the world’s governments to come together, affirm international cybersecurity norms that have emerged in recent years, adopt new and binding rules, and get to work implementing them.”

“Such a [set of binding rules set forth in a] convention should commit governments to avoiding cyberattacks that target the private sector or critical infrastructure or the use of hacking to steal intellectual property. Similarly, it should require that governments assist private sector efforts to detect, contain, respond to, and recover from these events, and should mandate that governments report vulnerabilities to vendors rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.”

1.10 Equitable taxation of digital services

At present, multinational companies in general, and ICT companies in particular, minimize (or even avoid) tax payments by structuring their operations to take advantage of the differences in tax laws in different countries.36 As a result, many ICT companies pay little or no tax. Since most activities are moving online, this can result in a significant loss of revenue for states, impeding their ability to provide basic services to their citizens. Further, it is important to recall that large companies are the main beneficiaries of various forms of state aid: subsidies, state-funded research and development, initiatives to favor exports, infrastructure such as roads and electricity, etc.

1.11 Equitable distribution of the value-added of a newly-discovered natural resource: data

It is obvious that personal data has great value when collected on a mass scale and cross-referenced.37 Indeed, the monetization of personal data drives both internet services and the provision of so-called free services such as search engines.38

Yet, at present, there are no laws or regulations that would ensure an equitable distribution of the value-added of data. On the contrary, the entire value-added is captured by a handful of dominant companies.39 This is not sustainable.

A recent study40 discusses the nature of digital production and digital economy, the political economy of the key resources in the digital economy – data and digital intelligence derived from data, the public sector’s legitimate role in the new landscape, and lists important areas for engagement by public sector workers. Furthermore, according to longstanding international law, states have the sovereign right to safeguard and control the exploitation of their natural resources in the interest of citizens.

1.12 Equitable application of labor laws for online work

It is obvious that many types of work are moving online, either partly or entirely, and certain types of traditional work (such as taxi driving) are being transformed by online platforms.41 There is general agreement that labor laws must continue to be applied even as the economy transitions to more online work.42 

1.13 Equitable application of consumer protection laws for online transactions

In most countries, consumers have recourse to a fast and inexpensive national dispute resolution mechanism if they are dissatisfied with a product or service. But they rarely have effective recourse if the product or service was bought from a foreign vendor through the internet.43

1.14 Equitable distribution of the value of intellectual property rights

Current intellectual property laws are dysfunctional and do not achieve their stated goals.44

1.15 Efficacy and safety of new technologies such as artificial intelligence

More and more aspects of daily life are being controlled by automated devices, and in the near future, such devices will take over many services that are today provided manually, such as transportation. To do that, automated devices will have to make choices and decisions.45 It is important to ensure that these choices and decisions comply with our ethical values. In this context, it is worrisome that some modern artificial intelligence algorithms cannot be understood, to the point where it might be impossible to find out why an automated car malfunctioned.46

At present, some actions have been proposed at the national level,47 but there does not appear to be adequate consideration of these issues at the international level.

As the above discussion shows, in certain key domains, current international law is not sufficiently explicit, meaning it does not map, with sufficient clarity, offline law to the online world. Based on these observations, the following section will explain why a new treaty is needed and how it could be negotiated.

2. The need for a new treaty

It has long been understood (and formalized in modern times in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia) that there are, or should be, international rules restricting and/or guiding the ways in which states interact with themselves and with their citizens. Such rules are referred to as international law. The scope and density of international law has increased steadily over time, leading to fundamental advances such as the abolition of slavery and colonialism, the explicit formulation of fundamental human rights, and the formation of international agencies dedicated to the development of international law.

There are numerous treaties (the main source of international law) that relate to the rights and obligations of states regarding ICTs.48 However, as noted above, there are areas in which current international law is inadequate.

This gap has recently been explicitly recognized by most developed and some developing countries, which have joined together in the context of trade negotiations to develop treaty provisions that address some of the issues outlined above.49 However, the proposals that are being put forward are largely intended to enshrine the current situation, which favors dominant internet companies.50

Several states too are initiating national processes that address some of the key issues outlined above. In that light, it would appear that states would be willing to support the initiation of a process to negotiate a new international treaty, specifically to address these matters. Such a treaty should not be an outcome of trade-related negotiations, because these issues are not directly linked to trade, and because trade negotiations are conducted in secret and without sufficient input from civil society and citizens.

It is likely that certain hegemonic powers (the US in particular) would oppose the negotiation of a new treaty along the lines outlined below. However, civil society and enlightened states could come together to negotiate a treaty without the US, as they have done in the past for banning nuclear weapons and certain types of conventional weapons, protection of geographic origin of products, etc. Once there is broad agreement on the content of a new treaty, its formalization would not necessarily be a long-drawn-out affair, as existing treaty-making mechanisms could be deployed to this end. In particular, the Plenipotentiary Conference held every four years – the next one will be in 2022 – by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), could convene a World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT; the last one was held in 2012). WCIT could address many of the issues outlined above. Issues that are outside the scope of the ITU could be addressed in other forums such as ILO, UNCITRAL, UNCTAD, WIPO, etc.

Such a new treaty – a Convention for Data and Cyberspace – should be inspired by the Delhi Declaration51 and by the Digital Justice Manifesto.52

3. The contents of the new treaty

The proposed new treaty would contain provisions along the following lines.53

3.1 Human rights

  • Parties shall adopt a binding instrument specifying that any restrictions to freedom of speech, freedom of communication, or privacy, on grounds of security concerns or otherwise, must be for strictly defined purposes and in accordance with globally accepted principles of necessity, proportionality, and judicial oversight. (See for example specific proposals by the JustNet Coalition.)54

3.2 Data

  • In order to ensure the protection of personal data, thus increasing consumer trust, Parties shall accede to Convention 108 of the Council of Europe and the 2018 protocol amending that convention (CM(2018)2 of May 18, 2018).
  • Parties shall ensure that national laws regarding personal data conform to the provisions of Convention 108 as amended in 2018, and shall apply those provisions to cross-border data flows.
  • Parties shall enact a national data policy which includes, in addition to personal data protection, provisions to ensure equitable distribution of the value derived from the monetization of data.

3.3 Competition

  • Parties shall enact a national competition/antitrust law which is not restricted to preventing consumer harm.
  • Parties shall develop and accede to global antitrust rules and an international enforcement mechanism for such rules.
  • Parties shall enact data-sharing legislation.

3.4 Taxation

  • Parties may impose local presence and/or data localization requirements in order to facilitate the enforcement of tax laws.
  • Parties shall develop and accede to global taxation rules and an international enforcement mechanism for such rules.
  • Parties may impose customs duties on data flows, in particular, when such flows are eroding existing tax bases and/or when alternate types of tax bases are insufficient to generate required tax revenues.

3.5 Access to the internet

  • Parties shall accede to the 2012 version of the International Telecommunication Union’s International Telecommunication Regulations.
  • Parties shall transpose to national law the provisions of ITU-Recommendation D.50, International Internet Connection.
  • Each Party shall administer its procedures for the allocation and use of scarce telecommunications resources, including frequencies, telephone numbers, internet protocol addresses, internet domain names, and rights-of-way, in an objective, timely, transparent, and non-discriminatory manner, in public interest.

3.6 Micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs)

  • Parties shall ensure that MSMEs have affordable access to internet connectivity, international payment platforms, and international physical delivery services.
  • Parties shall establish an international clearing house to facilitate and simplify mutual recognition of national e-signatures on customs and other legally required signed documents.
  • Each Party shall ensure that retail platforms do not themselves supply goods or services offered for sale on the platform.

3.7 Artificial intelligence

  • Parties shall adopt a model law or a treaty on ethical principles for artificial intelligence.

3.8 Access to technology

  • Each Party shall ensure that enterprises around the world have access to modern technology on affordable, objective, timely, transparent, and non-discriminatory terms.
  • Parties are encouraged to procure open source software for government use.
  • No provisions of trade-related agreements shall be construed as preventing the procurement of open source software for government or private use.
  • Access to source code may be mandated under national law for specific purposes, such as verification of compliance with national laws and regulations (competition, taxation, safety, environment, etc.).

3.9 Consumer protection

  • Parties shall enact national law or regulations mandating minimum security requirements for ICT devices, in particular, those interconnected to form the Internet of Things (IoT).
  • Parties shall enact national law or regulations to prohibit unsolicited commercial emails (spam) and shall establish effective enforcement mechanisms, including at the international level.
  • Parties shall transpose to national law the provisions of ITU-Recommendation E.157, International Calling Party Number Delivery, and shall have enacted national laws prohibiting the misuse of international telephone numbers (see ITU-Recommendation E.156, Guidelines for ITU-T Action on Reported Misuse of E.164 Number Resources).

3.10 Employment and working conditions

  • Parties shall take appropriate measures to address the employment issues arising from e-commerce, including by implementing relevant recommendations of the International Labour Organization.

3.11 Security

  • Parties shall refrain from hacking personal accounts or private data held by journalists and private citizens involved in electoral processes.
  • Parties shall refrain from using ICTs to steal the intellectual property of private companies, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, and to provide competitive advantage to other companies or commercial sectors.
  • Parties shall refrain from inserting or requiring “backdoors” in mass-market commercial technology products.
  • Parties shall agree to a clear policy for acquiring, retaining, securing, using, and reporting of vulnerabilities that reflects a strong mandate to report them to vendors in mass-market products and services.
  • Parties shall exercise restraint in developing cyber weapons and ensure that any that are developed are limited, precise, and not reusable; Parties shall also ensure that they maintain control of their weapons in a secure environment.
  • Parties shall agree to limit proliferation of cyber weapons; governments shall endeavor not to distribute, or permit others to distribute, cyber weapons and to use intelligence, law enforcement, and financial sanctions tools against those who do.
  • Parties shall limit engagement in cyber offensive operations to avoid creating mass damage to civilian infrastructure or facilities.
  • Parties shall endeavor to assist private sector efforts to detect, contain, respond, and recover in the face of cyberattacks; in particular, they shall enable the core capabilities or mechanisms required for response and recovery, including Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs); intervening in private sector response and recovery would be akin to attacking medical personnel at military hospitals.
  • Parties shall facilitate the establishment of an international cyberattack attribution organization to strengthen trust online.
  • Parties shall, individually and in cooperation, develop and apply measures to increase stability and security of international telecommunication networks and in the use of ICTs in order to achieve effective use thereof and avoidance of technical harm thereto, as well as to maintain international peace and security, the harmonious development of ICTs, and to prevent ICT practices that may pose threats to international peace and security.55
  • In case of ICT incidents, Parties shall consider all relevant information, including the larger context of the event, the challenges of attribution in the ICT environment, and the nature and extent of the consequences.
  • Parties shall not knowingly allow their territory to be used for internationally wrongful acts using ICTs.
  • Parties shall consider how best to cooperate to exchange information, assist each other, prosecute terrorist and criminal use of ICTs, and implement other cooperative measures to address such threats.
  • Parties shall not conduct or knowingly support ICT activity contrary to their obligations under international law, that intentionally damages critical infrastructure, or otherwise impairs the use and operation of critical infrastructure to provide services to the public.
  • Parties shall take appropriate measures to protect their critical infrastructure from ICT threats, taking into account General Assembly Resolution 58/199 on the creation of a global culture of cybersecurity and the protection of critical information infrastructures, and other relevant resolutions.
  • Parties shall respond to appropriate requests for assistance by another State whose critical infrastructure is subject to malicious ICT acts; they shall also respond to appropriate requests to mitigate malicious ICT activity aimed at the critical infrastructure of another State emanating from their territory, taking into account due regard for sovereignty.
  • Parties shall take reasonable steps to ensure the integrity of the supply chain so that end users can have confidence in the security of ICT products; they shall prevent the proliferation of malicious ICT tools and techniques and the use of harmful hidden functions.
  • Parties shall encourage responsible reporting of ICT vulnerabilities, and share associated information on available remedies to such vulnerabilities, to limit and possibly eliminate potential threats to ICTs and ICT-dependent infrastructure.
  • Parties shall not conduct, or knowingly support, activity to harm the information systems of the authorized emergency response teams (sometimes known as computer emergency response teams or cybersecurity incident response teams) of another State; a Party shall not use authorized emergency response teams to engage in malicious international activity.

Notes

Richard Hill is currently a civil society activist in the area of ICTs, including internet governance and data privacy. He has participated in numerous civil society, intergovernmental, and multistakeholder discussions and has published blogs and peer-reviewed articles. He was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunications Union.

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Whose Knowledge Is Online? Practices of Epistemic Justice for a Digital New Deal

Whose Knowledge Is Online? Practices of Epistemic Justice for a Digital New Deal

Azar Causevic & Anasuya Sengupta

The internet, as the primary digital infrastructure for knowledge, exacerbates existing inequities of marginalized communities across the world, even as it promises to be emancipatory and democratic. Through this essay, we offer our understanding of epistemic injustice, and how it manifests online. We also offer possible practices towards epistemic justice that need to be at the heart of any form of a “digital new deal”. We first analyze two critical ways in which epistemic injustice manifests online: knowledge infrastructures, and knowledge creation and curation. We then describe our work to challenge these injustices on Wikipedia and through radical community archives, in partnership with the Dalit community from South Asia and the diaspora, the Shoshone and Kumeyaay Native Americans from the United States, and the queer community from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Finally, we offer three core organizing practices to decolonize the digital: centering the leadership of the marginalized and convening unusual and unlikely allies; contextualizing the digital to specific experiences and needs; and countering the hegemony of the “global” through a constellation of translocal imaginations and designs from across marginalized communities. More broadly, this essay argues for the decolonization of digital practices and calls for an urgent (re)imagination and (re)design of technological spaces. This, we contend, can only be done through the leadership and imaginations of marginalized communities, in a process free from material and cognitive exploitation.

Illustration by Deniz Erkli

Who are we, and why do we fight for epistemic justice online?

We are Azar Causevic and Anasuya Sengupta. We are friends and fellow fighters in the cause of ‘epistemic justice’: the recognition that not all knowledge systems and communities of knowledge have been treated equally through history, and the practice of challenging these inequities. We believe that at the foundation of many forms of violence in the world today is the violence of “unknowing”, that we do not know each other as fully or as well as we should or could. The knowledges of the majority of the world – women, people of color, LGBTIQ+ folks, indigenous communities, and most of the Global South – have been marginalized, undermined, exploited, or ignored by historical and contemporary structures of power and privilege. Nowhere is this more starkly obvious – and simultaneously hidden – than in the digital worlds of the internet. To us, the (re)imaginations and (re)designs of the internet can be truly transformative only by centering the leadership and knowledges of the marginalized: the majority of the world.

Azar Causevic was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Throughout my life, I have been trying to understand war, (transgenerational) trauma, gender, desire, loss, and injustice from personal and community perspectives. In 2011, a group of us started Okvir, an LGBTIQ+ grassroots organization in Sarajevo. We began by building community resilience and queer visibility in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, and after seven years of activism and organizing, have been able to put together structured mental health support for our community members. We were also able to build a queer archive to honor the stories and testimonies of LGBTIQ+ survivors of the 1990s Bosnian war as well as queer, feminist and anti-militarist resistance to the war in former Yugoslavia.1

Anasuya Sengupta was born in India.
As a woman from a middle class but “upper caste” or “savarna” family, I have struggled to understand, challenge, and transform my own simultaneous positions of oppressor and oppressed, (non)power and (non)privilege. I lived and worked in India till my early 30s, working both locally and internationally in feminist and social justice movements. In the early 2000s, I tried to bring together (unsuccessfully, at the time) feminist communities with free/libre and open source technology (FLOSS) communities. I moved to the United States in 2007, and more recently, to the United Kingdom, where I find myself a “woman of color” coping with my racialized identities and experiences. In 2016, I co-founded Whose Knowledge?, a global, multilingual campaign to center the knowledges of marginalized communities online.2

The (re)imaginations and (re)designs of the internet can be truly transformative only by centering the leadership and knowledges of the marginalized: the majority of the world.

The two of us came together through the work of our organizations, and are now part of a growing community of practice and praxis around the world that works to make public knowledge online, for and from us all. We can only do this by ensuring that the internet’s infrastructure, design, architecture, content, and experience are governed and led by the imaginations and expertise of the marginalized majority, grounded in the practice of epistemic justice.

In this essay, we lay out the ways in which we understand epistemic injustice, and how it manifests online. We then offer some practices towards epistemic justice online that we believe need to be at the heart of any form of a “digital new deal”.

What is epistemic injustice, and how does it manifest online?

Historical and current structures of power and privilege continue to define what is considered “received” or “accepted” knowledge, who creates it, and how. Institutions and individuals embedded in systems of capitalism, colonization, patriarchy, racism, and LGBTphobia have actively undermined, destroyed, or appropriated the knowledges of much of the world’s populations. This has led to severe knowledge or epistemic injustices against marginalized communities even though they are the majority of the world, and the power enabling the internet. Yet the internet, as the primary digital infrastructure for knowledge, further exacerbates these inequities, even as it promises to be emancipatory and democratic.

Historical processes of colonization and imperialism – by western Europe and the United States – have also produced implicit and explicit assumptions of racial and “civilizational” hierarchies. These assumptions have, in turn, informed and justified the expansion of colonial and imperial rule in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and the slave trade from these regions into North America and Europe.3

Even after the mid-twentieth century, when decolonization movements began across Asia and Africa, as well as among indigenous communities of the world, these assumptions have continued to shape how people of color, including African-American, Native American, and other non-white communities in the US, are treated. Most critically, beyond the facts of whose material resources were and continue to be exploited and extracted, these assumptions have determined whose knowledges and histories are considered worthwhile, and deserving of preservation and amplification. The cognitive consequences of slavery, colonization, and imperialism extend across the world, and often remain unanalyzed and unchallenged.

Miranda Fricker, a feminist philosopher, calls these hierarchies of knowing “epistemic injustice”: “[the] wrong done to someone […] in their capacity as a knower”.4 She makes a distinction between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice “deflate[s] the credibility” of an individual or disbelieves a community – for example, when the police don’t believe a black man on the streets. Hermeneutical injustice is a refusal to acknowledge the “social experience” of someone different from you because you disbelieve a concept – for example, a woman who experiences sexual harassment is not believed in a culture that either lacks an understanding of the concept or willfully undermines it.

These forms of testimonial and hermeneutical injustices are particularly stark in public knowledges on the internet. Two critical ways in which knowledge injustice manifests online are: a) knowledge infrastructures, and b) knowledge creation and curation.

Online knowledge infrastructures

The design, architecture, and governance of the internet’s “global” platforms and tools rarely include women, people of color, LGBTIQ+ folks, indigenous communities, and those from the Global South (Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and the Caribbean). Currently, over 58 percent of the world’s population can access the internet.5 Of those, over 75 percent are from the Global South.6 More than 45 percent of women across the world are online.7 And yet, the internet does not look like us, and it is certainly not governed by us: a trans person from a country of the Balkans who speaks four different languages other than English, or a brown woman from India who speaks five languages other than English.

Instead, it is primarily the perspectives of white, cisgender, North American men that dictate how our knowledge infrastructures are created and managed. This includes complex issues of the global digital economy and ecosystem: digital (material, technical, and cognitive) labor, the colonization of data,8 and e-waste “management” in the Global North that takes the form of “dumping” in the Global South. In essence, the platforms, policies, and protocols that most of us experience as the “internet” are created for and decided by the “local” context of the United States, making this “local” the largely unquestioned “global” of the rest of the world.

Facebook, for instance, is notorious for its role in spreading hate speech on the internet, often driven by its lack of awareness of non-US contexts and utter disregard for criticism emanating from there. The United Nations, for instance, has strongly condemned Facebook’s role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, where the social media platform did not have a team on the ground, let alone one with expertise in the local languages. This, years after activists have been warning about the unfolding crisis.9 Twitter tries to do better on hate speech, for instance, through a “fact check” feature that determines whether indigenous communities are appropriately addressed, but its curation style guide only describes populations in the US, Canada, and Australia,10 ignoring the 370 million indigenous peoples across 70 countries.11 So-called “artificial intelligence” or machine learning platforms, fed by datasets that are primarily based on white men, notoriously replicate systemic biases.12 With the majority of the world excluded from knowledge infrastructures, such instances will continue to exist and proliferate.

The inability of marginalized communities to create knowledge in their own languages on the internet reinforces and deepens existing offline inequalities. Language is a proxy for knowledge; the fewer the languages in which online public knowledge is available, the more restricted our access to the full range and multiple forms of human knowledge.

Another aspect of digital infrastructures that is often ignored or underanalyzed is that of language. The internet we have today is not multilingual or multiform enough to reflect the full depth and breadth of humanity. The inability of marginalized communities to create knowledge in their own languages on the internet reinforces and deepens existing offline inequalities. Language is a proxy for knowledge; the fewer the languages in which online public knowledge is available, the more restricted our access to the full range and multiple forms of human knowledge.

Besides, the majority of public knowledge online is textual, in English, and created or curated by a select few. A few years ago, Google estimated that the nearly 130 million books published in modern history are in only 480 languages, a tiny fraction of the over 7,000 languages of the world.13 Most of the world’s languages are similarly missing from the internet.14 Of the languages represented, English dominates general online content, accounting for 60 percent of the world’s top 10 million known websites.15 Most scholarly (including digitally accessed) publications are in English: this includes approximately 80 percent of all scientific journals16 and 90 percent of all social science journals indexed on Scopus and JSTOR.17 And while the internet has the potential to represent multiple forms of knowledge – multimedia, oral, visual, tactile, and embodied, which constitute most of the collective body of human knowledge18 – these forms are missing from its archives.

Knowledge content and curation online

Like knowledge infrastructures, public online knowledge is skewed as well, because the majority of those who use the internet do not produce the content on it. Take for instance, the world’s foremost source of free public online knowledge, Wikipedia. Only 20 percent of the world (primarily white male editors from North America and Europe) edits 80 percent of its content,19 and only 1 in 10 editors is female.20 The result is that there are more articles online about Antarctica than most countries in Africa.21 Besides, Wikipedia’s citation policies require as references secondary sources like books, peer reviewed journal articles, and other forms of physical and digital publishing that have the inherent biases of language and location we have already described.22

These inequities also extend to visual knowledge. Wikipedia is again a good proxy to explain why women remain invisible in online spaces. Less than one-fourth of Wikipedia biographies are about women. Such biographies either do not exist or are incomplete. Black, brown, indigenous, and queer women are more likely to be missing and their knowledges underrepresented or deleted due to Wikipedia’s current policies.23 When they do exist, women’s biographies are unlikely to carry their faces. We estimate (based on a forthcoming study) that less than 20 percent of Wikipedia articles on women have pictures. And when women’s faces are missing from Wikipedia, their invisibility becomes more entrenched.

Half a billion people read Wikipedia every month.24 It is among the top 20 most visited websites in the world,25 and the largest free and openly available information base for many other websites, including Google’s search engine and its knowledge graph.26 Content gaps on Wikipedia thus have a significantly amplified impact on the broader internet. When we look for our childhood inspirations on the internet, we are more likely to find detailed articles on the Simpsons’ TV show rather than any information on Lepa Mlađenović, the Serbian lesbian feminist, or We Also Made History, the first book detailing women’s participation in India’s Dalit movement. As part of our archival work, we had to write these articles so they could “exist” on Wikipedia and be known more broadly on the internet, and in the world.

Where do we go from here? Practices of epistemic justice

“Our encounters with mainstream knowledge production must be placed in this historical context. We remember that Dalits and other caste-oppressed people were not allowed access to reading, writing, or learning for millennia.”
– Maari Zwick-Maitreyi, Dalit scholar and activist27

“[The] scientific knowledge [of indigenous peoples] was designated as ‘folklore’ and our cosmology relegated to the category of ‘myth’. Our great literatures in the form of dances, songs, and oral histories became and continue to be cultural artifacts easily commodified and appropriated.”
– Persephone Lewis, professor of tribal practice (University of San Diego), from the Yomba Band of Shoshone Indians

What we have learned through years of working at the intersections of feminist, queer, social justice, art, and technology movements, is that power and privilege are truly confronted and transformed in practice. So our work has been about practicing new ways of navigating and understanding knowledge and the digital, for ourselves and our communities. Three critical aspects of this work are: a) the ways we think and act around the politics and hierarchies of knowledge; b) the politics and hierarchies, even more specifically, of history; and c) how this helps us (re)imagine and (re)design the digital for very different (digital) futures.

What happens when we start understanding the folklore and myths of indigenous and other marginalized peoples as different ways of expressing scientific and other knowledge in their contexts? What happens when we collect “ourstories” from communities whose existence was perennially negated?

Science and technology aren’t the exclusive provenance of 18th century Enlightenment, or contemporary scholars and researchers of Europe or North America. Throughout history, the knowledges of marginalized peoples have been actively destroyed and undermined by structures of power and privilege. For example, some indigenous knowledge systems were regarded as primitive, pagan, and heathenish, while others were systematically relegated as non-knowledge.28 These power relations continue to imbue present-day knowledge production.

But what happens when we start understanding the folklore and myths of indigenous and other marginalized peoples as different ways of expressing scientific and other knowledge in their contexts? What happens when we collect “ourstories” from communities whose existence was perennially negated?

Politics and hierarchies of knowledge

When we first started Whose Knowledge? in 2016, and began challenging the politics and hierarchies of knowledge, we started with Wikipedia. We were Wikipedia editors ourselves, and understood the urgency of making the world’s largest online encyclopedia truly representative of the worlds we inhabit. Even though we couldn’t shift and change the form of the encyclopedic entry, we wanted to make sure that communities like the Dalits from South Asia and the diaspora, or the Shoshone and Kumeyaay Indians from the United States, were not forgotten and marginalized many times over in the digital knowledge commons. This was particularly important to Anasuya, as a “savarna” Indian who bears responsibility for her caste communities who have inhabited and gained from an oppressive caste system for millennia. I also found an intriguing emotional and political connection with my Native American friends whose lands had been brutally colonized by Europeans in search of my own; the colonizers found us both, and our histories and experiences of colonization resonate even while they are different.

The Dalits are the community of over 250 million people from South Asia and the diaspora who were formerly and pejoratively called “untouchables”. The “upper caste” or “savarna” communities of the caste system considered them fit only for manual scavenging and the handling of corpses – practices which continue to this day. As Maari Zwick-Maitreyi reminds us, Dalits have been systematically denied access to spaces and tools of education and knowledge. When we began collaborating with our partners, the Dalit feminist group Equality Labs,29 they had already been working on retelling South Asian history from the perspectives of Dalit Bahujan communities,30 through the radical community project, Dalit History Month.31 We used this as a foundation to map the Dalit Bahujan knowledge we wanted to bring online, including to Wikipedia. This enabled our Dalit friends and scholars determine the knowledge they wanted to archive. Since 2017, they’ve created a huge swathe of new and modified content32 through editathons we’ve helped them organize: over 100 editors modifying 270 articles and creating 30 new ones.

Yet, soon after they began their work, a Wikipedia editor of Indian origin began to systematically reverse these efforts, by removing significant sections of edits and additions, and flagging other edits as inappropriate. To this day, Dalit editors and their articles continue to face significant backlash and reversions on Wikipedia. The biographical article about the Dalit South Asian icon, Dr. BR Ambedkar (known for being the architect of India’s constitution, among many other things), is periodically vandalized. We’ve been building an ally network to push back against these trolls, but the process is slow, painful, and retraumatizing for a community of activists and scholars challenging overlapping forms of power. This is especially so in the current moment in India, governed by a Hindu fascist state that is systematically destroying and undermining all knowledges and histories that don’t uphold a monocultural “Vedic” narrative.

These extraordinary forms of brutalizing marginalized communities and their knowledges resonate with the experience of the Kumeyaay Nation and Yomba Band of Shoshone Indians who we work with in the United States. During conversations with the Kumeyaay elders on bringing their knowledges online, we were reminded that, until very recently, it was illegal to practice Native American cultures and beliefs in the US. It was only in 1978 – within living memory and existence of most of their generation – that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act allowed them to share their knowledges publicly. The elders also reminded us that for many indigenous peoples across the world, sacred knowledge is not meant to be shared openly. Over time, the scientific knowledge of these communities, as Persephone Lewis tells us, became “reduced” to myth and story, their cultures and practices exploited and commodified.

These politics and hierarchies continue to be exemplified in the marginalization of Native Americans in the present-day US. When we first began editing Wikipedia together, Kumeyaay scholar Michael Mishkwish Connolly did not begin with Kumeyaay astronomy and agriculture (on which he is an expert). Instead, he began with editing a Wikipedia article on the Californian Gold Rush,33 which at the time, only made a passing reference to the impact of the Gold Rush on Native American populations. Where it did mention them, the accompanying illustration was of a Native American “savage” shooting arrows at “hapless” white settlers. Today, that section of the article is far more substantial, recounting the genocide perpetrated on the native populations by the settlers, with a historically accurate illustration of a group of settlers pointing their guns at Native Americans. Lewis, who is professor of tribal practice at the University of San Diego, has been working with her students to mark and honor these many facets of Native American knowledge and history, and bring them online through Wikipedia.

For both Dalit and Native American people, challenging the politics and hierarchies of digital knowledge is not an intellectual effort: it is the essence of their own self-respect, self-determination, and dignity as communities. It is emotional, cultural, economic, and deeply political. It is a practice of epistemic resistance and revolution.

Politics and hierarchies of history/ourstory

As part of Okvir’s Queer Archive project, in collaboration with Whose Knowledge?, we collected “ourstories” from our community of LGBTIQ+ activists in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) who had survived the Bosnian war (1992-1995). Up until then, war narratives had been monopolized and monetized by political ethnonational elites or “eligible” victims and survivors, and did not include the experiences of queer feminist activists or our anti-military comrades. There were no recorded accounts of queer people in the diaspora, in concentration camps, or hiding in basements, queer sons and daughters of those who fought against each other, queers who refused to shoot, queers who didn’t belong to any of the ethnic categories, queers who died, and so on. Ourstory was crowded out and invisibilized by the male, heterosexist, ethnonationalist history of the war.

The interconnections between “war”, “LGBT”, “queer”, “security”, “gender”, “sexuality”, “resistance”, “ethnicity” have historically been ignored in BiH. These concepts have been given meaning only by those in power. As we mourned each victim, we understood that history and justice didn’t include us, that we were not recognized as legitimate to claim justice in the first place. Following years of community conversations, we decided to start by archiving “ourstories” from the painful period of the Bosnian war, even as we understood that our existence goes beyond the former Yugoslavia and its disintegration, and further back into the past. We needed to trace part of our roots at the intersections between three different, but as it turned out, deeply connected movements in the region: feminist, anti-militarist, and early LGBT activism.

In a discussion during our early work on Queer Archive, one of us asked aloud: “Who are my (queer antifascist) people? Yes, we did have the Antifascist Front of Women during WWII, but were queers there? I need to find out who my people are and what they did during this war that we remember. Did they resist? How did they survive?” So many powers have conquered Bosnia and Herzegovina throughout history, so many wars have been fought on its land, and there is such a strong antifascist legacy. Yet, there are no documented traces of queer existence in recorded history. It is as though we did not exist. The question ‘who are my people’ haunted us. This blindspot in collective memory left us feeling dislocated as a political community, and this was a gap we urgently needed to fill.

In October 2016, we started documenting the work and survival stories of our community’s pioneers for the archive. In subsequent years, this initiative has anchored the queer community in BiH, giving us a sense of continuity in our own struggles, and a reason to celebrate. Being able to look back at the past with pride and a sense of belonging is vital in the context of BiH where belonging and pride have normally been reserved for the majority who claim the entirety of history, and exclude those opposed to violence, division, and profit. The anti-military queer women who worked on rape trauma with survivors, the queer people who initiated the first queer organization, or the gay men who, to this day, work on preserving the antifascist legacy are the foundations of our archive.

(Re)imaginations and (re)designs of the digital

“If we taught histories along with technologies, we would be able to bring the genius of human collaboration and problem solving back into technological spaces […] Are we linking technology to processes of extraction in the interests of the elite, or are we prepared to rethink technology from the ground up, rather than naively recirculate the forms of technology given to us?”
– Kavita Philip, professor of history and feminist science and technology studies, University of California, Irvine

The decolonization of digital practices calls for an urgent (re)imagination and (re)design of technological spaces, with the leadership of marginalized communities, through a process free from exploitation. This needs a deeply feminist, human, and humane politics and practice – the commitment to address deep inequities, and affirm, acknowledge, share, and redistribute knowledge without extraction and exploitation. From the perspective of marginalized communities, this needs critical and radical creativity and adaptability, and the courage to speak many truths to many powers, while documenting and centering our own heritage, histories, ancestors, and pioneers.

This work must simultaneously challenge the entrenched political economies of knowledge that exist both in the physical and digital, material and cognitive, economies of the local and global. We need to see the interconnectedness of cognitive and material labor, and honor the bodies, minds, and spirits of marginalized communities. We can only imagine (digital) futures through acknowledging our pasts and presents.

We need to, once and for all, break the myth of the “global” internet that is primarily designed and controlled from Silicon Valley, California.

Three core organizing practices will help us in this process: a) centering the leadership of the marginalized and convening unusual and unlikely allies; b) contextualizing the digital to specific experiences and needs; and c) countering the hegemony of the “global” that comes from a very specific local Silicon Valley perspective, through a constellation of translocal imaginations and designs from across marginalized communities.

Center the margins and convene unusual and unlikely allies

The many inequities of the digital that we currently live with will not be overcome and transformed by those who created them. At Whose Knowledge?, in partnership with many movements, organizations, communities, and individuals across the world, we have begun convening unusual and unlikely allies who will help us dream of and act upon visions of a feminist and decolonized internet. Our Decolonizing the Internet conference in Cape Town in 2018, and the Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages convention in 2019, brought together community activists and scholars, technologists, archivists, librarians, open knowledge advocates, and many others, to think through ways to transform our digital presents and futures. Over 60 percent of our groups comprised women or trans/non-binary folks, over 60 percent were from the Global South, and more than 70 percent were people of color. Centering marginalized communities and their expertise meant that the conversations and agendas for action were radically different from those of a homogenous group of California-based or focused technologists.34

Contextualize, contextualize, contextualize

Our systems of knowledge, our languages, our socio-political and economic contexts are rarely understood, or centered in, current digital designs of the internet. But there can be no digital new deal without a deep, meaningful, and intentional understanding of different and specific contexts and experiences.

In creating Queer Archive, we found that platforms for archive building are rarely contextualized and localized in different languages. Most of them are dependent on unpaid, unacknowledged, volunteer community work for their localization and translation. For instance, Omeka, a popular open source, web-publishing platform for sharing digital collections in BiH is not yet translated to Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian. Simply cross-referencing and combining metadata in English and our local languages requires additional labor, let alone creating metadata “classifications” and systems that apply to our contexts. The internet abounds in these forms of disembedded, decontextualized design and knowledge infrastructures.

Counter the “global” hegemony of Silicon Valley through a constellation of translocal imaginations and designs

We need to, once and for all, break the myth of the “global” internet that is primarily designed and controlled from Silicon Valley, California. We each access and experience the internet not in a singular form, but in multiple ways. Yet, this homogenizing narrative is entrenched in digital infrastructures, content, and governance, as we have pointed out throughout this essay.

We need to counter this hegemony through a constellation of translocal imaginations and designs that also include our friends from marginalized communities of California, and that will make our digital futures what we want, need, desire, and imagine. Both of us have spent the last few years connecting this constellation of communities through our own work, and that of our friends. Only through these powerful translocal connections, can we move towards epistemic justice online and (re)affirm that “our knowledges are urgent. They are practical. They are creative, colourful and collective. They are plural […] Our knowledges are transformative. They are hope.”35

Notes

Azar Causevic was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Gender-in-process queer, pronoun they. Queer feminist activist. Community organizer and one of the core team members of the LGBTIQ+ association Okvir and the Queer Archive project. Devoted to sustainable LGBTIQ+ community building in BiH with respect to all aspects of security and safety. Passionate about queer spaces of love, memory, and resistance. Engaged in video, graphics and sound production, and design. Peer counselor. IT explorer. Poetry and psychoanalysis lover.

Anasuya Sengupta is co-director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to center the knowledges of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) online. She has led initiatives in India and the USA, across the Global South, and internationally for over 25 years, to amplify marginalized voices in virtual and physical worlds. She received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute, and is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. When not rabble-rousing online, Anasuya makes and breaks pots and poems, takes long walks by the water and in the forest, and contorts herself into yoga poses.

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Food for All or Feeding the Data Colossus? The Future of Food in a Digital World

Food for All or Feeding the Data Colossus? The Future of Food in a Digital World

Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration
(ETC Group)

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the global resource grab in our food and agriculture systems. The encompassing digitalization of the core ecological and social components of these systems is the new means of making vast profits. Approaches that claim precision through efficient utilization of resources are, in fact, forms of power grab by the data colossus – the world’s largest corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alibaba – from the fields and fishing grounds of farmers and fisher folk. In response to these incursions, some groups of smallholder and peasant farmers have been either struggling to benefit in the fringes of digitalization or attempting to create their own open source alternatives. Ultimately though, the principles of food sovereignty can only be protected by democratic processes that challenge the monopolistic powers of these corporations. To develop alternatives to a corporate-controlled ‘fourth industrial revolution’ and regain control over our food and agricultural futures, we need to assert peasant farmers’ sovereignty over their data, promote agro-ecology and bottom-up technologies, and build a comprehensive global system of participatory technology assessment.

Illustration by Mansi Thakkar

Introduction

Food and agriculture has always been a key battleground for the deployment of new technologies. The sector has often acted as a vehicle to win over to industrial models of production, the hearts, minds, stomachs, and pockets of people who produce food and those who consume it – which is everyone. It is also a big business. The World Bank estimates that the food system accounts for at least a tenth of the global economy, making food a natural target for technology titans seeking new speculative investment opportunities for the development and deployment of new technologies.1

Technology has transformed the global food system several times in the recent history and big technology firms (whether in chemicals, genetics, or machinery) have been especially active in exploiting this field. Far from being politically neutral, technology is always introduced within an ideological framing and advanced by powerful players who use it as a lever to shift or retain power in the food system and, thereby, over populations. As it was for industrial chemistry pioneers in the last century, so it is today for data colonialists who smell profits in the fields and the fishing grounds.

The power vested in technology to transform the global economic system has never been greater. The exponential technological changes ushered in by the so-called fourth industrial revolution have the potential to upturn all economic sectors including food and agriculture. This essay argues that any alternative to this corporate-led technological food future will have to contain strategies to counter this tsunami and challenge the ideologies behind it. These alternatives must centre the interests and livelihoods of peasant farmers, small farmholders, and indigenous communities who feed 70 percent of the world’s population, and yet, have been perennially pushed to the margins by previous technological waves and their disruptive consequences for the food system.

The essay is structured as follows. In Section 1, we outline how mega-corporations have identified food and agriculture systems as sources of data and then proceeded to harvest this data for financial gains. Sections 2, 3, and 4 identify some of the most dangerous features of this data colossus. Finally, Section 5 proposes the strategies and components of an alternative new deal for food and agriculture based on a democratic process of technology assessment and the principles of food sovereignty.

1. The flawed food system as a ‘data problem’

While food producers traditionally consider seeds, breeds, soil, and cultural practices as the bedrock of the food system, corporate players are increasingly regarding data as the key strategic resource. A great mapping is underway, reimagining every aspect and challenge of the food system as a big data enterprise – from soil, climate, and genetic data, to logistics, trade, consumer, and health data. The streaming of big data from farm machinery, grocery shopping, or agro-biodiversity is now an increasingly valuable commodity in its own right, leading to the rapid economic ascendancy of data platforms in the agri-food industry and the ‘datafication’ of all aspects of food, agriculture, human health, environment, and other related domains.

Data surveillance, processing, and manipulation is transforming each ‘link’ across the food chain – beginning with breeding and genetic engineering strategies at one end, followed by data-mediated food logistics and commodity delivery systems in the middle, and digital consumer retail and health technologies at the other end.2 But reframing the challenges faced by the food system as a ‘data problem’ only suits the interest of investors such as asset management firms with horizontal shareholding across the food chain.

To be sure, this overarching system of control enabled by the datafication of the global food system did not happen overnight. The decades-long struggles of family farmers in the Global North to defend their ‘right to repair’3 was a subtle warning of the technological slavery that would come with the corporate takeover of data and technology on the farm. Farmer groups have cried foul on digital ‘turnkey’ agreements where the user of data-enabled tractors legally surrenders rights by the act of turning on the machine. They have locked legal horns with farm machinery giants to protect their right to repair farm machinery. In this digital Wild West, many governments and regulators have been persuaded to allow corporations to reap vast profits from e-commerce and digital trade without ever being required to pay taxes. In the post-pandemic economy, unmitigated corporate influence on the food chain, facilitated by big data surveillance, is being repackaged as the harbinger of food safety, health, and personalization benefits to end consumers, and production cost efficiencies to farmers and fisherfolk. Over time, platform companies can boost their profits by utilizing big data patterns and machine learning (often called artificial intelligence or AI) to redesign the entire food system. The result would be a food system stripped of all direct human relations with the soil, plants, animals, rivers, or the oceans, and mediated by data and data-driven business strategies.

2. Food systems in a biodigital world: Old game, new tricks and traps

Food systems contain both the complex and diverse living world of biology and the hyper-rationalized behavioral world of economics. It is at this interface that biodigital convergence – the interactive combination of digital technologies and biological systems – has emerged.4 We see this trend in every step of the food chain – the development of robotic bees to aid pollination, the co-evolution of digital and biological technologies in the agricultural application of CRISPR-Cas9 technologies,5 and synthetic biology microorganisms ‘programmed’ to secrete industrial proteins. Beyond the individual ‘apps’, a digitally-enhanced agro-ecosystem is being envisaged as a bio-digital system – a living, food-growing landscape shaped and nudged by robotic and data-driven machines.

Biodigital convergences across the food system are paving the way for new players, from sectors that are not traditionally associated with food and agriculture, to wield power over food production and consumption. This includes everything from digital technology platforms to companies manufacturing drones and hyperspectral sensors, and oil, energy, and finance majors that want to biodigitally reshape landscapes and farming practices, marketing them as climate change mitigation initiatives and reaping carbon credits to offset emissions from their fossil fuel-dependent businesses. These biodigital interventions will have profound and long-lasting impacts on the global food system, hunger, food sovereignty and farmers’ rights to seeds, and development. They will displace rural labor, undermine traditional and local knowledge systems, further marginalize farmers, and expand extreme industrial agriculture.

For agri-food giants, data strategies are not just a means to uncover and capture new efficiencies in food. These strategies form the basis for shifts in the economy toward ‘surveillance capitalism’6 as data giants amass and leverage datasets from both food producers and consumers as a new form of capital. The agricultural and food data thus collected can be profitably combined with environmental, health, security, and consumer data to deliver real-time insights with exploitable value beyond the food system. This means that the big names in food in the coming decades are most likely to be data processors. Amazon with its data trove, data-led insights, and AI capacity to understand the consumer grocery end of the food chain is now stepping into what its supporters call ‘precision agriculture’. Its web services subsidiary is partnering with major seeds and agrochemical companies as well as genomic data initiatives like the Earth Biogenome project. Similarly, Alibaba is aggressively moving into the digital food and agriculture space through its ‘ET Agricultural Brain’.7 Meanwhile, giant agribusinesses such as Bayer (now incorporating Monsanto), Yara, and John Deere are reinventing themselves as data providers, crunching data generated from farmers’ fields in strategic alliance with digital platforms.8 Corporate behemoths in poultry and livestock have also embraced big data, machine learning, and the internet of things (IoT) to make their operations more ‘efficient’, which is often code for reducing dependence on human labor while maximizing profit at every stage.

For agri-food giants, data strategies are not just a means to uncover and capture new efficiencies in food. These strategies form the basis for shifts in the economy toward ‘surveillance capitalism’ as data giants amass and leverage datasets from both food producers and consumers as a new form of capital.

The industrial agricultural system, comprising long food chains that depend on fossil fuel, leaves food availability vulnerable to energy shocks and trade disruptions. The emerging data-dependent agri-food system will find itself confined by limitations and vulnerabilities arising from data infrastructures. On-farm data, consumer food data, genomic data, among others, will constitute an ever-larger driver of the data colossus enabled by massive networks of supercomputers, servers, data centers, fiber optic cables, and 5G wireless systems. No-holds-barred mining of lithium, copper, silicon, and other rare earth minerals necessary to create the infrastructure for this colossus will increasingly place a hard physical limit on the ability of digital food systems to feed people. The possibility that deliberate cyberattacks, ill-designed algorithms, or network outages could cause food shortages in the digitally-mediated food chain is yet to be reckoned with, as is the vulnerability of our complex food system. With industrial farming and food provisions increasingly designed and directed by machine learning, the potential for unexplained (and unexplainable) points of failure in the food system is growing.

Energy and material limits on data systems will also drive interest in low-energy biological modes of computation, data transfer, and storage — such as molecular communication developed to process and carry digital information on biological and chemical molecules such as DNA or pheromones. Farmers and fisherfolk may find themselves recast as literal data farmers and synthetic molecular communication may interfere with natural ecological modes of communication and other mutually beneficial relationships between living things, such as gene flow and pollination processes.910

Biodigital investments are additionally flowing into biotech strategies that do not modify the food itself but, instead, either modify elements of agro-ecosystems such as soil microbes, weeds, and insects, or do not incorporate modified DNA into the final product such as ‘transient modification’, RNAi sprays, biosynthesis, and big data breeding strategies.11 By avoiding the legal definition of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), these kinds of technologies could allow the industry to sidestep regulations that have safeguarded most consumers from genetically engineered foods for the last 25 years.

3. Creating illusions of ‘choice’

Corporations attempt to ‘nudge’ or persuade consumers towards specific behaviors – for instance, into accepting GMOs – while giving them the illusion of choice. During the pandemic, online sellers enticed consumers to save time and avoid social contact by using different ‘hyper-nudging’ techniques.12 Such techniques include consumer-targeted discount e-coupons, products placed strategically at the online point of sale, and leveraging insights from a consumer’s shopping history in order to offer new products according to taste, lifestyle, and income.13 Needless to say, these hyper-nudging techniques have very little transparency and even lesser regulatory limits on the purposes of algorithmically-driven desire-modification and to what end.

The manipulation of consumer behavior can generate real-time profit opportunities in genetics or farm conditions. Technology platforms with interests across the food chain can leverage consumer insights to redesign seeds, farming patterns, and logistics in ways that maximize short-term profit at great cost to ecosystems, health, justice, and people’s rights.

4. Corporate megabytes for lunch?

The future of our food system thus stands compromised. With technology companies making inroads into the system, digital technologies are at the forefront of shaping the present and the future of food and agriculture. As the digitalization tsunami sweeps across farming communities, landlessness, land grabbing, exploitative market relations, and the lack of social protections will likely worsen. The knowledge and agency of farmers and peasant families will be pushed further into the margins as robotic agriculture moves into their lands, obliterating the role of women farmers, wiping out livelihoods, and transforming economies. The underclass of people living in economically precarious circumstances in rural and urban areas will keep rising, exacerbating income and social inequalities.

As the digitalization tsunami sweeps across farming communities, landlessness, land grabbing, exploitative market relations, and the lack of social protections will likely worsen.

The trillion-dollar companies Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet have already become so powerful that governments and multilateral organizations like the United Nations (UN) heed their advice on public health, education, and digital cooperation policies. These firms and their political surrogates claim that digital technologies can solve the world’s problems, ranging from diseases and aging to energy and food crises. They echo the false promise of small-scale solutions – that utilizing big data, sensors, and machines could render diverse smallholdings and fishponds more profitable. Instead of giant autonomous combine tractors rolling across enormous fields, they advocate for swarms of small robots to be deployed in smaller disaggregated plots. Catchy labels like ‘climate-smart’ digital and genomically-enhanced agriculture are promoted as consistent with demands that industrial modes of production be replaced with more democratic approaches that give local communities more control. In reality, such shifts merely entrench the power of the already-dominant megacorporations that own these technologies and thus control the infrastructure of an increasingly digitalized food system.

Hyperbolic promises of ‘technology for good’, involving public-private partnerships such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), proclaim that digital technologies can deliver higher income, better living conditions, and more equitable status for peasants and smallholders in the post-pandemic world. And some small enterprises, farmers’ groups, and civil society organizations do indeed venture into harnessing the potential of digital technologies in good faith from their position in the fringes, relying on smartphones and open operating systems as tools for digital leverage. But more often than not, the pro-poor narratives are propagated by self-styled digital saviors and the vested interests behind these technologies.

5. An alternative new deal for food and agriculture

Reversing the corporate capture of the global food system and reclaiming it for people and the planet calls for building an alternative new deal for food and agriculture. This is a task already being undertaken by some farmers’ groups and popular movements which are actively discussing alternative digital technologies, based on a set of premises different from those espoused by corporate interests. Ultimately, whether or not, how, and which technologies may be beneficial for peasant farmers, pastoralists, and fisherfolk on whose backs the global food system is built, will depend on the conditions, requisites, and sincerity in building this new deal. But at its core, it should take into account the following components:

5.1. Peasant farmers’ sovereignty over data

Data giants are already forcing a new, poorly understood reality upon food systems. There is an urgent need to interrogate and expose who controls and benefits from this evolving digital reality. Without a doubt, the digital food system is being reconfigured to benefit data processors, industrial agricultural giants, biotechnology players, commodity and grain behemoths, the global logistics machinery, and retail giants that are, in turn, gradually being swallowed by digital platform giants.

It is, therefore, more urgent than ever to talk about food sovereignty, the right of peasant farmers, peoples, and countries to define their agriculture and food policies in ways that establish direct, democratic control over how they feed themselves, and how they maintain land, water and other resources for the benefit of current and future generations. It is a vision that animates all food movements struggling for justice. In the post-pandemic world, where digital technologies are ubiquitous, peasants and smallholder movements globally will have to consider if farmers’ control over data has a place in the tenets of food sovereignty. Some argue that limited digitalization could be useful in agriculture and is compatible with food sovereignty. This especially if peasant farmers decide to digitize information and data on their practices and resources for the benefit of their communities, based on free, prior, and informed consent and full knowledge. Others question whether this new, fleeting, and seemingly fungible ‘economic commodity’ approach to data and associated disruptions have any place in a resilient food system that privileges life processes, communities, and place.

Key to this debate is the recognition and defense of the central role of farmers and fisherfolk in creating the knowledge, relationships, and harvests that nurture the majority of the population, and that are now being reduced to data without their consent. Irrespective of whether farmers consciously generate these datasets, taking back control over data is critical to determining their community’s future. These debates need to be part of a collaborative effort to reimagine and reconfigure digital relations in ways that can protect and advance the rights of peasants, smallholder farmers, women farmers, agricultural and food chain workers, cooperative markets, local breeders, and fishing communities.

Just as farmers’ movements and civil society fight for seeds and associated knowledge to remain free from proprietary rights and enclosures, publicly-generated environmental data, genetic data, weather data, and agronomic data must, at the very least, remain in the public sphere, free from enclosures or commercial exploitation. Some initiatives offer free and open source software in which algorithms and data are not proprietary, but controlled by those who create the data. These are steps in the right direction but not, in themselves, sufficient.

Just as farmers’ movements and civil society fight for seeds and associated knowledge to remain free from proprietary rights and enclosures, publicly-generated environmental data, genetic data, weather data, and agronomic data must, at the very least, remain in the public sphere, free from enclosures or commercial exploitation.

A promising example of a redefined model for generating, developing, and sharing data – digital and otherwise – in the agriculture sector is the Farm Hack initiative, a global collaborative platform for exchange of knowledge and people-centred farm tools among farmers across the world.14 The right to repair movement, of which Farm Hack is an example, is an important spoke in redefining the role of data in food systems and asserting people’s right and control over data and data-driven technologies. Data tools in production systems should be regarded as a means for peasant farmers and smallholders to better understand their own environment, consider options, and develop skills, capacities, and potentials based on their needs and self-determination. However, even in such models, we need to ask who is doing the data aggregation, through which ideological lens, and what kind of power does the aggregator acquire in relation to farmers and the community.

Farmers and communities should expose and challenge ostensibly attractive deals and free apps extended by technology companies to suck up knowledge and data to improve their algorithms and machine learning capacities. Google, for example, is distributing AI tools for crop identification to African farmers which, like its core search technology, does not make it clear that data from users – purportedly the recipients of a ‘free’ service – are being used to improve the company’s algorithmic capabilities. There is no agreement to return that value to the farmers whose crop data are being digitally pirated to improve neural nets in North America. Many agricultural technology start-ups are, with good intentions, establishing similar collaborations with communities and non-governmental organizations to generate big data that power proprietary algorithms. These collaborations are based on the premise that data is a free and worthless commodity at the extraction stage, but gains in value immeasurably once processed by algorithms developed by data colonialists.

If we are to counter such extractivist practices, the principle of free, prior, and informed consent to be sought from farmers and communities before collecting data from their fields and agricultural practices, should be inviolable. The terms ‘free’, ‘prior’, and ‘informed’, when taken seriously, would mean that the real costs and implications of engaging in data relations are transparently and fairly spelt out before farmers give their consent.

5.2. Agroecology and the fight for ‘wide tech’

Socially just forms of ecological food production that build on existing practices by smallholders and peasant farmers, often termed agroecology, are practiced by hundreds of millions of farmers who feed the majority of the world’s population.1516 These practices are developed by communities across generations through shared and collaborative knowledge systems that incorporate local, traditional, and indigenous knowledge and practices, in addition to being informed by institutional knowledge. While the pandemic has provided an opportunity for digital technologies to make significant inroads into our food systems, agroecological approaches, particularly those based on the principles of food sovereignty, are also growing in popularity and can provide a counterweight. However, bottom-up agroecological technologies and innovation including open source platforms – collectively referred to as ‘wide tech’ – need to safeguard against potential corporate appropriation that can undermine local innovators and prey on local knowledge and resources.

The fight for agroecology should be undertaken on all fronts, local to global. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is an important and legitimate arena for such a fight. Over the past few years, civil society has made much headway in advancing the agroecology agenda at this forum. However, the misappropriation of the concept of agroecology is also underway, with industrial agriculture interests advancing their own corporate interpretation and lobbying for an expansion of agroecology deliberations to include ‘other innovative practices’ which are barely defined. It is only a matter of time before digital farming lobbyists start expounding the gospel of ‘cyber-ecological’ or ‘robo-organic’ farming. While peoples’ movements have successfully pushed for a recognition of agroecology as an organizing framework for food systems, the corporate push for digital agriculture is now taking centerstage. The proposals to create a Digital Council for Food and Agriculture at the FAO and convening of a Food System Summit by the UN in 2021 are driven by agribusiness proponents who have elevated digital solutions as an organizing theme with agroecology as an add-on.

5.3. Cutting the bots out: Creating shorter food supply chains

Against this backdrop of increasing corporate concentration, globalization, and digitalization of the food system, has emerged a countervailing trend among food producers and consumers. Since the pandemic, many smallholder food producers in the Global South have reconnected with local consumers in the midst of disruptions in export markets and commercial supply chains during lockdowns.17 Some surveys suggest that up to a third of consumers in the United Kingdom are buying more locally-produced foods.18 Policy responses imposing social distancing during the pandemic have ironically fostered mutually supportive relationships between producers and consumers in many countries. Communities have witnessed the emergence of shorter supply chains through direct producer-consumer links, community-supported agriculture, and even systems of bartering. Disruption in jobs and livelihoods have also engendered social innovations and entrepreneurship across communities in various contexts, especially among women and youth. The flourishing mutual aid and stronger local networks often have a digital character, enabled largely by existing communication technologies and rudimentary, often non-proprietary, software for social collaboration and micropayment.

The counter-trend towards short supply chains and less industrialized systems could continue and even increase in the coming years, strengthened by demands for greater nutrition, diversity, a healthier environment, and mutual support among peoples. However, given the huge amounts of capital being invested in the digitalized industrial food system, and the disregard for its ecological and social impacts, there is a real risk that an increasing proportion of the global food system will become locked into industrial models.

5.4. Interrogating techno fixes: Participatory technology assessment

Technology assessment (TA) is fundamental to the debate on fair, just, and ecologically sustainable use of digital technologies that serve the common good. Participatory TA is a process that enables people to evaluate new and emerging technologies and allows them to examine the interests and powers behind the introduction of new technologies, the ways in which they are applied, and their potential impacts on the environment and communities. The active involvement of civil society, indigenous peoples, local communities, farmers, fisherfolk, popular and social movements is fundamental in participatory TA, which is aimed at democratic control over technologies, grounded in the precautionary principle and the rights of communities to free, prior, and informed consent.

Respecting collective decisions to adopt or reject a technology or putting conditions on its development and application is a key element of TA. The process could focus on scientific research linked to the development of future technologies that may directly impact communities, as well as existing technologies that were imposed without such consent. It could foster food sovereignty and even conflict reduction in communities19 through peasant agroecological approaches. It could provide a powerful platform for communities to examine the relevance of digital technologies in the food system, explore the desirability of non-digital options, and consider a variety of options and innovations beyond the technological sphere.

6. End reflections

Innovation and technological developments can take many paths, each involving intrinsically political choices. Precaution requires an understanding of the real nature of uncertainty by avoiding the scientific error of mistakenly assuming safety or harm. Reclaiming our future in a way that is guided by precaution and democratic accountability, rather than abandoning it to the data colossus, is not only possible, but also a moral imperative.

Notes

ETC Group is a small, independent civil society organization that monitors the impact of emerging technologies and corporate strategies on biodiversity, agriculture, and human rights. It has offices in Quebec in Canada, Davao in the Philippines, Mexico City and the UK.

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A Westphalian Turning Point for the Digital

A Westphalian Turning Point for the Digital

François Soulard

The shockwaves of the Covid-19 pandemic have brought to the forefront the physiognomy of digitization. In the backdrop of a fragmented multilateral stage, the intensified use of digital technologies to support the post-pandemic recovery has come without sufficient awareness of the inherent dangers generated by the computerization wave. Far from being a mere new industrial sector, the IT economy is “upgrading” the current industrial economy and is shaping a new matrix. Akin to the two previous industrial revolutions that started in 1775 and 1880, a new technical system has been on the rise since 1975, this time based on the synergy of microelectronics, software engineering, and the ubiquitous networked connectivity. To limit the predation wrought by this new system and envision a digital new deal, it is necessary to address the lack of understanding of the new digital economy and refresh our doctrines. This calls for a Westphalian turning point for the digital. Granted that the turn is unlikely to come any time soon, the time is still ripe for us to design new initiatives and prepare the ground for new foundations.

Illustration by Kevin Ilango

Introduction

“The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought.”
– Joseph Licklider, March 1960

The Covid-19 pandemic has put health, political, and economic systems under considerable strain, accelerating a phenomenon already at work in the digital continent and, more broadly, on the security front.

This has exposed a deeply fragmented multilateral stage, torn between geopolitical rivalries and nationalist reflexes while allowing for medium-intensity scientific cooperation. On the one hand, as with the previous health crises of the 2000s such as Ebola, MERS, and SARS, the coronavirus pandemic has created – on a whole new scale – a sense of urgency that has forced the adaptation and invention of innovative responses. On the other, it has provided alibis for certain actors to impose their will, strengthen their control, and manipulate opinions if needed to conquer economic markets, all in the name of efficiency to meet the demands of the healthcare spiral.

The cascading effects of the Covid crisis are not entirely new. Despite the many imperfections in the multilateral framework, the World Health Organization (WHO) has provided the basis for countries to develop crisis responses, with some adaptations to suit their local contexts. And yet, in every country, the current crisis remains marked by extreme operational vulnerability, irrespective of the degree of material development.

While the initial sources of the pandemic may have been easily identified and secured, the absence of a steering function for risk modeling, effective response mechanisms, and a coordinated global action required in the face of a threat of this magnitude has landed us in the current debacle. In short, our international system stands bare and archaic, with the G20, the WHO, and other players unable to orchestrate any transnational efforts. As the current crisis has unfolded, it has exposed the flaws in our socio-economic systems and modes of action adopted to cope with the situation.

The absence of a globally coordinated response to the pandemic is a missed opportunity to move towards better economic models than the ones we are currently stranded with. Our current models, relying on a rigid vertical segmentation of productive activities, resulting in the concentration1 and optimization of economic costs in long delocalized chains, have proved to be less resilient to the crisis. Some cards have also been reshuffled in the realm of perceptions, geopolitical relations, technologies, and economics. One of the consequences of the pandemic has been a crude sketching of the world canvas in which we will operate in the decades to come, in which the traditional balance of power, the lack of cooperation, and the assertion of national interests will be the linchpins. New stress points arising from the pandemic and the acceleration of previous trends are likely to seal medium-term arrangements. The crisis has favored a wave of sovereign posturings and affirmations which were already underway at the global level. Big Tech corporations are taking the place of fossil-fuel producers in the stock market podium while clean power shares are up by 45 percent so far in 2020.2

However, unlike the global financial collapse of 2008, the pandemic is an external accident which originated outside the current economic and political matrix. This diagnosis is often challenged on the grounds that the circulation of the virus could have been facilitated by the no-holds-barred extraction of natural resources, unregulated globalization, experimental manipulation of living beings, or even by the authoritarian nature of the Chinese state. Besides, the emergence of every new climate or security risk3 increasingly forces us to re-evaluate existing notions of economic efficiency and pay attention to the long-term variables of resilience and adaptation.

Be that as it may, beyond the ideological sensitivities and despite the intensity of the global economic slowdown, we can see that current responses to the pandemic are not built on the identification of an ‘endogenous fracture’ in global capitalism. For states and other actors engaged in international exchanges, there has been no real questioning of the engines of the economic status quo. Rather, attention has been focused on the imperative to manage the health contingency and promote recovery, possibly accompanied by certain corrective measures. The focus has also been on a certain strategic reorientation, in particular on the decoupling and relocation of sectors. The recovery plans have been criticized for reinforcing earlier standards of productivism and not taking into account, for example, the new climate commitments4 resulting from the Paris Agreement of 2016.

There is an intensified use of digital technologies to support post-pandemic recovery without any particular awareness of an endogenous crisis in the digital sphere. There are neither new insights in the governance of the digital nor a reorientation in decision-making, only an acceleration of previous tendencies. The computerization of the real economy is one of them.

This initial diagnosis of the origins of the crisis is central because it has determined the forms taken by recovery strategies and their interactions with the digital sphere. We are at a stage where many – including sections of the global economic elite5 – are rushing to underline the contradictions exposed by the pandemic. And yet, there are few signs that it has led to a fundamental shift in the nature of recovery models.6 There is an intensified use of digital technologies to support post-pandemic recovery without any particular awareness of an endogenous crisis in the digital sphere. There are neither new insights in the governance of the digital nor a reorientation in decision-making, only an acceleration of previous tendencies. The ‘computerization of the real economy’ is one of them.

In this respect, the digital continent, the primary focus of this essay, is perhaps one of the most fertile areas to explore in the present landscape. The shockwaves of the pandemic have brought to the forefront the ethos and physiognomy of ‘digitization‘. This physiognomy needs to be approached carefully through a lens and a vocabulary that can accurately describe the processes at work. Instead of digitization, for instance, which only refers to the sub-process of data encoding in a binary format, I will evoke the process of ‘computerization’. The latter raises the idea of a transformation of the old technical system, constituted by the alloy between the human workforce and machines, into a new one based on the alloy between programmable automatons and the human brain. In this context, the question of ‘cognitive registers’ is of primary importance. A new understanding is needed to grasp these manifestations in depth and see beyond the parameters defined by the spirit of the times. The difficulty in envisioning computerization as a phenomenon that goes beyond a mere technical disruption is a crucial part of the agenda. This is at the root of the current digital imbalance that exacerbates the impacts in terms of predation and threats, and reduces the potential for a social justice-oriented digital economy. Through negative and positive shocks, the pandemic is offering us a sort of radiography of the characteristics of the new digital economy. This new economy is not merely a new industrial sector, it is ‘upgrading’ the current industrial economy and shaping a new matrix.

1. The fault lines of the emerging new technical system

Let’s start with the weaknesses of our cognitive structures. The disarray created by the pandemic led to its initial diagnosis through ideological bubbles and horizontal communication networking. The resulting ‘spinning of perception compasses’ disrupted critical intervention efforts in the immediate aftermath of the emergency, particularly in communities with overly rigid or permissive leaderships, regardless of the political regimes in force.7 One just has to look at how the Chinese state’s hermeticism ultimately constituted the best escape hatch for the virus to all of China and beyond. Or how posturing by the US head of state exacerbated the healthcare stalemate. This dispersal of perceptions also weighed on public debate and the corrective measures that were projected on economic models.

Due to the central role digital networks have played since the onset of the crisis, they have undoubtedly been affected by this ‘spin’ and found themselves somewhat in the crossfire. IT resources have been deployed heavily in response to the emergency, albeit not without errors or backpedaling.8 For many businesses and governments,9 the crisis has forced a rapid advancement in computerization,10 something that had previously been strategically undervalued or delayed.11 Of course, the revenues of many IT services – excluding various privileged sectors – have declined.12 Nevertheless, this line of business has made a double gain in legitimacy, boosting economic growth and consequently fitting into most economic recovery plans in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and elsewhere.13 But in turn, and below the media radars, the effectiveness of computerization in certain areas has inevitably led to a new wave of feudalism by furthering an all-out dependence, monopoly, and a spectre of surveillance. Feudalism, as a particular form of predation, is a relationship in which one of the two parties is able to extract wealth by force or impose a transaction on the other.14 It is akin to the conquest and control of territories, this time not in the geographic space but in the economic sphere, by a new breed of ‘lords’ who are disposed to wage battle at their borders to defend their domination and eventually redistribute their excess wealth as an act of charity.

In the US, the head of the White House rants about the country’s tech monopolies and the Attorney General has announced that he wants to initiate antitrust proceedings against Google. If we are to believe Standard & Poor’s analysis, the six digital giants – namely Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft – have broken previous stock market valuation records, holding nearly a quarter of the world’s total market valuation amongst themselves. Their market value increased by around 43 percent between January and September 2020, while the rest of the large companies on the same index saw their cumulative value decline by 4 percent.15 In Europe, against a backdrop of re-industrialization and computerization of services, the recent concession of national sovereign data by governments to US corporations has generated much outrage. Despite the General Data Protection Regulation (2018) and the invalidation of the Privacy Shield voted on at the European level in July 2020, France, for example, has decided to implement its national Health Data Hub with Microsoft.16 Furthermore, almost everywhere, under the garb of security measures, the temptation for surveillance has gained ground both in authoritarian regimes as well as in democracies that, at least outwardly, preach about citizens’ rights. On top of this, we have seen a resurgence of cyberattacks and hijackings (including those on health systems) that have been engulfed in the vortex of the pandemic to monetize a share of the destruction.17

This sequence of events leads us not far from a Hobbesian state of nature whose cacophony would encourage us to revisit the social contract at the heart of our societies. The idea is not that far-fetched either. For now, we will measure the change of scale achieved by ‘network rapacity’ by taking a look at one of the first such theses published in 1998 in Hijacking the World: The Dark Side of Microsoft, and those compiled by Shoshana Zuboff in 2019 in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The titles speak for themselves. This particular rapacity of networks, as Niall Ferguson reminds us,18 is only touched upon by the sycophants of the techno-industrial revolution who hardly evoke the idea of negative externalities and are worried about the rising frictions of globalization. The boost provided by the pandemic to digitization has also led to a spurt in its forms of predation, letting the new digital economy emerge by the force of circumstances in the backdrop of an inappropriate ‘apprehension by thought’. The confusion, the superficiality of discourses, and the rise of oxymorons (‘inclusive growth’, ‘inclusive labor markets’, ‘sustainable development’, ‘netizen’) reflect a growing disconnect between these different plans.

Schematically, for the proponents of dominant neoliberalism, the ‘digital revolution’ is a central vector of growth that must be made to coincide with the postulates of liberal or state regulation of markets, perfect competition, and the primacy of shareholder value; it will usher in a green economy or the “great reset”19 that would embody the new course to follow in order to meet global challenges. Here, digitization is seen as one disruptive innovation, among others. This is the perception of the Sino-American duopoly and it is the vision that President Xi Jinping has just outlined20 amid geopolitical tensions that intensify the competition around electronic technologies. For the heterodox – from Marx and Keynes to Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph Stiglitz, James Galbraith, or Jeremy Rifkin among others – whose theoretical field widens to socio-cultural dimensions, digitization is a novelty that perpetuates the inequalities of wealth, asymmetrical relations, and the primacy of finance. They criticize the general equilibrium theory preached by neoliberalism. For others, for instance Yanis Varoufakis, Thorstein Veblen, Gaël Giraud, or Pierre Calame, the digital is a relative, even ‘technicist’ innovation, which distills changes in the physiognomy of societies and must be put at the service of a transition towards a more sustainable economic matrix, a matrix which cannot be reduced to the dominant economic trends. Digital networks are also seen as a technical element. This is true for the Green New Deal proposed by the Democratic Party in the US, which oddly, in the country of Silicon Valley, mentions low technology but ignores digital innovation.21 In all these cases, IT, thus distanced and reduced to the ‘digital’, only serves political ends – not a negative in itself – and is relegated to the background. Above all, it is not seen as a ‘new technical system’ – a synergy of fundamental techniques to organize the economy and the society, which has consequences for the anthropological field. We will elaborate on this concept a little later.

Ultimately, it is as if the brutality of the collisions triggered by the digital continent continues to elicit behaviors oscillating between fascination, mimicry, and blindness on the one hand, and refusal and negation on the other. The current transition to a new technical system is a period of turmoil in which entrepreneurs with the first-mover advantage generate high profits, while others remain prisoners of older forms of organization to which they have become accustomed. Computerization still appears to be a phenomenon ‘endured’ by the majority of economists and elites who perceive neither its full potential nor the dangers to which societies are exposed with its emergence. Potentialities are on the side of a new economy that enhances quality, functionalities, services, automation of repetitive tasks, clean power energy, full employment, and new forms of intelligence relying on the alloy between human brains and the programmable automaton. In this respect, if we conclude that the pandemic offers only a small window of opportunity to advance these digital issues, it is because the reform proposals and the political subjects that campaign for these potentialities are, for the moment, too external to the political and social spheres in general, and the ruling spheres in particular.

2. A new frame of reference for ‘computerization’

This leads us directly to the conditions likely to build a better understanding of computerization and its integration into its preferred field: the system of production of goods and services. In essence, if computerization is an ‘endured innovation’ around which a series of creative destructions develop, as Schumpeter points out, this is because it is ‘ill-treated’ in our minds – misunderstood and under-conceptualized. A new frame of reference is therefore necessary, capable of escaping the disciplinary corset to which computerization is usually subjected and, instead, focusing on its ‘transformative force’. To me, the need for this new frame of reference has become a central issue in recent years through various processes such as the Earth Summit (2012), the World Forum of Free Media, the Internet Social Forum, as well as through my own work on computer ecosystems. It echoes other conceptual contributions that we will briefly mention here.

The contemporary technical system, initiated around 1975, not only reconfigured the socio-economic matrix through the third industrial revolution; it also ushered in new relationships with nature, in which the link connecting intentions and human action, thought, organization, communication, forms of competition, market size, and consumer needs began to be modified.

To define this frame of reference and project towards a sustainable digital horizon, we should venture into a field that is philosophical, conceptual, and epistemological and draw inspiration from thinkers of the history of techniques such as Bertrand Gille, André Leroi-Gourhan, or Gilbert Simondon. They describe how the networked computer is much less an isolated invention than a technology embedded in a new technical system. The latter is a cluster of techniques, basically microelectronics, software engineering, and the ubiquitous networked connectivity, intertwined with a singular cohesion. The first modern technical system, born in 1775, was based on the synergy between mechanics and chemistry. It was completed around 1880 by energy, with the advent of oil and electricity. The contemporary technical system, initiated around 1975, not only reconfigured the socio-economic matrix through the third industrial revolution; it also ushered in new relationships with nature, in which the link connecting intentions and human action, thought, organization, communication, forms of competition, market size, and consumer needs began to be modified.

Techno-skeptics frequently oppose this vision, rejecting the idea that a mere bundle of techniques could have such a systemic impact on social and cultural dimensions. Gilbert Simondon emphasizes the antagonist relation between culture and techniques by putting forward an anthropological response: “Culture has constituted itself as a defense system against techniques […] It ignores a human reality within technical reality. To play its full role, culture must incorporate technical beings in the form of knowledge and in the form of a sense of values.”22 Its corollary is that for a change in the technical system to occur, new techniques must be available, but it is equally necessary to effect a socio-cultural change. This is the stage, confusing and highly perilous, which resembles the anarchic landscape that we have outlined above, underlining the need for ‘new cognitive tools’ to understand this situation. More than defeatism, utopianism, or ideological conformity, it is imperative to resort to realism, to methodological and rigorous exploration facilitating epistemological crossbreeding, and a ‘multilingualism’ which also characterizes IT.

Such a reconfiguration does not erase the previous industrial system based on a synergy of chemistry, mechanics, and energy. It computerizes it to varying extents depending on the maturity of each national economy and its cultural foundations. Among the few economists venturing off the beaten track, Michel Volle has attempted to summarize the characteristics of the new emerging economy.23 This refers to regimes of monopolistic competition, fixed-cost production, maximum risk, and increasing returns to scale. Unlike the mechanized economy, the contemporary economy tends to be spontaneously ultra-capitalist and form temporary monopolies around innovations. This is not to say that the mechanized economy has eliminated all forms of violence. On the contrary, despite its professed principles of balanced exchange, trade union rights, and a certain constraint on monopolies, the exploitation of labor, imperialist tendencies, colonization, and the extractivism inflicted on peripheral economies continue unabated.

But because of its intrinsic characteristics, the contemporary economy is now the bearer of new forms of endemic violence. It tends to shift the historical opposition between the working class and the owners of capital to a confrontation between ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘predators’. Here, entrepreneurs are conceived as those who are passionate about the active relationship with realities and people, and who put innovation at the service of productive action and the real economy. Since the 1980s, the exaltation of shareholders has eroded companies, driving out entrepreneurs and replacing them with managers concerned only with attractive accounting results. According to Volle, this evolution, which has gone hand in hand with the rise of neoliberalism and the rising power of the financial system, is a key factor in the current crisis. Predation, which historians remind us is the economic regime of feudalism, has taken the form of a vast constellation of practices that have continued to grow over the past three decades: the hyper-volatile activity of banks and the decoupling of the financial sphere from the productive one, illicit diversion of financial flows, civil and industrial espionage, confiscation of capital as mentioned in the work of Thomas Piketty,24 data extractivism for monetization and intelligence, the temptation to exploit the synergy between human intelligence and the programmable automaton through the reductive logic of data and programs, and so on. Laurent Bloch also illustrates the rejection of computerization and its effectiveness within companies and in information systems.25

To understand this physiognomy in greater depth and consider strategies for action, we should also be interested in the simultaneous emergence of neoliberalism and computerization, which together have amplified this new state of nature. Neoclassical thought that unfolded since the 1970s, and its emergence as a political force, coincide with the beginnings of computerization. It can be argued that the postulates of neoliberalism, contrary to the patrimonial economy that computerization has brought about,26 have come in part to respond to the wave of destabilization caused by the new emerging technical system. In their preoccupation with shareholder value, self-regulation of the markets, and the withdrawal of the state, the founders of neoliberalism turned their backs on the emerging new technical system, creating a climate all the more conducive to its predatory effects. Whereas these should be better understood and contained, the dominant ideology continues to encourage their free rein.

3. A new deal for a new economy

These statements need to be developed in greater detail than we can do here. But let us retain their main implications when it comes to sketching out the strategies for change. The first perspective, which we see as a backbone, is to focus attention on the structural transformations generated upstream and downstream by the computerization of economic models and institutional actors. It invites us to reconsider the conceptual grids, to adopt a less fearful, conservative, and Manichean perception of the dangers and advantages of computerization. It suggests that attention should be directed less towards areas already formalized (internet governance, digital data and rights, e-commerce, cybersecurity, media and social networks, etc.) and more towards the dynamics at work between the organized human being and the ubiquitous programmable automaton. Of course, the above mentioned sub-domains continue to be relevant registers around which a whole series of actors have been structured. But they evade other cross-cutting issues and the overall vision of a change in the socio-productive architecture. This explains, in particular, why the idea of an industrial revolution or a great societal transformation has not yet garnered a consensus.

In this regard, the conceptualization effort is not only theoretical. It has to be connected with the trenches that arise in the spaces where the legal, the political, the organizational, and the economic integrate and confront each other. The case studies and monographs developed in different socioprofessional environments are valuable epistemological sources to feed a new interpretative framework. While most indicators or statistics are not designed to make visible the emerging new economy, monographs are more adapted to enhance its essential characteristics and to produce the basics of an intellectual framework. This was the case in 1847 when the modern technical system emerged. More recently, Erik Brynjolfsson, among others, has contributed to overcoming the blind spots in the productivity brought about by IT.27

In addition to these writings, there is also a need for transformative narratives. This is the second perspective which refers to a mobilizing imaginary capable of guiding the efforts to build a “new economy”, that is to say, responding to the objectives of cohesion and well-being while remaining within the domain of biosphere viability. As previously discussed, the new economy must be enriched by previous doctrines. In view of the vigor of the peoples whose historical and continued demands for more dignity marked the year 2019 – from Algeria, Brazil, Bolivia, France to Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India and beyond –28 it seems difficult to imagine that the new efficiency and the forms of intelligence that appear today borrow only from market rules or develop themselves outside ideas of justice and equity. However, that threat is already knocking at the door. New technologies are showing that, in the absence of a new framework of thought and adapted regulation, they amplify potentially extreme tensions in terms of inequalities, distribution of wealth, and social rupture. This doctrinal effort, therefore, invites a review of the values of and the relationships among equity, freedom, efficiency, and new constraints and regulations. As these are specific to each geo-cultural base, the foundations of this new economy are, therefore, linked to a debate on the integration of each society into sustainable globalization.

From this perspective, the term ‘digital economy’ is largely insufficient to stimulate such mobilization. This is also the intuition of the “Great Reset” initiative undertaken by the World Economic Forum which envisions “urgently build[ing] the foundations of our economic and social system for a more fair, sustainable, and resilient future”.29 We may be seriously skeptical about this initiative, driven as it is by the promoters of unregulated liberalism. But let us recognize that a strong perspective needs to be developed, capable of addressing not only the political sphere but also citizens and economic players. The idea of a “general assembly of the computerized economy”, launched by IT specialists calling on the diversity of professional circles, could be a lead. This initiative should not be seen only as an intellectual exercise. It must set itself the goal of building influence on political and economic leaders, and therefore take a long-term view.

The Treaty of Westphalia, which sealed a new international order in the 17th century, was the outcome of a change in the conception of European leaders who then opted for a new system of balance of power after a prolonged period of destabilization. Reduced to current multipolarity and contemporary economics, recent news leads us to believe that we are not currently at a turning point of this nature. However, it is nevertheless necessary to invest in preparing for the crises to come and create the conditions to initiate a less costly and less destructive shift. It is now impossible to ignore that the contemporary economy is the scene of a new dialectic between predation, balanced exchange, the rule of law, and the return of feudalism in a modernized form. The challenge of finding new foundations along the way is, therefore, more seriously posed than ever.

Notes

François Soulard is a French migrant and activist, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He currently coordinates the international networked communication platform Dunia (https://dunia.earth). He is also member of the Forum for a New World Governance. ​

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A Digital New Deal Against Corporate Hijack of the Post-Covid 19 Future

A Digital New Deal Against Corporate Hijack of the Post-Covid 19 Future

Gianluca Iazzolino, Marion Ouma & Laura Mann

Our essay focuses on the political context in which the consolidation of the dominant digital paradigm takes place. It is structured into three parts: we first describe the role of technology companies in restructuring the global economy and creating the economic and social vulnerabilities that have been exposed by the current global health crisis. We then identify some trends that are likely to be exacerbated by the pandemic, specifically the growing public reliance on tech firms for basic services, the influence of tech firms on public debates, and the attempts by tech firms to capture civil society organizations and social movements through their philanthrocapitalism. We eventually sketch a policy framework to help address these dangers and to avoid a corporate hijack of the post-Covid 19 future, arguing that state regulatory and fiscal capacities must be strengthened and that independent research must be funded by the tax revenues extracted from tech giants. Civil society organizations could contribute by forming transnational alliances to keep tech giants in check and help engage citizens in public debate.

Illustration by Kevin Ilango

Introduction

It is hard to fathom what kind of social and economic future lies on the other side of Covid-19. In the early days of the pandemic, some were hopeful that the crisis might usher in a new economic order. Others cautioned that the long-term economic and social impacts would be grave. One group, however, seems to be having an unambiguously ‘good crisis’. Amidst dismal GDP figures, mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and bankruptcies, the world’s top seven tech giants – Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Tencent, Facebook, Alphabet (Google), and PayPal – added an overall market capitalization of $1.2 trillion during the first six months of 2020. Amazon alone, despite spending $4 billion on logistical upgrading, saw its value climb by $401.1 billion, boosted by the expansion in online shopping and cloud computing. The second biggest winner, Microsoft, has likewise benefited from the mass shift of work from office to home, and the growing reliance of workers and households on its cloud services.1

In addition to hefty market capitalizations, these tech Leviathans have also used the Covid moment to strengthen their political capital, positioning themselves as reliable actors in the face of government shortcomings. In several US states, health departments are leveraging the data power of Google, Facebook, and Apple for contact tracing. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is helping support CommCare, a mobile data collection platform developed by Dimagi, a for-profit social enterprise, which initially sought to provide e-health solutions in Africa and Asia, but has since branched out to the US and Ireland. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published2 an op-ed in The Washington Post to burnish his company’s public utility credentials.

This moment of potential consolidation risks unsettling the precarious balance between tech giants on the one hand, and the public sector, labor organizations, independent research, and civil society, on the other. Yet, the current crisis is not a watershed; for these tendencies have been long in the making: the platformization of public services, the creation of corporate-led economic ecosystems, the restructuring of production, and the datafication of workers and customers. While most governments were caught by surprise, tech giants were ready, and are now poaching smaller firms on the verge of collapse – a trend that is likely to accelerate after the pandemic. The world that lies on the other side may, therefore, be a world in which a handful of large companies can move capital, produce knowledge, and shape the political and public conversation in their favor.

While most governments were caught by surprise by the current crisis, tech giants were ready, and are now poaching smaller firms on the verge of collapse – a trend that is likely to accelerate after the pandemic.

This series has asked contributors to imagine a ‘Digital New Deal’ akin to Roosevelt’s Keynesian revolution. Our contribution draws attention to the varied political context of this paradigm contestation and the political strategies deployed by tech firms to thwart wholesale paradigm shifts. Section 1 describes the role of tech companies in restructuring the global economy and creating the economic and social vulnerabilities that have been exposed by the current global health crisis. Section 2 identifies some trends that are likely to be exacerbated by the pandemic, focusing on growing public reliance on tech firms for basic services, the growing influence of tech firms on public debates, and attempts by tech firms to capture civil society organizations and social movements through their philanthrocapitalism. The final section sketches a policy framework to help address these dangers and to avoid a corporate hijack of the post-Covid 19 future. In particular, it argues that state regulatory and fiscal capacities must be strengthened in order to tackle the opacity of their business operations and to extract tax revenue to fund more independent research. In pursuit of these policies, activists can help by forming transnational alliances to keep tech giants in check and help engage citizens in public debate.

 1. An overview of the dominant digital paradigm

In explaining the role of intellectuals in driving long-term policy change, Milton Friedman3 once remarked, “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

In the spring of 2020, many hoped that the Covid-19 crisis might precipitate a rupture in the fortress of free-market economics. Even the right-leaning Economist magazine asked if a new paradigm was at the gates.4 Pressure had been building for some time. Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century5 had laid bare growing economic inequalities that have been accelerating in high-income countries since the 1970s, when free-market policies were embraced as the dominant growth model.

After 1975, technology firms were at the forefront of this growing consolidation of wealth. The shareholder value business revolution put pressure on managers to lower their production costs,6 and so they introduced productivity-enhancing technology to rationalize production, increase worker surveillance, and restructure production beyond the boundaries of the firm. This restructuring gradually eroded the skill intensity of production and allowed managers to restructure production and redistribute tasks to cheaper workforces.7 In many cases, this unbundling of production resulted in offshoring, allowing firms and workforces in low- and middle-income countries to gain footholds in global production networks.8 Yet, for those services that required proximity to markets, employment was retained onshore, but with skills and wages restructured downward through digitization and platformization.

During the pandemic, the social vulnerabilities of this restructuring have been laid bare. In cities like London, where workers are concentrated in the service sector, the ‘lockdown’ and removal of high earners from city centers devastated the local low-skilled labor market. Meanwhile, other low-skilled ‘essential’ workers in food and healthcare provision were forced to work through the pandemic, exposing themselves and their families to higher rates of infection. In low-income countries like Kenya, lockdown measures devastated the livelihoods of urban residents working in the informal sector. For close to 80 percent of the world’s working population dependent on day-to-day earnings, staying at home is hardly an option, given that government assistance would be insufficient to cushion their livelihoods. While some may have hoped that the pandemic would reset the economic paradigm by revealing its structural vulnerabilities, politicians have, instead, turned to tech firms to help keep the existing economic paradigm afloat.

By and large, neo-classical economists have understood the role of tech companies as generating efficiency and productivity gains for individuals and markets as a whole.9 By lowering transaction costs, tech firms promise to lower entry barriers and forge more inclusive markets and financial systems. Furthermore, by facilitating the compulsion of market actors to make ‘better’ decisions through nudging and coded incentives, behavioral economists hope that digital technology will help enhance worker productivity and improve transparency in the overall investment climate. However, as many political economists have highlighted, these platforms have also reshaped the knowledge economy and altered the careful balance between public and private governance.10

First, these platforms aim to transfer knowledge requirements away from workers and onto the platforms themselves, thereby altering both the relative bargaining power of capital and labor within economies as well as the technological advantages of high-income economies relative to others within global production networks. Second, by virtue of their network effects and ability to facilitate “interoperability”– the ability of systems to share data and interact – these firms are slowly embedding themselves at the heart of both market structures and interfaces between public and private service provision. The legal scholar Frank Pasquale has developed the concept of “functional sovereignty”11 to describe the power that a private firm acquires when it rises above all other market participants to become the force shaping and organizing the market as a whole. Over the past decade, tech behemoths like Google and Amazon have accrued this power. They have nipped potential competitors in the bud and gained leverage vis-à-vis the state to become de facto alternative regulators, able to police disputes and interactions among the other market participants.

The legal scholar Frank Pasquale has developed the concept of “functional sovereignty” to describe the power that a private firm acquires when it rises above all other market participants to become the force shaping and organizing the market as a whole. Over the past decade, tech behemoths like Google and Amazon have accrued this power.

A growing community of intellectuals, activists, and politicians have pressed for greater scrutiny of these firms. In response, policymakers have begun to introduce digital taxes, basic income grants, and new kinds of antitrust regulation.12 Outside of the US, policymakers are additionally concerned by the dominance of US-based firms in new areas of economic development. For example, African trade negotiators have strongly pushed back against attempts by US trade negotiators to introduce binding regulation covering e-commerce into World Trade Organization (WTO) rules13. Likewise, European economies have sought to develop a common digital market in an effort to create opportunities for European firms to compete. However, the relative power of policymakers varies enormously across the world, and African countries, by virtue of their legacies of structural adjustment and continued dependence on aid and foreign direct investment, enjoy much narrower policy space than their European counterparts. These differences in the policy environment will no doubt shape the likelihood of countervailing policy responses in the form of Digital New Deals. In the next section, we examine how technology firms have tried to reshape the policy environment in both high- and low-middle income countries, positioning themselves at the center of government and donor-led attempts to restructure the economy and public services during the pandemic.

2. Fault lines of the dominant digital paradigm

As we have highlighted in the previous section, technology corporations are currently leveraging their logistics power to uphold the existing economic paradigm. Within the specific context of the Global South, the functional sovereignty of tech giants is further enhanced by the asymmetrical relationship between donors and governments. This context narrows the space for alternative models to emerge by allowing these firms to deepen public reliance on digital platforms for governmentality14, to reshape the research agenda of domestic institutions and tech communities, and to alter the strategic focus of civil society organizations and social movements.

State over-reliance on corporate services

The myth of a dynamic private sector vis-à-vis the sluggish state continues to garner appeal despite concerted attempts by scholars such as Mariana Mazzucato to debunk it.15 In fact, the current pandemic has injected fresh lifeblood into its veins. Before 2020, public anger over austerity and the outsourcing of public services was gaining momentum, but the public health emergency triggered by Covid-19 has largely neutralized this conversation. The current pandemic provides a sort of Rorschach test for advocates of private sector efficiency, on the one hand, and those who blame austerity for undermining state capacity, on the other. Both sides see in this a confirmation of their belief system. Yet, free-market proponents appear to be prevailing, as several governments have awarded test-and-trace contracts to corporate giants. For instance, the UK government has signed deals with, among others, Google, AWS, and the controversial data analytics company Palantir to store NHS (National Health Service) patient data on their clouds.16 Such deals have sparked fears among data justice activists who worry that such data may be used for totally different purposes. This fear is particularly heightened in cases when firms such as AWS and Palantir remain active in sensitive fields such as border and immigration services. As Busemeyer and Thelen17 have theorized through the concept of ‘institutional source of business power’, the over-reliance of the public sector on “these arrangements foster(s) asymmetric dependencies of the state on the continued contribution of business actors in ways that, over time, tilt the public-private balance increasingly in favor of business interests”.

In low-income countries, the legacies of structural adjustment and aid dependence have further strengthened the dependence of the state on private, mostly foreign, firms. As Thandika Mkandawire18 has argued, aid dependence can make governments and civil society more accountable to donors than to their own citizens. Structural adjustment also results in the outsourcing of public services to non-governmental organizations and private actors. In recent years, international organizations like the World Bank and corporate-philanthropic actors like the Gates Foundation have argued that digital technologies can help bring about greater efficiency and accountability within social service provision, and have framed private companies as the repositories of sufficient technical and managerial capabilities to deliver donor-led programs more cheaply, effectively, and transparently.

For instance, in rural Kenya, over the past years, a whole host of agricultural tech firms has emerged to fill the void left by the retreat of public extension services to smallholder farmers, offering private services ranging from advice to credit to market access. One is Safaricom, a mobile network operator, which has been able to capture a large share of the market for financial and data services through its control over M-Pesa, its flagship mobile money platform. Its management has pursued a shrewd strategy to consolidate control over the market by exploiting regulatory loopholes and forging a privileged alliance with the country’s elite across the political spectrum.19 In the words of a Safaricom executive, its digital platform for farmers, Digifarm, and its network of agents, the Digifarm Village advisors, represent ‘an extension service that people can actually see’. Yet, this network also allows it to collect valuable and strategic agricultural knowledge, and demographic and value chain data for the Kenyan state and private companies. In social policy too, a growing number of banks and mobile network operators have positioned themselves as conduits for the delivery of social grants to citizens across Sub-Saharan Africa. The logic underlying these arrangements is steeped not only in ideas of efficiency and accountability but also in the financial inclusion agenda. As scholars working on financialization have warned,20 this convergence of social policy and financialization increases the vulnerability of public finance to the volatility of financial markets.

Shaping the research agenda and the public conversation

The awarding of contracts for test-and-tracing to tech firms represents not only a partial abdication of state responsibilities but also a further expansion of corporate players into the production of social knowledge. By hoarding large and diverse digital data, tech giants will no doubt play a critical role in the organization of scientific evidence.21 Tech giants have been particularly proactive in reshaping the research agenda and public conversation about how to regulate them. They have exerted influence through a myriad of ways. For example, large tech firms can soften or deflect criticism that may influence the attitudes of the general public, and eventually, the regulators. Particularly telling is the case of the Open Markets Foundation (OMF), a think tank at the forefront of the regulatory battle with large tech conglomerates. In 2017, it came into conflict with its then parent organization, New American Foundation, after it took a strong stance in favor of fining Google and breaking up Facebook and Amazon. The episode is recounted in an influential paper by Lina Khan, one of the most prominent OMF members.22

Such companies also use selective access to their data as a means to influence research agendas. For example, the ride-hailing firm Uber granted access to several high-profile economists including Steven Levitt and Peter Cohen, who collaborated with the company on a series of papers that depicted the company in a favorable light.23 African countries are even more vulnerable to these attempts by technology firms to shape the public conversation in their favor, due to the impact that structural adjustment had on research and higher education institutions.24 Recent initiatives such as Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) illustrate the influence of cloud service providers in extracting and organizing scientific evidence through datafication. Supported by AWS, the platform uses Earth observation data from space agencies and the Open Data Cube technology to share insights on environmental changes and transformations of human settlements with policymakers. This initiative has the potential to contribute to policymaking and research. Nevertheless, we should be cautious about the long-term consequences of a private firm storing, analyzing, and commercializing Earth Observation data. This privatization of knowledge risks reinforcing AWS functional sovereignty vis-à-vis other sources of knowledge and the asymmetric dependency of local and international research institutions on the platform’s data power. Eventually, this company may acquire a monopoly of knowledge.

The corporate capture of civil society

The growing philanthropic engagement of tech giants adds a new layer to the so-called ‘NGO-ization of the civil society’,25 through funding and the provision of technological capabilities. Behemoths like AWS and Google are offering support to non-profit organizations in order to create a favorable ‘ecosystem’ for their business models. For example, Amazon’s Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) claims “to accelerate sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the cost and time required to acquire and analyze large sustainability datasets.”26 Likewise, Google has offered direct financial support to NGOs and community organizations during the pandemic, in addition to the package of services specifically designed for non-profit organizations through its Google for Nonprofits initiative, ranging from support to enhance visibility to data analytics tools. The writer Arundhati Roy27 points out that the NGO boom in countries like India (and Kenya) in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with the opening of the country to the market economy. According to her, this proliferation of NGOs led to a professionalization of resistance, depoliticizing social movements and locking them up into partnerships with market actors. In a recent article, the sociologist Ashok Kumbamu28 discusses how philanthropic giants such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Gates Foundation are deploying dispossessing strategies to establish what he calls the “philanthropic-corporate-state complex”. His primary focus is on agricultural producers and their genetic varieties, but his analysis is also relevant to the field of digital humanitarianism and civil society where the philanthropic-corporate-state complex may become “an agency for the spread of neoliberalism in a ‘humane’ form across the globe”. This dependency of NGOs and humanitarian organizations on the technical and financial support of corporate players might inhibit criticism against them.

3. Fixing the fault lines

Addressing these fault lines as the world reels from the worst pandemic in a century presents additional challenges. With resources and efforts devoted to checking the spread of the virus and reversing its economic impacts, most states, research institutions, and civil society organizations are hesitant to scrutinize their relationship with corporate partners. And yet, this moment of reckoning is long overdue and has never been more urgent as the pandemic looks set to crystallize the dominance of a few tech giants.

The recipe for a Digital New Deal must not aim at a return to the pre-Covid-19 era, but fix the socio-economic rifts that have been laid bare and widened by the pandemic.

The pillars of the original Keynesian New Deal were the so-called three ‘Rs’: Relief for the unemployed and the poor; Recovery of the American economy; and Reform of the existing regulatory framework to avoid a repetition of the crisis. This time, however, the context is different: the challenge is not one of recovering an overheated domestic economy and reinstating it to its pre-crisis state, but one of fundamentally addressing the new international context of production. The recipe for a Digital New Deal must not aim at a return to the pre-Covid-19 era, but fix the socio-economic rifts that have been laid bare and widened by the pandemic. We suggest three critical steps to achieve this goal.

Strengthening the regulatory capacity of the state

Over the past years, big tech firms have formally become more accommodating to the idea of regulation. In reality, they have sought to water down any attempts to tackle their market power, holding on to the view that too-strict rules might curtail individual freedom, stifle innovation, and inhibit the benefits of digitization. As Big Tech firms gather more and more data, they must become transparent about their data points and their purpose. And yet, as these companies move into areas previously controlled by the state, it will become harder to enforce such accountability.

To address this power asymmetry, new regulatory frameworks will need to tighten the privacy rules of already vulnerable individuals, particularly as public health has been used to justify a rollback of existing legislation. As noted by Privacy international,29 regulators must track measures adopted during the pandemic including high levels of surveillance, data exploitation, and misinformation. Big Tech companies are likely to resist these demands when they see them as posing an existential threat to their business models. On the other hand, supranational entities might leverage access to the markets of their members to force tech firms to comply with such regulations.

A possible blueprint of this approach may be the draft of the EU Digital Services Act regulation – currently under discussion – which proposes that large tech companies like Amazon and Google “shall not use data collected on the platform…for [their] own commercial activities…unless they [make it] accessible to business users active in the same commercial activities”. The proposed regulation aims to tackle functional sovereignty by designating and targeting gatekeepers, that “shall not use data received from business users for advertising services for any other purpose other than advertising services”.30 If approved by the EU Parliament, this regulation would force digital platforms acting as gatekeepers in the single market to share the customer data they collect with smaller rivals and to stop giving preference to their services. Moreover, it will make tech giants liable for the products and services they market or embed in their platforms.

Taxing Big Tech to fund public research

Over the past few decades, education and research organizations have been starved of public funding, and become increasingly reliant on private companies for access to funding and data. We suggest an increase in public research funding, financed by a tax on tech firms, to counteract this reliance.

The idea of a digital tax is, of course, not new. In 2012, a series of tax scandals involving Apple, Google, and Amazon forced G20 leaders to launch the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project (BEPS), which was eventually extended to low- and middle-income countries.31 Nevertheless, BEPS has proven to be somewhat of a fig leaf; its financial reports are not publicly available and, therefore, not subject to the scrutiny of independent organizations. Moreover, the provision is toothless against ‘corporate regime shopping’, through which tech giants strategically structure their operations and shell companies so as to benefit from the most friendly and low-tax jurisdictions. More recently, supranational bodies such as the EU and national governments have taken a more aggressive stance. Since 2018, nine Asian countries, including India and South Korea, as well as Latin American countries like Mexico and Chile have been in discussions on how to tax revenues, rather than profits, of tech companies.32 In 2019, for instance, France had approved a 3 percent tax on revenues generated in its territory by digital corporations.33

The Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT), a think tank that includes among its members economists Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, and Joseph Stieglitz and the lawyer Irene Ovonji-Odida, suggests a BEPS 2.0, which will address regime shopping, the geographic allocation of global profits and associated taxes according to the business of the tech giants in each country, and the introduction of a 20-25 percent global minimum effective corporate tax rate on all profits earned by multinationals.34 These levies on services provided on national territories, and separate from corporate income taxes, may be used by national governments or supranational entities to increase public spending on research, improve publicly-owned data infrastructures, and minimize the reliance on corporate support.

Creating space for new forms of action

Beyond governments, activists must play a role in keeping tech giants in check and engaging with the public. We suggest that organizations such as consumer pressure groups and tech-savvy civil society organizations need to form a transnational alliance to help grassroots movements gain visibility.

Vigilant civil society organizations and advocates have a responsibility to ensure that regulators do not roll back regulations that were in place before the pandemic, and that the current emergency measures do not become permanent. Civil society organizations already participating in digital spaces must reach out to new partners including social movements involved in public services to help rethink their strategies, languages, and ways of engaging with the general public and policymakers. Meaningful collaboration requires the inclusion of consumer associations which can exert commercial pressure on digital platforms, and social movements which have a better grasp of grassroots’ calls for social change. For example, citizen-led organizations can help policymakers make a stronger case for BEPS and put pressure on corporations to make their financial and tax reports public. Not-for-profit organizations also have a critical role to play in backing up policymakers by offering feedback on and flagging off loopholes in draft regulations. This was the case in the above mentioned EU Digital Services Act, which was subjected to open consultation throughout the development process.

4. End reflections

The current pandemic is throwing into sharp relief and exacerbating structural inequalities that are steeped in past political choices. The risk is that the players that have benefited most from these choices, and are consolidating their dominance in the present, will eventually hijack the post-Covid 19 future. Avoiding a corporate capture of this moment of transformation requires a rethinking of the public-private relationship on the one hand, and the state-citizen relationship on the other.

By being more responsive to the needs of their citizens, governments can mend the fractures and faults related to digital tech and those brought about by Covid-19. Success will include shifting digitech power from extractivism to a place where this power is used for societal good.

Notes

  • 1 Financial Times (2020a) Prospering in the pandemic: the top 100 companies. 19 June.
  • 2 The Washington Post (2020) Mark Zuckerberg: How data can aid the fight against covid-19. 20 April. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/20/how-data-can-aid-fight-against-covid-19/.
  • 3 Friedman, M. (1962/2002) Capitalism and Freedom Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • 4 The Economist (2020) “The Covid-19 Pandemic is Forcing a Rethink in Macroeconomics” The Economist, July 25th 2020. Available electronically at: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/25/the-covid-19-pandemic-is-forcing-a-rethink-in-macroeconomics.
  • 5 Piketty, T. (2013) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • 6 Davis, G. F. (2009) Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-shaped America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  • 7 Autor, D. H., Levy, F. and R.J. Murnane (2003) “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(4): 1279-1333.
  • 8 Kleibert, J. M. and L. Mann (2020) “Capturing Value amidst Constant Global Restructuring? Information-Technology-Enabled Services in India, the Philippines and Kenya” The European Journal of Development Research, 1-23.
  • 9 Mann, L. and G. Iazzolino (2019) “See, Nudge, Control and Profit: Digital Platforms as Pervasive Epistemic Infrastructures” Working Paper, IT for Change.
  • 10 Mann, L. and G. Iazzolino (2019) “See, Nudge, Control and Profit: Digital Platforms as Pervasive Epistemic Infrastructures” Working Paper, IT for Change; Langley, P. and A. Leyshon (2017) “Platform Capitalism: the Intermediation and Capitalisation of Digital Economic Circulation” Finance and Society 3(1), 11-31; Gurumurthy, A., Chami, N., Bharthur, D. and P.J. Singh (2019) “Tackling Online Inequality: Making Digital Platforms Work for Inclusive Development” IT For Change, Final Technical Report; Srnicek, N. (2017) Platform Capitalism. London: John Wiley & Sons; Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.
  • 11 Pasquale, F. (2018) From territorial to functional sovereignty: the case of Amazon. Open Democracy. January 5th. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/from-territorial-to-functional-sovereignty-case-of-amazon/.
  • 12 Khan, L. M. (2018) “The Ideological Roots of America’s Market Power Problem” The Yale Law Journal, June 4th 2018.
  • 13 Naidu, V. (2019) “Knowledge Production in International Trade Negotiations is a High Stakes Game” Africa at LSE Blogpost. June 14th 2019. Available electronically at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2019/06/14/knowledge-production-international-trade-digital/.
    James, D. (2020) “Digital Trade Rules: a Disastrous New Constitution for the Global Economy, by and for Big Tech” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Available electronically at: https://www.rosalux.eu/en/article/1742.digital-trade-rules.html.
  • 14 The concept of governmentality was developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault to indicate a set of practices and rationalities to govern subjects.
  • 15 Mazzucato, M. (2013) The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths London: Anthem Press.
  • 16 Williams, O. (2020) Revealed: Palantir secures £1m contract extension for NHS data store work. New Statesman. July 15. https://tech.newstatesman.com/coronavirus/palantir-nhs-datastore-contract-extension.
  • 17 Busemeyer, M. R. and Thelen, K. (2020) ‘Institutional Sources of Business Power’, World Politics, 72(3), pp. 448–480.
  • 18 Mkandawire, T. (1999) “Crisis Management and the Making of’ Choiceless Democracies’ in Africa” in Joseph, R. (Ed) The State, Conflict and Democracy in Africa. Boulder: Lynne Rienner; Mkandawire, T. (2010) “Aid, Accountability, and Democracy in Africa” Social Research: An International Quarterly 77(4): 1149-1182.
  • 19 Tyce, M. (2020) ‘Beyond the neoliberal-statist divide on the drivers of innovation: A political settlements reading of Kenya’s M-Pesa success story’, World Development. 125.
  • 20 Karwowski, E. (2019) ‘Towards (de-)financialisation: The role of the state’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 43(4), pp. 1001–1027. doi: 10.1093/cje/bez023.
  • 21 Mann, L. and G. Iazzolino (2019) “See, Nudge, Control and Profit: Digital Platforms as Pervasive Epistemic Infrastructures” Working Paper, IT for Change.
  • 22 Vogel, K.P. (2017) Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant. New York Times. August, 30. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-google-new-america.html.
  • 23 Cohen, P., Hahn, R., Hall, J., Levitt, S. and R. Metcalfe (2016) ‘Using big data to estimate consumer surplus: The case of Uber’ NBER Working paper No. 22627. Available electronically at: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22627.pdf.
  • 24 Mamdani, M. (2007) Scholars in the Marketplace. The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA;  Mkandawire, T. (2014) “The Spread of Economic Doctrines and Policymaking in Postcolonial Africa” African Studies Review, 171-198; Obamba, M. O. (2013) “Uncommon Knowledge: World Bank Policy and the Unmaking of the Knowledge Economy in Africa” Higher Education Policy, 26(1): 83-108.
  • 25 Lang, S. (2013). NGOs, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Choudry, A. and Kapoor, D. (2013) NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects London and New York: Zed Books.
  • 26 https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud/asdi.
  • 27 Roy, A. (2014) The NGO-ization of resistance. Pambazuka. September 23. https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/ngo-ization-resistance.
  • 28 Ashok Kumbamu (2020) The philanthropic-corporate-state complex: imperial strategies of dispossession from the ‘Green Revolution’ to the ‘Gene Revolution’, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2020.1727132.
  • 29 Privacy International (2020) Telecommunication data and COVID-19. https://privacyinternational.org/examples/telecommunications-data-and-covid-19.
  • 30 Espinoza, J. (2020) Brussels drafts rules to force Big Tech to share data. Financial Times, September 30. https://www.ft.com/content/1773edd6-7f1d-4290-93b6-05965a4ff0db.
  • 31 Ocampo, J.A. (2019) Decision on future of Corporate Taxation. February 14. ICRICT. https://www.icrict.com/icrict-in-thenews/2019/2/14/decision-on-future-of-corporate-taxation.
  • 32 Martin, T. W. and Schechner (2018) Facebook, Google May Face Billions in New Taxes Across Asia, Latin America. Wall Street Journal. October 28. https://www.wsj.com/articles/countries-push-digital-taxes-on-tech-giants-1540742400.
  • 33 Swanson, A. (2019) U.S. Announces Inquiry of French Digital Tax That May End in Tariffs. New York Times, July 10. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/business/us-france-tariffs.html.
  • 34 Ocampo, J.A. (2019) Decision on future of Corporate Taxation. February 14. ICRICT. https://www.icrict.com/icrict-in-thenews/2019/2/14/decision-on-future-of-corporate-taxation.

Gianluca Iazzolino is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of International Development, based at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa. His main research interests include informal economy, migration and ICTs. He is particularly interested in the political economy of digital innovation and in the Future of Work agenda in middle and low-income countries. He is currently working on two projects, one focusing on data-driven agro-innovation in California’s Central Valley and Kenya’s Rift Valley and another exploring how digitisation and datafication are reshaping public communications and the informal economy in East Africa.

Marion Ouma completed her doctoral studies in Sociology under the South Africa Chair Initiative (SARChl) in Social Policy at the University of South Africa in 2019. Her research interests include sociology, social policy, social protection, policy-making and the political economy of Africa’s development. She has published in Critical Social Policy and authored a book chapter in The African Political Economy edited by Samuel Oloruntoba and Toyin Falola. Currently, she is a research consultant for the project “A Tale of Two Green Valleys: Power Struggles over Data-Driven Agro-Innovation in Kenya’s Rift Valley and California’s Central Valley”.

Laura Mann is an Assistant Professor in the LSE’s International Development department and a research affiliate of the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa. Her research focuses on the political economy of knowledge and technology. She is currently working on two projects, one examining the political economy of digital data value chains in agriculture (in the Rift Valley, Kenya and the Central Valley, California, USA) and a second examining the role of Western donors in social protection and higher education policy in post-revolutionary Sudan.

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The Coming Shift in Internet Governance

The Coming Shift in Internet Governance

Roberto Bissio

The internet could not exist without the common protocols and procedures for its constituent networks to link and transfer data between each other. How these protocols are decided upon is key to shaping a service that is currently used by nearly half of humanity. Yet, the ‘governance of the internet’ is not only about connecting devices, but also about what people are allowed, expected, or solicited to use these devices for. At the point when these protocols were first created, the internet was intended to be used solely for research and education, with any personal or commercial benefit being forbidden. This was the case until 1992, when previously fettered corporate greed became the driver of the ‘internet boom’. Eventually, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, approved in 1996 by the US Congress, created the (rather weak) legal basis for social media and the gig economy by allowing on the internet activities which remained prohibited in the brick-and-mortar (and printed paper) world. The US ownership of the internet through ICANN and US-based monopolistic platforms is creating a ‘governance bottleneck’ precisely when the Covid-19 pandemic has made the internet an indispensable global public good. The time is ripe to usher in a new era for the internet.

Illustration by Mansi Thakkar

Introduction

Back in 1989, in order to open my first dial-up account to access the internet at the vertiginous speed of 300 baud (bits per second, slower than the speed at which we read, but six times faster than telex!), I had to sign a written commitment to only use that powerful tool for research or educational purposes. I was to definitely not waste valuable bandwidth in “extensive use for private or personal business” and refrain from any “use for for-profit activities”.

That was in Montevideo, Uruguay. The service provider was the public university but the conditions were imposed by National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), the connectivity backbone of the National Science Foundation of the United States, which encompassed all connecting networks, irrespective of where they were located in the world.

As a journalist in a Latin American country just emerging from over a decade of military dictatorship, the lure of the internet, for me, lay in the possibility of accessing an enormous wealth of information and the promise of expanding freedoms. Yet, even when I was working for an NGO and profit was not my motivation for using the internet, it seemed odd that entry into this utopic ‘cyberspace’ required prior acceptance of a series of restrictions imposed by a foreign power.

1. A network for altruistic cooperation

The Internet Protocol and other data communication protocols identified by acronyms such as TCP, UDP, DNS, and BGP were initially developed in 1985 to connect the ‘supercomputer centers’ of five US universities funded by the National Science Foundation. NSFNET operated the ‘backbone’ – the actual cables allowing for high speed data communication from coast-to-coast between the five nodes – and then provided access, at no cost, to other universities and regional networks, and eventually, to any other network that was employing these protocols (although those residing abroad had to pay the whole cost of the international connection).

The TCP/IP protocol, initially developed on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the US Department of Defense, only determined how computer networks would be connected, but the 12 points of the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) of NSFNET also clearly spelled out what users could or could not do. The AUP (of which I was required to sign a summarized Spanish translation) started by declaring that use of the network for any purpose other than “open research and education in and among US research and instructional institutions (…) is not acceptable”. Communication with foreign peers for accepted purposes was legitimate “as long as any network that the foreign user employs for such communication provides reciprocal access to US researchers and educators” (Article 2).

Essentially, the internet started off being about researchers having remote access to supercomputers funded by taxpayers’ money, through similarly subsidized data links. If a researcher or an educator were to derive any personal or commercial benefit from the use of these public resources, that would have been tantamount to a misuse of such resources, and become the subject of a scandal.

In reality, the AUP was not so much about policing individual usage, but determining which networks could or could not be connected to the backbone. A for-profit private institution could get connected for educational or research purposes, but a for-profit network charging for its services, or a network with businesses as clients, would not be eligible.

The issue became more problematic when miniaturization brought computing out of big universities, state agencies, or corporations, and into individual homes and garage-based enterprises. In 1982, the home computer became Time magazine’s “machine of the year”. Empowered by these tools, users soon pressed to join ‘the network’. The number of email addresses quadrupled between 1985 and 1989 to one million. By 1991, the number had further tripled to three million.

Many private networks sprang up to meet this demand, often developing their own protocols and new uses such as chatrooms and newsgroups. It was at this point that the AUP started being perceived as an obstacle. This was also a time when the US was celebrating its victory in the Cold War, an outcome frequently attributed to the country’s technological advantages. A new Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act was voted in by the US Congress in 1992, based on the rationale that “the position of the United States in the world economy faces great challenges from highly trained foreign competition”.1 At the end of a series of measures to improve scientific and technological education, the Act included a cryptic amendment to the 1950 law regulating the National Science Foundation, now authorizing it “…to foster and support access by the research and education communities to computer networks which may be used substantially for purposes in addition to research and education in the sciences and engineering, if the additional uses will tend to increase the overall capabilities of the networks to support such research and education activities”. The undefined “additional uses” of the internet would now be understood to include all kinds of for-profit traffic and activities.

2. Greed is good

That little amendment tore down the firewalls between commercial and non-commercial uses of the internet. The AUP continued to be the policy behind the NSFNET nodes, but the Network started to allow its backbone to channel traffic generated by commercial service providers without any control of its use. Thanks to this hidden subsidization of a new activity, the number of email addresses jumped to 25 million in 1996 and the Internet Protocol became the standard for computer-mediated communications, displacing alternative formulas such as the French Minitel, which attached a “dumb terminal” (screen and keyboard) to fixed telephone lines.

A sizeable proportion of the US population was already ‘online’ in 1996, when Congress approved another small amendment that would shape the evolution and governance of the present-day internet and become the origin of many of its most persistent problems – from fake news to the informalization of work through the gig economy. In this amendment to the Communications Decency Act (CDA), a Section 230 was added, stating that, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The section boosted the internet by guaranteeing to digital publishers an immunity that does not exist in the material world.

The consequences of Section 230 are evident in how the internet ecosystem has developed over the years. Social media, especially the most widely-used platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and the Google-owned YouTube have been exposed and criticized in recent years for channeling hate messages, propaganda, and disinformation, sometimes to the extent of influencing political processes in major countries and contributing directly to massacres, as in the well-documented case of the Rohingyas in Myanmar. The intentional and coordinated activity of ‘trolls’ (humans or automated message-generators called bots) exacerbates a trend already embedded in the algorithms that decide which messages are highlighted and made more visible. Extreme messages are systematically given precedence over nuanced postings because the algorithms have ‘learnt’ that those messages get the most ‘likes’ or are reproduced faster and wider. The obvious objective of such behavior is to maximize advertisement revenue, and the act of ‘opening up the internet’ to commercial activities usually gets a rap on the knuckle in this scenario. This, despite the fact that advertisements have been the main source of revenue for commercial radio and TV in many countries for decades, without generating similar problems.

What placed digital social media companies in a unique position, allowing them to evolve into platforms serving billions of users and simultaneously misusing the confidence vested in them by users, is the particular legal environment created by Section 230 and how it redefined publishing. The French Assembly established in 1789 stated that “the free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man”. But even in countries without actual censorship laws, the publisher of printed materials remains limited by provisions regarding copyright, questions of libel, obscenity, national security or “responsibility provisions”. Freedom of speech does not allow one to cause panic by screaming “FIRE” in a crowded theatre and the publisher of a recipe can be sued for damages if it results in poisoning. On the other hand, entities which are simply carriers of (someone else’s) content cannot be blamed in any way for that content. For instance, the phone company is not responsible for obscene or threatening calls made through their lines.

When internet services started to be offered to the public, email could easily be likened to postal services: both were ‘carriers’, not responsible for the content of the messages they transmitted. But a publicly readable digital bulletin board made the digital service providing it liable as a ‘publisher’.

In 1995, Prodigy Communications Corporation, an online service, which offered subscribers news, shopping games, and bulletin boards, was sued for libel after an anonymous user accused a banker of engaging in fraudulent acts. The Supreme Court of the State of New York ruled that Prodigy was “a publisher” – not simply a “carrier” – and therefore liable “because it had exercised editorial control by moderating some posts and establishing guidelines for impermissible content”. If Prodigy had not engaged in any content moderation, it might have been granted free speech protections afforded to some distributors of content, like bookstores and news stands.23

Section 230 was meant to protect the perceived competitive advantage of the US in the digital realm by supporting emerging, and at the time rather experimental, platforms like Prodigy. It gave the digital publisher an immunity unavailable to those that published on paper. It also formed the legal basis for social media companies being able to generate enormous profits from content freely contributed on their platforms by the public they supposedly serve, without being liable for it.

Globally, in 1998, when the commercial uses of the internet were starting off, the World Trade Organization (WTO) decided to ban countries from applying customs duties on electronic transmissions. This e-commerce moratorium is still in effect, even after a research paper published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 2019 estimated that the potential tariff revenue loss to developing countries due to the moratorium was $10 billion in 2017.4

The e-commerce moratorium – India, South Africa, and other developing countries will push for it to be lifted during the coming WTO Ministerial Conference in 2021 – does not say anything about the content of electronic transmissions. But it does mean that countries find themselves practically unable to enforce their own publishing laws on social media companies operating from the US, and have to either accept the criteria laid down in Section 230 or ban these platforms altogether (and thus be seen as exercising censorship).

Section 230 is the legal basis of not just Facebook or Twitter, but all platforms that are part of the gig economy. It allows ride-hailing and food delivery platforms like Uber, DoorDash, etc. to claim that they do not actually hire the driver or the person delivering food to your home (which would make them responsible as employers), but only channel ‘information’ (the availability posted by the bicycle owner) to the pizza parlor looking to reach its customers. While a hotel chain is responsible for what it offers it guests, Airbnb is not liable for any claim made by hosts because it is a ‘platform’ for information providers who happen to have free rooms in their homes. Monopolies earning billions were thus created under an obscure appendix of a Decency Act, whose other articles were soon blocked by the courts for infringing on free speech.

In 2000, the European Union introduced an E-commerce Directive along similar lines as Section 230, limiting the liability of “information society services”. However, courts have different interpretations of what that means. In 2017, the Court of Justice of the European Union granted to Airbnb the status (and benefits) of an “information society service” while in another ruling it decided to classify Uber as a “service in the field of transport”, with different responsibilities.5 However, the adoption by Europe of similar rules as US did not produce the desired effect of stimulating similar or competing European platforms. Facing the evidence of multiple problems caused by unfair competition and monopolistic practices, the Europeans started to discuss more stringent regulations and a comprehensive review was announced in 2020 as part of a new EU Digital Services Act package.6

3. The censored president

On October 6, 2020, two separate events coincided in inaugurating a new chapter in internet governance. First, the antitrust subcommittee of the US House of Representatives issued a 449-page report stating that “companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” The report concludes that “these firms have too much power, and that power must be reined in and subject to appropriate oversight and enforcement.”

Directly targeting the four GAFA companies – Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple – the report makes a case for breaking up Big Tech, as was done in the past with Standard Oil or ATT when they gained monopoly power. There is no bipartisan agreement on the precise measures to be taken, with the Democrats pushing for a new law and some Republican members of the subcommittee preferring to rely on existing antitrust legislation, but the very recognition of this problem at the highest echelons of decision-making is a major step.

As this report was made public at the Hill, from the White House president Donald Trump tweeted a one liner: REPEAL SECTION 230!!!

A day prior, Twitter had blocked Trump’s account after the president publicly posted the email address of a journalist, in violation of the platform’s policy forbidding the sharing of private information without the consent of the affected person. Trump’s preferred tool of communication with the public remained blocked until the offending tweet was removed.

The Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has also gone on record calling for the revocation of Section 230 on grounds that “it [Facebook] is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false”.

Irrespective of the outcome of the 2020 US presidential elections, it would not be far-fetched to expect that Section 230, the “backbone of internet governance” will change substantially in the near future. If that happens, what would it be replaced with? The short answer and the best case scenario: nothing.

Implicitly, Trump wants these platforms to be neutral carriers and thus unable to censor him, while Biden seems to want a responsible publisher that checks the facts and is liable for known falsehoods. If Section 230 is repealed, an internet platform could be one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Irrespective of the outcome of the 2020 US presidential elections, it would not be far-fetched to expect that Section 230, the “backbone of internet governance” will change substantially in the near future. If that happens, what would it be replaced with? The short answer and the best case scenario: nothing.

Without Section 230 (and other equivalent legislations), the legal framework for publishing or carrying messages on the internet would be the same as in the offline world, meaning that publishers will have to be responsible for what they publish, and carriers will have no liability for, no say in, and no ownership over the content they carry. Online versions of trusted publications will be more valuable, and advertising will return from a few global platforms to local content producers. There will be some friction in short-term small value contracts negotiated through electronic means, meaning that the respective roles of workers and employees, or of sellers and buyers of products and services will have to become more transparent and easier to regulate and be taxed by governments as anonymity is reduced or disappears altogether.

Workers, small businesses, responsible publishers, and governments will be the winners in this scenario. Huge platforms that are now widely recognized as damaging monopolies would suffer, yes. And they will most likely argue that such a change is an attack on liberties. But the limits on what can be said or advertised already exist, and offline regulations have also been implemented in the online world. For example, the FOSTA-SESTA7 bills passed by US Congress in 2018 (promoted by Republican legislators but voted for, among other democrats, by Senator Kamala Harris) makes web platforms liable if they carry ads for prostitution, even though consensual sex work is not illegal in all US states. Following this legislation, sites that do not usually moderate content, such as Craigslist or Reddit, were forced to discontinue their personal ad sections in the US, even as they carried them in their websites for other countries. It is arguable if the FOSTA-SESTA acts actually reduce prostitution or only confine it to the ‘deep web’, but by making websites liable for content published by a third party, they do bore a hole in the flank of Section 230 and the (excessive) guarantees it provides to publishers.

With human rights caught between the corporate self-regulation practiced by the monopolistic platforms and the authoritarian regulation supported by many politicians to counter fake news, a group of Latin American researchers and civil society organizations have proposed a “third way”. They call for an “assymetric regulation” where the bigger the platforms are, the more responsibilities they should undertake.

With human rights caught between the corporate self-regulation practiced by the monopolistic platforms and the authoritarian regulation supported by many politicians to counter fake news, a group of Latin American researchers and civil society organizations have proposed a “third way”. They call for an “asymmetric regulation” where the bigger the platforms are, the more responsibilities they should undertake.8

Ultimately, under human rights law, governments are the duty bearers and it is up to them to “respect, protect and fulfil” those rights, while the role of business is to “comply with all applicable laws and to respect human rights” an obligation that comes with “appropriate and effective remedies when breached”.9 No self-regulation can substitute the need for a legal norm, even when, these norms are established by the same governments which renege their human rights duties.

In the triangle formed by civil society, state, and the market, people hold rights, governments bear duties, and corporations are granted privileges. These privileges can only be justified if corporations meet expected outcomes and should be taken away when the collateral damage outweighs the expected benefits, or privileges are abused to build monopolies.

The Covid-19 pandemic made the internet an essential tool around the world, with the Financial Times arguing that “internet access is both a human right and a business opportunity”.10

With a view to ensuring access to information as a right, in August 2020 the Argentinian government froze the tariffs of paid TV, internet, and fixed and mobile phone services, declaring them “essential and strategic competitive public services”. While keeping these services in private hands, the government recovered its authority to regulate them closely.11 On October 7, 2020, the House of Representatives in Colombia unanimously approved a bill declaring the internet an “essential public service” with the same legal status as the provision of drinking water, sanitation, or electricity. This recognition of universal access to the internet as a right should, over time, lead to government interventions to ensure accessible and competitive prices.

4. But… the internet (still) belongs to the US

Covid-19 has forced governments to ensure wider access to the internet in order to make “social distancing” possible. This push brings us closer to the aspiration of the internet as a “global public good”. But the reality is that, in many ways, the internet is still owned by the US.

As mentioned earlier, the US government directly owned or funded the supercomputers linked by the Internet Protocol and the lines that carried the data. Gradually, those operations were transferred to the private sector. However, through the Department of Commerce, the US Government still controlled the assignation of a unique number (known as IP address) to every device connected to the internet and a unique name for some of them. Thus, the internet user can type www.socialwatch.org and a Domain Name Server will drive the connection to http://52.117.222.8 which is the IP number of the computer hosting the desired webpage. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) hosts the root zone database that ensures the coherence of the system.

The fact that the government of one country could unilaterally, and at whim, wipe out another from the internet and wreak havoc just by deleting a registry in a database is a huge obstacle in transforming the internet into a global public good.

To understand the governance relevance of running IANA, think of the following example: In November 2019 the CEO of VPN.com, an internet corporation, wrote to President Trump12 requesting, in addition to the existing sanctions against Iran, “to terminate all access to .ir domains by removing the .ir domain delegation from the DNS root zone until these sanctions are lifted.” The same letter explains that “the primary impact of this action would eliminate all web access and e-mail service to .ir domains. This would cause massive economic and communication disruption to Iran across more than 1,131,300 .ir domains.”

Irrespective of the merit of the proposed sanctions, in international law, such measures against a country can only be imposed by the Security Council of the United Nations. The fact that the government of one country could unilaterally, and at whim, wipe out another from the internet and wreak havoc just by deleting a registry in a database is a huge obstacle in transforming the internet into a global public good.

The good news, from an internet governance point of view, is that the US president does not have the power to impose such a decision any more, after former president Barack Obama transferred all of IANA functions from the US Commerce Department to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in October 2016. The bad news is that the “multistakeholder governance” of ICANN – where corporations, governments, and end users have a say – is far from being genuinely multilateral, democratic, or fair. A non-profit organization incorporated under the laws of the State of California, ICANN is still a US institution, subject to the authority of US courts and federal executive agencies like the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Following the Snowden revelations of 2013, and the increasing distrust of the US government by others such as China and Russia as well as its allies in the EU and Latin America, Obama in 2014 announced the intention to transition key internet domain name functions “to the global multistakeholder community”. The US Congress, in a bipartisan resolution, added that it would not accept a proposal to replace the role of the US government on the internet “with a government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution”.

ICANN was requested to produce a proposal that could ensure “the security, stability, and resiliency of the internet DNS” (domain name system) and “maintain the openness of the internet”. But, after two years of consultations, it was never defined what “openness of the internet” means.

Civil society proposed, and the human rights community celebrated as a victory, the new bylaws of ICANN which state that “respecting internationally recognized human rights as required by applicable law” is one of the “core values” of the organization. But a long caveat after that affirmation explains that “this Core Value does not create, and shall not be interpreted to create, any obligation on ICANN” and it “does not obligate ICANN to enforce its human rights obligations, or the human rights obligations of other parties, against other parties.” A (forthcoming) legal analysis by the Harvard Business Law Review concludes that “the new aspirations in the Bylaws are drafted in a way that they carry little, if any, legal weight”, and “amount to little more than a veneer intended to bolster ICANN’s public image”.13

As arbiter of the internet domain names, ICANN invoices 140 million dollars a year to the registrars that, in turn, rent the use of those names to the public. Most of the income pays for a staff of 400, earning on average $200,000 a year.

On October 1, 2016, the US Department of Commerce officially stopped performing any internet-related functions and the responsibilities held until then by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), was passed on to ICANN. What was initially announced as a new model of global multistakeholder governance ended up being described in the official website of the NTIA as a “privatization of the DNS”, since those functions previously performed by a public agency subject to congressional oversight are now in the hands of a private entity. As arbiter of the internet domain names, ICANN invoices 140 million dollars a year to the registrars that, in turn, rent the use of those names to the public. Most of the income pays for a staff of 400, earning on average $200,000 a year.

If there was hope for forging international confidence in the neutrality and fairness of ICANN back in 2016, that is much less likely now, after four years of the Trump administration during which the world has seen the US unilaterally abandon signed international commitments like the Paris Agreement on Climate, withdraw from the World Health Organization in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, and openly disdain treaty entities that the US itself pushed for, like NATO or the WTO.

5. A new internet era?

During the transition debates leading up to the establishment of ICANN, there was an alternative arrangement proposed in the form of an entity created by an international treaty and subject to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. This proposed international entity would have been founded by sovereign parties and would have had extraterritorial immunity even if it was headquartered in the US. US law does not apply within the perimeters of the UN headquarters in New York and Swiss law does not apply inside the building of the WTO in Geneva. Headquarters of international organizations have similar statuses as those of foreign embassies. The mechanisms of international law – immunity, and extraterritoriality – have evolved in this way precisely to make trade and diplomacy possible and to create entities outside of the jurisdiction of any single government.

Many stakeholders and advisors commented during the transition that, for the internet to be free of undue government pressures and respect and promote human rights, ICANN should have extraterritorial status and immunity from government prosecution. This would have been possible only if it was an international organization created by a treaty.

Becoming such an entity doesn’t mean that governments will run it. An international organization can have non-state actors as members and decision-makers. For example, the International Labour Organization is tripartite, with governments, workers, and employers of each member country sitting as equals in its assembly. The status of an international organization is also compatible with the condition imposed by the US Congress that ICANN not be “government-led”. This is the case with the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose statutes protect the independence of its judges from any government interference. Yes, a treaty-making process can be cumbersome and take decades, but it can also be quite fast and efficient. The ICC was negotiated and ratified in less time than it took to rewrite the ICANN bylaws through a multistakeholder process.

Ideally, a treaty defining the governance of the internet as a global public good could also define the composition of an external body, completely independent of ICANN, to which it is to be accountable and whose composition can be deemed to represent the “global public interest”. This can include representatives of communities affected by ICANN’s policies, including the half of humanity that is not yet connected to any internet service. Currently, only those actors directly interacting with ICANN participate in consultations and while governments and civil society are represented, it is the big corporations that have the major say.

The alternative proposals were deemed “unrealistic” four years ago. Even passing on the reins of the internet from the US government to an NGO was criticized by a group of Republican legislators led by Texas Senator Ted Cruz as a “radical proposal”. “Like Jimmy Carter gave away the Panama Canal, Obama is giving away the internet,” Cruz said.14 An official statement by (then presidential candidate) Donald Trump backed that view: “Congress needs to act, or internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost.”15

Once in the White House, Trump attacked other Obama-era legislations but not the new status of ICANN. No attempts were made to reverse the transition and, in 2018, the privatization was pushed further by an NTIA decision to stop controlling the prices set by ICANN “in line with the public policy priorities of the Trump administration”.16 As a result, ICANN negotiated a new agreement with Verisign, the firm that registers the .com domains, allowing it to gradually double its prices over the next 10 years.

The ICANN transition became a fait accompli and disappeared from US debates. But while other issues (like Section 230) seem more urgent, Trump’s attempts to extend the US-China trade war into the realm of the internet, the Huawei boycott, or the TikTok ban in the US, do not bolster confidence in the future neutrality and impartiality of a US-based entity at the heart of internet governance.

The unsolved governance problems of the internet thus seem to converge and press for urgent changes. In less than 40 years, the nature of the internet shifted several times, metamorphosing from a cooperative endeavor among researchers and educators to a profit-led incubator of daring initiatives which later transformed into oppressive monopolies. These shifts were induced by political decisions about how to govern the internet and its usage. A new shift is due to start now. And this time, it cannot result from some arcane, opaque regulation. Instead, it must be the subject of an informed, transparent, and inclusive global debate and legitimate international decision-making.

From stakeholders to rightsholders

After a period of empasizing the role of stakeholders in international governance, a new momentum towards focusing more on rightsholders is apparent in the “Escazú Agreement” on “Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters”, adopted on March 2018 and currently just one ratification short of entering into force.

The purpose of the Agreement, which is a legally binding treaty for its signatories in the Latin American and Caribbean region, is “to guarantee the full and effective implementation in Latin America and the Caribbean of the rights of access to environmental information, public participation in the environmental decision-making process and access to justice in environmental matters”. In order to ensure those rights, “each Party shall encourage the use of new information and communications technologies, such as open data, in the different languages used in the country, as appropriate. In no circumstances shall the use of electronic media constrain or result in discrimination against the public.”17

Notes

Roberto Bissio is based in Uruguay where he coordinates the secretariat of Social Watch, an international network of citizen organizations that monitors sustainable development policies. He is co-editor of the Global Policy Watch and was a member of the advisory group to the CCWG Accountability Group of ICANN during the “transition”.

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Data Rights and Collective Needs: A New Framework for Social Protection in a Digitized World

Data Rights and Collective Needs: A New Framework for Social Protection in a Digitized World

Mariana Valente & Nathalie Fragoso

All social programs employ some ‘legibility’ scheme, to make citizens visible, readable, and verifiable to the state. Today, this trait is combined and enhanced by the datafication process. Social protection systems around the world are becoming increasingly computerized and reliant on beneficiaries’ data for related decision-making. Digital technologies that are capable of collecting and verifying large amounts of data are employed to this end, impacting the exercise of both digital and social rights. In this essay, we will address the differential impacts of the datafication of social protection on marginalized populations, using examples from existing literature and our own research. We then engage with existing reflections on social protection and datafication to highlight the importance of a data justice framework for the current global political and economic context.

Illustration by Jahnavi Koganti

Introduction

Sixteen-year-old Ana, who belongs to a minority religious and ethnic group, was forced to flee her home in a Latin American country when violent conflict broke out. She and her family crossed the border into a neighboring country in the Americas. Once there, her parents applied for refugee status and social protection benefits and waited for an official response. 

After a six-month wait, law enforcement officials visited their home – which they share with another immigrant family – armed with a database of all asylum applications, with details like the number of accompanying children, ethnicity, and religion of the applicants. Typically, this data is crossed-checked against additional information obtained from social media handles and biometrics collected at the border for intelligence purposes. This task is performed by a private company that is in partnership with another (also private) corporation that specializes in facial recognition technologies, and to this end, owns and manages a database of images of over 300 million citizens worldwide.

When Ana’s face was scanned at the border as part of immigration procedures, the system could not find her in the database – although it did find her brother Luiz, a successful gamer with a substantial online presence. But now, Ana’s face is also part of the database that, among other things, is used by the police for crime-solving. Her facial features are recorded and linked to her fingerprints, her name, and other identifiable information. This is the same database that, according to a media report, law enforcement officials relied on to ‘mistakenly’ arrest a black man when the facial recognition system tied to the database returned a false positive.

To an extent, Ana is aware that data about her is being collected and stored – she had to answer several questions posed by multiple border officials. But she does not know the details of how this information will be treated, and whether or how she can access it. She is not aware, for instance, that the data thus collected is shared with multiple government agencies and private stakeholders, or that her social media information is being collected and used. She has no idea that the biometric data collected from her can be used for crime investigations. She does not know that people who have not come in contact with immigration and social protection services are less represented in all these databases. All she knows is that this information will be used by the government to decide whether her family is eligible for a conditional cash transfer program; it will determine her immigration status and her ability to go to school in the country where she now lives.

Ana’s situation is hypothetical but based on real-life incidents. It raises many questions about data, digital technologies, and access to social protection programs. In this essay we are concerned with what happens to social protection programs when they become datafied.

In Seeing Like a State (1998), J. Scott introduces the concept of ‘legibility’ to analyze how states use information about their citizens to achieve certain goals. He outlines a process in which states simplify and standardize citizens’ data for purposes of social control, thereby dissolving local and contextualized understandings. Signifiers and measures which are ubiquitous today, were historically, more often than not, created and enforced by modern states. Permanent surnames, for instance, were almost everywhere a state project to fix an individual’s identity, link them to a group, and promote the status of male family heads. They were useful for taxation, property rolls, and censuses. Cadastral mapping of land holdings and standardized weights and measures were part of elaborate and costly state campaigns. These attempts to classify and assimilate – aimed at making objects ‘legible’ to the state – were often met with localized and grassroots resistance. They stood in direct opposition to local practices which were multiple and diverse, and served a community that understood them.

Legibility also implies that things are overly simplified. In contemporary societies, the complexities of social life are necessarily flattened out, for instance, when states classify citizens’ economic situations into income tax bands. To be sure, some such standards are necessary for centralized planning and monitoring – and colonial powers have employed them extensively. However, such categorization also has a direct impact on how legal and administrative measures apply to people and situations, and they also, in turn, shape reality (Scott, 1998).

All social programs make use of some legibility scheme. They aim to make citizens visible, readable, and verifiable to the state by putting them into simplified and standardized categories.

All social programs make use of some legibility scheme. They aim to make citizens visible, readable, and verifiable to the state by putting them into simplified and standardized categories. Cash transfer programs, for instance, reduce the complexity of individual situations in a given territory to the category of ‘poverty’ or ‘extreme poverty’. Similarly, digital technologies that are capable of collecting and cross-checking large amounts of data relate, at different levels, to legibility, visibility, and readability. The treatment of this data, which frequently takes the form of big data, is often conducted by third parties: private sector, academic, or non-profit institutions. 

As Linnet Taylor and Dennis Broeders argue, an earlier landscape characterized by “data for development” collected and treated primarily by the state, is now being replaced by a “messier, more distributed landscape of governance where power accrues to those who hold the most data” – these are largely private entities. In this new landscape, the authors point out, citizens are frequently unaware of the data that they are providing to these entities. And perversely, citizens are also being made visible or legible by data of unknown (or questionable) reliability, biased by conditions such as internet connectivity or previous exposure to specific policies. This means that their ability to access social protection programs is tied to data that may be unreliable, collected without prior consent, and often under the control of private agencies. These factors, the authors argue, should compel us to look beyond the framework of legibility.

Linnet Taylor defines data justice as “justice in the way people become visible, represented, and treated as a result of the production of digital data”. It is a framework for data revolution that goes beyond a merely technical approach to one driven by a social justice agenda.

In this context, a growing body of literature, especially in development studies, has been looking at people’s interactions with digital data through the perspective of data justice – or data injustice, for that matter. Taylor (2017) defines data justice as “justice in the way people become visible, represented, and treated as a result of the production of digital data”. It is a framework for data revolution that goes beyond a merely technical approach to one driven by a social justice agenda.

Data justice is better understood when tied to a sister diagnosis – that of ‘datafication’. According to Heeks and Shekhar (2017), datafication can be defined as the increasing use and impact of data on social life. When processes that relate to and are conducted by people, become increasingly computerized and reliant on data, we can say that a process of datafication is underway. When it comes to social protection or development policies and their increasing use of technology, we might also be speaking of data being made available on populations that had hitherto been digitally invisible.

Visibility, however, can be ambiguous. While some argue that it is central to de-bureaucratization, modernization, and citizenship consolidation (Kanashiro, 2011), visibility can also create new risks and exaggerate particular power imbalances. People subjected to various kinds of social stigma, groups that are routinely discriminated against, and citizens who bear the status of informality or illegality, may be justifiably fearful of becoming visible – whether digitally or otherwise.

Datafication requires a data justice perspective because its potentially negative consequences are felt most severely by those who are already disadvantaged by existing inequalities along the lines of race, class, gender, socio-economic status, and other social markers. The datafication of social protection, in particular, needs a data justice approach so that it is grounded in principles of social justice.

In this essay, we will address the differential impact of datafication on marginalized populations by drawing on examples from existing literature and our own research. Next, we will engage with existing reflections on social protection and datafication to highlight the importance of a data justice framework for the current global political and economic context.

1. When data decides

The Brazilian Bolsa Família Program is the world’s largest conditional cash transfer program. As of June 2020, it covered over 14 million families (or 43 million people) in poverty and extreme poverty. Although the program was introduced with the objective of providing social security as a universal right, it was gradually accepted as a focalized program – targeted at sections of the population that are understood as being the most in need. Over time, it was co-opted as a hegemonic welfare model, aligning with the guidelines of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and furthering the neo-liberal project of successive Brazilian governments of the 1990s. Besides, it is a conditional cash transfer program linked to certain education and health outcomes: for instance, children must be enrolled in school, have regular attendance, and be given all the necessary vaccinations. Beneficiaries continue to be covered by the program only if they remain compliant. It is worth noting that, although by law the benefit program is meant for the family, it is provided preferentially to women who are more than 90 percent of its beneficiaries.

The selection of families for the program is automated, based on data stored in the Single Registry (CadÚnico). This federal registry informs all federal programs aimed at the low-income population, except for pension schemes. As of May 2020, 35 percent of the Brazilian population was part of the Single Registry. The extent of this database, both in terms of the number of citizens and the amount of data available on them, is aimed at finding vulnerabilities and fighting multidimensional poverty. It allows for the identification and assistance of populations to be targeted by public policies on basic sanitation, employment, and housing.

Data from the Registry is also shared between the agencies running the Bolsa Família Program and the ministries of health and education that provide data on school attendance and health duties relating to children in the family. The person responsible for the family unit is required to provide 77 different pieces of information for the Single Registry, with varying degrees of detail and sensitivity. There are training manuals to guide the interviewer, but nothing in them relate to data rights or informational self-determination. The interviewer is asked to make the beneficiary’s responsibilities clear, including providing factual information under penalty of criminal liability and maintaining up-to-date information, but there is no clarity provided on the state’s obligations with respect to the data thus collected.

Nowhere is it mentioned, for instance, that public service concessionaires, which are private companies, get access to the full Single Registry database, purportedly for informing programs on tariff benefits. In the past, this vast repository of data, evidently of interest to third parties with commercial, electoral, and social control interests, has been compromised several times, leading to substantial damage. On a few different occasions, beneficiaries received WhatsApp messages promising new benefits, which turned out to be a scam and and introduced some kind of malware into their cellphones, or they were directly reached by electoral campaigns.

It is also not mentioned that a beneficiary’s name, social ID number, and the amounts received as social benefit are published online for the sake of transparency. Our research shows that this, together with the incentives offered by the government to report fraud, has enabled a sort of social surveillance that takes on a gendered form. Women, who form a large majority of the beneficiaries, are stigmatized and reported for not spending their money on what is expected – the household and children.1

The datafication of social protection in Brazil has allowed for an increased legibility of vulnerable populations while also re-entrenching such vulnerabilities through increased data sharing among state organs, insufficient access control, austerity programs, and heightened state surveillance.

Focalization as well as verification procedures, linked to conditions for receiving benefits, are indeed constitutive features of the program. From its very inception, the Bolsa Família Program anchored its legitimacy in the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the permanent efforts designed to target those who need it the most. These characteristics of the program have been accentuated in the past few years. Social and political shifts have created new political majorities and a concrete trend of social welfare cuts, which materialized in the form of budgetary and financial restrictions in the New Tax Regime (EC 95/2016). Recent decrees (for example, Decree 10.046/2019) also facilitate data sharing for detecting fraudulent and undue benefit claims. In this context, inclusion errors in social programs have gained centrality in the public sphere – and beneficiaries’ data is shared extensively across operations for general purposes as well as for specific investigations. In her Master’s thesis, researcher Isabele Bachtold concludes that these processes lead to “constant surveillance” and “a daily struggle to prove to be poor”. To this we would add the daily struggle to continually prove oneself deserving of benefits.2 In these ways, the datafication of social protection in Brazil has allowed for an increased legibility of vulnerable populations while also re-entrenching such vulnerabilities through increased data sharing among state organs, insufficient access control, austerity programs, and heightened state surveillance.

Experiences in other countries allow us to observe other consequences of datafication. In India, the biometric database Aadhaar, launched in 2009, has over a billion records and was created under the justification of allowing easier access to welfare by the target population as well as combating welfare fraud. Under the program, people below the poverty line need to confirm their identity through iris or fingerprint scans when collecting benefits. There is, however, plenty of documented evidence on how the system produces further injustices. There have been cases in which people could not have their fingerprints or irises read due to hard work or malnutrition, as  fingerprints degrade or disappear. Besides, the requirement that only one family member be scanned for purposes of welfare collection, the failure to consider that this person might be unavailable to make the collection, the decision to provide double authentication only by phone, often inaccessible to claimants, all presuppose a middle-class standard that exacerbates burdens on the most vulnerable. 

Similar problems were faced in Brazil after the implementation of facial recognition systems in public buses to verify users’ identity and prevent third parties from using the free card passes granted to children under five years of age and people with disabilities, or the scholar passes given to students. The system is designed to block the card if it cannot match the person with the ID. In some cities, the system fails to identify children with disabilities, as the height of the facial recognition camera prevents them from reaching it, resulting in unfairly blocked ID cards which can only be unlocked upon payment of a fee. Profiling and discrimination, surveillance and control, targeted scams, and advertisements are other underlying risks of datafied public policies.

2. Social protection and privacy

As these examples indicate, social protection systems across the world are becoming increasingly computerized and reliant on beneficiary data for decision-making (Masiero and Das, 2019). This is especially so when such programs rely on focalization. The promise of datafication of social programs lay in being able identify and include (with some precision) those who need it, and exclude the ones who don’t. For this very reason, the United Nations identified in the use of data a revolutionary potential that could accelerate the journey towards sustainable development.

But while it is eminently possible for governments to adhere to principles of inclusion and justice in the use of digital technologies, these are often adopted without proper considerations of risks to privacy, autonomy, and equality. Algorithmic decision-making is prone to errors, and decisions around the adoption of technologies can result in unfair exclusions. Especially in societies characterized by extreme inequalities – inevitably reflected in the data collected on their members – the management of information and its use for decision-making must be under intense scrutiny, review, criticism, and social control.

It is not only a matter of discrimination resulting from the datafication, but discrimination in datafication. The technology is being incorporated first and foremost in programs and facilities that carry out public policies, and in a non-optional way. That is, the collection and processing of data are inevitable when citizens access public services and exercise their rights. 

This leads to associated privacy concerns. Privacy, besides leading to autonomy and self-determination and being a right on its own, it is also a precondition for other rights such as freedom of expression and of association and assembly. It is, therefore, central to political participation. However, the burden of exercising such rights lays heavier on some communities than others, for instance, women and people of color. For this reason, their exposure to risks associated with data can cause more harm. 

In 2019, the UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty dedicated their annual report to social protection and digital technologies. The report presents several case studies showing how, in the name of fraud detection, savings, and efficiency, citizens are obliged to give up on privacy, autonomy, choice, and dignity. These problems are unfolding both in the Global North and South, and can be summarized as follows: digital technologies offer an irresistible promise because of how they can tackle fraud and eliminate friction in the awarding of benefits; however, their shortcomings and potentially negative impacts and consequences are underestimated, and the causes they serve end up with sub-optimal results in the process.

In a situation of economic deprivation, one can hardly refuse to disclose data, especially if the access to assistance depends on such disclosure. Because refusal is not plausible and consent is either not required or effectively not free, these programs must embed privacy and data protection in their legal and technical design.

Individuals are not in a position to resist these processes. In a situation of economic deprivation, one can hardly refuse to disclose data, especially if the access to assistance depends on such disclosure. Because refusal is not plausible and consent is either not required or effectively not free, these programs must embed privacy and data protection in their legal and technical design. It is in this sense that when conceiving social protection programs, it is not enough to think of privacy as a negative right – by asking the state to abstain from the individual private sphere. Data enables and informs social assistance; and the damages caused by unfair processing of data are collective and require collective legal protection. 

This means that data processing operations must go beyond compliance with principles such as lawfulness, fairness, transparency, purpose limitation, data minimization, accuracy, security, and accountability. They must also reaffirm the fundamental purposes of social protection, that is, ensuring dignity in the face of risks arising from a market economy. Social protection with unprotected data deepens vulnerability and aggravates inequality instead of solving it.

In the overarching analysis, when combined with austerity policies and their links to social protection and state expenditure, the deployment of extensive data collection and processing operations may serve predominantly to exclude beneficiaries and focus less on identifying vulnerabilities. But technology and data can serve better ends. For instance, they can be used to identify sectors where there is an “assistential vacuum” so that public policies can be directed accordingly. To allow for these questions to be seen and debated, governments must strip the use of technologies from techno-determinist assumptions3 and use a proper and transparent framework for their design and deployment. The data justice dimensions developed by existing literature are extremely helpful in this regard.

3. Data justice and the case of social protection

First of all, data justice is a call for bringing justice first. The distinctions between online and offline, analogical and digital, are becoming increasingly blurred, as analysts from different fields weigh in on these debates. Choices about procedures to collect and treat data, algorithmic decision-making, which systems to contract, and who the subjects of these systems and processes may be, are political decisions. The benefits and potentials of data should be highlighted with this perspective in view.

Second, social protection programs need to rely on diagnoses of how data systems discriminate or perpetuate inequalities, as well as discipline and control. This essay has highlighted a few such instances but more research and dialogue on this is welcome. There are a few academics, research centers and civil society organizations promoting these ties. Some examples are Fundación Karisma in Colombia, Derechos Digitales in Chile, Privacy International, the Digital Welfare State and Human Rights Project at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law, the Research Group for Information Systems at the University of Oslo, and the Global Data Justice project at Tilburg University.

Linnet Taylor proposes a critical discussion on how a rights-based approach might not be the most appropriate to develop a transnational framework for data justice. Such a framework is needed urgently as citizens in specific jurisdictions suffer specific impacts because their data is treated somewhere else – especially when public-partnerships are at stake and transnational corporations play a role in the production or processing of data about citizens. National legislation is unable to address some of the challenges posed by these data processes. Different societies may care about privacy, for instance, without formally recognizing it as an individual right. 

A rights-based approach should, therefore, be replaced by a collective and needs-based approach; and this should be accompanied by relevant international frameworks and legislations. Besides transnational solutions, data justice frameworks provide inputs for immediate consideration at the national level as well.  Taylor proposes a framework based on three pillars: a) visibility (the need to be represented but also to opt out of data collection and processing); b) digital (dis)engagement (relating to the need to preserve autonomy and sharing data’s benefits), and c) countering data-driven discrimination. This framework goes far beyond privacy and the existing international frameworks for data protection, such as the OECD’s Fair Information Principles – although privacy is an important factor.

All these pillars involve difficult questions, as Taylor recognizes. The integration between visibility, fair representation, and autonomy is hard to reach. For instance, should people be allowed to opt out of the census, which is, despite the confidentiality of the information, an invasive moment in the relationship between the individual and the state and, at the same time, an essential part of citizenship in democracies?

Policy-making processes should be open, inclusive, and participatory, and account for procedural justice, which is an important part of data justice. Human rights concerns must be built into the decision-making process for a new social program or reform of an existing one.

Ultimately, policy-making processes should be open, inclusive, and participatory, and account for procedural justice, which is an important part of data justice. Human rights concerns must be built into the decision-making process for a new social program or reform of an existing one. Privacy, security, and data protection must be part of the standards that need to be met. Differences between contexts and legal frameworks considered, systems should be secure, audited, accountable, and transparent to citizens. They must also guarantee that human intervention is easily accessible whenever errors are identified. The dignity of beneficiaries should be paramount in data sharing, which should, in turn, be limited to what is strictly necessary.

Notes

  • 1 Valente, Fragoso and Neris, upcoming (2020).
  • 2 Other recent measures in Brazil raise the bar on the concerns around maximalist data collection, sharing and treatment. Decree 10.047 / 2019 included the Single Registry among other 51 databases free for access for the National Institute for Social Services; Decree 10.046/2019 created the so-called Base Register (“Cadastro Base”) to consolidate federal databases and “biographical attributes”, including biometric, and facilitate data sharing between public offices. This Decree has been widely criticized by data protection and privacy researchers and advocates, including ourselves.
  • 3 Techno-determinism or technological determinism is the assumption that social changes can be explained by technological advances only, or primarily. It refers to giving undue weight to technology in certain processes. Although it is mostly used for analytical purposes, we here refer to policy decisions that promote the adoption of technologies aiming at producing social and economic results, without taking other factors into consideration, which will influence how these technologies are appropriated or the effects they will cause.

Mariana Valente is the Director of InternetLab (Brazil) and Professor at Insper University, São Paulo. She has a PhD in Sociology of Law from the University of São Paulo, where she also earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. She is also a former visiting researcher at the Berkeley School of Law.

Nathalie Fragoso is the head of research on privacy and surveillance at InternetLab (Brazil). She has a PhD in Sociology of Law from the University of São Paulo Law School, where she also earned her Bachelor’s degree. She has also an LLM (Master of Laws) from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

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Towards Workers’ Data Collectives

Towards Workers’ Data Collectives

Christina Colclough

The commodification of workers as a consequence of increased digital monitoring and surveillance is well underway. Through advanced predictive analytics, work and workers across the world are becoming datafied to the detriment of fundamental, human, and workers’ rights. This essay argues that trade unions must expand their services to include collective control over workers’ and work data through the formation of what I term Workers’ Data Collectives. However, to do so, unions urgently need to address regulatory gaps and negotiate for much improved workers’ data rights in companies and organizations. Without these two goals for the collectivization of data and an alternative digital ethos backed by new regulatory institutions, I argue, union and worker power will be significantly diminished leading to irreparable power asymmetries in the world of work. 

Illustration by Kevin Ilango

Introduction: The asymmetric datafication of society and work

Currently, the United States and China together account for 90 percent of the market capitalization of the world’s 70 largest digital platforms.1 These platforms, in turn, are superpowers dominating markets and societies. Microsoft, followed by Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, and Alibaba account for two-thirds of the world’s total market value. At the same time, roughly 50 percent of the world’s population still do not have access to the internet.2 The majority of this population is in the developing world. The companies mentioned above – collectively referred to as Big Tech – are utilizing the lack of public programs to expand internet coverage in these areas by offering platform-controlled internet access.3 These programs have been criticized for data leaching and de facto internet control, squeezing out of local businesses, exertion of censorship, and impeding on the freedom of individuals.45 It is not for no reason that many, myself included, speak of a de facto digital colonialism. But data colonialism isn’t just a tech company endeavor. Chinese companies have exported artificial intelligence surveillance technologies to more than 60 countries including Iran, Myanmar, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and others with dismal human rights records. Reports also claim that Chinese companies supply AI surveillance technology to 63 countries, 36 of which have signed up for China’s politically-led Belt and Road Initiative.6

Data is being extracted from the actions and non actions of citizens across the world at a never-ending rate. Your smartphone’s 14 sensors track your internet activity, your use of e-services, your credit card payment information, your shopping habits, what apps you use and when, what you do, where you go, how you go there, your surroundings, and much more. All of this data is used to profile you and make predictions about you. These extraction systems remain obscure, hidden under the hood, while engaging in constant surveillance and making predictions about what you will or should do, what information should or shouldn’t be made available to you. But it’s not only about you. The probability analyses and inferences affect people like you – those alive now and those not yet born.

Now, think of all that data (picture it as a constant information flow you are knowingly or unknowingly giving away about yourself), and ask what influence it can or might have on your work and career? It is not difficult to put a profile together on the type of worker you are: investable or less so?

Job announcements are made almost exclusively online now. Will an algorithm predetermine your suitability and accordingly hide from or show you an available job? Probably. Research7 has shown that even when employers try to reach all audiences with a potential ad, the audience is mediated by – to use one example – Facebook’s algorithm. It is often the algorithm, rather than the employer, that decides whether you are a likely candidate and if the job announcement should be made available to you. Isn’t this an infringement on our liberty to form and shape our own life? What kind of power are we allowing these companies to wield in the process?

This may sound like science fiction or an episode out of ‘Black Mirror’ but it isn’t. At work, our companies are also becoming data miners and creators. Applicant Tracking Systems, that is, software used by companies to assist with human resources, recruitment, and hiring are estimated to be used by 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies.8 Candidates can be screened, sourced, assessed, interviewed, and vetted by artificial intelligence systems.9 On the job, you can be subject to algorithmic systems that measure your productivity or efficiency, schedule your workday, monitor the breaks you take, and those you don’t. Algorithms can plan the exact route you should take on the warehouse floor, or on the road between clients.

The increasing number of workers working remotely in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, has only increased corporate demand for surveillance and monitoring software.10 Some of these tools enable stealth monitoring, automated and periodic screenshot taking, video feeds, audio recording, keyboard tracking, optical character recognition, keystroke recording, or location tracking. Naturally, this often deep and intrusive surveillance11 raises serious concerns about workers’ privacy. It also begs that we ask: What is happening with the data that is being mined? Who has access to it? What is it used for? Should this data be mined in the first place? What about workers’ rights to be who they are and safeguard their privacy rights? How do we ensure that our workplaces are diverse and inclusionary? Are algorithmic systems in compliance with human rights and anti-discrimination laws? Are companies selling datasets to the multi-billion dollar sector of predictive analyses that include personal information about their workers? We must ask these questions and improve our collective agreements so that they protect our human rights, our freedom of speech, freedom of thought, of assembly, and of being human. Through collective agreements, we can create an alternative digital ethos free from surveillance capitalism and predictive analyses.

A good place to start is right here, right now, by asking what rights do workers have over data? It is a question not sufficiently raised and discussed. But the value or importance of workers’ data is undeniable. In European Parliament amendments of the now adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there were far more substantive articles on workers’ data protection. In California, an amendment to the data protection law – the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) – to exempt workers’ data from its scope was met partially through an exemption that lasts until 2021.1213 In other countries, employees are either directly excluded from data protection regulations (Australia, Thailand) or employers require employees’ informed consent to process data. However, as the GDPR clearly states, given the power asymmetry between workers and companies, informed consent should not be regarded as a legal basis for processing employee data.1415 In other words, if your employment depends, directly or indirectly, on providing consent to data processing, you have little choice but to comply.

In the above, we have established that workers’ data is gathered and generated by companies, and that these data can be used in corporate decision-making, and transferred, sold, or used by third parties. We have also discussed that these data can directly influence your work and career prospects, and affect workers like you. Yet, as a worker, you have few, if any, rights in relation to these data and how they are used. The power asymmetry is thus growing between you and the companies which seem to know or infer information about you that can directly affect your life. For workers to maintain any control over their working lives, this power divide needs to be bridged. But we need to go further and ask: what if workers themselves controlled workplace data, drew insights from them, and used them to campaign for better working conditions, inclusive and diverse labor markets, fundamental rights, and new laws? The following sections will explore how we could make this happen.

Step 1: Establishing workers’ (data) rights

To date, very few collective agreements include specific articles on workers’ data rights. So we need to first ask, what should these data rights cover? The figure below depicts what I call the data life cycle at work and provides the grounds on which unions should intervene to improve workers’ rights.

Figure 1: the Data Life Cycle at Work, by Christina Colclough

The data collection phase covers both internal and external data collection tools, sources of the data, whether shop stewards and employees have been informed about the intended tools, and whether they have the right to refute or block (parts of) said tools and their data sources. In addition, unions should demand that the shop stewards, on behalf of a worker or group of workers, gain access to the data/datasets and inferences that include employee data or personally identifiable information.

In the data analyses phase, unions must cover the gaps in current regulation and ensure rights with regards to the inferences – profiles, statistical probabilities, etc. – made using algorithmic systems and datasets. Workers should have greater insight into, access to, and rights to rectify, block or even delete inferences made about them. Since these inferences can be used to determine work scheduling and wages (if linked to performance metrics), or can leveraged by human resources to decide who to hire, promote, or fire, access to them is key to the empowerment of workers.

Data storage might at first glance seem boring, but it is actually really important, and will become even more so if current e-commerce negotiations within and on the fringes of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are actualized.16 These discussions go far beyond facilitating the buying and selling of online goods and services and propose the following: a) prohibiting data localization, which means that data, by law, cannot be required to be stored under the jurisdiction of the home country; b) establishing corporate right to transfer data across borders and store such information wherever they want, including in data havens; c) banning governments from demanding disclosure of source codes and algorithms, even in cases where it may be necessary for security reasons. (For a full list of proposals, see page 17-18 of this report by Deborah James.)

To put it simply, these proposals say that data must be allowed to be moved across borders to what, we can expect, will be areas which have the least privacy protection. They will then be used, sold, rebundled, and sold again in whatever way corporations see fit. The recent European Court of Justice ruling 17 which invalidates the EU-US Privacy Shield can be seen as a slap in the face of proponents of unrestricted flow of data, but the demand is nonetheless still on the table.

Finally, the data off-boarding phase is also one where workers and unions must be vigilant. Off-boarding refers to the deletion of data, but also the selling or passing on of data and inferences/profiles/datasets to third parties. Unions should negotiate for much better rights with regards to: a) knowing what data/datasets/inferences are off-boarded, b) who they are off-boarded to, and c) objecting to the off-boarding to third party(ies) and even blocking it. The need to negotiate these rights acquire great urgency in light of the e-commerce negotiations within the WTO (but also in other plurilateral trade negotiations). As Shoshana Zuboff asserted in her speech at Rightscon 2020:

…human futures markets [predictive analytics] need to be criminalized, they need to be made illegal. They cannot stand. Human futures markets have predictably anti-democratic consequences. Those consequences are already clear. The economic imperatives of surveillance capitalism are a direct result of the financial incentives in those markets.” (my insert)

With successful data life cycle negotiations we will move towards collective rights in a datafied world. If workers have rights to these data, they will also have the right to decide what to do with them, for instance, share or pool them towards beneficial ends. It is to this we now turn.

Step 2: Forming the workers’ data collective

Before I jump into describing my data collective dream, let’s dwell a bit on the state of play in various forms of data collectives. There is a growing body of literature on data trusts, data commons, open data, and, more broadly, data stewardship. A commonality between these ideas is that they seek to empower the majority, and not just a few, through access to and (partial) control over aggregates of data. Another commonality is that the legal structures and institutions to empower groups of individuals through the collectivization of data are currently not really in place.18 The idea of an empowering structure is really still that – an idea.

There are existing examples of open data. Most are provided by private companies (for example, Facebook’s Data for Good, Google’s BigQuery which hosts a range of public and private datasets, Sage Bionetworks’ open data for the advancement of human health), some by international organizations (like the United Nations), and others are publicly-funded research projects (such as DECODE).

Whereas open data can be beneficial for groups, they are not explicitly constructed to be. Data trusts, however, for the most part, are constructed to be beneficial for the collective, as Sean McDonald, one of the world’s leading experts on data trusts, notes in this article, and as Sylvie Delacroix and Neil D. Lawrence advocate in much of their work.19

We have, in sum, a growing desire to make data beneficial to the collective, but not necessarily clearly-defined laws and institutions to facilitate this. So let me remain in the sphere of ideas and ideology and define the purpose and function of what I see could be an interesting and empowering data collective for workers.

What’s in the workers’ data collective?

A successful negotiation of the data life cycle in favor of stronger data rights will put all workers in a position to make decisions on data that are personal and/or personally identifiable. For example, your work data including education, skills, age, gender identification, wages, job responsibilities, contract, location during the work day, speed of work, time spent at work, length of commute etc., should be for you to pool into a collective structure that is aimed at representing your best interests. The cooperative Driver’s Seat is an example par excellence of pooling said data.

In addition, you could add to the collective, at least in principle and until they are banned, the inferences your company (private or public) has made on you – are you identified as a productive worker and on what grounds.

The app WeClock that was developed in the lab I was leading, adds a further source of work-related data that you could pool into the collective. This app gives you plenty of insights into your daily work conditions. How much time do you spend on your feet? Do you get any breaks? How much work is creeping into your private life as you send emails or answer company Slack messages after hours, and much more.

Now imagine that many of your colleagues did the same and pooled their data into the collective. The Workers’ Data Collective would then be in possession of lots of work-related data. New data as they come in, and old data as they get supplemented by the new.

Governing the collective

Data in itself is not useful. It needs to be structured. The purpose of this structuring, that is, what it is structured for, will be determined by the statutes of the Workers’ Data Collective. Let’s imagine the collective has a policy to combat wage theft – a multi-billion-dollar20 crime against workers. Data could be structured to find patterns in worked hours relative to paid hours. Or, the collective could be mandated to track and combat discrimination. The purposes can change over time, just as resolutions are voted for in democratic organizations. The Governing Board, known in data trust language as the trustees or settlers, will be voted in. It will be responsible for taking decisions about the collective’s data in the best interest of those who have submitted their data to the collective. The Governing Board members could be selected among data holders, but do not have to be. They could be a third party – a team of data collective governance experts.

The overall aim of the collective could, for example, be to ensure Rewarding Work for all workers. The statutes will determine how this should be done and through which policies; whether datasets can be sold for the benefit of the collective, and/or whether external access to the aggregated or even raw data can be granted, and if so, under what conditions. The statutes will stipulate the decision-making structure and the roles of the collective’s staff – those tasked to structure and analyze the data and those with legal, communications, administrative, and engagement skills. It is here that workers and their unions could put into action the principles of data minimization, ethical data handling, human rights before profit. The data collective must also have strict data governance policies and practices in place to protect the integrity and rights of those who have donated their data to the collective. This is necessary not least in order to prevent a third party from obtaining data from the collective without its direct agreement. The trust will need elaborate cyber security systems to ensure ethical and fair sharing of data and data security for all participants. It will also need to document all of the above.

With this framework in place, a Workers’ Data Collective will have a well-defined aim, purpose, and governance structure. These details should be made clear to workers who are considering putting their data into the collective, and so should the redlines for what the collective will not allow. One redline could be that no access to data be granted to union busting firms, their intermediaries, or known partners. Another redline could disallow predictive analytics. The Governing Body could be tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that these redlines are respected. It will also be necessary to have internal methods of redress in place to ensure that the data collective is complying with the given aims and purposes.

To hold the various trusts accountable to the law, a public regulator tasked to oversee some aspects of data trusts must be established. This authority should have a dispute resolution mechanism to resolve issues within the data collective, such as a breach of rules and redlines. It also should have a data collective auditing mandate, and a law enforcement obligation. For data collectives with a transnational membership, the auditing and enforcement authority should be transnational and consist of national authorities. Here we can draw inspiration from the European Data Protection Board21 – an independent data protection authority whose purpose is to ensure consistent application of the GDPR. The International Labour Organization (ILO) would be a natural home for such an independent body.

The benefits of collectivizing data

In the above, we have established a two-step process towards empowering workers across the world in the digital economy. We need stronger workers’ rights to data and sound structures that will allow us to collectivize that data. To realize these benefits, behavioral, legal, and technical changes will need to be made. We will need to overcome our own lethargy, form new habits, establish new laws and new authorities at the national and global level. We will need new governance structures, technological solutions for secure data portability,22 and conscious choices about which collectives we will entrust with our data. These are daunting requirements. So what are the benefits?

To begin with, this will allow us to create an alternative digital economy where data is regarded as an infrastructure similar to roads, railway lines, water supplies, and energy. We will vastly reduce Big Tech’s control over our minds, emotions, actions – past and future. We might well succeed in actualizing Shoshana Zuboff’s demand that human futures markets be made illegal. We will ensure that information that is ours becomes responsibly useful to us. Trade unions across the world will get an additional and timely purpose, and we could expect greater mobilization towards this. We will undo the colonizing effects of the current e-commerce discussions and the skewed digital hegemonies and support, not hinder, the development of empowering digital transformations.

On a more practical level, we will pool resources such that we actually have access to persons with the skills and knowledge to protect our data on the one hand, and analyze it to our benefit, on the other. Digital storytelling and visualizations are a powerful means to campaign for change. At the MIT Media Lab, Dan Callaci analyzed and compared data from a WeClock trail in New York to show how often, on the same day, workers were within six feet of one another (see figure 2 below). Used in the context of the pandemic, this could show the relative risk for workers at the workplace.

Figure 2: Dan Callaci’s analysis of workers’ data from a WeClock trail in New York.

The benefits do not stop there. The Workers’ Data Collective, like Driver’s Seat, could be used to test and challenge corporate algorithms. It will empower us as individuals and communities if we know who has our data and for what purpose(s).

The data collective could democratize the digital economy and empower workers to form and shape the world of work, advocate for regulatory change, and find remedies for persistent injustices. This will allow us to stop being “users” of digital technology, steered, controlled, and manipulated by algorithms and, instead, reclaim our humanity. This includes, not least, our human rights, our freedom of association, assembly, expression, thought, belief, and opinion.

Many data protection regulations across the world, even those aimed exclusively at consumers, are weak. We must fight for a digital ethos that is responsible and puts our rights above profit-seeking surveillance tools and predictive analytics. In the world of work, unions must be the guardians of this alternative ethos, and themselves become stewards of good data governance. Here an ILO Convention advocating for workers’ data rights will not only be an act of solidarity with workers in weaker institutional environments, but also a necessary step to prevent digital colonialism.

By negotiating the data life cycle, unions and workers will become much more familiar with, and insightful about, the potentials and challenges as well as the power of digital tools. For our ultimate aim of creating worker-owned and run Data Collectives, unions need to embrace this learning.

Existing power asymmetries will only widen if workers and their unions do not build capacity in the fields of data, algorithmic systems, and their governance. By negotiating the data life cycle, unions and workers will become much more familiar with, and insightful about, the potentials and challenges as well as the power of digital tools. For our ultimate aim of creating worker-owned and run data collectives, unions need to embrace this learning. Unions must work together smartly to build capacity.

Furthermore, by extending these rights across all parts of the value or supply chain, all workers and countries will be able to develop their own digital transformations without a priori being stripped of the ability to localize their data due to trade agreements.

I understand if you are now thinking: where do we start, and who will get the ball rolling? Here, we may be in luck as help is at hand. Let’s turn to the credit unions.

Credit unions as workers’ data collectives?

A 2019 white paper ‘Data Cooperatives: Digital Empowerment of Citizens and Workers’ that I co-authored, explored the existing trust relations between credit unions and their members. Credit unions act as fiduciaries towards their members and, in some constituencies, are already chartered to securely manage their members’ digital data as well as to represent them in a wide variety of financial transactions, including insurance, investments, and benefits.

Over 100 million people are members of a credit union in the United States today. Over 6 million in Europe.23 Worldwide there are over 57,000 credit unions in 105 countries representing 217 million members. 24

In Europe, many trade unions owned or controlled credit unions at least up until the global financial crisis. In the UK, the financial crisis and the consequential social and economic dismay renewed interest from the union movement to support and establish credit unions. 25 Could credit unions be revitalized as Workers’ Data Collectives?

In our white paper, we argue:

“…it is technically and legally straightforward to have credit unions hold copies of all their members’ data, to safeguard their rights, represent them in negotiating how their data is used, to alert them to how they are being surveilled, and to audit the companies using their members’ data.”

Many trade union-associated credit unions share the same membership pool. For those that do, the institutional structure, the fiduciaries, and the size to start building a Workers’ Data Collective will already be in place.

Psst… It’s not only about workers

To emphasize, my vision is that many such data collectives will simultaneously exist. For workers and for many others. You, as an individual, can choose to pool your data into one or several data collectives. One might be a local collective for your community promoting climate sustainability. Another could be for health data with the goal to improve diagnosis and treatments. Some might prefer a capital gains trust, or one with the mission to improve competitiveness in local and regional markets. The point is, we will share our data with collectives which are trustworthy and whose aims and purposes align with ours.

This can, rightly, result in a battle of ideologies, but that, in turn, could enhance democracy and democratic participation. The task will be to avoid false inflation of individual data collectives. For this, we need the audit trail and authorities mentioned above. We will certainly also need public and transparent governance reporting as well as new laws and enforcement authorities. But with the Covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on our societies, economies, and health, we have the opportunity to think bold, think big, and change the very destructive path we are heading down.

End reflections

This essay has presented a multi-step vision for a Digital New Deal for workers and for citizens. Fixing data and privacy rights is not an end in itself. We will need to draw a new map for the digital economy and society. We will need to demand from our politicians that they think big – constructively. The current exploitation by Big Tech is not a fad. It won’t go away unless forced to by law. The vision outlined above, is neither utopian nor unattainable. But it will require responsible and dedicated actions on our side. Now.

Notes

Dr Christina J Colclough is an advocate for the worker’s voice. She has been involved in regional and global trade labor movements, where she has been responsible for future of work policies, advocacy, and strategies. Christina now supports a wide range of progressive governments and organizations in their digital capacity building and transformation. She was named one of the world’s most influential women on the Ethics of AI in 2019. Contact and more information on: www.thewhynotlab.com. Find her on Twitter @CjColclough