The backlash against Big Tech has given political movements as diverse as populist nationalist conservatives and woke progressives a common cause. Occasionally political entrepreneurs try to catalyze a movement around this anti-Big Tech sentiment, writing manifestos calling for change. The latest one comes from a group called “People vs Big Tech,” which has published a manifesto signed by 70 organizations calling for a “new digital economy.”
In this post, we made a few edits to their manifesto that, we think, clarifies the meaning and politics. Have fun reading it…
Manifesto
We, a small, elite, ideologically homogenous group of people and organizations from across the English speaking world, are fighting for a future where the digital infrastructure underpinning our world works for people, workers, and the planet. (We added “workers” because we were not sure they were included in the category “people” and besides, the implicit class analysis gives us a slightly radical cachet, even though none of us are workers.)
We want creativity and innovation to flourish free from centralized control. And that’s why we’re calling for states – the most centralized and controlling organizations in the world — to take charge of our digital future.
We believe in a world where power over data and technology is decentralized! But we also want data and technology to be redistributed, and that will require a central authority, so, uh, forget about that first part.
We want all digital media to be “democratized,” which means, insofar as it can be defined and put into practice, subjecting digital media to nationwide elections and political control. This does not create any risk that communications will be controlled by whoever controls the state. We are determined to democratize digital technology even though most countries’ political systems are not democratized.
We want people to be able to choose between a wide variety of digital tools to explore and connect, but we also want to make sure that no one is ever harmed in the process, so you will need our permission to use any digital tool.
While we find it empowering to use Big Tech’s services to freely send messages like this out to a global public, we feel deeply oppressed by the fact that private, for-profit firms are the ones enabling it. While competing private firms have provided the low prices, ubiquitous infrastructure and free applications that are now enabling our activism and widespread digital access, we do not recognize this because it is not consistent with our ideology.
We demand privacy, even though we have knowingly surrendered data about our interactions on platforms to get services paid for by advertisers. We reject the commercial, ad-supported business model, but have no idea how free services will be economically sustained without it.
We want to eliminate online hate and algorithm-fed virality. We do not know what kind of algorithm can do a better job of managing the diverse, often conflicting voices of the billions of people connected by digital media. Nevertheless, we will continue to point the finger at you, Big Tech, as responsible for all the bad acts humans commit online. If there were no social media, there would be no bullying, no hate, no political conflict, no diverging values, no disinformation, no propaganda. None of these things existed before Big Tech, and such things never happen when governments are in control of media.
We want a digital world where we really get to control and trust what we see on our social media. That means algorithms that filter out the messages and people we don’t like. We all like the same things, don’t we?
It’s a world we know is possible, necessary and urgent. But it won’t come about by chance. Creating the digital future we all deserve will take a determined ‘whole of government’ effort. We are still uncertain which of the world’s 192 governments we are talking about, though. We don’t think a global state exists, either, so who knows what the fuck ‘whole of government’ means? And please don’t ask whether “whole of government” includes the military and intelligence agencies; we prefer to ignore those aspects of the state.
We think “break up the powerful tech monopolies” is a great slogan, and we wholeheartedly embrace it, but we can’t for the life of us tell you what it means. Will we mandate universal interoperability and open the floodgates of spam and global access to private data? Will we separate Operating Systems from applications and create compatibility problems? Will we spin off multiple Googles hosted in separate territories, like the old Bell system breakup?
While we cannot answer any of these questions, calls to “break up Big Tech” do make it seem like we actually have a policy for the digital economy – and hey, we’re really sticking it to The Man!
We call for breaking down Big Tech’s walled gardens, even though it is far from clear what walls we are talking about. But let’s be honest: we do want there to be walls. That is what “the people” and “workers” seem to be voting for these days: immigration walls, tariff walls, etc. When we criticize walls we want to make it clear that export controls, data localization, trade barriers, bans on foreign information sources, and digital sovereignty are OK. It’s just Big Tech’s walls – you know, the invisible ones – we want to tear down.
If the world does as we ask, we promise the world a digital nirvana. Everyone will be rich and no one will make any money. Democracy will triumph even in societies with no democratic institutions.
For this to happen, we must replace the tiny group that currently holds the strings to the digital economy with a different tiny group, which we fervently hope to be part of.
The post Beyond Big Tech: A Manifesto for Big Government appeared first on Internet Governance Project.
Source: Internet Governance Forum