We are gaining Technology but losing Democracy

Technology capitalism is the dominant economic establishment of our time, and it is on a crash course with democracy, and this is more visible than ever in the Western world. Technology capitalism’s giants—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple—now possess, operate, and mediator nearly every aspect of human interaction with global information and communication systems, unconstrained by public law. All roads to economic, social, and even political participation now lead through a handful of unaccountable companies, a state that has intensified during two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.​

The result is a path of social decay:

• The destruction of privacy.
• Extensive corporate concentrations of information about people and society.
• Poisoned discourse.
• Fractured societies.
• Remote systems of behavior manipulation.
• Weakened democratic institutions.

While the Authoritative governments designed and deployed digital technologies to advance their system of authoritarian rule, the West failed to create a coherent vision of a digital century that promotes democratic principles and government.

Rights and laws once codified to defend citizens from industrial capitalism—such as antitrust law and workers’ rights—do not shield us from these harms. If the ideal of the people’s self-governance is to endure this century, then a democratic counterrevolution is the only solution.

U.S. and European lawmakers have finally begun to think seriously about regulating privacy and content. Still, they have yet to consider the far more fundamental question of structure and govern information and communication for a democratic digital future.

Three principles could offer a starting point. First, the democratic rule of law governs. There is no so-called cyberspace immune to rights and laws, which must apply to every domain of society, whether populated by people or machines. Publishers, for example, are held accountable for the information they publish. Even though their profit-maximizing algorithms enable and exploit disinformation, technology capitalists have no such accountability.

Second, unprecedented harms demand unprecedented solutions. Existing antitrust laws can break up the tech giants, but that won’t address the underlying economics. The target must be the secret extraction of human data once considered private. Democracies must outlaw this extraction, end the corporate concentration of personal information, eliminate targeting algorithms, and abolish corporate control of information flows.

Third, new conditions require new rights. Our era demands the codification of epistemic rights—the right to know and decide who knows what about our lives. These fundamental rights are not codified in law because they have never come under systemic threat. They must be codified if they are to exist at all.

We can be a technology capitalist society or a democracy, but we cannot be both. Democracy is a fragile political condition dedicated to the prospect of self-governance, harbored by the principle of justice and maintained by collective effort. Each generation’s mission is always the same: to protect and keep democracy moving forward in a relay race against anti-democratic forces that spans centuries. The liberal democracies have the power and legitimacy to lead against technology capitalism and do so on behalf of all peoples struggling against a dystopian future.

The most influential architect of the U.S. political system, James Madison, was deeply fascinated by the Enlightenment thinkers who saw politics as a science. They imagined a system of checks and balances producing good government almost as a machine with wheels and pulleys could have motion or transfer energy. They did not expect people to be wise or virtuous. “If men were angels,” Madison famously wrote in the Federalist Papers, “no government would be necessary.” Madison built a system, he believed, that did not require virtue to function. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he urged, and from this conflict of interest would come ordered liberty and democracy. This American model became the template for much of the world.

In the United States and worldwide, we are now witnessing experiments in politics without angels—and they aren’t working so well. Democratic institutions have weakened in many places, broken in others, and feel under stress where they are still functioning. Those countries that have not faced the full furies of populism and nationalism—Germany and Japan are the most striking examples—have escaped these dangers because of their culture and history rather than some better democratic design. Everywhere, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s truth seems to hold: Institutions are merely lengthened shadows of men. If such men fail and misbehave, venally or irresponsibly, the democratic system is endangered. We enter the 21st century asking one of the oldest political questions, much older than the Enlightenment ideas that democracy was built on. It is a question the ancient Greeks and Romans debated more than two millennia ago: How do we produce virtue in human beings?