COMMENTS ABOUT ROCK THE INTERNET BLUES

From Sam Lanfranco, York University, Canada

I agree with the general thrust of the analysis however remember, I am an economist and we spend more time looking for the holes in the hull of the ship than we do praising the beauty of the ship’s lines. I like the thrust of the piece but my job is to be a critic and point out where I think there are weaknesses in how it is put together.

There is nothing in the analysis I disagree with in terms of content and argument, but I think that several parts of the strategy suggested either will not work or are bad strategy ideas. I think the use of the 4th Industrial Revolution is a wrong way to set the context. The next stage needs another name.  In my work with Klaus Stoll (our CircleID.com stuff) we don’t have a stage. We focus on the rights and duties of digital citizenship, in particular global digital citizenship, For the users of our data (in surveillance capitalism) we talk about the digital integrity of digital business practices (which for the most part does not exist at this time). You might look at http://www.circleid.com/posts/20200505-internet-governance-and-universal-declaration-human-rights-part-5/ 

I also do not think that a call for a Digital Emergency, similar to a Climate Change Emergency, will get much traction. Hell, for much of the world Climate Change gets little traction. I agree that there is a multifaceted need for education here, and that is part of what I am working on, both in the Circle.ID stuff and elsewhere. I am pushing for evidence based policy (of course) and for evidence influenced behavior (with integrity too!). 

The challenge is how to get there. Part is of course what is taught in school, and there is work to be done on that curriculum. Much of school “digital literacy” and “digital citizenship” curriculum is either about how to use the Internet (tools, skill, etc.). Much of digital citizenship is sort of like how to be a responsible traveler in the Internet ecosystem.

I would argue that what is needed is a digital civics that is integral to just plain civics as a curricular component. Civics is almost non-existent with regard to literal or virtual governance at the moment. But, school curriculum does not reach those out of school, and much of curricular digital civics remains to abstract (and academic) to be internalized by students. Also, how do we education those outside the formal schooling system?

Here is what I think here. It is a long analysis, but I will keep it short here. One problem with any proposal for moving forward is that it requires words that may already have unfortunate baggage. I am reminded of when micro-finance was all the rage. 99.9% of the time it was done wrong, and it soon got a reputation for either being a bad idea or a good idea that didn’t work.  The focus shifted to development goals (MDGs, SDGs, etc.) with wording being refined for two reasons. Success was limited so we needed now ideas, or at least new words. Also, my group may have been left out in the last formulation, so be explicit about me. There were also backroom deals. Let’s end hunger, but let’s not call access to food a right. Other UNDP HDI targets were just that, targets, but let’s not say that people have a right to health care, a job, or food.

A similar slight of hand (or trick) has been used around the terms stakeholder and multi-stakeholder process. There is a lot of what I call check list consultation of stakeholders, in the “We held a meeting, 60 people from “the community” came and expressed their views”... stakeholder process concluded. Then it is back to the lobbyists, the policy makers and their experts. The stakeholders have been all but totally marginalized.

I am working on stuff that both points out how the terms and associated practices have been perverted or marginalized, and suggests that there are ways to make it work. I would go further and argue that a bottom up multistakeholder engagement in policy development, feeding into democratically elected policy making bodies, and multistakeholder engagement in implementation would not only make multistakeholder engagement meaningful, it would be the engine of dialogue for that cross constituency education that is missing, as you point out, in the social media dialogue.

I am suggesting that this is not just a fix to a problem, but that it is the milestone to be passed at this point in global history. I recall that after WWI John Maynard Keynes (the guru of fiscal policy) write The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In it he argued that as a result of industrialization the world had become interdependent and that there was a need for global approaches to solving problems. He also argued that the victors had to help rebuild Germany so it could produce the surplus that the victors wanted in compensation for the war. France and England blocked that. The resulting German inflation and what followed gave us Hitler, the Holocaust, Genocide, WWII, (toss in the global depression). The world rejected the idea of the League of Nations. After WWII Keynes and those who thought like him were brought in the build the international organizations that have served relatively well (with problems) for 75 or so years.

Where we are today, in large part because of the Internet, there is a need for bottom up citizen engagement in policy development, democratic-based policy making, and engagement in policy implementation. Something of a knowledgeable engaged literal and digital citizenship.

Anyhow, that is where I think the next steps lay. There is little hope for a mass education program, and any attempt would be perverted by those who had selfish ends. I prefer trying to drive learning while doing with a bottom up stakeholder engagement in policy development…fed into democratic policy making processes.

Another element, which you touch on in terms of digital algorithms (mining our data) and lack of transparency, is the need for ways to foster, insist on, and evaluate the integrity of digital business practices.

There are too few of us trying to figure out were we go here. Too many are just trying to get a paid seat on the bandwagon, or get publications for career advancement. As you say, there is an Internet Ecosystem crisis, along with the Climate crisis, and they challenge is around strategy to wake up the digital citizens around what should be their rights and their duties/obligations as engaged citizens.

The education is of course central. Within the formal school curriculum the way the rights and duties of digital citizenship are handled are inadequate. The ways that the integrity of digital business, and governance, practices are handled are inadequate. I am all in favor of work on those fronts (starting with educating the teachers). We tried, and failed, to get the stupid One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) people to understand that computer assisted education (and education about IT) required knowledgeable teachers. They ignored that until the ran out of steam and died.

My main focus at the moment however is how to get a knowledgeable and engaged public, at the community and civil society level. How to rebuild the torn social fabric that has produce such divisions and unwillingness to engage in constructive dialogue? My push at the moment is for stakeholder engagement starting at the lowest levels of policy and concern, the local...be that in education, housing, racism, food security, climate change, etc.....whatever. Real policy development dialogue, not just "check mark" consultation, is the path forward. For example, the BLM organizing will (again) run out of steam it all it is about is protesting, and not engagement in solutions. Even promises by political and administrative leaders are not enough here. There is an unbalanced stakeholder engagement in policy development. Those with money and high personal stakes (stakes which may be counter to the common good) have their stakeholder presence in policy development via their money (political contributions), their lobbyists, and their material offers (trips, post-public service jobs,...bribes/corruption). Until we facilitate and encourage engagement as a citizen's right and duty, the oligarchs and the oligopolies (FB, Amazon, Google, etc.) will both set the rules of engagement and call the plays in the game.

There can be multiple roads to building an aware and engaged citizenry. Part of raising awareness, as you and others stress, is getting people to understand what "they" are doing with "our data" and what that is doing to both "us" and "society at large".