FUTURE POLITICS

It is not surprising that this brilliant and ground-breaking book was chosen as a Guardian book of the day and Prospect and Evening Standard book of the year when it came out in hardback. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to get to grips with the profound and far-reaching impacts of digital technology on politics. The fundamental issues have moved on from 20th-century preoccupations with the relationship between states and markets and require a radical rethink of the scope of basic political categories. And as the author points out in his preface to the paperback edition, we are neither intellectually, philosophically nor morally prepared for the world we are creating.

The six main parts address what the author calls the digital life world, then the respective futures of power, liberty, democracy, justice and politics. Given increasingly capable systems, increasingly integrated technology and increasingly quantified societies, the challenge posed is the extent of control by digital systems whereby those who control technology will have enhanced opportunities to control us through this very power and to limit our freedom accordingly. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee observed, he and his colleagues are 'philosophical engineers' redesigning the very basis of our political and social fabric. So it becomes important to be able to explore these issues within the context of political theory and its practical applications. Here some basic vocabulary and analysis is enormously helpful, for instance the elements of social order in terms of coordination, cooperation and control and various types of analysis - conceptual, normative and contextual. Then questions of how we gather, store, analyse and communicate information. All this is occurring within the overall context of our commercial and political world expressed through the Internet and driven by the migration of advertising revenues online where we as users unwittingly become the product. It is still crucial, however, to be able to hold elites to account.

The section on the digital lifeworld is enormously informative and will surprise readers with its reporting on AI with, for instance, programmes for lip reading performing at 93% accuracy and forecast of outcomes of legal cases at 79%, not to mention records on chess and other board games. Machine learning is now developing automation of automation with computing power expected to multiply by 64 in terms of speed in the next 10 years. Algorithms are omnipresent, as Amazon and Netflix customers will know only too well (adverts for a suitcase I looked at came up on my weather forecast even though I had bought another one), and this technology is pervasive, connective, sensitive, constitutive and immersive. We now generate more data in two hours than was generated since the beginning of time up until 2003, while companies like Facebook and Google compile 'life logs' from our 'data exhaust' that are able to predict our activities and decisions.

In the new connected digital lifeworld, code and algorithms are power. Power can either be power to (empowerment) or power over in terms of force, scrutiny and perception-control, all of which the author examines in detail. Power is further analysed not only as force, but also coercion, influence, authority and manipulation. We are now open to scrutiny - and consequently to a corresponding abuse of power - to an unprecedented extent with respect to our lives, desires, plans and even purposes; and all the more so with the advent of smart devices to be intensified with the advent of 5G – the author gives a telling example of a clue to a murder derived from an unusually excessive use of water metered by the criminal's own device. And self-driving cars will not allow us to break speed limits or park in restricted areas. Positively, the author argues that this could constitute a form of 'wise restraint' with smart fridges advising obese people on what not to eat. Perception control is effectively behaviour control, and we already subject to a great deal of filtering, for instance news feeds and searches (research has shown that positive and negative news feeds can affect our moods accordingly, as the current coronavirus crisis so tellingly demonstrates). So the bottom line is that these powerful economic entities wield immense political power.

Liberty and freedom also require new concepts beyond freedom of action and thought. The author offers and defines the scope of Digital Libertarianism, Digital Liberalism, Digital Federalism, Digital Paternalism (see wise restraint above), Digital Moralism and Digital Republicanism. Online technology offers us new affordances while at the same time feeding into predictive algorithms with political implications, as we saw with the 2016 US election. Interestingly, both in this campaign and in Brexit, up to a third of messages and tweets came from bots, and this is likely to continue - it is already also the case with respect to the debate on climate change. The discussion on liberty then feeds into future democracy: 'if we care about liberty, there must be a corresponding increase in the ability of the citizenry to hold that power to account.' (p. 208) The author then gives a brief history of democracy with more details of online campaigning and highlighting its new forms, including, crucially, deliberative democracy at a time when people are increasingly confined within self-looping bubbles of information and no longer critically exposed to other viewpoints. This phenomenon is related to 'no-platforming' controversies in universities as well as the rise of fake news and the misleading equating of truth with belief. As the author points out, there must be mechanisms for the resolution of reasonable moral disagreement.

Next comes justice, principally in terms of asset and wealth distribution and recognition 'how humans see and treat each other, including our systems of social status and esteem' (p. 208) - which entails new forms of assessment and ranking applied not only in tourism but increasingly also within companies and universities. This is how students become customers and is partially responsible for the steady rise in first-class degrees as universities seek to market themselves. The author gives examples of algorithmic injustice according to how algorithms are set and the views they reflect; in this sense, neutrality can entrench existing injustice. Then there is a chapter on technological unemployment where the author observes that, between 2000 and 2010, 'the US lost about 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, 85% of which losses were attributable to technological change.' (p. 295) The author's brother Daniel has just produced a whole book on this subject - Future Work - Daniel and his father also wrote a book together on the future of the professions in 2016. Work is valued for income, status and well-being, while what the author calls the work paradigm reflects these assumptions. There is no doubt that we need a fundamental debate around future work scenarios, including these value connections and the relative capacity of people to flourish with more time for leisure. Wealth and capital will also need to be reconsidered, and our current crisis is bringing fraternity or solidarity to the fore beyond a conservative focus on liberty and a socialist concern with equality - some people are now promulgating extending the notion of a 'sharing economy' and we already see this manifest in one form in Uber and Airbnb.

In his final reflections on politics, the author notes that we will not only have to make technology companies accountable, but also 'keep the power of the supercharged state in check' as we already witnessing with surveillance totalitarianism in China. Legitimacy must still be based on consent and fairness, which will entail both transparency and structural regulation involving appropriate forms of accountability. We must ask ourselves 'how much of our collective life should be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems – and on what terms' (p. 361) within limits analysed by HLA Hart in his seminal The Concept of Law (p. 365).

Despite its magisterial scope, I felt that there were a few important gaps in the analysis. The psychological aspect of resistance to change was not addressed, nor the importance of the aware individual as exemplified in the work of CG Jung - The Undiscovered Self, for example. Much of the thinking was left hemisphere in terms of Iain McGilchrist's approach, and the work of Riane Eisler on dominator and partnership societies was not mentioned, nor that of Sir Karl Popper on open and closed societies. In terms of themes, consciousness was absent as was our overall relationship with nature within the Western worldview; and the discussion on democracy could have benefited from a consideration of the role of 'nudging' in policy terms. These represent mainly what one might call the inner attitudes rather than outer structures, but it is essentially the inner that drives the outer the more aware and free one becomes inwardly. Developing and maintaining our inner freedom constitutes a great challenge for each of us in our time.