The data republic: Living with technology

To safeguard democracy, the use of data should be made as transparent as possible

“TECHNOLOGY IS NEITHER good nor bad; nor is it neutral,” said the late Melvin Kranzberg, one of the most influential historians of machinery. The same is true for the internet and the use of data in politics: it is neither a blessing, nor is it evil, yet it has an effect. But which effect? And what, if anything, needs to be done about it?

Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher who thought up the concept of the “public sphere”, has always been in two minds about the internet. Digital communication, he wrote a few years ago, has unequivocal democratic merits only in authoritarian countries, where it undermines the government’s information monopoly. Yet in liberal regimes, online media, with their millions of forums for debate on a vast range of topics, could lead to a “fragmentation of the public” and a “liquefaction of politics”, which would be harmful to democracy.

The ups and downs of the presidential campaign in America and the political turbulences elsewhere seem to support Mr Habermas’s view. Indeed, it is tempting to ask whether all this online activism is not wasted political energy that could be put to better use in other ways. Indeed, the meteoric rise of many online movements appears to explain their equally rapid demise: many never had time to build robust organisations.

But online activism cannot be dismissed. Some movements have had real impact, either by putting an issue on the political agenda or by taking over an existing organisation. Without the Occupy movement, the debate about income inequality in America would be much less prominent. The same goes for the Black Lives Matter campaign and violence against African-Americans. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters managed to commandeer the Labour Party. In America, Donald Trump seems about to do the same with the Republican Party (though whether he can do it to the whole country remains to be seen).

No going back

Only the most extreme critics want to go back to a time when the flow of information was controlled mostly by governments and mass media. And the current political turbulences may lead to the creation of services that calm them down. Earlier this year, for instance, Change.org, a petition site with nearly 140m members, launched Change Politics, which lets any user, including media companies and other organisations, post endorsements. The idea is that voters will be able to draw on recommendations by people they trust, rather than being manipulated by political commercials and tweets.

The effect of vast quantities of data is both easier and harder to gauge. As this special report has shown, piles of digital information and the algorithms to analyse them tend to be good for those in power. Political parties with plenty of money can use them both to target voters and to discipline recalcitrant candidates by cutting off access. Autocratic governments that were blindsided when the internet took off in the mid-1990s have regained their vision. Data can make cities more efficient, but also more centralised and controlling.

All this suggests that data and analytics risk slowing down and perhaps even undoing the welcome redistribution of power to ordinary people that the internet seemed to be able to offer. They create “points of control” in what used to be largely an “open system”, as Yochai Benkler of Harvard University puts it in a recent article in Daedalus, an American journal. The design of the original internet, he writes, was biased towards decentralisation of power and the freedom to act. Along with other developments such as smartphones and cloud computing, he now sees data as a force for recentralisation that allows “the accumulation of power by a relatively small set of influential state and non-state actors”.

Does this matter? Another law of technology, particularly the digital kind, is that it is never in equilibrium. Data can empower both empires and rebels. David Karpf, of George Washington University, expects a rise in what he calls “analytic activism”, the title of a forthcoming book of his. One example is MoveOn.org, a left-wing advocacy group in America with a voracious appetite for data of which even many of its 8m members are unaware. Among many other things, it closely tracks whether people have read the many messages it sends out.

Equally important, digital technology has a “capacity to surprise”, says Helen Margetts of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). The database politicking within America’s parties has created room for non-partisan offerings. One is NationBuilder, a startup based in Los Angeles. Its clients get access to a basic national voter file to which they can add their own data and share it with other campaigns if they wish. “Unlike an organisation which keeps a big central database, we don’t have to make a decision on who can use it,” says Jim Gilliam, the startup’s chief executive.

And then there is the blockchain. This technology, a version of which powers bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, could prove to be a big democratic reset button. It is essentially a new type of database that is owned and maintained not by a single actor but by its users, who collectively agree to any changes. Such “distributed ledgers”, as they are known, could one day become alternatives to big centralised databases. Venture-capital firms have made their first bets on such undertakings, including OpenBazaar, a peer-to-peer marketplace. Perhaps one day voter files will be kept in blockchain-like distributed ledgers, which allow citizens to reveal their data only to the candidates they like.

Taming the beast

It would be foolish, however, to base public policy solely on the hope that some new service or technology will come along to solve existing problems. So what safeguards might be introduced to limit the power conferred by data? The most radical proposal comes from Evgeny Morozov, a technology critic. He thinks that big companies such as Facebook and Google should be barred from owning certain types of data, such as the keywords users search for, and whether those users have voted in the past. Instead, this information should belong to the individuals concerned and shared only if they so choose. Yet the political will to implement such a policy is lacking in much of the world, says Mr Morozov.

A more practical idea comes from Gavin Starks, the executive director of London’s Open Data Institute. He argues that certain types of data may need to be kept available to all: address files and geospatial information, for instance, are akin to roads and other public infrastructure and need to be treated in the same way. “We need to discuss who owns our data infrastructure, what roles the public and private sectors should have, and what role we as citizens play,” he recently wrote in a blog post.

Others think that more transparency would help. Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina wants campaigners to be required to publish all the messages they pitch to voters—in the same way as they are obliged, at least in America, to show in detail how they have spent their campaign money. And Eitan Hersh of Yale University recommends that voters should be given the chance to check the information held about them in campaign databases.

Transparency over the use of algorithms has its limits. Opening them up for inspection, as some have proposed, can make them lose their value because it will allow them to be gamed. Others are so complex that even their authors do not fully understand how they operate. One possibility is to develop algorithms that check on algorithms. Researchers at Columbia University have built a software tool called Sunlight to reveal why, say, users of online services are presented with certain ads.

Luciano Floridi, also of the OII, calls for an ethical framework for the use of data, much like that currently being developed for reproductive technologies. Some companies have already started to move in this direction. Google has set up an ethics committee for artificial intelligence. And the British parliament’s science and technology committee recently proposed the creation of a national data-ethics council.

The debate about data and politics has only just begun and these proposals need time to mature. But getting the rules for managing digital information right is critically important. Societies will have to decide how they want data to be used, in politics as well as in other spheres. As Alec Ross, a former State Department official who now works as an adviser on technology politics for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, puts it in his new book “The Industries of the Future”: “The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age.”

Data and politics are likely to become ever more intertwined, as science-fiction writers have long forecast. They may have got the details wrong, but some of their ideas are nevertheless worth considering. Isaac Asimov, who died a quarter of a century ago, before the internet took off, invented a prophetic universe ruled by a group of “psychohistorians” who forecast humanity’s future, using a set of complicated equations. To prevent people from interfering with the predictions, they had to keep them secret, but that in turn created untold complications. The story, like this special report, suggests that technology is morally neutral. Data are neither good nor bad for democracy. It all depends on how people use them.

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