Edward Snowden: “It's not the data that's being mined, it's the people. What to do when the most powerful institutions in society are the least accountable?”
We are, once again, on the threshold of a mysterious era, one that links humanity and technology, hope and many dangers. In fact, we are, once again, on the threshold of a brave new world, on a journey to the cyberspace universe. The big trends of this brave new world follow the formula of the “three Ds”: digitization, dematerialization and disintermediation, but the shadow of a fourth D, unemployment, is increasingly imminent.
The digital revolution is increasingly confused with the advent of the automatic society and the automation, if you like, of automatic calculation procedures or algorithmic society.
What, then, is “algorithmic governance” about? From technological platforms, from social networks, from raw data extracted from these networks in the form of infrapersonal signals, from calculation procedures and statistical correlations in the form of behavior patterns.
the algorithmic society
At the structural level, the algorithmic society feeds on a cyberculture, a vast informational environment, the hyper intelligence of technological devices, the management of the Big Data and Cloud Computing and, obviously, the “digital addition” caused among users. Our personal data collected on multiple fixed and mobile devices are filtered and processed in large data centers through protocols and mathematical procedures called algorithms.
The end result of this processing is in the form of personalized profiles and behavior patterns that are then sold to marketing and advertising companies or directly to large distribution and retail companies. These two-sided markets, free upstream and paid for downstream, are called “two-sided markets” and it is they that provide the gigantic revenues to the big digital platforms like Google and Facebook.
This is the truth of algorithmic society, produced in real time and successively reconfigured by an immense mass of permanently updated data. The system Big Data cleans, sorts, categorizes, and algorithmically calculates the data. It doesn't matter the context, the uniqueness, the meaning of these data. Individuals are “temporary aggregates of raw data”, quantifiable and successively reconfigured on an industrial scale, if you like, a kind of objectification of individuals. Everything is indexed to any quantitative indicator, for the purposes of hypercompetitive and performative society.
Basically, we are facing a kind of "extractive model" in which Internet citizens, users of networks and platforms, are producers and suppliers of a gigantic mass of personal information, much of it subliminal, in a vertiginous and hypnotic informational environment, which has so much benignity and toxicity.
Algorithmic society, in its calculating exuberance, transforms algorithms into cognitive prostheses, which not only provoke the externalization of knowledge, but also the proletarianization of some /many professional and intellectual classes. The algorithmic society is therefore a highly paradoxical society with numerous political and societal conflicts on the near horizon.
At the level of the individual subject, our “double algorithms” can be very useful if we know how to manipulate them for our benefit; in the rest, our trail, our traceability, will be exhaustively explored in order to produce supra-individual patterns that “anticipate and guide” our behavior, all guaranteed by the rationality of the algorithmic protocol.
In terms of power relations, the algorithmic society is clearly a new way of managing political uncertainty and insecurity, just look at the “social credit” system in force in China. To this end, it proceeds by inverting the terms of the equation, that is, it is the means (the technical and technological system) that take care of the ends and as political and social innovation runs much more slowly, there is a risk of becoming prisoners of high toxicity of the algorithmic society. Edward Snowden is right.
The revolution in the labor market, in search of a "new normal"
In terms of the social organization of employment and work, the algorithmic society of automation is a truly disruptive technology, that is, it will soon create strong structural unemployment, but it is also a great opportunity for the social and political innovation that will arrive , I am sure, riding the automatic and algorithmic society.
Unlike the great previous civilizational transitions, from orality to writing and from writing to the press, always made in the universe of atoms and molecules, the transition from press to computing and networks, to the world of screenagers, is made from atoms to bits, that is, we are dematerializing the next great civilizational mutation and eliminating to a great extent the previous space-time references. This is how the new business models of the digital age and culture increasingly express this fundamental change.
In a civilizational mutation where technological platforms play the main role as they are the hub of all the interests involved, we are witnessing the paradigmatic transition from the society of objects and goods to the society of icons, signs, signs and symbols, that is. that is, a transition to (i)economy.
In the new society of information, intelligence, internet, imagination, innovation, intangible and immaterial goods, we will witness a trade off between the old economy of industrial and material products and the “new icon of immaterial services”, in a constant exchange between product and service and between ownership and access.
Here, with algorithms and behavior profiles, object sensing, intelligent digital assistants, automatic and intelligent machines, augmented and virtual reality and the flag of transhumanism, we are finally in a “new normal”. Daily life in this “new normal” can be extraordinarily boring and tiring. Otherwise let's see. At home it is the “internet of things” that is in charge.
shopping on-demand will be standard practice. The spaces of co-working will become part of our professional activity. Rental services in startups de renting they will also be a current practice. The economy crowd, do crowd funding of small business, of crowd sourcing e crowd learning for the areas of training and education, it will be a fundamental instrument in current use in many collaborative economy formats. The services freelancer em open source via Skype will come in late into the night because of time zones.
Unfortunately, this evolution of the socio-labor universe does not have a known script or argument and, above all, the circumstances in which it will take place are not well known. We suspect, however, that the professional paths will go through a period of strong socio-occupational and socio-family turbulence. Arriving here, an immense field of possibilities opens up that crosses several meanings of pluriactivity and pluri-income. Henceforth, in socio-labor matters and in the public space, the terms of the discussion will be, among others, the following:
– Polarization and bipolarization of the world of work,
– Fractionation of working hours and working hours,
– Intermittency and discontinuity of labor relations,
– Employability and lifelong training,
– Versatility and multifunctionality of personal skills,
– A universal right to social protection rather than a simple socio-labour right,
– A horizontal pluriactivity right instead of a simple labor right,
– A tax law that takes due account of multi-income and pluriactivity,
– A commercial law that takes into account intermittency and self-employment.
Finally, the discussion around the concept of universal basic income (RBU) and/or unconditional income (RBI) will emerge in the public space, a guaranteed minimum income disconnected from the conventional economic activity associated with an employment relationship.
But, also here, we will witness a very troubled history in the matter of RBU, with countless outcrops in the public debate and very varied versions that will be confused with guaranteed minimum incomes and social insertion income, even more elaborate and complete versions, including in the space of the euro zone as a complementary financial stabilization measure.
I remember that our commissioner Elisa Ferreira has this responsibility in the new European commission. In any case, the digital revolution will henceforth feed this utopia of the RBU that will remain in the public space and will serve to renew and reform the XNUMXst century welfare state.
Final Notes
Despite the difficulties, I'm sure that behind the technological exuberance, the economy of applications and entrepreneurs startups there is a silent revolution going on, a revolution of common sense, collective intelligence and conviviality.
In other words, the more utopian, benign and supportive side of cyberculture is also in progress, in very varied versions: the society of common and collaborative goods, the economy of the 4th sector (gift, volunteering, communion, contribution ), social and complementary currencies, collective territorial intelligence and the formation of network actors, the full application of the principles of the circular economy and a new, more creative and innovative organization of work and, finally, universal basic income or existence, the great utopia of the XNUMXst century.
In the new normal of the XNUMXst century, the “internet of humans” joins the “internet of things”. We will all have, in principle, the easier life. From now on, all objects will be able to be connected to a mobile device by means of sensors and continuously output all the pre-cooked information, for example, through an intelligent digital assistant.
Intelligent machines and robotization free us from an important part of our tasks and alleviate our “hard disk” for other applications. We will be, more and more, an “augmented man” through countless devices that allow us access to augmented and virtual reality. This “addition of humanity” is made possible through new interfaces and implants between the brain and devices that can be either the watch and glasses or the nano-devices implanted in our brain.
In this “new normal” of the XNUMXst century, our mix income will most likely include part-time wage income for others, variable income from self-employment. on-demand, an income in kind (voucher) for collaborative and voluntary work in the local community, an equally variable income from the rental and/or sale of occasional goods and, who knows, a “universal basic income” in the near future.
We will return to the subject.
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