As Alvin Toffler predicted, its industrial era institutions and practices have proved themselves ill-equipped to cope with the pace of technological change. Government has not aged well over the past 50 years. As Alvin Toffler predicted, its industrial era institutions and practices have proved themselves ill-equipped to cope with the pace of technological change.
Democratic governments could have been at the vanguard of the positive uses of technology, placing citizens center stage and helping strengthen our rights and laws and modernize our institutions. They could have provided continuous feedback mechanisms to improve policy outcomes and used open public data to monitor economic, social, environmental, and cultural progress. They could have regulated domestic and global technology companies to ensure they play by the same rules as everyone else, and lifted people and communities out of old, dying jobs and industries and into new ones.
The best organizations use technology in constructive, creative ways, rethinking and redesigning their products, processes, and services to better meet consumers’ needs. These learning organizations flatten and streamline their internal structures and use constant feedback to refine and optimize the way they work. Used well, technology can also improve job satisfaction, cutting out pointless internal processes and administration and freeing up time for employees to pursue their areas of expertise and interest.
Many governments, however, walk not in the footsteps of such enlightened organizations, but in those of technology corporations and authoritarian regimes. They intrude into our personal lives, gathering and acting upon unprecedented levels of our data in both public and private spaces, online and offline. They use often unproven technologies that automate inequality and undermine human rights and the exercise of justice in the pursuit of their own financial or political goals.
Authoritarian states outpace democracies in their exploitation of new technology. They embrace and fashion it in their own image—tightening political control and further suppressing their own citizens through an increasingly inescapable and dehumanizing surveillance. Technology is tilting the balance between citizen and state, enabling an unprecedented intrusion into our lives that will grow stronger and more damaging if it is not soon corrected. Democracy and freedom are unlikely to prosper in a world flooded with technologies monitoring and analyzing all aspects of our daily lives. Proof, if it were needed, of Toffler’s prediction that the roaring current of technological change would overturn institutions, shift our values, and shrivel our roots—including, it seems, the essential roots of democracy.
This failure to orchestrate technology as a public good has contributed to a growing sense of alienation and disadvantage. Unable to cope with the fast-paced and unrecognizable world around them, many citizens increasingly seek solace in what Toffler termed “the politics of nostalgia.” Yet the past is far from being the desirable place portrayed by a growing band of populists. We are in a much better world now than the one our ancestors experienced, even if it might not always feel that way at a personal or local level. In the second half of the 20th century, the share of the world population living in democracies increased continuously. Global child mortality rates have dropped dramatically. Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900, and the number of people in poverty is down by around three quarters since 1990.
These improvements do not mean we can or should rest easy, however. Many problems remain, from homelessness to mental illness, social immobility to drug abuse, climate change to inequality. But surrendering to the siren voices serenading us onto the rocks of a false past will reverse progress and increase inequality and uncertainty, not tackle it.
As Toffler observed, the problems we need to address are ultimately not scientific or technical, but ethical and political. We need to redesign technology and embed democratic rules, values, and behaviors deep within it. In the same way that many consumer goods and services are checked for safety—electrical, suitability for young children, toxicity, fire resistance, fitness for human consumption, hygiene—before they can be sold, so too our technologies should be validated for their compliance with democratic values, protecting us from the invasive, inappropriate, and socially corrosive models of big business and anti-democratic states, politicians, and bureaucrats.
Every significant technical, social, and economic advance has involved government intervention and correction, often implemented long after it was first required—from worker safety on the factory floor to the abolition of child labor, from sanitation to mine safety. The problem is not so much technology itself, or capitalism or the creeping intrusion of hostile regimes, as it is the apparent lack of willingness and ability of our governments to anticipate and respond effectively.
We need to cultivate a new age of democratic enlightenment supported by, not dictated by, technology. One in which social, human, and environmental improvements have as much focus and value as more traditional economic measures. This requires government to let go of its inward-looking bureaucratic instincts and to open up—monitoring and releasing public data regularly, frequently, and automatically to enable citizens to see the extent of progress and to determine where resources are best directed or redirected.
Better use of public data is essential if democracy is to survive and prosper over and beyond the next 50 years. Yet no government has used technology to make open data and insights about its own operations part of day-to-day processes. This failure is a major obstacle to the modernization and improvement of democracy. It lets lies and half-truths be easily fabricated, circulated, and amplified. It makes it difficult to rebut raw emotion, prejudice and bias with hard, objective evidence.
A move to a new form of politics enabled by technology and informed by transparency, open data, and continuous feedback will doubtless fuel the lazy populist accusation that politicians do not know their own minds and allow themselves to be swayed by events. Constant corrections and improvements will be required to reflect facts over opinions, outcomes over dogma, reality over prejudice.
Politicians who respond to ever-changing evidence, fine-tuning and improving policy on the fly, are likely to be caricatured as weak. Policies based on data instead of dogma offer the best way to meet human, cultural, social, environmental, and economic needs, but they will take patience and time to prevail. Governments need to capture and release reliable open data about the efficacy of political decisions and the performance of the state. It will help us distinguish between the fake and the real, between scientific evidence and irrational belief.
To make sense of this rich and potentially overwhelming volume of data we need immersive, interactive, and intuitive ways of verifying, navigating, and understanding it. We need to bring art and craft and creativity to science and technology, to move beyond dry spreadsheets and charts, to let facts and evidence dance and come alive around us. Video game and 3D augmented reality will let us viscerally experience alternative policy options, exploring how they might interact and play out. Creative technologies can help us make a meaningful, personal, human connection between evidence and instinct—providing a sort of real-world, immersive SimCity™ that lets us enjoy trying out various evidence-based “what-if” ways of achieving various policy outcomes.
Better use of technology will help us make progress with the outcomes that Toffler called for. Fifty years on he would be disappointed, but probably not surprised, by how few governments publish annual reports on quality of life and social progress. Nor have we seen the necessary recognition that progress is about more than economic growth. As Toffler observed, technological questions cannot be answered in technological terms alone—they are political questions.
Enlightened democratic leaders need to reclaim a positive vision and passion for our democratic future and the role of technology in delivering it, and to think more critically about the human qualities and values of democratic society. Politicians need to break technology away from the toxic grip of corporate entities—global monopolies, authoritarian regimes, and public bureaucracies living in the past—who have embedded their self-serving values deep within its design.
We are at a turning point as to where technology impacts democracy: from “smart” speakers eavesdropping on our private and family lives to so-called “artificial intelligence”; from moves toward a cashless society to mass facial recognition; and from behavioral analytics to social media and “fake news” and the corruption of democratic elections.
Governments have a choice. They can choose to sleepwalk into the future, tinkering with the museum of outdated institutions and failed dogmatic initiatives while authoritarian, discriminatory, and invasive technologies dehumanize society and undermine our right to freedom and a private life. Or they can choose to embrace the open, participative potential of technology to reinvigorate democracy, gathering, publishing, and acting honestly on public data and citizen feedback. They can reinforce and protect our rights both online and offline, ensuring we have meaningful control over the way technology can access and use our private information. They can find a way to convince those who feel left behind that the best possible future is one of democracy and liberty and progress and hope and the pursuit of happiness—not the false politics of nostalgia, regression, division, and hate.
Our democratic future, our future state, depends on our governments using technology to modernize and strengthen essential institutions and processes that protect democracy. Governments must redesign and streamline the inefficient organizational and policy silos and processes that create friction and raw human suffering, thus generating frustration with public services. We need to challenge and reject the toxic design of much current technology and make it an open, positive, participative force for good. And, most importantly, governments must renew a commitment to universal rights and the rule of law, adopting a more scientific and objective approach to policymaking. Doing so would provide an essential stimulus to global democratic progress.
As our governments begin using technology to improve transparency and trust, they should hold other governments, and the companies who supply our goods and services, to the same standards. Technology can make visible and verifiable, for example, an entire supply chain, from source to purchase. It can enable us to see whether products and services have come from rogue regimes or companies—those using child labor, paying workers slave wages, or employing those living and working in inhuman conditions—or from those producers operating ethically. Imagine how profound such a change would be in establishing trust and facts over falsehood and deception: we could simply scan any good or service with our phones to discover its verified, authentic details. It is time to use technology to protect, enhance, and grow democracy, rather than undermining and shriveling it.
As consumers and citizens, we too have an important role to play—to demonstrate through our actions that we care about the responsible uses of technology. There is an unmet appetite for improved social responsibility and more ethical regimes, companies, supply lines, products, and services. We should change our own behavior to support positive uses of technology, and to actively reject the negative. Doing so will not only be good for democracy, but will provide a competitive or political advantage for those organizations, private and public, who choose to use it in more open and progressive ways.
The next 50 years will likely constitute one of the most challenging and important eras in the history of democracy. Let us hope our governments, and we, choose to shape technology and society to rise to that challenge.
Dr. Jerry Fishenden is an internationally recognized technologist, writer, and composer currently working with a range of public, private, and not-for-profit organizations. He has held senior executive positions at Microsoft, the City of London financial regulator, the UK Parliament, the UK Government, and the National Health Service. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), and a member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. He is co-author of Digitizing Government: understanding and implementing new digital business models (see http://www.digitizinggovernment.org), a practical playbook for modernizing large, complex organizations. He is currently working on several books, mobile apps, and related works.