Digital Constitutions
The Biden administration has been a turning point. You could have the intuition that something was going wrong for decades with relation to western institutions for decades. The year 1971 is often chosen as being the starting point of this decay. There are many reasons. Not the least one being that it is the year that the gold standard was abandoned. Yet nothing is clear: was it the root cause of the decline or a visible sign of secret forces that were the true reasons of the decay ? What is clear on the other hand is that the succession of events emanating from the Trump Biden debate is an inflection point. It suddenly became public knowledge that the person nominally in charge of the executive branch of the USA administration is in fact not in charge at all. Of course we knew it for months before. But they *pretended*. They have stopped to even pretend. We still have no idea who is ruling the country, neither do we know who is the commander in chief of the largest nuclear arsenal on earth. Biden was removed from running again, visibly against his own will. I just know that someone published a tweet in which it is written that he withdrew from the race. Strangely he was absent from media presence for days around this publication. Something without any precedent in the history of the USA happened, yet the POTUS didn't even took the time to address the nation... Then quickly followed
Trump's assassination attempt.
The crowning of Kamala as new democrat candidate —without any interest in making you believe that something like a due process was even considered in the first place.
Riots in the UK themselves followed by crackdown on free speech at a level that even Orwell himself was not envisioning…
The true nature of the EU was revealed by a crazy letter published on Twitter by Thierry Breton who basically threatened E. Musk because he was going to to interview a former president of the USA.
I am not going to comment much on each of these extraordinary events — and the list expanding by the day. I simply take them as they are: visible proofs that we are no longer living in liberal democracies (I am specifically thinking at “the west”), or at least what the term was supposed to denote few decades ago. You can call the current regime the way you prefer, reality is here.
I am not really surprised. After all it has been years now that I have integrated the fact that institutions designed and fit for a written culture were not going to make it in a digital culture. This substack is mostly about that, from a social media/technological point of view.
Netizens
Now the question becomes: what's next? It looks like the powers that be have had an early start. Practice, as often, preceded theory. The idea of governance (WEF style) may look strange and abstract at first glance but it turns out that it works. "Something" is calling the shots because there is an orientation. It is not like we are witnessing erratic moves. There is a clear direction. It is clearly not the one of more freedom for the citizens. The direction is actually the disappearance of the notion of citizen. They are replaced by netizens. In the same way that cities and nations are being replaced with networks. The difference being that citizens were the source of legitimacy, while netizens are only allowed to do things (to have reach on social media) in so much as they help (repeat and propagate the approved messages) the system to work. Citizens vote, netizens gather authorization.
The USA were founded as a result of the enlightenment. Back then, the monarchy was the dominant political institution. New ideas and technologies emerged, printing press was one of them. They changed the intellectual, social and religious landscape. Something of the same nature is occurring with digital technologies. We have reached the point where we need to fight again for our freedoms. Liberal democracies are mutating, under the influence of those new information technologies, into autocratic regimes. Just like monarchy was becoming absolute in France under the reign of Louis XIV. Then revolutions took place. Two paths were explored : the American and the French ones. I am not going to make a historical exposé but troubles following French revolution in Europe only ceased after two world wars. Sure there was a civil War in the USA, but for once, it was fought because the country did not lived up to its proclaimed ideals.
Digital rights
The overall philosophy of the American constitution is a good starting point: government is here to protect self evident rights that are given to every human by God. Even if you are not specially into religion, you can conceptualize God given rights as the idea that there are rights that are self evident and beyond discussion. Government, or any other human institutions, are not the source of those rights. They are beyond our personal opinions.
Now the question is: does the digital culture changes this playing field ? And if yes; how ? Are there *new* rights of the nature of the the God given rights for a digital society ? This question may appear strange. The “God” part in “God given” suggests a pack of immutable rights, say something like the Noahide Laws or the Ten Commandments. But new technologies introduce possibilities that simply never existed before. It has never been possible to spread a message instantaneously all across the world before. Therefore no one thought, or felt compelled to think, about the moral and legal implications of such possibilities. Even if you are Platonic and thinks that ideas pre-exist and float in the ether, you can still imagine that we simply never discovered them because of a lack of our wisdom. That is why I call such rights new.
My intuitive feeling is that yes there are such new rights. Then come a methodological issue: how can we find them ? It might look strange once again because if they are God given like rights they are not the production of imagination. Is it a revelation ? Is it a spiritual inquiry ? I don’t know at the end of the day, but what I know is that it takes a long time for such rights to be formalized in an adequate way. Think hundreds of generations long as a minimal time frame. Now compare with how fast the digital revolution is unfolding. From almost 0 to almost all inhabitants on earth have been impacted in the span of 3 decades. And the internet of the 2000 is just another world from what we know today. So trying to formalize those new rights is like building a sand castle on the shore when the tide is rising. Yet it is not like we have a choice. Starting to ponder about them now is better than tomorrow.
New fundamental issues
The first thing is to have an idea about what digital culture changes with relation to written culture. Those changes are indexes that point towards what has to be processed to synthesize those new rights. Here are two of the most important points that come to my mind:
Stability issues. The absence of technology protected us from brutal changes. There were brutal changes but they were the result of wars or natural disasters (volcano eruption, pandemics, earthquakes, floods you name it). Things were not evolving fast across human civilizations simply because, at best, information was moving at the pace of men: you had to physically tell the others what the new things are. Written words, and later printing, somewhat address those limitations. But before the telegraph and the use of radio waves, information was moving at the pace of horses. It is no longer the case. Technology moves fast, and is more or less instantaneously shared across the globe. Even on the world of atoms things move faster: access to travel by plane have changed the world. The problem of large scale migrations is no longer necessarily linked with wars and invasions in the style of Attila. Yet they produce very fast transformations of the landscape. I have witnessed the transformation with my own eyes. It is not just xenophobia or racism. There is a rate of change that destabilize the whole society. The recent elections show it: the vote for far right parties is an expression of this destabilization. You can like it or hate it, it doesn’t change the fact that the destabilization is here. My intuition is that too much is dangerous. How much is acceptable ? How can it be formalized ? Those are very hard questions and both of usual answers —no borders (left pathology) or no move (righ pathology)— are lazy ways to address the issue. There is also a cultural dimension to add to this geographical one. Just remember that Obama was officially against gay marriage when he first ran for office for instance. Maybe a significant difference could be made between migrants and residents. Something like a resident is someone investing many generations on a given part of the earth. Residents have a long term interest in local problems. Having this distinction doesn’t forbid people from moving around. I don’t think the institution of nation state will remain, it does not mean that I envision global anarchy either.
Asymmetry of the informational space. When the only way to propagate a message was through humans, the limit was the reach of your voice. Mechanically it meant that information propagation was like light: if someone can hear/see you, you can hear/see him too. The informational space was isotropic. It is no longer the case. If you can see a post of Elon Musk, and even reply to it directly, he is not going to see it. Likewise, what you see on your timeline is not what others see. This is a major issue that was not existent when the first amendment on free speech was crafted into constitutional law. There is truth in “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” but it is not the whole story either. Users and designers of social media have not the same access to information: it is very hard to know whether you have been shadowbanned or not for instance. This is not a peripheral issue in a digital society. Here also I am struggling to find a neat way to encapsulate the idea, but something like: the informational space has to be as isotropic as possible. What does it mean in practice is tricky. More thinking has to be done on that subject.
The stability issue is fundamentally about the disharmony that information speed has introduced into the world: atoms and electrons/photons do not move at the same speed. Information is no longer local, which is also in part the second point. The fact that information has now a marginal cost of 0 allows the multiplication of listener. You never know whether your tweet is going to be ready 12 times or a hundred million times. Things like that don’t happen in the atom world.
We are no longer ruled under the regime we think it is. The bureaucracy is using new information technologies to extend its power way beyond what the founding fathers could have imagine. It is time to fight for our liberties. Again.
