Beyond the coronavirus emergency, other major issues need attention. Whether we like it or not, the digital revolution is transforming our economy, our society, and our political life.
Our party contains many committed privacy activists, and a heartening number of data scientists, to inform our debate. One of the several LibDem data scientists I’ve recently met lent me Jamie Susskind’s weighty volume on Future Politics: living together in a world transformed by tech, published 18 months ago (thank you Samie Dorgham).
It’s a very ambitious book, ranging from Aristotle and J.S. Mill to Tim Berners Lee and Silicon Valley. Its central message is that ‘the threats to liberty are unprecedented’, but that active engagement by principled defenders of an open society can hold in check ‘the supercharged state’ and the private monopolists of the internet.
He details examples of the rapid spread of misinformation on social media, and of ‘the engineering of consent’ through detailed targeting of voters. Well-funded professionals – political technologists, as the Russians call them – can shape public perceptions. He explores the algorithmic injustice that flows from incomplete data (often leaving out marginal groups) and (often unconscious) bias.
The billionaires of the digital revolution are almost all white, male and American, displaying varying degrees of naivety or arrogance about the impact of their networks on political and social life. Women, ethnic minorities, black and Asian faces, are all under-recognised. When algorithms are refined through machine learning, repeatedly analysing accumulated data, social injustice accumulates as well.
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