2.2. Towards a Digital Commonwealth

Data Collection, Algorithms and AI, or “Automated Decision Making”

The problem is not limited to the platform monopolists, but also applies to the state and other actors who collect and use data.

This includes all aspects of algorithmic automated decision making (often mislabeled as “Artificial Intelligence”). In order to be clear, this paper uses the term “Automated Decision Making” (ADM) instead of “Artificial Intelligence” (“AI”), because the use of this concept helps much better to clearly set out the issue: how are those automated decisions made? And who decides how they are made? We see today how the expansion of information technology has not been accompanied by expanded democratic control, resulting in a massive concentration of power and surveillance capabilities in a few hands, and little accountability or oversight by the public.

Artificial intelligence is, today, often neither artificial — its “magic” veneer obscures the all-too-human labour and decisions that shape its development — nor intelligent, as it reflects a blinkered set of powerful interests over all others. Instead of opening our eyes to new possibilities of a free and equal society, ADM is used to consolidate existing hierarchies and explore new mechanisms of control. 

Need for a New Paradigm

It is time for a new paradigm of the digital economy. A paradigm through which we establish new forms of ownership and governance of data and digital technologies, guided by democratic principles. A paradigm that unleashes the power of data and digital technologies for the common good and that helps to usher in an innovative, democratic, socially just and ecological transformation of our societies and economies. Moving towards such a digital commonwealth in which we will collectively benefit from the digital transformation will help us create a mixed and democratic economy. It will help us gain more democratic rights and to become free and sovereign in our technological choices, as individuals and societies.

For DiEM25, citizens in a digital commonwealth

  • know, and can exercise, their clearly defined rights as data subjects;
  • democratically govern the use of data, setting its scope for private purposes, and harnessing its power for the public good;
  • have recourse to institutional means of enforcing their rights, such as independent, public data audits; and
  • can democratically counter imbalances in economic power through alternative business models such as platform cooperatives.