At the end of the longest day
Food for thought in the pre-conference, stakeholder events — OECD Ministerial, Cancun, 21st June 2016
I attended the CSISAC (Civil Society Information Society Advisory Council) sessions for most of today and the joint session with TUAC (Trades Union Advisory Council). With my usual approach to conferences of swamping the twitter feed as a form of personal ‘open’ note-taking, I could hardly keep up with the ideas and issues being raised. Batteries of both my laptop and phone bit the dust in a flurry of typing and swyping.
It was a fascinating experience, which served as an excellent ‘framing’ for the formal conference itself over the coming two days and also re-iterated what ‘multi-stakeholder’ actually means in terms of how the OECD provides platforms for engagement and debate. Of course, the more probing question would be the extent to which such advisory council perspectives are effective when at variance with established opinion. Nonetheless, for me, it was an excellent opportunity to meet with a range of participants and learn a great deal more about many of the social, economic and employment issues around ‘the digital economy.’ As one might have expected, some particularly passionate and eloquent contributions arose from both the panel and the floor.
Two of the recurring themes were those of privacy/ownership of personal data and employment rights/business models. One of the impassioned speakers that I met on the first day was, Bharavai Gesai, of the New York Taxi Workers’ Association, and whose challenge to Uber was a theme picked up throughout the conference by a number of participants. Damon Silvers (AFL-CIO), who participated in the same panel session as I did (on day two), echoed the earlier comments from the TUAC session that Uber represented ‘the use of 21st Century technology to promote 19th Century labour practices’. The refusal of that company to acknowledge obligations to its workforce, designating them instead as being independent contractors operating with their ‘clients’ and merely using Uber as a platform for effectively their own business, despite the fact that Uber controls their rates of pay (variable depending on demand, and often very low), determines how they operate and dictates a range of requirements for compliance.
The underlying question of the characteristics of capitalism in the digital age, was the theme of the keynote presentation by Shosana Zuboff: “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.” Her introduction contextualised the argument by reminding us that in terms of user numbers/people, Google is as big as Indonesia; Facebook, China and Dropbox, the US. The continued assumption that ‘digital’ is good, better, faster, cheaper, is a fundamental philosophical error. There are now new market forms and new economics entirely indigenous to the digital world. The digital has created Advocacy Capitalism and Surveillance Capitalism. Whereas the technology has so much promise, for example, for health and education, the practice has been different, with the selling of personal health data, tracking students, capturing personal information, processing and selling it on without real consent.
Surveillance capitalism overtook the advocacy model in 2001 in response to the then ‘crisis’ and impatience after the ‘dotcom bust’. Surveillance is now the default mode, and this was illustrated by her quoting that of the top million websites, 90% leak data to, on average 9 external domains which harvest and sell data. Digital companies want to ‘be like Google’, capturing and selling personal data for profit, regardless of their original industry. The success of Google, is not down to advertising, but rather is based on behavioural data and future prediction. Building up predictive patterns for specific users and types of user; and strengthening this with new forms of data (which users might not normally, willingly provide) are what is responsible for Google’s increase in revenues — ‘behavioural surplus’: users are the resource from which marketable data, models, or algorithms, are extracted. Of course, the logical progression of such an approach is that the prediction models are more accurate the more predictable the users can become, so there is an inherent incentive in shaping, steering and changing user behaviour. It is this latter development which of course has profound consequences for individual agency and democracy — the threat of a ‘coup from above’ and whereby we feel that there are no alternative approaches to working in a digital world.
You can read more about this argument in Shosanna’s essay, published earlier this year in Frankfurter Allgemeine.
In subsequent panel discussions in both the CSISAC and TUAC sessions the issue of consumer rights, democratic rights, and the rights of workers were all brought to the fore. There was a strong consensus that workers in the ‘digital economy’ should be entitled to the same as those in the ‘real’ economy. No one was doubting that there is a transition taking place in terms of economics and the nature of work, nor were those representatives advocating a ‘luddite’ approach, but rather that fairness, good working conditions and quality of life must be given primacy of attention.
The data, privacy and safety concerns that arise from the ‘Internet of Things’ was also given some consideration, particularly in the presentation by Bruce Schneier (Berkman Center). As we embed more and more network nodes, pipe more and more data and information, and become increasingly reliant on networked systems (often with proprietary algorithms) then we need to ensure appropriate oversight and ethical application. The point about cybersecurity was coincidentally being discussed at the same time in a parallel technical panel session at which ICANN’s David Conrad was quoted as saying that:
“the only people who trust the Net, are those who do not know how it works.”
Mishi Choudhary (Software Freedom Law Center) argued that users, people are the ‘owners’ of the internet and that the tech companies are merely trustees on the public behalf. Users are not just consumers, but producers also and engaged citizens. Privacy, she stressed, is a key requirement for democratic government and citizens need the right to autonomy. The current conceptualisation of the internet and the ‘digital economy’ which is held by governments is flawed. It is too constrained to a model of consumption and extraction of profit, with corporate ownership of personal data and information. In that sense, the internet cannot truly be thought of as a ‘public sphere’; indeed, there’s a danger that a better analogy of the way things are developing is that it being more like a ‘shopping mall’ where owners could simply excluded people, saying “you’re not allowed to hand our your leaflets here.” A broader reframing would yield far wider benefit and more opportunities for creativity, production and indeed the economy — these were some of the emerging points from the panel discussion on these themes.
Other challenges posed were about the loose use of the terms ‘platform’ and ‘sharing economy’. How is it a ‘sharing economy’ if you look at the actual business models of many of those companies often attributed with that label? What’s new perhaps is the platform, but organising profit generation around precarious labour is, sadly, a very old idea. Uber is, as Bharavai Desai reminded us, despite what it says, an employer and can no longer be permitted to neglect its obligations as such. How is it that companies can ‘buy influence’ and shape the debate? To what extent are many of the ‘new’ internet companies employing lobbyists more than other members of a ‘workforce’? How do we deal with the ‘revolving door syndrome’ whereby people move between corporate, government and regulatory sectors?
All fascinating and important questions that are not asked often enough in many fora focused on digital technology and the economy.
Oh, and that was just the first pre-conference day! The event itself was launched later that evening.
