The unlikely tech giant empowering citizens through data
By Brendan Maton
Here’s a list of well-known players in the tech world; spot the odd one out: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Barcelona.
That is the city of Barcelona, not the football club. Either way, Catalonia’s biggest city is not famed for its creation of any social networking site or search engine or even a smartphone.
All the others, corporate giants of the US West Coast, control much of the digital economy. Almost 50% of all online purchases in the US go via Amazon. Over 93% of all internet searches go via Google.
According to Rainer Kattel, professor of innovation and public governance at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), all these companies are about user experience (UX). Whenever you make a purchase or finish a search, you will be asked how you felt about the effort: information which then gets looped back into the company’s understanding of your preferences and folk like you. If that sounds like amazingly effective marketing, it is. That’s why these companies and their Chinese peers, Alibaba and Tencent, are now the biggest in the world. Global trade in data is now bigger than global trade in goods.
And one of the wonders of the most successful companies is how few staff they employ. Kattel notes that Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, has a bigger IT department than the entire workforce of Facebook. That is because so much of the work in tech giants is done by the algorithms that form patterns of behaviour among users and subsequently orientate far more accurate exchanges between buyers and sellers.
There is, however, a shady side to this commercial, highly automated mining of data. In international politics, democratic elections are being influenced covertly by foreign organisations via social media. In the home, tech giants have developed into surveillance specialists, spying on users’ every twitch and murmur via smartphones and speakers. Most people haven’t a clue what information they are ceding or for what purpose it is being taken. Which is why one Harvard Law Professor, Shoshana Zuboff, has dubbed the tech giants “Big Other”. She warns individuals that they are not customers or even the product for these companies but just the raw material.
At Kattel’s UCL lecture on Rethinking Capitalism, one student asked how individuals should deal with the giants of the digital economy given that they provide convenient, often amazing, services while in the long-term threatening democratic control of our lives? Kattel noted that in previous waves of capitalism, there had been countervailing powers such as trades unions. But in this day and age, the countervailing power to Facebook and Google is not clear. Regulations have so far always lagged behind the tech giants. Conventional fines barely lighten their coffers.
Step forward Francesca Bria, chief information officer of the city of Barcelona. The Catalan city has decided to help its citizens and inspire other public authorities by making itself the countervailing power to the tech giants.
One means is by using Open Source software to create IT programmes rather than take the off-the-shelf proprietary products from big IT vendors. Open Source is an uncommercial, co-operative method of developing software. Not only does it avoid being straitjacketed into expensive servicing agreements but feeds from collaborative, public-minded problem-solving within the IT community. Eighty per cent of Barcelona’s new IT development budget is devoted to Open Source.
Barcelona also reaches out physically to local tech firms and start-ups to encourage their business and boost IT know-how in Catalonia. Part of this relationship is sharing data via city data challenges from which techies can develop services. The tech giants have done an amazing job of hoovering as much data as possible into their domains. But the crucial difference in this practice is that Barcelona considers data as a common good, and protects the anonymity of its citizens when giving their details to third parties while leaving its own workings open to scrutiny. This is the exact opposite of Facebook or Google. The public can interrogate everything Barcelona is doing with residents’ information. Even the algorithms used in forming patterns from data are now being audited. “There is no black-box government,” asserts Bria.
So when Barcelona’s citizens offer up personal details to obtain parking permits, or new accommodation or to pay council tax, they are shielded from commercial exploitation. Anonymity is ensured by encryption, which should become a human right for the digital age, according to Bria. The city is leading DECODE, a EU consortium that is developing a decentralised and privacy-enhancing smart contract platform that puts individuals in control of whether they keep their personal information private or share it for the common good.
Bria’s department has even created a social networking site of sorts: Decidim.org. It is not trivial: you can’t upload pictures of your latest holiday here. But you can build campaigns with others on matters which concern life in the locality and hold the council to account. Decidim.org is one of the largest online communities for participatory democracy in the world.
All these projects treat data-sharing as a means to improving citizens’ lives in the digital age and creating public value, not a route to profit for a few Big Tech firms.
The two philosophies are set to rub against each other more and more as smart devices permeate our cities. Bria warns that 5G will soon enable incredibly fast data flows. So who is to say that a smart car hired in the city of Barcelona (or Paris or Bonn) cannot feed back real-time information on its passengers, traffic routes and the passing streets back to a tech firm?
We are already most of the way there to such scenarios and it is the tech giants which have been investing most in broadening and deepening their surveillance techniques, even building their own cars. They do not yet own the streets but as Toronto’s Quayside project suggests, the tech giants’ ambition is to control and exploit as much of our urban environment as possible. No wonder that the Barcelona project appears evangelical by contrast.
“Will data be controlled by big businesses, the State or by citizens? This is a key question for our digital future. What we need is a new social pact on data,” argues Bria.
Amsterdam and New York are two other great cities already examining how to emulate Barcelona as countervailing powers to the tech giants. Together they are promoting the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights to put citizens’ rights at the centre of their digital policies. The heft of many more municipalities is needed.
Rainer Kattel and Francesca Bria will be joined by Jaideep Gupte in our upcoming public lecture series in partnership with the British Library titled “Innovation and the Welfare State”, discussing how to bring the data economy back under democratic control. Learn more.
Rainer Kattel is deputy director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and recently presented a lecture as part of of our Rethinking Capitalism undergraduate module on “Governing the digital economy”. These lectures will be released weekly to the public. Follow us on YouTube for more or check this page weekly.
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