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The Silver Bullet

Webster's 2016 word of the year was xenophobia. This is damning statement of our current social environment, and sits in striking comparison to word of the year 2014 which was culture. We find ourselves in a turbulent time, where answers seem hard to find, and society more unpredictable than ever.

Technology gets positioned within this discourses in many different ways, often in contrast as either a problem or the solution. Those attributing technology as the cause of various social and environmental problems are fast becoming the minority, but they are being replaced with equally matched enthusiasm by technology evangelists who consider technology as the solution to our problems.

For this generation and the ones that follow, technology takes a central role in our everyday lives. Thus the promise of an egalitarian future through technology is one that we are enthusiastic to embrace. And, as an early technology adopter, I also have a keen interest in how technology could empower the down trodden, open up new forms of democracy, movement, social interaction and understanding.

This has lead me to start an investigation into how our technological geography hopes to improve our environmental and social one. Through this essay I will examine some of the social issues that concern our society today, their origins, and some of the technological solutions that people have proposed. In doing so I hope to touch on the difficulties of the technological solution, and reflect on the often zealous enthusiasm for a technological silver bullet.

The Protagonists

During the course of my investigation, I was drawn to a wide range of different issues in which technology played, or is proposed to play an important role. The following protagonists were picked solely as personal topics of interest, but out of which reoccurring themes, some of which were not immediately obvious, started to surface.

Democracy

Initial research brought me to the book Citizen Lobby by Leif Olsen.

It is widely agreed among researches, politicians and citizens alike, that our current democratic systems are not sufficiently meeting their promise of accurate representation. No better example can be used than that of the most recent US election where multi-million dollar businessman Donald Trump was elected the 45th president, despite a majority of the population voting otherwise. In Leif Olsen's book Citizen Lobby, a new system for democratic policy making and citizen representation is proposed to better approach our technologically interconnected world in times of capitalistic society.

In 2013 the UN held the 128th Annual Assembly in which it covered "The use of media, including social media, to enhance citizen engagement and democracy" and in particular the qualities social media has in bridging the gap between citizens and their representatives. They concluded that citizens would not only have a closer relationship with their representative government, but also be able to monitor and contribute directly to the decision making process.

In Leif's research he identifies in which ways our current democratic system falls short in representing the wider populace. One of which is the imbalance between institutional lobbies and grass roots movements formed by (often special interest) groups of citizens. In our current democratic model, and also according to Colin Crouch's book Post-Democracy, current policy development favours economic stability rather than the considerations of its citizens. An institutional lobby has far more power in comparison to citizen based movements, as businesses have hard quantifiable gains and losses which are closely recorded and monitored, and furthermore can be accurately predicted.

Leif also identifies the difficulties in representing vastly diverse communities, in which manifests segregating policy criteria built around racial, religious or tribal clusters. These are policies in which calculations of risk in regards to loyalty, over political criteria take precedent. It is evermore obvious that parties are promoting themselves around these segregating criteria, as demonstrated in the rise of anti-immigration parties throughout the west, but also more subtly wherein a political policy making is motivated by religious or socioeconomic affiliations.

Our social structure gets ever more complex, and demands then a re-evaluation of the concept of our global society. So then, as an alternative, the concept of a Glocal society is presented. The idea that rather than the terms global and local being antonyms, they are in fact "a range of complementary meanings" and inhabit the same space. Glocal thought then is acting in a local sphere which in turn has global result, or visa-versa.

Finally, the plight of democracy itself, that of inclusion. It has been widely acknowledged that efforts to develop multicultural societies within our current systems have failed. Both Angela Merkel (Aljazeera 2010) and David Cameron (Aljazeera 2011) have admitted on record this very fact. This then gives rise to segregation politics, political rhetoric that encourages exclusion, and therefore an ever growing need for a participative democracy.

It would appear that the internet then provides us with the perfect platform for us to easily engage with our representatives, them with us, affect policy change more directly and thus be better represented. Although to the same end, the institutional lobby wields ever greater power in this area too. As the UN had hoped between representative and citizen, in the same fashion business is directly influencing their customer base in regards to policy to improve their political position. Even though it may seem that this is balanced by independent online news organisations, political movements, and bloggers, in comparison to the political process, debate is often short lived. Often serious discussion is quickly replaced by general opinion sharing, and fail to ever materialise in the political spectrum.

Where successes are gained in online debate, it is often again local to a specific cause that resonates particularly with the online cluster. Leif gives the example of the SOPA-PIPA debate in the US in where the online community came together in regards to the intellectual rights guiding the use of the internet. In this case you see that the local pertains to the internet community, the concern was specialist and thus the debate was sustained long enough to make it into the political sphere.

Leif chooses to remodel the democratic system, on the basis that the primary failing point is the balance between the institutional lobby and the citizens collective voice. He suggests the implementation of a mandatory, yearly, month long series of meetings, in which (much like that of jury duty) citizens are randomly selected and required to meet at their local university, school, or public hall, to discuss the current state of policy. It is noted that the citizen lobby (as Leif coins it) is not a decision making body, but a advisory one in that it opens direct dialogue between citizens as a whole and their local representative, who in turn will have a voice to propose, alter, argue policiy ideas.. Furthermore the analysis of policy suggestions is aided by "educated" advisers and moderators who are required to have a Master's level in their respective field. Physical attendance is mandatory for a designated minimum of time, which can be supplemented by online engagement.

On entering into this new idea of democracy with an enforced participatory model, one is enthusiastic on the claims that this will balance the voice of citizens, to that of the institutional lobby, returning the representation of government back to the people and their needs. It is fair to say that Leif realises the limitations of technology and suggests that the only way to have invested participation is to have physical engagement. However it is in his earlier chapters that interesting points were made in regards to cross cultural identity, and the choice to remove meta-local issues from the (seemingly only) local democratic debate. Despite criticising the political theorist Habermas's claims that it is possible to create consensus based on universally accepted morals, and that segregation politics is to be avoided, he fails to suggest any possibilities to address the wide cultural variance of people in local communities. Furthermore, despite identifying a new online elite class emerging, he chooses to re-enforce a standard of the academic elite as fonts of knowledge in which society should rely.

The Rub

It is these points that triggered many further questions about culture, identity and technology. From here we need to start and investigate the history of our current paradigm of identity, nation, its interaction with virtual identity, geography, and how capitalism and the online institutional lobby politically and socially affect us. To further my research I want to investigate the history of the passport, big data, algorithms, the block-chain, and examine how our societies intermingle within them.