The Tech Coup

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Marietje Schaake: “Over the past decades, under the cover of “innovation,” technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality—where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world—is terrible news for democracies and citizens.
In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies—from social media to artificial intelligence—have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can—and must—resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world.

Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world—and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late…(More)”.

Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Nicol Turner Lee: “President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that the United States would close the digital divide under his leadership. However, the divide still affects people and communities across the country. The complex and persistent reality is that millions of residents live in digital deserts, and many more face disproportionate difficulties when it comes to getting and staying online, especially people of color, seniors, rural residents, and farmers in remote areas.

Economic and health disparities are worsening in rural communities without available internet access. Students living in urban digital deserts with little technology exposure are ill prepared to compete for emerging occupations. Even seniors struggle to navigate the aging process without access to online information and remote care.

In this book, Nicol Turner Lee, a leading expert on the American digital divide, uses personal stories from individuals around the country to show how the emerging digital underclass is navigating the spiraling online economy, while sharing their joys and hopes for an equitable and just future.

Turner Lee argues that achieving digital equity is crucial for the future of America’s global competitiveness and requires radical responses to offset the unintended consequences of increasing digitization. In the end, “Digitally Invisible” proposes a pathway to more equitable access to existing and emerging technologies, while encouraging readers to weigh in on this shared goal…(More)”.

The Department of Everything

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stephen Akey: “How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me.

From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing…(More)”.

Kenya’s biggest protest in recent history played out on a walkie-talkie app

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stephanie Wangari: “Betty had never heard of the Zello app until June 18.

But as she participated in Kenya’s “GenZ protests” that month — one of the biggest in the country’s history — the app became her savior.

On Zello, “we were getting updates and also updating others on where the tear-gas canisters were being lobbed and which streets had been cordoned off,” Betty, 27, told Rest of World, requesting to be identified by a pseudonym as she feared backlash from the police. “At one point, I also alerted the group [about] suspected undercover investigative officers who were wearing balaclavas.”

The speed of communicating over Zello made it the primary tool to mobilize crowds and coordinate logistics during the protests. Stephanie Wangari

Nairobi witnessed massive protests in June as thousands of young Kenyans came out on the streets against a proposed bill that would increase taxes on staple foods and other essential goods and services. At least 39 people were killed, 361 were injured, and more than 335 were arrested by the police during the protests, according to human rights groups.

Amid the mayhem, Zello, an app developed by U.S. engineer Alexey Gavrilov in 2007, became the primary tool for protestors to communicate, mobilize crowds, and coordinate logistics. Six protesters told Rest of World that Zello, which allows smartphones to be used as walkie-talkies, helped them find meeting points, evade the police, and alert each other to potential dangers. 

Digital services experts and political analysts said the app helped the protests become one of the most effective in the country’s history.

According to Herman Manyora, a political analyst and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, mobilization had always been the greatest challenge in organizing previous protests in Kenya. The ability to turn their “phones into walkie-talkies” made the difference for protesters, he told Rest of World.

“The government realized that the young people were able to navigate technological challenges. You switch off one app, such as [X], they move to another,” Manyora said.

Zello was downloaded over 40,000 times on the Google Play store in Kenya between June 17 and June 25, according to data from the company. This was “well above our usual numbers,” a company spokesperson told Rest of World. Zello did not respond to additional requests for comment…(More)“

Increasing The “Policy Readiness” Of Ideas

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Tom Kalil: “NASA and the Defense Department have developed an analytical framework called the “technology readiness level” for assessing the maturity of a technology – from basic research to a technology that is ready to be deployed.  

A policy entrepreneur (anyone with an idea for a policy solution that will drive positive change) needs to realize that it is also possible to increase the “policy readiness” level of an idea by taking steps to increase the chances that a policy idea is successful, if adopted and implemented.  Given that policy-makers are often time constrained, they are more likely to consider ideas where more thought has been given to the core questions that they may need to answer as part of the policy process.

A good first step is to ask questions about the policy landscape surrounding a particular idea:

1. What is a clear description of the problem or opportunity?  What is the case for policymakers to devote time, energy, and political capital to the problem?

2. Is there a credible rationale for government involvement or policy change?  

Economists have developed frameworks for both market failure (such as public goods, positive and negative externalities, information asymmetries, and monopolies) and government failure (such as regulatory capture, the role of interest groups in supporting policies that have concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, limited state capacity, and the inherent difficulty of aggregating timely, relevant information to make and implement policy decisions.)

3. Is there a root cause analysis of the problem? …(More)”.

What does a ‘mission-driven’ approach to government mean and how can it be delivered?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Institute for Government and Nesta: “… set out a recommended approach for how government could effectively organise itself to deliver missions. It should act as a guide for public servants at the start of a new administration that has pledged to do things differently.

Missions are designed to set bold visions for change, inspiring collaboration across the system and society to break down silos and work towards a common goal. They represent the ultimate purpose of the Government, and the story it aims to tell by the end of the Parliament.

To succeed, government will need to adopt three key roles: driving public service innovation, shaping markets and harnessing collective intelligence to improve decision-making. Achieving these missions will require strong foundations and well-recognised enablers of good government, pursued in a specific manner to bring about a cultural change in Whitehall…(More)”.

Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alexander A. Guerrero: “It is widely accepted that electoral representative democracy is better — along a number of different normative dimensions — than any other alternative lawmaking political arrangement. It is not typically seen as much of a competition: it is also widely accepted that the only legitimate alternative to electoral representative democracy is some form of direct democracy, but direct democracy — we are told — would lead to bad policy. This article makes the case that there is a legitimate alternative system — one that uses lotteries, not elections, to select political officials — that would be better than electoral representative democracy. Part I diagnoses two significant failings of modern-day systems of electoral representative government: the failure of responsiveness and the failure of good governance. The argument offered suggests that these flaws run deep, so that even significant and politically unlikely reforms with respect to campaign finance and election law would make little difference. Although my distillation of the argument is novel, the basic themes will likely be familiar. I anticipate the initial response to the argument may be familiar as well: the Churchillian shrug. Parts II, III, and IV of this article represent the beginning of an effort to move past that response, to think about alternative political systems that might avoid some of the problems with the electoral representative system without introducing new and worse problems. In the second and third parts of the article, I outline an alternative political system, the lottocratic system, and present some of the virtues of such a system. In the fourth part of the article, I consider some possible problems for the system. The overall aims of this article are to raise worries for electoral systems of government, to present the lottocratic system and to defend the view that this system might be a normatively attractive alternative, removing a significant hurdle to taking a non-electoral system of government seriously as a possible improvement to electoral democracy…(More)”

Finding, distinguishing, and understanding overlooked policy entrepreneurs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gwen Arnold, Meghan Klasic, Changtong Wu, Madeline Schomburg & Abigail York: “Scholars have spent decades arguing that policy entrepreneurs, change agents who work individually and in groups to influence the policy process, can be crucial in introducing policy innovation and spurring policy change. How to identify policy entrepreneurs empirically has received less attention. This oversight is consequential because scholars trying to understand when policy entrepreneurs emerge, and why, and what makes them more or less successful, need to be able to identify these change agents reliably and accurately. This paper explores the ways policy entrepreneurs are currently identified and highlights issues with current approaches. We introduce a new technique for eliciting and distinguishing policy entrepreneurs, coupling automated and manual analysis of local news media and a survey of policy entrepreneur candidates. We apply this technique to the empirical case of unconventional oil and gas drilling in Pennsylvania and derive some tentative results concerning factors which increase entrepreneurial efficacy…(More)”.

The Digital Economy Report 2024

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by UNCTAD: “…underscores the urgent need for environmentally sustainable and inclusive digitalization strategies.

Digital technology and infrastructure depend heavily on raw materials, and the production and disposal of more and more devices, along with growing water and energy needs are taking an increasing toll on the planet.

For example, the production and use of digital devices, data centres and information and communications technology (ICT) networks account for an estimated 6% to 12% of global electricity use.

Developing countries bear the brunt of the environmental costs of digitalization while reaping fewer benefits. They export low value-added raw materials and import high value-added devices, along with increasing digital waste. Geopolitical tensions over critical minerals, abundant in many of these countries, complicate the challenges.

The report calls for bold action from policymakers, industry leaders and consumers. It urges a global shift towards a circular digital economy, focusing on circularity by design through durable products, responsible consumption, reuse and recycling, and sustainable business models…(More)”.

Fixing frictions: ‘sludge audits’ around the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Governments worldwide are increasingly adopting behavioural science methodologies to address “sludge” – the unjustified frictions impeding people’ access to government services and exacerbating psychological burdens. Sludge audits, grounded in behavioural science, provide a structured approach for identifying, quantifying, and preventing sludge in public services and government processes. This document delineates Good Practice Principles, derived from ten case studies conducted during the International Sludge Academy, aimed at promoting the integration of sludge audit methodologies into public governance and service design. By enhancing government efficiency and bolstering public trust in government, these principles contribute to the broader agenda on administrative simplification, digital services, and public sector innovation…(More)”.