On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Lee McIntyre: “The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation, Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre explains how autocrats wield disinformation to manipulate a populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread, and most importantly, how we can win the war on truth.

McIntyre takes readers through the history of strategic denialism to show how we arrived at this precarious political moment and identifies the creators, amplifiers, and believers of disinformation. Along the way, he also demonstrates how today’s “reality denial” follows the same flawed blueprint of the “five steps of science denial” used by climate deniers and anti-vaxxers; shows how Trump has emulated disinformation tactics created by Russian and Soviet intelligence dating back to the 1920s; provides interviews with leading experts on information warfare, counterterrorism, and political extremism; and spells out the need for algorithmic transparency from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On Disinformation lays out ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens—from resisting polarization to pressuring our Congresspeople to regulate social media—as well as the important steps our government (if we elect the right leaders) must take.

Compact, easy-to-read (and then pass on to a friend), and never more urgent, On Disinformation does nothing less than empower us with the tools and knowledge needed to save our republic from autocracy before it is too late…(More)”.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Anu Bradford: “The global battle among the three dominant digital powers—the United States, China, and the European Union—is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires, her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape the world in the decades to come.

Across the globe, people dependent on digital technologies have become increasingly alarmed that their rapid adoption and transformation have ushered in an exceedingly concentrated economy where a few powerful companies control vast economic wealth and political power, undermine data privacy, and widen the gap between economic winners and losers. In response, world leaders are variously embracing the idea of reining in the most dominant tech companies. Bradford examines three competing regulatory approaches—the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model—and discusses how governments and tech companies navigate the inevitable conflicts that arise when these regulatory approaches collide in the international domain. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear.

Digital societies are at an inflection point. In the midst of these unfolding regulatory battles, governments, tech companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society. Digital Empires lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explains the forces that shape those choices, and illuminates the immense stakes involved for everyone who uses digital technologies….(More)”

The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Igor Tulchinsky and Christopher E. Mason: “… about two powerful, and symbiotic, trends: the rapid development and use of artificial intelligence and big data to enhance prediction, as well as the often paradoxical effects of these better predictions on our understanding of risk and the ways we live. Beginning with dramatic advances in quantitative investing and precision medicine, this book explores how predictive technology is quietly reshaping our world in fundamental ways, from crime fighting and warfare to monitoring individual health and elections.

As prediction grows more robust, it also alters the nature of the accompanying risk, setting up unintended and unexpected consequences. The Age of Prediction details how predictive certainties can bring about complacency or even an increase in risks—genomic analysis might lead to unhealthier lifestyles or a GPS might encourage less attentive driving. With greater predictability also comes a degree of mystery, and the authors ask how narrower risks might affect markets, insurance, or risk tolerance generally. Can we ever reduce risk to zero? Should we even try? This book lays an intriguing groundwork for answering these fundamental questions and maps out the latest tools and technologies that power these projections into the future, sometimes using novel, cross-disciplinary tools to map out cancer growth, people’s medical risks, and stock dynamics…(More)”.

The Design of Digital Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Gianluca Sgueo: “Ever-stronger ties between technology, entertainment and design are transforming our relationship with democratic decision-making. When we are online, or when we use digital products and services, we tend to focus more on certain factors like speed of service and user-friendliness, and to overlook the costs – both for ourselves and others. As a result, a widening gap separates our expectations of everything related to digitalization – including government – and the actual practice of democratic governance. Democratic regulators, unable to meet citizens’ demands for tangible, fast and gratifying returns, are seeing the poorest results ever recorded in terms of interest, engagement and retention, despite using the most cutting-edge technologies.

This book explores various aspects of the relationship between democracy, technology and entertainment. These include, on the one hand, the role that digital technology has in strengthening our collective intelligence, nurturing empathic relations between citizens and democratic institutions, and supporting processes of political aggregation, deliberation and collaboration. On the other hand, they comprise the challenges accompanying digital technology for representation, transparency and inclusivity in democratic decision-making.

The book’s main argument is that digital democratic spaces should be redesigned to narrow the gap between the expectations and outcomes of democratic decision-making. It suggests abandoning the notion of digital participatory rights as being fast and easy to enjoy. It also refutes the notion that digital democratic decision-making can only be effective when it delivers rapid and successful responses to the issues of the day, regardless of their complexity.

Ultimately, the success or failure of digital democracy will depend on the ability of public regulators to design digital public spaces with a commitment to complexity, so as to make them appealing, but also effective at engaging citizens…(More)”.

The Legal Singularity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie: “…argue that the proliferation of artificial intelligence–enabled technology – and specifically the advent of legal prediction – is on the verge of radically reconfiguring the law, our institutions, and our society for the better.

Revealing the ways in which our legal institutions underperform and are expensive to administer, the book highlights the negative social consequences associated with our legal status quo. Given the infirmities of the current state of the law and our legal institutions, the silver lining is that there is ample room for improvement. With concerted action, technology can help us to ameliorate the problems of the law and improve our legal institutions. Inspired in part by the concept of the “technological singularity,” The Legal Singularity presents a future state in which technology facilitates the functional “completeness” of law, where the law is at once extraordinarily more complex in its specification than it is today, and yet operationally, the law is vastly more knowable, fairer, and clearer for its subjects. Aidid and Alarie describe the changes that will culminate in the legal singularity and explore the implications for the law and its institutions…(More)”.

Tyranny of the Minority

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?

With the clarity and brilliance that made their first book, How Democracies Die, a global bestseller, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a coherent framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind.

In this revelatory book, Levitsky and Ziblatt issue an urgent call to reform our politics. It’s a daunting task, but we have remade our country before—most notably, after the Civil War and during the Progressive Era. And now we are at a crossroads: America will either become a multiracial democracy or cease to be a democracy at all…(More)”.

A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Antón Barba-Kay: “There no longer seems any point to criticizing the internet. We indulge in the latest doom-mongering about the evils of social media-on social media. We scroll through routine complaints about the deterioration of our attention spans. We resign ourselves to hating the internet even as we spend much of our waking lives with it. Yet our unthinking surrender to its effects-to the ways it recasts our aims and desires-is itself digital technology’s most powerful achievement. A Web of Our Own Making examines how online practices are reshaping our lives outside our notice. Barba-Kay argues that digital technology is a ‘natural technology’-a technology so intuitive as to conceal the extent to which it transforms our attention. He shows how and why this technology is reconfiguring knowledge, culture, politics, aesthetics, and theology. The digital revolution is primarily taking place not in Silicon Valley but within each of us…(More)”.

Public Policy and Technological Transformations in Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Gedion Onyango: “This book examines the links between public policy and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technological developments in Africa. It broadly assesses three key areas – policy entrepreneurship, policy tools and citizen participation – in order to better understand the interfaces between public policy and technological transformations in African countries. The book presents incisive case studies on topics including AI policies, mobile money, e-budgeting, digital economy, digital agriculture and digital ethical dilemmas in order to illuminate technological proliferation in African policy systems. Its analysis considers the broader contexts of African state politics and governance. It will appeal to students, instructors, researchers and practitioners interested in governance and digital transformations in developing countries…(More)”.

Philosophy of Open Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sabina Leonelli: “The Open Science [OS] movement aims to foster the wide dissemination, scrutiny and re-use of research components for the good of science and society. This Element examines the role played by OS principles and practices within contemporary research and how this relates to the epistemology of science. After reviewing some of the concerns that have prompted calls for more openness, it highlights how the interpretation of openness as the sharing of resources, so often encountered in OS initiatives and policies, may have the unwanted effect of constraining epistemic diversity and worsening epistemic injustice, resulting in unreliable and unethical scientific knowledge. By contrast, this Element proposes to frame openness as the effort to establish judicious connections among systems of practice, predicated on a process-oriented view of research as a tool for effective and responsible agency…(More)”.

De Gruyter Handbook of Citizens’ Assemblies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Min Reuchamps, Julien Vrydagh and Yanina Welp: “Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) are flourishing around the world. Quite often composed of randomly selected citizens, CAs, arguably, come as a possible answer to contemporary democratic challenges. Democracies worldwide are indeed confronted with a series of disruptive phenomena such as a widespread perception of distrust and growing polarization as well as low performance. Many actors seek to reinvigorate democracy with citizen participation and deliberation. CAs are expected to have the potential to meet this twofold objective. But, despite deliberative and inclusive qualities of CAs, many questions remain open. The increasing popularity of CAs call for a holistic reflection and evaluation on their origins, current uses and future directions.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Citizens’ Assemblies showcases the state of the art around the study of CAs and opens novel perspectives informed by multidisciplinary research and renewed thinking about deliberative participatory processes. It discusses the latest theoretical, empirical, and methodological scientific developments on CAs and offers a unique resource for scholars, decision-makers, practitioners, and curious citizens to better understand the qualities, purposes, promises but also pitfalls of CAs…(More)”.