1. Early Democracy and the Materiality of Small-Scale Collective Choice

Early democracy was a system in which rulers governed jointly with councils or assemblies consisting of members who were independent from rulers and not subject to their whims. Sometimes such councils and assemblies would provide information, sometimes they would assist with governance directly. Sometimes councils and assemblies involved participation from large parts of the population (either directly or through delegation), sometimes councils were elite gatherings. Rulership might be elective or inherited. Its material conditions were such that early democracy would arise in smaller rather than larger polities, in polities where rulers depended on subjects for information about what they owned or produced and so could not tax without compliance, and where people had exit options. Under such conditions, rulers needed consent from parts of the population. Early democracy thus understood was common around the globe and not restricted to Greece, as the standard narrative has it.Footnote ⁸

However, what is special about Athens and other Greek democracies is that they were most extensively participatory. The reforms of Cleisthenes, in the sixth century BC, divided Athens into 139 demes (150 to 250 men each, women playing no political role) that formed ten artificial ‘tribes’. Demes in the same tribe did not inhabit the same region of Attica. Each tribe sent 50 men, randomly selected, for a year, to a Council of 500 to administer day-to-day affairs and prepare sessions of the Assembly of all citizens. This system fed knowledge and insights from all eligible males into collective decision making without positioning anyone for take-over.Footnote ⁹ It depended on production and defense patterns that enslaved people to enable parts of the population to attend to collective affairs. Transport and communication had to function to let citizens do their parts. This system also depended on a steady, high-volume circulation of people in and out of office to make governance impersonal, representative, and transparent at the same time. That flow required close bookkeeping to guarantee people were at the right place – which involved technical devices, the material ingredients of democratic governance.

Let me mention some of those. The kleroterion (allotment machine) was a two-by-three-foot slab of rock with a grid of deep, thin slots gouged into it. Integrating some additional pieces, this sophisticated device helped select the required number of men from each tribe for the Council, or for juries and committees where representation mattered. Officers carried allotment tokens – pieces of ceramics inscribed with pertinent information that fit with another piece at a secure location to be produced if credentials were questioned. (Athens was too large for everyone to be acquainted.) With speaking times limited, a water clock (klepsydra) kept time. Announcement boards recorded decisions or messages. For voting, juries used ballots, flat bronze disks. Occasionally, the Assembly considered expelling citizens whose prominence threatened the impersonal character of governance, ostracisms for which citizens carved names into potsherds. Aristotle argued that citizens assembled for deliberation could display virtue and wisdom no individual could muster, an argument for democracy resonant through the ages.Footnote ¹⁰ It took certain material objects to make it work. These objects were at the heart of Athenian democracy, devices in actor-networks to operationalize consent of the governed.Footnote ¹¹

2. Modern Democracy and the Materiality of Large-Scale Collective Choice

As a European invention, modern democracy is representative, with mandates that do not bind representatives to an electorate’s will. Representatives emerge from competitive elections under increasingly universal suffrage. Participation is broad but typically episodic. The material conditions for its existence resemble early democracy: they emerge where rulers need subjects to volunteer information and people have exit options. But modern democracies arise in large territories, as exemplified by the United States.Footnote ¹² Their territorial dimensions (and large populations) generate two legitimacy problems. First, modern democracy generates distrust because ‘state’ and ‘society’ easily remain abstract and distant. Secondly, there is the problem of overbearing executive power. Modern democracies require bureaucracies to manage day-to-day-affairs. Bureaucracies might generate their own dynamics, and eventually citizens no longer see themselves governing. If the head of the executive is elected directly, excessive executive power becomes personal power.Footnote ¹³

Modern democracy too depends on material features to function. Consider the United States. In 1787 and 1788, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, under the collective pseudonym ‘Publius’, published 85 articles and essays (‘Federalist Papers’) to promote the constitution. Hamilton calls the government the country’s ‘center of information’.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘Information’ and ‘communication’ matter greatly to Publius: the former term appears in nineteen essays, the latter in a dozen. For these advocates of this trailblazing system, the challenge is to find structures for disclosure and processing of pertinent information about the country. Publius thought members of Congress would bring information to the capital, after aggregating it in the states. But at the dawn of the Republic, the vastness of the territory made these challenges formidable. One historian described the communication situation as a ‘quarantine’ of government from society.Footnote ¹⁵ Improvements in postal services and changes in the newspaper business in the nineteenth century brought relief, facilitating the central role of media in modern democracies. Only such developments could turn modern democracies into actor-networks where representatives do not labor in de-facto isolation.Footnote ¹⁶

‘The aim of every political constitution is or ought to be first for rulers to obtain men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of society’, we read in Federalist No. 57.Footnote ¹⁷ To make this happen, in addition to a political culture where the right people seek office, voting systems are required, the design of which was left to states. Typically, what they devised barely resembled the orderliness of assigning people by means of the kleroterion. ‘Ballot’ comes from Italian ballotta (little ball), and ballots often were something small and round, like pebbles, peas, beans or bullets.Footnote ¹⁸ Paper ballots gradually spread, partly because they were easier to count than beans. Initially, voters had to bring paper and write down properly spelled names and offices. The rise of parties was facilitated by that of paper ballots. Party leaders printed ballots, often in newspapers – long strips, listing entire slates, or pages to be cut into pieces, one per candidate. Party symbols on ballots meant voters did not need to know how to write or read, an issue unknown when people voted by surrendering beans or by voice.

In 1856, the Australian state of Victoria passed its Electoral Act, detailing the conduct of elections. Officials had to print ballots and erect booths or hire rooms. Voters marked ballots secretly and nobody else was allowed in polling places. The ‘Australian ballot’ gradually spread, against much resistance. Officially, such resistance arose because it eliminated the public character of the vote that many considered essential to honorable conduct. But de facto there often was resistance because the Australian ballot made it hard for politicians to get people to vote for them in exchange for money (as such voting behavior then became hard to verify). In 1888, Massachusetts passed the first statewide Australian-ballot law in the United States. By 1896, most Americans cast secret, government-printed ballots. Such ballots also meant voters had to read, making voting harder for immigrants, formerly enslaved people, and the uneducated poor. Machines for casting and counting votes date to the 1880s. Machines could fail, or be manipulated, and the mechanics of American elections have remained contested ever since.

3. Democracy and Technology: Natural Allies?

The distant-state and overbearing-executive problems are so substantial that, for Stasavage, ‘modern democracy is an ongoing experiment, and in many ways, we should be surprised that it has worked at all.’Footnote ¹⁹ The alternative to democracy is autocracy, which is viable only if backed by competent bureaucracies. Stasavage argues that often advances in production and communication undermined early democracy. New or improved technologies could reduce information advantages of subjects over rulers, e.g., regarding fertility of land – if governments have ways of assessing the value of land, they know to tax it; if they do not, they have no good way of taxing it without informational input from the owners. Agricultural improvements led to people living closer together so bureaucrats could easily monitor them. Conversely, slow progress in science and development favored survival of early democracy.

Innovations in writing, mapping, measurement, or agriculture made bureaucracies more effective, and thus made autocracies with functioning bureaucracies the more viable. Much depends on sequencing. Entrenched democracies are less likely to be undermined by technological advances than polities where autocracy is a live option. And so, in principle, entrenched democracies these days could make good use of AI to enhance their functionality (and thus make AI a key part of the materiality of contemporary democracies). In China, the democratic alternative never gained much traction. In recent decades, the country made enormous strides under an autocratic system with a competent bureaucracy. Under Xi Jinping, China aggressively advertises its system, and AI has started to play a major role in it, especially in the surveillance of its citizens.Footnote ²⁰

Yuval Noah Harari recently offered a somewhat different view of the relationship between democracy and technology.Footnote ²¹ Historically, he argues, autocracies have faced handicaps around innovation and growth. In the late twentieth century especially, democracies outperformed dictatorships because they were better at processing information. Echoing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Harari thinks twentieth-century technology made it inefficient to concentrate information and power.Footnote ²² But Harari also insists that, at this stage, AI might altogether alter the relative efficiency of democracy vs. authoritarianism.

Stasavage and Harari agree that AI undermines conditions that make democracy the more viable system. This does not mean existing democracies are in imminent danger. In fact, it can only be via technology that individuals matter to politics in modern democracies in ways that solve the distant-state and overbearing-executive problems. Only through the right kind of deployment of modern democracy’s materiality could consent to governance be meaningful and ensure that governance in democracies does not mean quarantining leadership from population, as it did in the early days of the American Republic. As the twenty-first century progresses, AI could play a role in this process. Because history has repeatedly shown how technology strengthens autocracy, democrats must be vigilant vis-à-vis autocratic tendencies from within. Technology is indispensable to make modern democracy work, but it is not its natural ally. Much as in Winner’s infrastructure design, careful attention must be paid to ensure technology advances democratic purposes.Footnote ²³

1. Lewis Mumford and the Megamachine

Mumford was a leading critic of the machine age.Footnote ²⁵ His 1934 Technics and Civilization traces a veritable cult of the machine through Western history that often devastated creativity and independence of mind.Footnote ²⁶ He argues that ‘men had become mechanical before they perfected complicated machines to express their new bent and interest’.Footnote ²⁷ People had lived in coordinated ways (forming societal machines) and endorsed ideals of specialization, automation, and rationality before physical machines emerged. That they lived that way made people ready for physical machines. In the Middle Ages, mechanical clocks (whose relevance for changing life patterns Mumford tirelessly emphasizes) literally synchronized behavior.Footnote ²⁸

Decades later Mumford revisited these themes in his two-volume ‘Myth of the Machine.Footnote ²⁹ These works offer an even more sweeping narrative, characterizing modern doctrines of progress as scientifically upgraded justifications for practices the powerful had deployed since pharaonic times to maintain power. Ancient Egypt did machine work without actual machines.Footnote ³⁰ Redeploying his organizational understanding of machines, Mumford argues pyramids were built by machines – societal machines, centralized and subtly coordinated labor systems in which ideas like interchangeability of parts, centralization of knowledge, and regimentation of work are vital. The deified king, the pharaoh, is the chief engineer of this original megamachine. Today, the essence of industrialization is not even the large-scale use of machinery. It is the domination of technical knowledge by expert elites, and our structured way of organizing life. By the early twentieth century, the components of the contemporary megamachine were assembled, controlled by new classes of decision makers governing the ‘megatechnical wasteland’ (a dearth of creative thinking and possibilities in designing their own lives on the part of most people).Footnote ³¹ The ‘myth’ to be overcome is that this machine is irresistible but also beneficial to whoever complies.

Mumford stubbornly maintained faith in life’s rejuvenating capacities, even under the shadow of the megamachine. But clearly any kind of AI, and social organization in anticipation of general AI, harbors the dangers of streamlining the capacities of most people in society that Mumford saw at work since the dawn of civilization. This cannot bode well for governance based on meaningful consent.

2. Martin Heidegger and the World As Gestell

Heidegger’s most influential publication on technology is his 1953 ‘The Question Concerning Technology’.Footnote ³² Modern technology is the contemporary mode of understanding things. Technology makes things show up as mattering, one way or another. The mode of revealing (as Heidegger says) characteristic of modern technology sees everything around us as merely a standing-reserve (Bestand), resources to be exploited as means.Footnote ³³ This includes the whole natural world, even humans. In 1966, Heidegger even predicted that ‘someday factories will be built for the artificial breeding of human material’.Footnote ³⁴

Heidegger offers the example of a hydroelectric plant converting the Rhine into a mere supplier of waterpower.Footnote ³⁵ In contrast, a wooden bridge that has spanned the river for centuries reveals it as a natural environment and permits natural phenomena to appear as objects of wonder. Heidegger uses the term Gestell (enframing) to capture the relevance of technology in our lives.Footnote ³⁶ The prefix ‘Ge’ is about linking together of elements, like Gebirge, mountain range. Gestell is a linking together of things that are posited. The Gestell is a horizon of disclosure according to which everything registers only as a resource. Gestell deprives us of any ability to stand in caring relations to things. Strikingly, Heidegger points out that ‘the earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a material deposit’.Footnote ³⁷ Elsewhere he says the modern world reveals itself as a ‘gigantic petrol station’.Footnote ³⁸ Technology lets us relate to the world only in impoverished ways. Everything is interconnected and exchangeable, efficiency and optimization set the stage. Efficiency demands standardization and repetition. Technology saves us from having to develop skills while also turning us into people who are satisfied with lives that do not involve many skills.

For Heidegger, modern democracy with its materiality could only serve to administer the Gestell, and thus is part of the inauthentic life it imposes. His interpreter Hubert Dreyfus has shown how specifically the Internet exemplifies Heidegger’s concerns about technology as Gestell.Footnote ³⁹ As AI progresses, it would increasingly encapsulate Heidegger’s worries about how human possibilities vanish through the ways technology reveals things. Democracies that manage to integrate AI should be wary of such loss.

3. Herbert Marcuse and the Power of Entertainment Technology

Twentieth-century left-wing social thought needed to address why the revolution as Marx predicted it never occurred. A typical answer was that capitalism persevered by not merely dominating culture, but by deploying technology to develop a pervasive entertainment sector. The working class got mired in consumption habits that annihilated political instincts. But Marxist thought sustains the prospect that, if the right path were found, a revolution would occur. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin thought the emerging movie industry could help unite the masses in struggle, capitalism’s efforts at cultural domination notwithstanding. Shared movie experiences could allow people to engage the vast capitalist apparatus that intrudes upon their daily lives. Deployed the right way, this new type of art could help finish up capitalism after all.Footnote ⁴⁰

When Marcuse published his ‘One-Dimensional Man’ in 1964, such optimism about the entertainment sector had vanished. While he had not abandoned the Marxist commitment to the possibility of a revolution, Marcuse saw culture as authoritarian. Together, capitalism, technology, and entertainment culture created new forms of social control, false needs and a false consciousness around consumption. Their combined force locks one-dimensional man into one-dimensional society, which produces the need for people to recognize themselves in commodities. Powers of critical reflection decline. The working class can no longer operate as a subversive force capable of revolutionary change.

‘A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced civilization, a token of technical progress’, Marcuse starts off.Footnote ⁴¹ Technology – as used especially in entertainment, at which Benjamin still looked differently – immediately enters Marcuse’s reckoning with capitalism. It is ‘by virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, [that] contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian’.Footnote ⁴² He elaborates: ‘The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.’Footnote ⁴³ Today, Marcuse would bemoan that people see themselves in possibilities offered by AI.

4. Jacques Ellul and Technological Determinism

Ellul diagnoses a systemic technological tyranny over humanity. His most celebrated work on philosophy of technology is ‘The Technological Society’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the world Ellul describes, individuals factor into overall tendencies he calls ‘massification’. We might govern particular technologies and exercise agency by operating machines, building roads, or printing magazines. Nonetheless, technology overall – as a Durkheimian social fact that goes beyond any number of specific happenings – outgrows human control. Even as we govern techniques (a term Ellul uses broadly, almost synonymously with a rational, systematic approach, with physical machines being the paradigmatic products), they increasingly shape our activities. We adapt to their demands and structures. Ellul is famous for his thesis of the autonomy of technique, its being a closed system, ‘a reality in itself […] with its special laws and its own determinations.’ Technique elicits and conditions social, political, and economic change. It is the prime mover of all the rest, in spite of any appearances to the contrary and in spite of human pride, which pretends that man’s philosophical theories are still determining influences and man’s political regimes decisive factors in technical evolution.Footnote ⁴⁵

For example, industry and military began to adopt automated technology. One might think this process resulted from economic or political decisions. But for Ellul the sheer technical possibility provided all required impetus for going this way. Ellul is a technological determinist, but only for the modern age: technology, one way or another, causes all other aspects of society and culture. It does not have to be this way, and in the past it was not. But now, that is how it is.

Eventually, the state is inextricably intertwined with advancements of technique, as well as with corporations that produce machinery. The state no longer represents citizens if their interests contradict those advancements. Democracy fails, Ellul insists: we face a division between technicians, experts, and bureaucrats, standard bearers of techniques, on the one hand, and politicians who are supposed to represent the people and be accountable on the other. ‘When the technician has completed his task,’ Ellul says, ‘he indicates to the politicians the possible solutions and the probable consequences – and retires.’Footnote ⁴⁶ The technical class understands technique but is unaccountable. In his most chilling metaphor, Ellul concludes the world technique creates is ‘the universal concentration camp’.Footnote ⁴⁷ AI would perfect this trend.

1. Public Spheres

Public spheres are actor-networks to spread and receive information or opinions about matters of shared concern beyond family and friendship ties.Footnote ⁵⁵ Prior to the invention of writing, public spheres were limited to people talking. Their flourishing depended on availability of places where they could do so safely. The printing press mechanized exchange networks, dramatically lowering costs of disseminating information or ideas. Eventually, newspapers became so central to public spheres that the press and later the media collectively were called ‘the fourth estate’.Footnote ⁵⁶ After the newspapers and other printed media, there was the telegraph, then radio, film production, and television. Eventually, leading twentieth century media scholars coined slogans to capture the importance of media for contemporary life, most distinctly Marshall McLuhan announcing ‘the medium is the message’ and Friedrich Kittler stating ‘the media determine our situation’.Footnote ⁵⁷

‘Fourth estate’ is an instructive term. It highlights the relevance of the media, and the deference for the more prominent among them, as well as for particular journalists whose voices carry weight with the public. But the term also highlights that media have class interests of sorts: aside from legal regulations, journalists had demographic and educational backgrounds that generated certain agendas rather than others. The ascent of social media, enabled by the Internet, profoundly altered this situation, creating a public sphere where availability of information and viewpoints was no longer limited by ‘the fourth estate’. Big Tech companies have essentially undermined the point of referring to media that way.

In the Western world, Google became dominant in internet searches. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube offered platforms for direct exchanges among individuals and associations at a scale previously impossible. Political theorist Archon Fung refers to the kind of democracy that arose this way as ‘wide aperture, low deference democracy’: a much wider range of ideas and policies are explored than before, with traditional leaders in politics, media, or culture no longer treated with deference but ignored or distrusted.Footnote ⁵⁸ Not only did social media generate new possibilities for networking but also an abundance of data gathered and analyzed to predict trends or target people with messages for which data mining deems them receptive. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal – a British consulting firm obtaining personal data of millions of Facebook users without consent, to be used for political advertising – revealed the potential of data mining, especially for locations where elections tend to be won by small margins.Footnote ⁵⁹

Digital media have by now generated an online communications infrastructure that forms an important part of the public sphere, whose size and importance will only increase. This infrastructure consists of the paraphernalia and systems that make our digital lives happen, from the hardware of the Internet to institutions that control domain names and the software that maintains the functionality of the Internet and provides tools to make digital spaces usable (browsers, search engines, app stores, etc.). Today, private interests dominate our digital infrastructure. Typically, engineers and entrepreneurs ponder market needs, profiting from the fact that more and more of our lives unfolds on platforms optimized for clicks and virality.

Especially, news is presented to appeal to certain users, which not only creates echo-chambers but spreads a plethora of deliberate falsehoods (disinformation, rather than misinformation) to reinforce the worldviews of those users. Political scientists have long lamented the ignorance of democratic citizens and the resulting poor quality of public decision making.Footnote ⁶⁰ Even well-informed, engaged voters choose based on social identities and partisan loyalties.Footnote ⁶¹ Digital media reinforce these tendencies. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and competitors seek growth and revenue. Attention-grabbing algorithms of social media platforms can sow confusion, ignorance, prejudice, and chaos. AI tools then readily create artificial unintelligence.Footnote ⁶²

Having a public sphere where viewpoints can be articulated with authority recently became much harder through the emergence of deepfakes. Bringing photoshopping to video, deepfakes replace people in existing videos with someone else’s likeness. Currently their reach is mostly limited to pornography, but their potential goes considerably beyond that. In recent decades, video has played a distinguished role in inquiry. What was captured on film served as indisputable evidence, in ways photography no longer could after manipulation techniques became widespread. Until the arrival of deepfakes, videos offered an ‘epistemic backstop’ in contested testimony.Footnote ⁶³ Alongside other synthetic media and fake news, deepfakes might help create no-trust societies where people no longer bother to separate truth from falsehood, and no media help them do so.

What is needed to countermand such tendencies is the creation of what media scholar Ethan Zuckerman calls ‘digital public infrastructure’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Digital public infrastructure lets us engage in public and civic life in digital spaces, with norms and affordances designed around civic values. Figuratively speaking, designing digital public infrastructure is like creating parks and libraries for the Internet. They are devised to inform us, structured to connect us to both people we agree with and people we disagree with, and encourage dialogue rather than simply reinforcing perceptions. As part of the design of such infrastructures, synthetic media must be integrated appropriately, in ways that require clear signaling of how they are put together. People would operate within such infrastructures also in ways that protect their entitlements as knowers and knowns, their epistemic rights.Footnote ⁶⁵

One option is to create a fleet of localized, community-specific, public-serving institutions to serve the functions in digital space that community institutions have met for centuries in physical places. There must be some governance model, so this fleet serves the public. Wikipedia’s system of many editors and authors or Taiwan’s digital democracy platform provide inspiring models for decentralized participatory governance.Footnote ⁶⁶ Alternatively, governments could create publicly funded nonprofit corporations to manage and maintain the public’s interest in digital life. Specialized AI would be front and center to such work. Properly designed digital public infrastructures would be like Winner’s inclusive traffic infrastructures and could greatly help solve the distant-state and overbearing-executive problems.

2. Political Power

As far as use of AI for maintenance of power is concerned, the Chinese social credit system – a broadly-based system for gathering information about individuals and bringing that information to bear on what people may do – illustrates how autocratic regimes avail themselves of technological advances.Footnote ⁶⁷ Across the world, cyberspace has become a frequent battleground between excessively profit-seeking or outright criminal activities and overly strong state reactions to them. By now many tools exists that help governments rein in such activities, but those same tools then also help authoritarians oppress political activities.Footnote ⁶⁸ While most mass protests in recent years, from Hong Kong to Algeria and Lebanon, were inspired by hashtags, coordinated through social networks and convened by smartphones, governments have learned how to countermand such movements. They control online spaces by blocking platforms and disrupting the Internet.Footnote ⁶⁹

In his 1961 farewell speech, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned against acquisition of unwarranted influence ‘by the military-industrial complex’ and against public policy becoming ‘captive of a scientific-technological elite’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Those interconnected dangers would be incompatible with a flourishing democracy. Eisenhower spoke only years after the Office of Naval Research had partly funded the first Summer Research Project on AI at Dartmouth in 1956, and thereby indicated that the military-industrial complex had a stake in this technology developed by the scientific-technological elite.Footnote ⁷¹ Decades later, the 2013 Snowden revelations showed what US intelligence could do with tools we can readily classify as specialized AI. Phones, social media platforms, email, and browsers serve as data sources for the state. Analyzing meta-data (who moved where, connected to whom, read what) provides insights into operations of groups and activities of individuals. Private-sector partnerships have considerably enhanced capacities of law enforcement and military to track people (also involving facial, gait, and voice recognition), from illegal immigrants at risk of deportation to enemies targeted for killing.Footnote ⁷²

Where AI systems are deployed as part of the welfare state, they often surveil people and restrict access to resources, rather than providing greater support.Footnote ⁷³ Secret databases and little-known AI applications have had harmful effects in finance, business, education, and politics. AI-based decisions on parole, mortgages, or job applications are often opaque and biased in ways that are hard to detect. Democratic ideals require reasons and explanations, but the widespread use of opaque and biased algorithms has prompted one observer to call societies that make excessive use of algorithms ‘black-box societies’.Footnote ⁷⁴ If algorithms do things humans find hard to assess, it is unclear what would even count as relevant explanations. Such practices readily perpetuate past injustice. After all, data inevitably reflect how people have been faring so far. Thus, they reflect the biases, including racial biases, that have structured exercises of power.Footnote ⁷⁵ Decades ago Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, a classic at the intersection of feminist thought and the philosophy of technology, warned the digital age might sustain white capitalist patriarchy with ‘informatics of domination’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Of course, digital technologies can strengthen democracy. In 2011, Iceland produced the first-ever ‘crowdsourced’ constitutional proposal in the world. In Taiwan, negotiations among authorities, citizens, and companies like Uber and Airbnb were aided by an innovative digital process for deliberative governance called vTaiwan. France relied on digital technologies for the Great National Debate in early 2019 and the following Convention on Climate Change between October 2019 and June 2020, experimenting with deliberation at the scale of a large nation.Footnote ⁷⁷ Barcelona has become a global leader in the smart city movement, deploying digital technology for matters of municipal governance,Footnote ⁷⁸ though it is Singapore, Helsinki, and Zurich that do best on the Smart City Index 2020 (speaking to the fact of how much innovation goes on in that domain).Footnote ⁷⁹ An Australian, non-profit, eDemocracy project, openforum.com.au, invites politicians, senior administrators, academics, businesspeople, and other stakeholders to engage in policy debates. The California Report Card is a mobile-optimized web application promoting public involvement in state government. As the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the world, democracies availed themselves of digital technologies to let people remain connected and serve as key components of public health surveillance. And while civil society organizations frequently are no match for abusive state power, there are remarkable examples of how even investigations limited to open internet sources can harvest the abundance of available data to pillory abuse of power. The best-known example is the British investigative journalism website Bellingcat that specializes in fact-checking and open-source intelligence.Footnote ⁸⁰

One striking fact specifically about the American version of modern democracy is that, when preferences of low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, there is virtually no correlation between policy outcomes and desires of the less advantaged groups.Footnote ⁸¹ As far as political power is concerned, the legitimacy of modern democracy is questionable indeed. Democracy could be strengthened considerably by well-designed AI. Analyzing databases would give politicians a more precise image of what citizens need. The bandwidth of communication between voters and politicians could increase immensely. Some forms of surveillance will be necessary, but democratic governance requires appropriate oversight. The digital public infrastructure discussed in the context of the public sphere can be enriched to include systems that deploy AI for improving citizen services. The relevant know-how exists.Footnote ⁸²

3. Economic Power

Contemporary ideals of democracy include egalitarian empowerment of sorts. But economic inequality threatens any such empowerment. Contemporary democracies typically have capitalist economies. As French economist Thomas Piketty has argued, over time capitalism generates inequality because, roughly speaking, owners of shares of the economy benefit more from it than people living on the wages the owners willingly pay.Footnote ⁸³ A worry about democracy across history (also much on the mind of Publius) has been that masses would expropriate elites. But in capitalist democracies, we must worry about the opposite. It takes sustained policies around taxation, transportation, design of cities, healthcare, digital infrastructure, pension and education systems, and macro-economic and monetary policies to curtail inequality.

One concern about AI is that, generally, the ability to produce or use technology is one mechanism that drives inequality, enabling those with requisite skills to advance – which enables them not only to become well-off but to become owners in the economy in ways that resonate across generations. Technology generally and AI specifically are integral parts of the inequality-enhancing mechanisms Piketty identifies. One question is how the inequality-increasing tendencies play out for those who are not among the clear winners. AI will profoundly transform jobs, at least because aspects of many jobs will be absorbed by AI or otherwise mechanized. These changes also create new jobs, including at the lower end, in the maintenance of the hardware and the basic tasks around data gathering and analysis.Footnote ⁸⁴ On the optimistic side of predictions about the future of work, we find visions of society with traditional jobs gradually transformed, some eliminated and new jobs added – in ways that create much more leisure time for the average people, owing to increased societal wealth.

On the pessimistic side, many who are unqualified for meaningful roles in tech economies might be dispensable to the labor force. Their political relevance might eventually amount to little more than that they must be pacified if they cannot be excluded outright. Lest this standpoint be dismissed as Luddite alarmism (‘at the end of the tunnel, there have always been more jobs than before’), we should note that economies where data ownership becomes increasingly relevant and AI absorbs many tasks could differ critically from economies organized around ownership of land or factories. In those earlier cases large numbers of people were needed to provide labor, in the latter case also as consumers. Elites could not risk losing too many laborers. But this constraint might not apply in the future. To be sure, a lot here will depend on how questions around control over, or ownership of, data are resolved, questions whose relevance for our future economy cannot be overstated.Footnote ⁸⁵

As recently argued by Shoshana Zuboff, the importance of data collection for the economy has become so immense that the term ‘surveillance capitalism’ characterizes the current stage of capitalism.Footnote ⁸⁶ Surveillance capitalism as an economic model was developed by Google, which to surveillance capitalism is what Ford was to mass production. Later, the model was adopted by Facebook, Amazon, and others. Previously, data were collected largely to improve services. But subsequently, data generated as byproducts of interactions with multifarious devices were deployed to develop predictive products, designed to forecast what we will feel, think, or do, but ultimately also to control and change it, always for the sake of monetization. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified increasing commodification as a basic mechanism of capitalism (though they did not use that very term). Large-scale data collection is its maximal version: It commodifies all our lived reality.

In the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt and others diagnosed mechanisms of ‘totalitarian’ power, the state’s all-encompassing power.Footnote ⁸⁷ Its central metaphor is Big Brother, capturing the state’s omnipresence. Parallel to that, Zuboff talks about ‘instrumentarian’ power, exercised through use of electronic devices in social settings for harvesting profits. The central metaphor is the ‘Big Other’, the ever-present electronic device that knows just what to do. Big Brother aimed for total control, Big Other for predictive certainty.

Current changes are driven by relatively few companies, which futurist Amy Webb calls ‘the Big Nine’: in the US, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Apple, in China Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.Footnote ⁸⁸ At least at the time of Webb’s writing, the Chinese companies were busy consolidating and mining massive amounts of data to serve the government’s ambitions; the American ones implemented surveillance capitalism, embedded into a legal and political framework that, as of 2021, shows little interest in developing strategic plans for a democratic future and thus do for democracy what the Chinese Communist party did for its system – upgrade it into this century. To be sure, the EU is more involved in such efforts. But none of the Big Nine are based there, and overall, the economic competition in the tech sector seems to be ever more between the United States and China.

The optimistic side of predictions about the future of work seems reachable. But to make that happen in ways that also strengthen democracy, both civil society and the state must step up, and the enormous power concentrated in Big Tech companies needs to be harnessed for democratic purposes.