The Design of Digital Democracy (Springer Textbooks in Law) 3031369459, 9783031369452

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introductory Remarks. When Did We Start Caring About Digital Aesthetics?
1.1 Technology, Entertainment and Design
1.2 Technological Progress and Social Interactions
1.3 Design-Thinking, Innovation and Experimentalism in Public Policy
1.4 The Aesthetics of Digital Democratic Governance
1.5 The Structure of the Volume
References
Chapter 2: The Aesthetics of Consumer Tech
2.1 The Four Parameters of Consumer Tech
2.2 What Do We Know About Time
2.3 The Apotheosis of Kronos
2.4 The Cult of Velocity
2.5 Digital Accelerationism and Working Poverty
2.6 Immediate Feedback and Digital Economy
2.7 Fast Technology, Changing Language
2.8 The `Ecstasy of Digital Speed´ and Dazzling Expectations
2.9 Fool-Proof Technology
2.10 Simplicity Equals Sanity
2.11 Digital Singularity
2.12 Digital Gratuity
2.13 The Costs of Consumer Tech: Ownership, Quality and Contentment
2.14 From Digital to Analogue, No Return
References
Chapter 3: Digital Aesthetics in the Public Sphere
3.1 The Problem of Replicability
3.2 The Inclusivity Dilemma
3.3 The Longevity of Law
3.4 Generality Vs Singularity
3.5 Reliability and Digital Governance
3.6 Digital Publicity
3.7 Democratic Dissonances
3.8 Post-Consultation Feedback. The Case of the French Convention Citoyenne Pour le Climat
3.9 The Aftermath of the Conference on the Future of Europe
3.10 The Paradox of Digital Democracy: The `Digital Undemocratic´
References
Chapter 4: The Digital Undemocratic: Dazzling Expectations vs Disappointing Outcomes
4.1 The Rhetoric of Digitally Efficient Government
4.2 The Structural Argument: `Innovation Theaters´ and `Knowledge-Scarcity´
4.3 The Procedural Argument: Wicked Problems and Public Regulation
4.4 The Cultural Argument: Public Sector and Market Competition
4.5 The Pandemic Acceleration of Digital Government
4.6 From Performance to Approach: The Design of Virtual Democratic Spaces
References
Chapter 5: Re-Conceptualising the Aesthetics of Digital Democracy
5.1 A Look Into a More Technological Future
5.2 Protecting Complexities
5.3 The Aesthetics of Virtual Democratic Interactions. Towards a New Narrative of Digital Democratic Spaces
5.4 Re-Framing Digital Consultations: Interactions Not Outcomes
5.5 Game-Design and Digital Democratic Spaces
5.6 Concluding Remarks
References

Citation preview

Springer Textbooks in Law

Gianluca Sgueo

The Design of Digital Democracy

Springer Textbooks in Law

Springer Textbooks in Law compiles high-quality educational content aimed at undergraduate and graduate students in all areas of law. All self-contained volumes are authored by accomplished academics and suitable for use in class as well as individual study. Many of them include chapter abstracts, definitions of technical terms, cases and self-assessment exercises, as well as recommended reading sections. This series is an invaluable resource for students and lecturers alike and spans the full range of topics in international and European law, including fundamentals of law and comparative law. Special attention is paid to current and emerging topics such as IT law, intellectual property, human rights as well as dispute resolution, mediation, arbitration – and many more.

Gianluca Sgueo

The Design of Digital Democracy

Gianluca Sgueo École d’Affaires Publiques Sciences Po Paris Paris, France

ISSN 2509-999X ISSN 2510-0009 (electronic) Springer Textbooks in Law ISBN 978-3-031-36945-2 ISBN 978-3-031-36946-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36946-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to the good that chaos, transformation and change bring to our lives. Mine has a name; actually, two names: Elettra e Dafne.

Acknowledgments

The inspiration for this book came from a chance meeting between the subject of my studies and flashes of insight. My research, publications, and teaching endeavors focus on participatory democracy, digital technology, and innovative approaches to policy-making—and specifically to game-design applied to public policy. With regard to the latter subject, I published a book titled “Games, Powers & Democracies,” in 2018, back when this debate was still in its infancy. It continues to evolve to this day. The hunch (good or bad, I shall leave readers to judge) is itself the result of a random combination of fortunate readings, stimulating conversations with people who inspired in me new reflections and thoughts, as well as professional experiences far and near in time. In this respect, I owe a lot to Massimo Mantellini and his book “Bassa Risoluzione” (Torino, Einaudi, 2018). Reading Massimo’s provocative thoughts on low-fi technology literally paved the way to “Il Divario”—a book (in Italian) I published with EGEA in 2022, dedicated to the challenges of digital transition in public governance—as well as to the volume you are reading. I also owe my gratitude to the people with whom I have shared the adventure of the IRPA’s Observatory on the Digital State since 2019 (and among them, in particular, Luisa Torchia and Bruno Carotti). The six years spent at the European Parliamentary Research Service, in Brussels, were a great source of inspiration. In the role of policy analyst, I focused on the issues that are most dear to me: writing on democracy, digitalization, and innovation. It was also during this time when I first shared publicly the intuition (at the time, in an embryonic state) I had about the aesthetics of digital democracy. I have very clear memories of that moment. It was January 2020. We had gathered with colleagues in the parliamentary library to present the annual report on the policy trends we foresaw for the year to come. None of us knew it yet, but just two months later, the world would change forever, dramatically. In retrospect, I can say the pandemic confirmed my intuition right and motivated me to keep working on it. Just few months later (it was 2021 and in Europe stay-at-home lockdowns and social-distancing measures were in force), I was invited to participate in an online vii

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talk by a friend, Francesco Berti, who at that time was serving as elected member in the Italian Parliament. Francesco’s political party, the Five Stars Movement, has been traditionally attuned to topics such as digital democracy and civic engagement. It was in the aftermath of that event that the project of writing a book about the digital aesthetics of democracy took concrete shape and became the editorial project that, two years later, resulted in the volume you are now reading. Another person to whom I wish to express my gratitude for being a source of inspiration and a guide is Vittorio Colao. The professional experience in the Digital Transformation Team of the Italian government that started in 2021 encouraged me to develop a more mature understanding of several key technical issues of digital government I touch upon in this book. My thanks are also extended to Alessio Butti, for offering me the chance of prolonging this experience with the new government that took over in October 2022. Among those with whom I have discussed the ideas presented in this volume, and whom I should credit for pushing me to see problems from fresh and unexpected perspectives, are my students at the École d’Affaires Publiques of Sciences Po. The cycle of lectures I gave on digital democracy during the fall 2022 in Paris were an incredible stimulus to help me making sense of digital challenges across countries and cultures. I am grateful to Professor Sabino Cassese for the comments and suggestions provided to earlier versions of this volume and to Giancarlo Vilella for the many and never mundane conversations we have had over the years. Useful comments on earlier drafts of this book also came from colleagues at the Brussels School of Governance, as well as from the scholars who attended the Conference “Quo vadis Digital Democracy?”, held in September 2022 in Bonn. At that conference, I presented a paper dedicated to digital design in collaboration with Gianluca Misuraca. It goes without saying that without friends and family, I would probably still be wandering about whether to write on digital aesthetics. Alessandro Elkhoury’s, Jesse Colzani’s, Giovanni Allegretti’s, and Jacopo Scipione’s comments on parts of this book, or articles I published on topics related to it, made tangible improvements to both content and style. Thanks to Dario Bevilacqua, who provided the most inspiring comments to read. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Tighe for helping with both the fluency of the English language and the contents in this book. Errors, omissions, or inaccuracies, however, remain my sole responsibility. As regards family, the one person without whom I could not have even started writing is Claudia, my wife. She is the only reason I am able (or at least I try) to do what I am passionate about and interested in. Finally, I want to extend my gratitude to the editorial team at Springer (in particular, I want to thank Anja Trautmann for her supportive and efficient handling of the book project) and to the anonymous reviewers, for their careful reading of the manuscript and their precious comments and suggestions. Two concluding notes for readers. First, despite being about technology, this book is the result of human labor. It was written without the aid of any artificial

Acknowledgments

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intelligence tool—something I have the feeling one should be proud of these days. Second, in the book I will often resort to data and statistics, which immediately presented me with a dilemma: where and how to cite sources? I solved the dilemma by recurring to both footnotes and references. The former is meant to satisfy curious, skeptics, critics and all those who would like to explore further the sources from which I have drawn the data. In the references, readers will find detailed information about authors and their articles and books. A selection of keywords and a brief summary concluding each chapter will provide students (and others) with an extra tool for orientation in the book’s issues.

Contents

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Introductory Remarks. When Did We Start Caring About Digital Aesthetics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Technology, Entertainment and Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Technological Progress and Social Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Design-Thinking, Innovation and Experimentalism in Public Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 The Aesthetics of Digital Democratic Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 The Structure of the Volume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 3 4 6 7 12

The Aesthetics of Consumer Tech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Four Parameters of Consumer Tech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 What Do We Know About Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 The Apotheosis of Kronos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 The Cult of Velocity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Digital Accelerationism and Working Poverty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Immediate Feedback and Digital Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 Fast Technology, Changing Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.8 The ‘Ecstasy of Digital Speed’ and Dazzling Expectations . . . . . . 2.9 Fool-Proof Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.10 Simplicity Equals Sanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.11 Digital Singularity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.12 Digital Gratuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.13 The Costs of Consumer Tech: Ownership, Quality and Contentment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.14 From Digital to Analogue, No Return . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

13 13 14 16 19 21 22 24 28 29 31 32 35

Digital Aesthetics in the Public Sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Problem of Replicability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Inclusivity Dilemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8

The Longevity of Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Generality Vs Singularity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reliability and Digital Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Digital Publicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Democratic Dissonances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-Consultation Feedback. The Case of the French Convention Citoyenne Pour le Climat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9 The Aftermath of the Conference on the Future of Europe . . . . . . 3.10 The Paradox of Digital Democracy: The ‘Digital Undemocratic’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

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The Digital Undemocratic: Dazzling Expectations vs Disappointing Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 The Rhetoric of Digitally Efficient Government . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 The Structural Argument: ‘Innovation Theaters’ and ‘Knowledge-Scarcity’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 The Procedural Argument: Wicked Problems and Public Regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 The Cultural Argument: Public Sector and Market Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 The Pandemic Acceleration of Digital Government . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 From Performance to Approach: The Design of Virtual Democratic Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re-Conceptualising the Aesthetics of Digital Democracy . . . . . . . . . 5.1 A Look Into a More Technological Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Protecting Complexities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 The Aesthetics of Virtual Democratic Interactions. Towards a New Narrative of Digital Democratic Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Re-Framing Digital Consultations: Interactions Not Outcomes . . 5.5 Game-Design and Digital Democratic Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

Introductory Remarks. When Did We Start Caring About Digital Aesthetics?

Abstract This chapter introduces readers to the transformative effects fueled by converging and overlapping patterns of design, tech and entertainment. These are in part positive and in part negative. Technology, for a start, has dramatically changed the ‘infrastructure’ of democratic systems (the number and quality of connections between citizens and public administrations, the physiognomy of the public space, and access to information). A second beneficial consequence influenced by technology, design and entertainment into democratic processes consists of the prominence gained by design-thinking and creative experimentation applied to problem-solving in public policy. On the other hand, stronger ties between technology, entertainment and design have widened the gap between citizens’ expectations of everything related to digitalization, including government, and the actual rendering of digitalized public decision-making. The decreased satisfaction in digitally based forms of democratic decision-making poses a crucial challenge to digitalised policy-making, in both national and supranational venues. Public regulators are seeing the poorest results ever recorded in terms of interest, engagement and retention despiteusing the most cutting edge and advanced technologies. Keywords Toggling tax · TED conferences · Mass consumption electronics · Cybersyn project · Design-thinking · Innovation · Experimentalism · Wickedproblems · Democratic innovations · Aesthetics · Digital democracy · Civic engagement

1.1

Technology, Entertainment and Design

This book has a story to tell—a story that begins with the smartphone in your pocket. Pick it up and take a look at it. There is a good chance that you have done this multiple times today. The one billion users of Android mobile systems receive an average of eleven billion notifications per day. Those using Google’s email service receive notifications of incoming messages by default at the upper right corner of the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Sgueo, The Design of Digital Democracy, Springer Textbooks in Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36946-9_1

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Introductory Remarks. When Did We Start Caring About Digital Aesthetics?

screen, the visual angle that is most likely to catch our attention.1 As a result, on any given day, the average smartphone user spends three hours and fifteen minutes on their devices, averaging around fifty-eight different ‘checks’. Divided per waking time, this is roughly one interaction every four minutes. In 2012, the average time spent on digital screens was around seventy-four seconds before switching. From 2016 to 2021, it fell to forty-seven seconds. By 2025, it is estimated that a mere eighteen seconds will elapse between one interaction and the next.2 But it is not just the quantity of time using our smartphones that has changed—the quality of time spent on our devices has also undergone a profound transformation. These days, the making ‘voice to voice’ telephone calls on a smartphone seems old fashioned when compared to the plethora of newer ways a device can be used to communicate and share information. Smartphones are used primarily to exchange messages with friends, colleagues, and family members, via instant messaging applications. Arguably the most well-known—WhatsApp—conveys forty-one million messages per minute globally. In 2022, it was the fourth app with the most downloads worldwide.3 Have you ever wondered what makes our smartphones—and more generally our digital screens—so attractive? Ease of use is a starting point. For the most part, devices are fast and relatively easy to use. Moreover, despite often being prohibitively expensive, they host plenty of personalized services, many of which are offered free of charge—or so we would like to think, anyway. In reality, our repetitive interactions with digital screens have quantifiable costs that—according to a study published in the Harvard Business Review in 2022—adds up to almost one tenth of our productive time every year. In this study, the authors measured the frequency with which ‘Knowledge workers’ (who work primarily with computers) toggled between different mobile applications over the course of a working day. They quantified an average of one thousand and two hundreds switches per day between apps and websites. The time workers needed to spend acclimating to the semantic context and purpose of new applications after each switch was given the label ‘toggling tax’; it was calculated to account for about nine percentage points of the annual productive time of digital workers.4

1

Williams (2018); North (2011); Chaparro-Peláez et al. (2022); Baltas (2003); Miller et al. (2014). Data provided by Exploding Topics, Time Spent Using Smartphones, 2023 (https:// explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats); Exploding Topics, Screen Time Statistics, Exploding Topics, January 13, 2023 (https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-stats); Vodafone – The Future Laboratory, The Connected Consumer 2030, 2022 (https://newscentre. vodafone.co.uk/app/uploads/2022/01/Vodafone_Report_FINAL_SD.pdf). 3 Data provided by Sensor Tower, Store Intelligence Data Digest, 2022 (https://go.sensortower.com/ q2-2022-data-digest-report.html). 4 Nerayana Murty et al. (2022); Mark (2023); Rogers (2014); Georg (1999); Norbre and Kastner (2014); Ward et al. (2017). In another estimate (Microsoft 2023) the daily inflow of data, emails, meetings, and notifications accounts for 57% of the average employee’s working time, compared to the 43% of working time dedicated to creating (in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations). 2

1.2

Technological Progress and Social Interactions

3

Aside from productivity, pervasive digital technology bears social, environmental, and political costs—most of which have not yet been fully identified. So, as it stands right now, we can state that an extraordinary combination of advanced technology, enticing entertainment and captivating design has evolved to the point of locking many of us into a morbid relationship with our smartphones (but the same applies to other technological products and services). The consequences are significant and touch on multiple aspect of our lives: how we relate to others, what we expect from our elected representatives, or whether we choose to engage in civic activities like voting, signing a petition or participating in protests (both online and offline)—and the list goes on. This will be addressed in the coming pages. But to begin, we need to clarify another point: when exactly did technology, entertainment and design become so intertwined? To answer this question, we need to take a step back in time to 1984. That year, Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks co-funded an event that would, a decade later, become a globally acknowledged and widely celebrated format for public speeches: TED Conferences. Wurman and Marks envisioned an event that would capture and celebrate what they believed was a nascent and promising trend. Their intuition was simple but brilliant. They had realized that technological innovation, entertainment, and design—until then, three distinct areas—were not just becoming more similar; they were actually converging. As this occurred, these fields amplified the magnitude of their impact on societies, economies, politics and institutions globally. The compact disc, the e-book, and 3D graphics were all showcased during the first TED conference. These innovations would eventually be hailed as successes and are now taught in business schools all over the world. While time proved Wurman and Marks correct, the two graphic designers were certainly not responsible for starting the process that led to what are now called ‘mass consumption electronics’, that is: both highly sophisticated and carefully designed to entertain, serve and—most importantly than ever—gratify us. Smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and the majority of digital services and applications we use every day (multiple times a day, as we have just seen) are the result of a transformation spanning two centuries and involving cultural, political, economic and societal factors. Commodity economy, urbanization, and colonialism are caught up in this process. Futurism, amateur photography and language have also played a key role in this transformation. Point taken for now. We will come back to it later.

1.2

Technological Progress and Social Interactions

This transformative process, fueled by converging and overlapping patterns of design, tech and entertainment, is still ongoing. Its destination (if ever there was one) remains uncertain and subject to debate. The actual effects for democratic systems, however, are already plain to see.

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Introductory Remarks. When Did We Start Caring About Digital Aesthetics?

These are in part positive and in part negative. Technology, for a start, has dramatically changed the ‘infrastructure’ of democratic systems—that is, both the number and quality of connections between citizens and public administrations, the physiognomy of the public space, and access to information. With technological progress, social interaction costs have lowered radically, and citizens have gained improved access to public structures through digital communication channels. This also explains why innovative, tech-based approaches to inclusive and participated policy-making have become the subject of a growing debate between academics and politicians. Let us be clear though: utopias of tech-savvy, self-organized societies made their first appearance around forty years ago, with the surge of cybernetics and the attempt to automate public processes for a more efficient state. In 1970, the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile tested a primitive form of ‘algorithmic regulation’ aimed at controlling state-owned industries. The ‘Cybersyn Project’ worked on the creation of the so-called ‘liberty machine’. This machine would operate in close to real time and facilitate instant decision-making, through a distributed network of shared information.5 The Cybersyn Project was fascinating and ahead of its time. However, it has only been in the last twenty years that the number of projects and discussions on the possible advantages and disadvantages of using technology in interactions between individuals and public bodies has exploded. Every day new conversations are being had as to the benefits (and potential threats) of technical advancements associated to democratic institutions by academics, legislators, civic advocates and public officials. Here is a striking example: no less than thirty-one officially recognized methods are being used in social sciences for theorizing, measuring, and applying deliberative democracy. Most of these methods are directly related to technological aspects, either as a tool for research (survey methods, indexes, and process tracings, for instance) or as the main area of analysis (as with the cases of online deliberative matrixes, social networks and big data analyses).6

1.3

Design-Thinking, Innovation and Experimentalism in Public Policy

Another beneficial consequence influenced by technology, design and entertainment into democratic processes consists of the prominence gained by design-thinking applied to problem-solving in public policy. Design-thinking broadened the very idea of ‘design’, moving it beyond the construction of physical products and spaces, into politics and policy, and elevating designers to a kind of medium capable of

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Medina (2011); Loeber (2018); Espejo (2009); Alvarez and Gutierrez (2022); Schwenberg and Bossel (1977); Barrionuevo (2008). 6 Ercan et al. (2022); Espejo (2014).

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Design-Thinking, Innovation and Experimentalism in Public Policy

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reinventing systems to better meet the desires of the people within them. After all, our age is quintessentially (and perhaps more than in any other moment in history) the age of design. This makes the quest for ‘good’ digital design a contemporary challenge, in spite of very little agreement among academics and policy-makers on how policy and design relate and interact with each other. This is accompanied by the progressive expansion of the role played by governmental entities in fostering innovation. From being primarily addressed to tackle market failures, innovation in government today is expected to simultaneously address societal, environmental and economic challenges, while creating new market opportunities. Democratic participation provides a good example in this regard. Efforts in modernizing participatory channels through digital technology have evolved from redressing criticism on democratic deficits through fostering digital interactions with stakeholders to current attempts at designing policy-making in a friendly, captivating and participative manner. Improving user interaction, for instance, has allowed policy-makers to draw on a wider and more dispersed range of expertise, thus helping identify and co-create new approaches to so-called ‘wicked’ problems. Citizens’ feedback to these efforts is very positive. Seventy-two percent of Europeans declare they would like to be able to vote in elections through their smartphone (while only seventeen percent would oppose it). There is even an alarming fifty-one percent of Europeans who would be excited at the idea of reducing the number of national parliamentarians and give those seats to an algorithm.7 To give another example, policymakers have widened disparities in technical abilities, cultural diversity, and linguistic capabilities among societal classes by using design techniques focused on inclusivity. Following Graham Smith’s groundbreaking research in the area, academics interested in this subject have started to look into and discuss how ‘democratic innovations’ are thought up and put into practice.8 To complete the list of positive consequences stemming from overlapping trends in technology, design and entertainment, we should credit the latter for slowly but steadily making its appearance in public governance. Experimental approaches based on nudging and game-design have helped public regulators worldwide to overcome cultural hurdles by opening decision-making to citizens. We know that such approaches differ in many ways. At the same time, we also know that they are all premised on the assumption that entertainment holds great potential in capturing citizens’ attention and stimulating their interest. Therefore, the complementary and holistic use of these various approaches, accompanied by ad hoc strategies to ensure 7 Data provided by the Centre for the governance of change – IE University, European Tech Insights 2022 (https://www.ie.edu/cgc/research/european-tech-insights/). 8 Smith (2009). Smith terms ‘democratic innovations’ the institutions ‘that have been specifically designed to increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process’. The innovation, claims Smith, is consequential to the fact that these institutions represent a departure from the traditional institutional architecture of advanced industrial democracies. Participatory budgeting, Citizens’ Assembly, town meetings, online citizen forums, and direct legislation are

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Introductory Remarks. When Did We Start Caring About Digital Aesthetics?

participation by the widest possible selection of stakeholders and interest groups (including outreach efforts, education- and awareness- building) and a design approach that is focused on inclusiveness, is being acknowledged by many scholars for its capacity to foster citizens’ willingness to engage meaningfully in civic and political spaces in fun and rewarding manners.9

1.4

The Aesthetics of Digital Democratic Governance

Unfortunately, the impact of the increased use of technology in democratic processes is not limited to the positive aspects. Stronger ties between technology, entertainment and design have also transformed our relationship with (and expectations of) democratic decision-making. The widening gap between our expectations of everything related to digitalization, including government, and the actual rendering of digitalized public decision-making has resulted in perverse and troubling outcomes. One for all: the higher our expectations in technology, the lower our satisfaction in digitally based forms of democratic decision-making. It seems as if the metrics that almost magically push our satisfaction to the extra mile when using digital tools have limited impact or no effect whatsoever when they are reproduced in digital public spaces.10 Understanding this point is crucial. Online, human behaviour unfolds in a market where attention is the main commodity. What citizens in digital societies desire is strongly influenced by what they perceive as valuable and rewarding. When we are online or when we use digital products, we have a tendency to overestimate certain factors like speed of service and user-friendliness, and to underestimate the costs— both for ourselves and others. In a nutshell: our expectations in digital products and services are dazzling. This poses a crucial challenge to digitalised policy-making, in both national and supranational venues. Public regulators are seeing the poorest results ever recorded in terms of interest, engagement and retention despite using the most cutting edge and advanced technologies. Public authorities are not meeting citizens’ demands for

all classifiable as democratic innovations, according to Smith’s taxonomy. Yet, to be classified as democratically innovative, concludes Smith, these institutions must possess two key features: the first is that they are designed to democratically engage non-organized or partisan citizens; the second is that they consist of institutionalized forms of participation; that is, they provide citizens with a formal role in policy, legislative or constitutional decision-making. 9 Sgueo (2019); Lerner (2014); Salen and Zimmerman (2003); Burke (2014); Bogost and Salen (2008); Waddington (2013). 10 In this book, I look at digital democratic spaces in their broadest sense. I therefore range from more traditional and established channels of democratic engagement, such as online consultations, to more recent and innovative approaches, such as digital participatory platforms to co-create policies. While obvious differences exist between these methods of consultation, they also share common traits, especially in the design.

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The Structure of the Volume

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tangible, fast and gratifying returns. This dramatic—and still unresolved—clash of values is hampering trust and eroding confidence in politics and policies. Many questions arise from this observation. First and foremost, what leverage should we place on the digital design of institutions, rules and spaces of democratic interaction? What weight must we give to aesthetics in digital democratic governance? Please note that this is simultaneously a methodological and a theoretical question. On the one hand, it leads us to wonder how digital government, and specifically digital democratic spaces, should be designed to widen the gap between expectations in and outcomes of democratic decision-making. In addition to procedural aspects, it forces us to consider whether aesthetic approaches to digital democratic decisionmaking are functional in handling efficaciously existing issues of civic engagement.

1.5

The Structure of the Volume

Building on these considerations, this book has three overlapping aims, corresponding loosely to its five parts, each offering some necessarily preliminary answers to the dilemmas discussed above. In Chap. 2, focus is placed on a simple, yet challenging, dilemma: what makes electronics for general use, also referred to as ‘consumer tech’, so widespread and ubiquitous? My aim is to provide a preliminary understanding of the key design features of consumer tech, and how these impact on our expectations on technology. I suggest four reasons are prevalent in this respect. The first couple relates to usage and time. Most consumer technology is offered to us with simplified interfaces designed to quickly meet users’ demands. The two additional features complementing hyper-velocity and over-simplification are singularity and gratuity, respectively. Combined, these four characteristics are primarily intended to gratify users, almost in real time. However, as we have just said, they come at a cost. Consumer tech’s products and services are, on average, qualitatively lower in comparison to their analogical—or professional—counterparts. The images we share on social media, the songs we listen through streaming services, or the news we read via RSS feeds, online newspapers, blogs, and podcasts are all qualitatively rounded down. Hence, understanding and accepting what in Chap. 2 I describe in terms of the ‘Lo-fi nature’ of digital services and products, is the first step to defining and assessing an aesthetic dimension of digital democratic spaces capable of matching the capacities of democratic structures and procedures with the expectations of citizens. The latter task is entrusted to Chap. 3. This draws on the existing fundamental design differences between consumer technology and digital democratic spaces. My claim is that democratic decision-making is antithetical to consumer technology on five grounds. First, digital democratic spaces must necessarily stay inclusive. Consumer tech instead can be—and often is—exclusive. Second, public regulation is

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Introductory Remarks. When Did We Start Caring About Digital Aesthetics?

designed after durability, while consumer tech plans its obsolescence. Third, with occasional exceptions, norms are designed to serve the interest of large and undifferentiated communities rather than targeting individual stakeholders. Intuitively, this implies that the principle of singularity permeating commercial technology is not applicable to digitalized public services. Fourth, virtual democratic spaces differ from consumer tech in terms of reliability. Consumers may always opt out and adopt cheaper alternatives—citizens do not enjoy the same degree of freedom. Fifth and finally, public regulators and market operators differ with regard to competitive gains. The former, unlike the latter, operate outside of market conditions. For this reason, they have fewer incentives to innovate at scale. Despite these distinctions, we nonetheless notice that the majority of digitalized public services in Western democracies are still predominantly modeled after consumer technology. Democratic interactions between citizens and public authorities are imagined and implemented by the latter following the standard criteria used by consumer tech. This approach, I claim, is profoundly wrong, as it encourages a paradoxical outcome: the average citizen is less (not more) gratified and willing to interact with governments. I provocatively termed this paradox ‘the digital undemocratic’. We may in fact accept our role of consumers with regard to the standardized ‘Lo-fi’ technology largely available on the market. We actually adapt relatively well to the trade-off between rapid gratification and suboptimal performance. This compromise, however, becomes unacceptable when we think of ourselves as citizens interacting with public entities via online platforms or other digital means.11 With the overlap of the consumer’s and the citizen’s persona, the latter sets on expectations that digital public services are unable to fulfil. The idea that digital decision-makers are always capable of delivering rapid, simplified and effective responses to complex issues is misleading. Democratic participation is a case in point. Many of us quietly accept complexity, duration, and even limited accessibility when it comes to analogue, offline, democratic decision-making. Nobody protests if, before voting at the polling station, they have to stand in line and wait their turn. Many of us are used to the inconvenience of having to travel to the town hall to discuss proposed changes to municipal planning with neighbours, knowing it will take time (and possibly be pointless). However, our acceptance quickly turns into frustration when we relate to, and engage with, digital spaces for public participation. It is as if we expect our digital democratic institutions to always be easy to interact with, capable of responding both immediately and effectively to our demands, and keep us entertained.

11

Cohen (2016). It is difficult to provide an unambiguous definition of the concept of a platform. This is due to the fact that the topic is suitable for multi-disciplinary analysis and application. Economic studies usually emphasize the propensity of platforms to become a space of interaction, at times exclusive, between two or more homogeneous groups of users. In this book, unless otherwise specified, the word platform will be used interchangeably with other expressions such as ‘space’, ‘arena’, or ‘fora’, to describe a digital venue where public sector’s institutions and citizens engage in interaction and debate.

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Why does this happen? Chapter 4 investigates the paradox of the ‘digital undemocratic’, with a focus on the rhetoric of digital government as the paradigm of efficient democratic governance. In this Chapter I present three arguments to explain why most democratic governments choose ‘cookie-cutter’ replicas of consumer tech design in the formulation of digital engagement mechanisms. The first is a structural argument: archaic and inefficient public administrations are unprepared to meet challenges imposed by disruptive events. However, unfortunately, the majority of public policies, indicators and standards aimed at engaging users in service design and delivery, involving them in testing and evaluating digital projects and initiatives, or monitoring satisfaction with digital governmental services, are focussed on delivering with impact and at scale. To put it simply, the problem is not digital democracy, but rather how we judge and measure it. The second argument I use to explain the digital undemocratic is procedural: increasingly complex regulatory issues, I claim, require coordinated solutions across a range of actors, sectors, and skills—something that is often lacking in the public sector. Interestingly, while traditional, top-down, regulatory approaches are ineffective at coping with the digital undemocratic, co-operative and networked approaches are not safe either, especially when confronted with issues of time- and resourcesscarcity. The third argument is cultural. Public regulators have limited incentives to change because of existing safeguards from market competition and innovation. This is a concept that we will meet again and again in this book: the quest for designing a more inclusive, transparent and gratifying digital democracy is primarily a cultural challenge. Chapter 5 moves beyond the issue of the digital undemocratic and examines the possible futures of digital democracy, from an aesthetical point of view. I am aware of the fact that this is a contentious topic. In the view of some, technology dominates humanity, not the opposite. According to this theory (which I will call for simplification ‘the fatalist argument’) designing technology in accordance to people’s expectation and in line with public institutions’ capacities makes no sense. The fatalist argument is quite successful in media and public debate. However, upon closer scrutiny, it proves fallacious and is, for this very reason, unacceptable. With obvious differences, the fatalist argument can be likened Albert Speer’s self-defence at the Nuremberg trials. Speer pleaded guilty. But he claimed he was not responsible for the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime. He was a technician, he argued. Instead, I defend the validity of the aesthetic approach to digital democratic governance and civic engagement. I suggest that the former could (and should) be reconceptualized in order to boost the latter. Hence, the central argument of Chap. 5: the notion of digital participatory rights as fast and easy to enjoy should be abandoned. We should also downplay the suggestion that digital democratic decision-making can only be effective when it delivers rapid and successful responses to the issues of the day, regardless of its complexity. How can we reach this goal? I explore three approaches with the aim of re-designing the aesthetics of digital democratic spaces and interactions, keeping a focus on complexity. The first is related to storytelling. I propose public decision-makers should elaborate a storytelling approach to digital democratic venues that shifts the focus

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1 Introductory Remarks. When Did We Start Caring About Digital Aesthetics?

from immediacy to complexity. The latter, I argue, is key to frame a sustainable approach to narrating and encouraging citizens’ roles in co-creating and co-designing digital public services. The idea of complexity, which consumer tech drives us to neglect, or even to escape, is fundamental to build a collective imagination of digital democratic systems. Governing, after all, remains a complex action. It results from the contribution of different skills, operating on multiple levels: local, national and supranational. Those who govern are constantly challenged by uncertainty. In deciding, democratic powers have to weight in and out diverging interests. They need time to take in, evaluate and smooth out the differences between all interests at stake, in order to adequately protect all stakeholders. This is how digitalised democratic decision-making should be narrated. Undoubtedly, defending complexity is unpopular today. Yet it is necessary. To define a storytelling of digital democracy that retrieves the importance of complexity is not enough. The second action I recommend to boost civic engagement via digital tools relates to the design of public spaces with a focus on the interactions, not the outcomes. Digital omni-channel experiences, for instance, should be optimised for the needs of different user groups, but have similar outcomes across all channels. Or, to make another example, citizens engaged in online participatory projects should be informed about the structures and procedures that are in the backdrop of the decisions they are called to co-create. To enhance interactions over outcomes is key for democratic decision-makers interested at nurturing healthy, sympathetic and long-term sustainable bonds with their constituencies. Third, and finally, I suggest that digital civic engagement be encouraged through creative approaches—namely via game-design incentives. A growing body of scholarship, supported by empirical evidence, suggests that behavioural incentives applied to digital public spaces may encourage a more robust and longer-lasting engagement from participants compared with similar initiatives that make no use of such incentives. My claim is that game-design applied to democratic governance may offer a chance for public regulators to gain the trust of citizens, and thus be perceived as legitimate; it adapts policy-making to budgetary and regulatory challenges; and most importantly, it may help to set up digital democratic offer in line with citizens’ demanding needs. Indeed, as with any innovation in policy, game-design is not without concerns. Gamified democratic governance embodies a number of weaknesses, both practical and theoretical in nature. It is data-intrusive, for starters. Moreover, game dynamics are designed and modelled to meet the needs and please the expectations of certain categories of users. They may end up fostering exclusion rather than inclusion. Hence, in promoting game-design as a solution to the paradox of the digital undemocratic, I also take into account and discuss its most controversial and problematic facets—namely: resource-consumption, privacy-intrusion, and long-term sustainability. Will democratic public powers ‘save’ themselves from the market? How will they make digital spaces more attractive—but also effective—at engaging citizens? This is the story this book would like to tell. It is a tale made of enormous and diverse

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obstacles—structural, social and cultural—that widespread digital technologies present to democracies that are losing ground, and how these challenges could be overcome. Let us be clear upfront: it is primarily a story of delays, unfinished journeys, loneliness and bewilderment—all stemming from our unmet, dazzling expectations for digital democracy. But there is a positive aspect to all of this: the story is still on-going and the final chapter, positive or not so positive, is yet to be written. Summary • Pervasive digital technology bears social (how we relate to others), economic (our productive time vs leisure time), environmental, and political costs (what we expect from our elected representatives, or whether we choose to engage in civic activities like voting, signing a petition or participating in protests, both online and offline). • Smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and the majority of digital services and applications we use every day are the result of a transformation spanning two centuries and involving cultural, political, economic and societal factors. Commodity economy, urbanization, and colonialism are caught up in this process. Futurism, amateur photography and language have also played a key role in this transformation. • With technological progress, social interaction costs have lowered radically, and citizens have gained improved access to public structures through digital communication channels. • Our age is quintessentially (and perhaps more than in any other moment in history) the age of design. This makes the quest for ‘good’ digital design a contemporary challenge, in spite of very little agreement among academics and policy-makers on how policy and design relate and interact with each other. • Efforts in modernizing participatory channels through digital technology have evolved from redressing criticism on democratic deficits through fostering digital interactions with stakeholders to current attempts at designing policy-making in a friendly, captivating and participative manner. • The complementary and holistic use of experimental approaches based on nudging and game-design, accompanied by ad hoc strategies to ensure participation by the widest possible selection of stakeholders and interest groups (including outreach efforts, education and awareness building) and a design approach that is focused on inclusiveness, is being acknowledged by many scholars for its capacity to foster citizens’ willingness to engage meaningfully in civic and political spaces in fun and rewarding manners. • Asking ourselves what weight we should give to aesthetics in digital democratic governance is simultaneously a methodological and a theoretical question. On the one hand, it leads us to wonder how digital government, and specifically digital democratic spaces, should be designed to widen the gap between expectations in and outcomes of democratic decision-making. In addition to procedural aspects, it forces us to consider whether aesthetic approaches to digital democratic decisionmaking are functional in handling efficaciously existing issues of civic engagement.

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References Alvarez J, Gutierrez C (2022) Cultural, scientific and technical antecedents of the Cybersyn project in Chile. AI Soc 37:1093–1103 Baltas G (2003) Determinants of internet advertising effectiveness: an empirical study. Int J Market Res 45:505–513 Barrionuevo A (March 28, 2008) Before ’73 coup, Chile tried to find the right software for socialism. The New York Times Bogost I, Salen K (eds) (2008) The rhetoric of video games. In: The ecology of games: connecting youth, games, and learning. MIT Press, Cambridge Burke B (2014) Gamify: how gamification motivates people to do extraordinary things. Bibliomotion, London Chaparro-Peláez J et al (2022) May I have your attention, please? An investigation on opening effectiveness in e-mail marketing. Rev Manag Sci 16:2261–2284 Cohen JE (2016) The regulatory state in the information age. Theor Inq Law 17(2) Ercan A et al (eds) (2022) Research methods in deliberative democracy. Oxford University Press, Oxford Espejo R (2009) Performance management, the nature of regulation and the CyberSyn project. Kybernetes 38(1/2):65–82 Espejo R (2014) Cybernetics of governance: the cybersyn project 1971–1973. In: Metcalf G (ed) Social systems and design. Translational systems sciences, vol 1. Springer, Tokyo Georg F (1999) The economy of attention. Merkur, Holladay Lerner J (2014) Making democracy fun: how game design can empower citizens and transform politics. MIT Press, Boston Loeber K (2018) Big data, algorithmic regulation, and the history of the Cybersyn Project in Chile, 1971–1973. Soc Sci Comput Rev 7:65 Mark G (2023) Attention span. Finding a focus for a fulfilling life. HarperCollins, London Medina E (2011) Cybernetic revolutionaries: technology and politics in Allende’s Chile. MIT Press, Boston Microsoft (2023) Work Trend Index Annual Report Miller EK, Buschman TJ, Nobre AC, Kastner S (eds) (2014) Natural mechanisms for the executive control of attention. In: The Oxford handbook of attention. Oxford University Press, Oxford Nerayana Murty R et al (August 29, 2022) How much time and energy do we waste toggling between applications? Harvard Business Review Norbre AC, Kastner S (2014) The Oxford handbook of attention. Oxford University Press, Oxford North P (2011) The problem of distraction. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto Rogers K (2014) The attention complex. Palgrave Macmillan, New York Salen K, Zimmerman E (2003) Rules of play: game design fundamentals. MIT Press, Boston Schwenberg H, Bossel H (eds) (1977) Cybernetics in government: experience with new tools for management in Chile 1971–1973. Concepts and tools of computer-assisted policy-analysis. BirkHäuser, Basel, pp 79–138 Sgueo G (2019) Games, powers & democracies. Bocconi University Press, Milano Smith G (2009) Democratic innovations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Waddington DI (2013) A parallel world for the World Bank: a case study of urgent: evoke, an educational alternate game. Revue Internationale des technologies en pédagogie universitaire 10:42–56 Ward AF et al (2017) Brain Drain: the mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. J Assoc Consum Res 2(2):140–154 Williams J (2018) Stand out of our light – freedom & resistance in the attention economy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Chapter 2

The Aesthetics of Consumer Tech

Abstract What makes electronics for general use, also referred to as ‘consumer tech’, so widespread and ubiquitous? Digital products and services are ideated, designed and marketed according to four fundamental characteristics: speed, simplicity, customization and gratuity. First, digital technology relates to time in an inverse proportionality ratio. The shorter the interval between the action performed by the user (and the expected result consequential to that action) the higher the level of satisfaction with the service. Second, technology and simplicity are bound together in a direct proportionality ratio. Users’ incompetence ceases to be a limitation with digital products and services; it becomes an asset. Third, digital singularity consists of digital services and products tailored on the needs of individual users. Fourth and finally, gratuity induces consumers to believe that digital technology is affordable and will become cheaper over time. The preference given by consumers to products and services designed according to these four parameters, may be represented as an ‘opportunity cost’, with important consequences on their expectations towards digital technology. Keywords Consumer tech · Kairologic time · Digital accelerationism · Instant gratification · Time poverty · Technostress · Generative AI · Info-polyglots · Foolproof technology · Digital singularity · Lo-fi technology · Digital lethargy

2.1

The Four Parameters of Consumer Tech

What makes ‘consumer tech’ so widespread and ubiquitous? For the most part, digital products and services are ideated, designed and marketed according to four fundamental characteristics: speed, simplicity, customization and gratuity. These parameters prevail over other criteria and guide consumers’ choices. In comparison, reliability, durability, resistance to shocks or scalability, to name but a few of the many other features available, are negligible or secondary. This is evidenced by data. According to the consultancy firm Gartner, more than two-thirds of marketers working in business organizations say their firms compete

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Sgueo, The Design of Digital Democracy, Springer Textbooks in Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36946-9_2

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primarily on the quality of customer experience they provide.1 A 2020 survey from Qualtrics revealed that eighty percent of these marketers expect to compete almost exclusively through the experience of their customers. Most companies would not dare make major changes to its platforms without first running extensive experiments to understand how these changes would influence user behaviour.2 Let us now reverse the perspective. The preference given by the average consumer to digital products and services designed in this manner, may be represented in terms of an ‘opportunity cost’, as described in classic economic theory. Consumers pay for the repeated and immediate satisfaction of their requirements delivered by digital technologies built to handle them easily and quickly. However, customers grow accustomed to services and goods that are frequently of lower quality compared to the potential they might have. This Chapter investigates into the aesthetics of consumer tech, by analysing its four main characteristics. The first to be addressed is the speed of service. Digital technology, as we shall see in a moment, relates to time in an inverse proportionality ratio. In essence, the user will be more satisfied with a service if there is shorter waiting period between the performance of an action and the results of that action. Technology and simplicity (the second aesthetical criterion driving consumer tech’s design) are instead tied together in a direct proportionality ratio. At times, this relationship is almost osmotic. Technological innovation is, in fact, simplification itself. For this reason, the ‘incompetence’ of the average user is not a limitation. Fool-proof technology transforms such incompetence into an asset. Digital singularity—the third characteristic to be analyzed in this Chapter—consists of digital services and products designed to meet the needs and expectations of every single user; or at least to create the illusion of tailor-made digital services. Fourth and finally, gratuity—real or perceived—induces consumers to think that digital technology is affordable and will become cheaper over time.

2.2

What Do We Know About Time

In Greek mythology, Kronos falls at the hand of his son Zeus. After being poisoned, Kronos is forced to expel Zeus’ siblings, the Hekatonkheires, and the Cyclopes from his stomach. With the help of his freed allies, Zeus overthrows his father and imprisons him in Tartarus. Digital technology tells us a different story. Kronos—the chronological, or sequential time—succumbs to Kairos, the qualitative time of life.

1

Data provided by Gartner, Key Findings from the Gartner Customer Experience Survey, 2018 (https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/insights/articles/key-findings-from-the-gartner-customerexperience-survey). 2 Luca and Bazerman (2020).

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What Do We Know About Time

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‘Kairologic time’, a nonlinear interval that cannot be controlled or possessed, with neither a beginning nor an ending, is magnified by the design of digital products and services, and eventually prevails over sequential time. Consumers of digital products and services are offered (and in consequence tend to give priority to) repeated and immediate gratifications of their needs. A loop is thus created: with digital tools, we can be gratified as many times as we desire. How digital technology encouraged this perception of time, as well as its key societal and political consequences, will be discussed thoroughly in the following pages. But before moving forward, it is worth a quick diversion into the nature of time—one of the most fascinating and unsolved dilemmas that challenges human thinking. Indeed, in addition to not having a standardized concept of time, we also lack a common understanding of how time passes. Philosophical thinking has long investigated both aspects (i.e., what is time, and how time flows), reaching divergent conclusions.3 Similarly, other scientific disciplines approached critically the temporal dimensions and reached conflicting conclusions. Historians, for example, separate time into events, using sequences of ‘before’ and ‘after’ aimed at clarifying when a given historical event has happened. Albeit lawyers consider chronological sequences in their work, within the legal profession, there is much focus on the time elapsed between the entry into force and the implementation of a norm. The underlying assumption of this approach is that a legal right that is ‘ungrounded’ into time certainty may deplete into an abuse. In both anthropology and sociology, time is functional to explaining human evolution. According to mainstream theories, homo sapiens came to dominate other species due to their capacity to imagine time (among other things) creatively, co-ordinately and flexibly.4 Finally, in hard sciences, time is used as a variable in research studies. Speaking of which, it is worth remembering that in physics time is considered a mostly-negligible variable. The celebre 1960s ‘Wheeler-DeWitt’ equation explicitly deems time irrelevant to the understanding of the universe.5 This brings us to a preliminary, albeit important, conclusion. If an attempt should be made with summarizing the diverging scientific approaches and understandings of time dimensions and flows, then a common element should be addressed, namely: the utilitarian approach to the flow of time. Let us pause a moment on this point. It tells us something interesting: that the comprehension of the temporal dimension and flow is based on individual—or sectorial at best—rather than objective approaches. Said otherwise, time expands

3

McCumber (2014); Le Poidevin and MacBeath (1993); Ray (1991). Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari (2018) exemplifies this claim by comparing humans to other species. Ants and bees, for instance, can work together in large numbers, as humans do. But they do so in a rigid manner. Unforeseeable events may have disastrous consequences for their colonies. Other species, such as wolves and chimpanzees, argues Harari, can cooperate in a far more flexible manner than insects. However, as Harari explained in a 2015 TedTalk (https://www.ted.com/talks/ yuval_noah_harari_what_explains_the_rise_of_humans), these species cooperate efficiently only in small numbers and with individuals that they know intimately. 5 Norbury (1998). 4

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The Aesthetics of Consumer Tech

or contracts according to our perception and to the environment within which it is measured. With this in mind, we can now move back to digital technology, and speculate on how it pushes us to think of time as a resource—or rather a scarce resource. Consumer tech is in fact designed to amplify our perception of time as a rare commodity, while persuading us we could make good use of it. As digital consumers, we are initially alarmed by scarcity and then convinced we are being offered a solution. Our satisfaction comes from the belief that we can accomplish more in less time.

2.3

The Apotheosis of Kronos

Here are few examples to help illustrate this point better. One of the first and most successful marketing efforts of the car-sharing service Uber was a simple but powerful promise to customers: ‘tap a button, get a ride’. Like most technologycentred companies, the service offered by Uber is swift and enticing. Customers can get what they want with just a few finger-taps on a smartphone screen, saving them the time and effort of phoning a call centre or filling in an online form. Similarly, the one-touch service from PayPal is based on the concept of immediate satisfaction. Once activated, users can shop online, freed from the formalities of authentication. There are cases in which credit card information is not even required. For example, to access the (free) trial of Sling’s streaming service, a first and last name suffice. It is fast and easy. Similarly, in 2014 online retailer Amazon introduced the ‘Dash Buttons’ as a way for customers to quickly re-order popular household items. After being retired, the baton of e-commerce on the world’s largest online retail shop passed to voice commands. In 2020, over four billion voice assistants were active globally. By 2024 (it is estimated) they will double to eight billion.6 Amazon’s voice assistant—Alexa—is compatible with approximately sixty thousand smart home devices across the planet.7 Two more examples: WhatsApp’s users can choose to listen to voice messages at double speed. This function is meant to help them save time. Alternatively, they can set an expiration date for any content they share. Once the time period expires, the content vanishes from view. This is called, rightly so, ‘ephemeral content’. The same underlying logic drives content shared via stories on the social network Instagram.

6

Hay (2018); Ammari et al. (2019); Terzopoulos and Atratzemi (2020); Zwakman et al. (2021). Data provided by Insider Intelligence, How big is the voice assistant market?, September 16, 2022 (https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/how-big-voice-assistant-market). 7 Data provided by Statista, Total number of smart home devices that are compatible with Amazon’s Alexa as of July 2020 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/912893/amazon-alexa-smart-homecompatible/); Good House Keeping, Amazon Alexa vs. Google Home: Which assistant should you pick in 2023?, 24 January, 2023 (https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/uk/product-reviews/tech/a3 9384401/alexa-vs-google-home/).

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The Apotheosis of Kronos

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Until 2014, purchases made through the Apple Store were subject to the ‘fifteenminutes policy’—as the company named it. Once a password was entered, users had a fifteen-minute window in which the payment mechanism of the in-app store remained active. This function was eventually removed after a United States (US) Federal Trade Commission investigation and settlement following complaints that it allowed children to make purchases from the Apple store without parental consent.8 Is the rationale of instant gratification understood? In the contemporary digital landscape, immediate gratification of individual needs has become the benchmark for assessing the quality of digital services and products. Speediness (combined with user-friendliness, as we shall see later in this Chapter) is the guiding criterion of technology’s qualitative assessment. All examples we made above demonstrate that digital technology relates to time in an inverse proportionality ratio. This means that the shorter is the interval between the action performed by the user (and the expected result consequential to that action) the higher the satisfaction for the service will be. A striking figure to further prove this: on average, our physical interactions with mobile devices conclude within just seventy-two seconds.9 Hence, the utilitarian understanding and use of digital time. It is worth emphasizing that this was not always the case. Actually, the idea of time-resource, not to be wasted, matured between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, in conjunction with three important events. The first is the emergence of a mercantile economy in which time—linked to commerce and trade—was out of sync with the Church perception of time, which was tied to prayer and worship.10 The second change is the emergence of the urban economy, which accompanied the spread of mechanical clocks (again, in Europe). This technology had a profound impact on the rhythms of human activities. These were no longer marked by the church bells, but were increasingly organized and systemized via the clocks located in public squares. Days were no longer just marked by mornings, afternoons and

8

United States of America before the Federal Trade Commission, in the Matter of APPLE INC., a corporation, Docket No. C-4444, March 25, 2014 (https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/ cases/140327appledo.pdf). In its complaint, the Federal Trade Commission alleged that Apple failed to notify parents that entering their password would approve a purchase and then open a fifteen-minute window in which unlimited charges could be made without authorization. In the complaint, the Commission cited examples of children incurring thousands of dollars in in-app purchases without their parents’ consent. Under the settlement, Apple was obliged to change its billing practices to ensure that it has obtained express, informed consent from consumers before charging them for in-app purchases. Apple was also obliged to provide full refunds, totaling a minimum of thirty-two and half million USD, to consumers who were billed for in-app purchases that were incurred by children and were either accidental or not authorized by the consumer. 9 Data provided by Budiu (2015). 10 Magnusson (1994); Johnson (1974); Judges (1939).

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evenings. Hours were also reckoned; then minutes were calculated, and finally (form 1656 onwards) seconds.11 The third factor contributing to the notion of time-resource is colonialism. The human conquest of terrestrial (and cultural) spaces often meant that settlers would ‘appropriate’ the time of the territories under their dominance. The measurement of time practiced by indigenous communities and linked to the rhythms of nature, progressively gave way to the rational systems of measurement practiced—and imposed—by the colonists.12 So, from the twelfth century onwards, the intertwining of efficiency and rapidity as measurements of performance emerged. The tracking of time implied that it could be treated as a commodity. Clearly, the apotheosis of Kronos. His, however, would be a short reign. Improvements in time-telling and time-tracking enabled the coordination of complex and large-scale activities. These innovations were not without detractors, and where there is change, there is (usually) opposition. In 1871, in Paris, revolutionaries set public clocks on fire. Their gesture had a strong symbolic value. It was meant to erase the (chronological) time that oppressed human lives. Two decades later, in 1894, Martial Bourdin, also a Frenchman, exploded a bomb in Greenwich Park, in East London. Bourdin was caught up in the explosion. He lost his life. We are not certain but it seems that his gesture was symbolically aimed at damaging the famous observatory that is named after that very park. A crazy romantic attempt from a man who wanted to annihilate the ambition to give time a standard measure on a global scale. Kronos, however, was not done. Not yet. Let us indulge him and jump ahead a few years. Measuring—and thus saving—time for the sake of efficiency grew in popularity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism celebrated the ‘bellezza della velocità’.13 Four years later, Frederick Taylor brought the chronometer into the factory. Taylor, an intellectual leader of the ‘Efficiency Movement’, suggested that industrial efficiency could be improved through measurement and standardization of workflow.14 Prior to Taylor, Adam Smith had already suggested increasing the dexterity of the workers and the productivity of the workshop.15 Karl Marx also proposed that workers should be compensated after the quantity of time they spent on the production side.16 Interestingly, with the diffusion of calculating machines in offices (an event that would take off globally only in the second half of the twentieth century), the growing enthusiasm for the augmented speed of human labour faced a new and unexpected challenge. In short, the efficiency and accuracy of automated labour did not increase

11

Landes (2020). Carlson (2010). 13 Marinetti (1914). 14 Taylor (1913). 15 Smith (1776). 16 Magun (2009). 12

2.4

The Cult of Velocity

19

automatically as expected. It actually remained dependant on the dexterity and attentiveness of the workers responsible for managing the mechanical aspects related to the use of machines, by entering numbers, pulling levers, and punching cards. Lorraine Daston describes how this new challenge profoundly impacted every time-related aspect of work.17 She explains that human operators had to adapt their working habits to the tempo of machines. However, because the gestures (and thus, skills) involved in the use of calculating machines could not be mastered to the point of becoming unconscious, the unusual combination of routine and unwavering concentration made calculation with machines exhausting for workers. By the early twentieth century technological innovation and human thinking had further progressed towards reshaping the understanding of time. On the one hand, the railroad compressed distance. The proliferation of steam locomotives allowed humans to overcome the limitations of geography. On the other hand, the telegraph condensed time, speeding up the transmission of information across space.18 In that same period, beginning with Emile Durkheim in 1915, social scientists, legal theorists and economists began studying time applied to social and political venues, posing for the first-time questions about what should be the pace and speed of politics.19

2.4

The Cult of Velocity

We finally arrive at the twenty-first century. The value—if you want to call it that— of digital technology is that it has brought chronological time to rout. Kronos abdicates. The dominance of Kairos, the cairological time, expressed in the cult of speed, begins. To borrow from Kundera: ‘La vitesse est la forme d’extase dont la révolution technique a fait cadeau à l’homme’—speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.20 There is an emblematic episode that explains well this cultural change. It dates back to 1998, at the dawn of the digital revolution. In that year the Swatch Group, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, proposed a new approach to measuring time. It was called, prophetically, ‘Internet Time’. The day was divided into a thousand parts, called ‘.beats’. Each beat lasted one minute and twenty-six seconds (clearly, an homage to the decimal minute introduced by the French Revolution). 17

Daston (2022). Wheeler (2019). In Wheeler’s opinion, the world is experiencing a third great network revolution. The first came in the fifteenth Century with the advent of the movable-type printing press (which created the first mass information economy). The second revolution came with the invention of the telegraph and the railroad early in the nineteenth century (which dissolved the geographical isolation that had created independent, self-sufficient, local resource-based communities). 19 Scheuerman (2004); Rosa and Scheuerman (2009). 20 Kundera (1998); Jones (2009). 18

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In Swatch’s proposal we find, albeit in embryonic form, the idea that the linear flow of time is superseded by a time composed of multiple different moments. Each of these moments is unique. The first watches that, in addition to the standard time, measured Internet time were marketed by Swatch in 1999. At first the idea seemed to catch on. The CNN network began to report the Internet Time on its website. In 2001, Ericsson produced a mobile phone displaying two different time clocks. One of these was the Internet Time. Ultimately, however, Internet Time turned out to be a flop. But not because of the concept itself—which had merit. What had been missing from the idea of Internet Time was foresight. Think about it: digital Kairos cannot be caged within any sequential trend format. If we assume that digital time is the multiplication of unique moments, each of which symbolizes a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, then we must infer that it cannot tolerate the existence of timetables that must be adhered to. In cairological time everything necessarily happens on demand, when you want it to. And it is immediate. Today evidence of the binomial relationship between digital technology and velocity can be found everywhere online: Internet webpages, hyperlinks, and popular social networks like Facebook, for instance, are predominantly blue.21 A colour commonly associated, among other things, to speediness. Another example of the cult of velocity is global time synchronization. At the outset of the Internet, the machines connected via a network did not share a single, reliable synchronized time. Engineers working at the Arpanet project created the ‘Network Time Protocol’ (NTP) to generate consensus on time and allow devices to communicate efficiently.22 In 1988 the NTP could synchronize the clocks of thousands connected computers that prior to that moment had been telling vastly differing times. Ten years later, NTP servers fielded eighteen billion timesynchronization requests from several million computers. They further increased in the following decade. In recent years, several tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, have implemented their own versions of NTP to handle leap-second malfunctions, adding to a wide debate on time synchronization. Sometime in the very near future, the issue of time synchronization is expected to depart planet earth and to accompany human exploration of space.23

21

In 2016 designer Paul Hebert (http://paulhebertdesigns.com/web_colors/index.php) did an analysis of the ten most popular websites on the Internet, and scraped data about the colors they were using. The most popular color by far is blue. 22 Hopper (2022). 23 Gibney (2023); Dirks (1992).

2.5

2.5

Digital Accelerationism and Working Poverty

21

Digital Accelerationism and Working Poverty

Digital accelerationism is so widely—and often uncritically—accepted and celebrated that a label has arisen to describe those who resist linking modernization to social acceleration. The ‘slow down modernity’ movement suggests ‘unhasty tempo’ as a precondition for enhanced mental and physical well-being, ethical life, and even a more accountable democracy. 24 The greatest benefit of these critical perspectives on digital accelerationism is the increased public awareness of its negative effects. Four are very significant. These have to do with societal standing, the economy, language, and, most importantly, customer expectations. The first consequence of digital accelerationism regards social status and how it is assessed. With digital technology, status in society stops being assessed on how little one works and begins to be parameterized according to the speed of web connection and the time spent online. It is no coincidence that since the 1980s, so-called ‘time poverty’ has increased globally.25 For equal hours worked—forty a week—many employees experience a net reduction in leisure time compared to working time. Digital technology has diluted the boundaries between productivity and fun, posing new dilemmas that are yet without satisfactory answers. If you watch a TV show while checking e-mails from your phone, is that free time or work time? What if you spend your lunch break sitting at your desk in office? Another thing to consider is that, within the framework of dilated productive time, everything becomes potentially urgent. Immediate feedback drives the digital economy. Since 1983 ‘time-theft’ (e.g., doing private calls while at work, overassociating with co-workers) has been formally codified—and it has been increasingly used by employers like Amazon to terminate contracts.26 This also explains why for many of us it is fine to check e-mails while watching a movie or eating dinner at a restaurant, to update social media profiles while attending business meetings or, worst, to tolerate with having conversations with friends cut short by constant phone checks. The incentives for optimizing any action in order to attain maximum efficiency, however, are where the most potent impact of the attention economy imposed by digital technology may be seen. This led American psychotherapist Craig Brod to coin in 1984 the definition of ‘technotress’ to describe an emerging disease of

Bauman (1990); Cohen (2018). In Filip Vostal’s (2017) claim, slowness becomes a ‘commodity’: one needs material and financial resources to prepare food and cook all day, to buy watches and ‘tune’ into the slow watch community. 25 Data on Time-poverty are collected by OCSE (Time poverty rates for men and women, by presence of children in the household, in How’s Life? 2013: Measuring Well-Being, OECD Publishing, Paris (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/how-s-life-2013/time-poverty-ratesfor-men-and-women-by-presence-of-children-in-the-household_how_life-2013-graph71-en). Giurge et al. (2020); Williams et al. (2016); Fraser et al. (2011); Lohmann and Marx (2018); Mark et al. (2008). 26 Snider (2001). 24

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adaptation caused by an inability to cope with computer technologies in a healthy manner.27 Many people became aware of technostress during the epidemic, particularly during the difficult transition from lockdowns (with schools, offices, and stores shuttered) to the gradual resumption of in-person professional and leisure activities. It was more stressful than anticipated to go from a time that was forcibly digital to one that was instead human. On the one hand, digital time meant days filled with many online activities, with virtually no friction in between. Returning to human tempo, on the other hand, meant dealing with downtimes (moving from home to the office, attending work meetings, taking part in conferences and business dinners) accompanied by a feeling of slowdown in productivity. Simply, many had lost the habit of it. This might also help to explain why, in the aftermath of the pandemic, so many workers declare that, if they were given the choice, they would be happy to give up part of their salary and company benefits in order to continue working remotely. In growing numbers, corporations are trying to meet this demand. Since 2021, Google employees who choose to stay home permanently can do so. In return for giving up twenty-five percent of their salary. Those at Telefónica, in Spain, are free to work in the office thirty-two hours a week, with a fifteen percent cut in their pay checks. The fashion house Desigual has proposed to its employees a cut in working-hours from thirty-nine and half to thirty-four and half per week, with a consequent six and half percentage points pay cut. As from 2023, employees at the Japanese trading House Mitsui & Co. are free to pursue side careers, such as being an artist. The list goes on.

2.6

Immediate Feedback and Digital Economy

Another area where we can observe the consequences of digital speed are financial markets and transactions. Immediate feedback is at the backbone of the digital economy. Predictive tools based on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are being applied by a wide range of market operators to speculating on the movements of financial markets, turning a mere fraction of a second into a decisive asset to successfully securing the trading of securities in the stock exchange.28 Financial capital is made, or lost, in a matter of (milli-) seconds. You might perhaps recall the famous case of the ‘Flash Crash’ happened on 6 May 2010 at the US stock market. The crash resulted in a nine percent drop of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in less than thirty minutes. The US Security and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission identified the cause

27

Brod (1984); Ennis (2005); Tarafdar et al. (2007, 2010); Mark (2023). Johnson (2018). The same principle is valid in online business. As reported by Jason Farman (Farman 2018), each tenth of a second spent by potential customer waiting on Amazon’s website is estimated to be equivalent to a revenue decline of one percentage point. 28

2.6

Immediate Feedback and Digital Economy

23

of the crash in the malfunctioning of a computer algorithm used to trade securities.29 Today, there are around three hundred and eighty underwater cables in operation around the world, spanning a length of over one million and two hundred thousand kilometres.30 These cables keep the Internet—and the economy—online. An estimated ten trillion USD in financial transactions are transmitted via these cables every day.31 One of the most important of these cables, operating from 2011, connect North America to Europe, and saves five milliseconds to market operators when completing financial transactions.32 The VISA company alone declares to handle three hundred and fifty thousand digital transactions per minute. It amounts at roughly six thousand transactions per second. Total revenues from such intangible transactions in 2022 reached two billion US dollars (USD).33 Cryptocurrencies are also exemplary in this regard. In 2020 these amounted at eight hundred and twenty-six million USD globally. The market is projected to grow to nearly two billion USD in 2028.34 In 2021, market capitalization of cryptocurrencies reached three thousand billion USD, and El Salvador even adopted Bitcoin as its legal currency.35 Parallel to the acceleration of digital transactions, however, has been the increase in volatility of the sector. It took only two tweets to Elon Musk to cause Bitcoin value to rise and fall precipitously.36 These wild fluctuations occurred within a few hours, globally. Another curious episode in this regard: in late 2020, the Bitcoin community found itself discussing the accuracy of the predictive models that had been used up to that point to estimate the value of that cryptocurrency. By convention, these models placed the ‘human’ time required to mine Bitcoin on the x-axis. 29 Data provided by Security and Exchange Commission, Commodity futures Trading Commission, Findings Regarding the Market Events of May 6, 2010, 30 September 2010 (https://www.sec.gov/ files/marketevents-report.pdf). 30 Data provided by TeleGeography: https://www2.telegeography.com. 31 Sunak (2017). 32 Data provided by ISPI, Undersea Cables: The Great Data Race Beneath the Oceans, May 28, 2021 (https://www.ispionline.it/en/publication/undersea-cables-great-data-race-beneathoceans-30651). 33 Data provided by World Bank, Where is the Wealth of Nations? Measuring Capital for the 21st Century, Washington D.C., 2006 (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/7505); Statista, WorldWide Transactions, 2022 (https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/fintech/ worldwide#transaction-value). 34 Data provided by Fortune Business Insights, Cryptocurrency Market Size by Component, By Type, By End-Use, and Regional Forecast, 2021–2028 (https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/ industry-reports/cryptocurrency-market-100149). 35 Alvarez et al. (2023), Sparkes (2022). 36 Huynh (2022); Ante (2021); Burggraf et al. (2020). On January 2021, Musk tweeted about DOGE, a meme coin. After the Tweet, the price of Dogecoin surged over three hundred per cent in four hours, before dropping to nearly half of its new high in the following couple of hours. On May 27, 2022, Musk tweeted that Dogecoin could now be used to pay for official Tesla items, and that SpaceX would soon follow suit (‘Tesla merch can be bought with DOGE, soon Spacex merch too’) The Tweet caused Dogecoin’s price to surge for a few hours. Finally, on May 13, 2022, Musk tweeted a statement about Tesla’s plan to no longer accept Bitcoin payments. As an outcome, Bitcoin fell from 54,819 USD to 45,700 USD, its lowest since March 1, 2021.

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Just a few months earlier, however, the Chinese government had banned the mining of the virtual currency, slowing down its global advancement. The Chinese ban had made one fact clear: the blockchain advancement does not depend on human time; it is actually contingent to the time of approved blocks.37

2.7

Fast Technology, Changing Language

The third consequence of digital speed concerns the structure and quality of language. Here is another story deserving to be told in more detail. Let us move from the following premise: languages evolve naturally and—in a similar fashion to the evolution of biological species—adopt new styles and metrics in response to environmental stimuli.38 The evolution of the word ‘deadline’ is a good illustration of this point. Prior to the twentieth century, deadlines demarcated a specific territory, specifically the line around a military prison beyond which anyone attempting to escape would be shot. The current meaning given to the word—a moment past which an assignment or task would be considered late—has been in use since the 1920s. This adaptation is further hampered in the case of technology and language, though, by a long history of dystopian worries about the potential negative effects the former might have on the latter. Already with Socrates,39 attempts to rationalize language were described as consequential to the rapid takeover of new technologies. Back in the twelfth century, the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi wrote that his age was one of distractions due to the technology of print. The French theologian Jean Calvin described readers wandering in a ‘confused forest’ of printed books. Across centuries, the impact of technologies on languages has been met with public concern and at times even with ferocious resistance.40 The contemporary landscape is particularly complicated in this regard. The diffusion of AI programs, collectively dubbed as ‘generative AI’, has escalated concerns on language integrity to a whole new level. Thanks to the support of technology, humanity has entered a phase in which the quantity of written language is unprecedented. The average digital-savvy citizens of the 2020s writes twice or three times more than their counterparts from a decade earlier. However, it is argued that the growth in volume of language (and content) as a result of technology is being 37

Chen and Liu (2022); Kaiser et al. (2018); Riley (2021); Rubechini (2023). The parallels between biological and language processes are summarized by The Economist, Like biological species, languages evolve, 12 November, 2020 (https://www.economist.com/books-andarts/2020/11/12/like-biological-species-languages-evolve). There are also studies (Wood et al. 2014)) showing how ‘textism’ and deliberate spelling mistakes, abbreviations and omission of apostrophes should not be understood as deterioration of language skills, but rather as natural boosts of constantly evolving languages. 39 Plato, ca. 370 B.C.E/1997, 551–552. 40 McKean (2023). 38

2.7

Fast Technology, Changing Language

25

offset by a decline in the quality of language. It is not just a matter of how much is written, claim critics, but also of how, with the aid of technology, our ability at memorizing new words, to write and communicate has improved or declined. Opinions are divided. Those who look favourably at the evolution of language and communication with technology, stress two points. First and foremost, they minimize the critical argument suggesting that attention was ‘stolen’ by the dopamine dispensers embedded in digital technology. Fears about attention span and focus—they claim—are as old as writing itself. We have always been distracted. Technological advances could perhaps make things only a little worse. The second argument used by those in the camp of favourable opinions, suggest that it makes no sense to expect a twenty-year-old in 2023 to know and use words like ‘CD-ROM’, ‘MS-DOS’ or ‘trackball’. These are terms from a very recent but already vanished technological past, close to extinction. At best we have words related to obsolete objects that are still in use, but lose their original meaning. We still ‘dial’ telephone numbers. We still ‘hang up’ the telephone. The former, however, is an out-dated operation. The second is even devoid of literal meaning. Landline phones, and before that, wall-mounted phones, disappeared from our homes long time ago. Some authors claim that technology may actually help to further democratise language, by making it accessible to wider audiences.41 Some preliminary assessments of existing AI-driven software’s impact on how people learn and engage with democratic tools and institutions, for instance, suggest these may support interactions among citizens within digital democratic spaces in a number of ways—for example by assembling complex information into simpler texts, or by customising and editing answers.42 Other favourable opinions on the impact of technology on language focus on language skills. Luciano Floridi, for instance, contends that info-polyglots are essential in today’s neo-manufacturing culture, where the bulk of employed individuals labor primarily with information.43 These are individuals who, aside from human language, are also knowledgeable in expressive languages such as design, logic, narrative composition, and coding. Opposing views focus more on the negative impacts that technology may have on the quality of language (and subsequently on the possibility that a set of shared democratic values and principles could be nurtured within digital democratic

41

Warschauer (2022); Chun et al. (2016); Godwin-Jones (2005, 2019). Data provided by Democracy Technology, How ChatGPT Could Be Useful for Democracy Technologies, Democracy Technologies, December 2022 (https://democracy-technologies.org/ opinion/the-team-tested-how-chatgpt-could-be-useful-for-democracy-technologies/?utm_source= Democracy+Technologies&utm_campaign=8c4cc3a192-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_11_2 9_03_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-48b74a5386-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID %5D). 43 Floridi L., Onlife Blog: ‘Le tre funzioni del linguaggio digitale e le loro conseguenze’, September 04, 2020(https://thephilosophyofinformation.blogspot.com/2020/09/le-tre-funzioni-dellinguaggio-digitale.html). 42

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spaces). Critical voices argue that this additional component of the linguistic changes brought on by digital technology should worry us considerably more than it really does. The struggle against ‘cognitive sloth’ is what prevents language from accurately capturing nuance and chiaroscuro.44 A few nations have already outlawed AI usage in colleges and universities. Digital velocity is perceived as a major contribution to this problem. With the exception of narrative styles that are traditionally based on speediness, as in the case of tales,45 negative consequences may concern the impoverishment of linguistic complexity, as with the case of the abandonment of past tenses in favor of present tenses, encouraged by technology. Negative effects may also stem from the diffusion of AI-generating systems into educational practices46 or in computation;47 or could translate into widening existing barriers between linguistically versatile citizens and those citizens who are not proficient in a second language (especially English for non-native English speakers);48 or could stretch as far as to be related to the crisis of the idea of the state.49 Two examples may help us to further illustrate this point: Amazon’s publishing model and social networks. Let us look at Amazon first. Every year, over one million and five hundred thousand authors self-publish a book. About three-quarters of these self-published books are available on Amazon. Differently from traditional publishing, that remunerates authors on the basis of the number of copies sold, Amazon’s remuneration is done in accordance to the number of pages read by those who buy books. In the dynamics of e-commerce, it is not relevant how many copies a book sells. What is important is the number of hits and interactions with the book. This approach disrupts the coordinates of the literary ecosystem. Readers become customers. Authors instead are service providers, and books are the service they offer.

44 Gloria Mark (2008) dismantles common misconceptions about our attention, among them that we should always be striving to focus when at work on our computers, and that the mindless scrolling we do on screens is counterproductive. 45 Italo Calvino (1985) explains that rapidity is among primary stylistic values. In a tale, events are concentrated in a few moments, and a narration becomes the essential element. When Calvino speaks of quickness, he is referring to both the ability of a writer to control the speed of a story (‘sentences can be used like the beats of a drum, dictating the march of the reader’s eyes. Syllables can warp time, pronunciations matter, spaces shape tempo’) and the pace at which the written word can travel. 46 Natale and Henrickson (2022) move from the assumption that such technologies may require people to reorganize their practices and approaches, they should also encourage us to reflect on what is, or should be, distinctive in academic writing. 47 Bindet (2022). Being increasingly dependent on words, symbolic computation has become entangled in debates about the nature of communication, progressively eroding the line between jargon and common language, and in doing so revealing the stakes underlying this boundary. 48 Will Kymlicka (1999) suggests that non-native English speakers may be cut out from taking part meaningfully in online conversations, to participating in web polls, or to engaging in any other online-based participatory venue. 49 Casini (2020, 2022).

2.7

Fast Technology, Changing Language

27

Immediate gratification of customers’ needs is what authors are expected to provide. The narrative style adapts in consequence. It becomes simpler. It leans toward sensationalism. It embraces and promotes primarily a quantitative approach to writing. Can we take it so far as to say that the Amazon model, in the long run, will deter readers from complexity? A second example of cognitive and linguistic laziness induced by digital technology is offered by the interactions nurtured through social networks. The digital platforms that host our virtual alter egos are designed following the principle of homophily—in order to bring together similar, or at least compatible, interests.50 Social media intentionally reduce our exposure to differences. We find ourselves interacting with like-minded people, removed from the complexity to which we would instead be exposed by a casual confrontation with different opinions. Thus, we polarize our opinions. In the US there is a Polarization Index that, based on data collected on social media, measures the average level of polarization of public opinion on a sample of ten divisive issues, from immigration to abortion rights, from health care reform to the minimum wage.51 Moreover, social networks favor synthesis. In general, the average amount of space taken up by text in major mobile apps does not exceed thirty-six percent. Short and direct messages work best, visual content prevails over written content. Once again, this is causing social networks’ users to lose the habit of complexity. The disaccustom to complexity, in conclusion, is directly reflected in the way we think and imagine the world around us. It permeates the relationships with others. Here we find a paradox. A society that is increasingly connected via technology is, for that very reason, also a more complex society. Yet the very spread of technologies that promise to take us away from complexity it is also depriving us of a mature understanding of that complexity. It fuels transactive forms of memory, based on a bartering between the desire to know and the Web. This is the reason for the existence of Google. Since 2014, the world’s most widely used search engine has featured an information box that appears at the top of the list of information produced by a search. The box contains a concise definition of the word, or combination of words, searched for by the user. These are called ‘direct answers’. They appear up to forty-one percent of the time if the search is conducted through a desktop computer. As much as sixty-three percent in the case of a search

50

Lee et al. (2019); Cialdini et al. (1998); Lerman et al. (2016); McPherson et al. (2001); Karimi et al. (2018). 51 Data provided by The Polarization Index, 2022 (https://thepolarizationindex.com). The latest issue of the Report (October 2021–March 2022) indicates in immigration and policing policy the most polarizing topics in the country, both primarily driven by conservative or extremist political parties, with a heavy dose of information from unreliable sources. In 2022, the level of polarization around abortion increased by almost ten points due to mounting reaction from the Left to restrictive state legislation that could potentially pave the way for overturning Roe v. Wade. LGBTQ+ rights became the fifth most polarizing issue. Finally, the topic of the vaccine remained a source of controversy, as both Left and Right poitical parties began to question the vaccine’s efficacy and long-term side effects.

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launched from a mobile device. On at least half of the occasions, Google information takes up three-quarters of the screen. The aim is to encourage user retention by preventing people from moving to other web pages from Google. 52

2.8

The ‘Ecstasy of Digital Speed’ and Dazzling Expectations

The fourth consequence of cairological time is the most important for the purposes of our research on the aesthetics of digital democracy. It relates to the expectations that consumer tech generates regarding service delivery. Digital products and services are expected to reduce to the minimum the time elapsed between the action and its satisfaction. These expectations have been gradually rising, in correspondence to the acceleration of pace of technological progress. Twenty years ago, an electronic processor was capable of interpreting about two or three million operations per second, with significant energy consumption. Today, a device that is considerably smaller and consumes a small fraction of the energy used by its predecessor is capable of processing over thirty million instructions per second.53 The gain, in terms of time, is mighty, as exemplified by the AMD processors advertising: they ‘make time irrelevant’.54 Consider another example: Toy Story, the popular computer-animated comedy film directed by John Lasseter, produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It was released in theatres in 1996, revolutionizing the market of animated films. The movie was so complex that Pixar, the production company, claims that it took between forty-five minutes and thirty hours to render each frame. In total, it took eight hundred thousand hours of computation on several

52

Tene (2008); Toubiana and Nissenbaum (2011). Data provided by The Markup, Google Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google, July 28, 2020 (https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/0 7/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors). The authors of the study examined more than fifteen thousand popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls ‘direct answers’, which are populated with information copied from other sources, ometimes without their knowledge or consent. Google’s decision to place its products above competitors’ and to present ‘answers’ on the search page—explain the authors—has led to lawsuits and regulatory fines. For example, European Commission, CASE AT.39740, Google Search (Shopping), Antitrust Procedure 27/06/2017 (https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/39740/39740_14 996_3.pdf). 53 Data provided by Tech Centurion, Best Mobile Processor Ranking List 2021 (https://www. techcenturion.com/smartphone-processors-ranking). 54 The AMD advertising is available here: https://subscriptions.amd.com/newsletters/ commercialchannelnews/archives/2019_11_en.html.

2.9

Fool-Proof Technology

29

machines, totalling more than one hundred and fourteen thousand frames.55 With current technology, processing the entire Toy Story would take less time than the length of the film itself. The principle is clear. If technology progresses by lowering the latency time between the demand and the delivery of digital services, consumers will expect the same from every technological and digital product. This, however, poses us a dilemma. To what extent is it fair to expect from democratic governments to provide equally fast digital services? This question cannot be answered in just one way. Actually, to be fair, the question is misleading because it uncritically imposes the parameter of speed as a measure of public performance. As we will see in Chap. 3, expecting rapidity from democratic decision-making is not always the optimal choice.

2.9

Fool-Proof Technology

The second standard that drives consumer tech is user experience. In much the same way as with digital speed, user experience took years to develop and become the standard we now know. Literature abounds of tales of more technological and simpler futures. In one of his lesser-known pieces, Jules Verne—a nineteenth century French novelist—imagined the future of the city of Paris, a century ahead of his time.56 Verne’s version of the French capital of 1960 looked very silent and ordered. Parisians would displace using speedy electromagnetic trains and gas-powered automobiles instead of horses. They would communicate via photographic telegraphs and would buy groceries in shops illuminated with electric lights. Verne’s vision was not uncommon at his time. A more technological future was already imagined as simpler and faster. The notion that technology needs to be easy to use, however, matured at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1888, Kodak was about to commercialize its first non-professional photo camera model. George Eastman, the founder of the company, came up with a catchphrase destined for tremendous success in the years that followed: ‘You Press the Button, We Do the Rest’.

55

Henne et al. (1986); Price (2008); Snider (1995) (https://www.wired.com/1995/12/toy-story/) reports that the film began with animated storyboards to guide the animators in developing the characters. Twenty-seven animators worked on the film, using four hundred computer models to animate the characters. Each character was first either created out clay or modeled from a computerdrawn diagram before reaching the computer-animated design. Out of all of the characters, Woody was the most complex, as he required seven hundred and twenty-three motion controls, including two hundred and twelve for his face and fifty-eight for his mouth. Fort further info: Entertainment Weekly, ‘Toy Story: The inside buzz’, December 8, 1995 (https://ew.com/article/2010/06/29/toystory-inside-buzz/). 56 Verne (2020).

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First photography, then telecommunications, and later mobility and services: everywhere in the world, ‘ease of use’ has become a reference standard for technology. Market success is determined primarily by the immediacy of interactions with new technological products or services. We only need ten actions to buy a product on Amazon. With just nine touches we can book a flight; and in a mere six, we can have food delivered directly to our door. On a website, the ‘three-clicks rule’ makes the current standard of the average interactions needed to access the requested information.57 A study by Sistrix published in 2022 found that the first organic result in Google Search has an average click-through rate of twenty-eight percentage points.58 Google basically preloads the first search result (on any search engine) in the background before users even click on it, hoping that they will do so. The principle that movements should be minimized in digital services is so widespread that in 2021 the French Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés fined Facebook sixty million euros because it forced two-clicks on users who elected not to be tracked by cookies. A perverse complication, according to the French Commission.59 We have said that digitalization and speed are related in an inverse proportionality ratio. Technology and ease of use, on the other hand, are bound together in a direct proportionality ratio. At times, this relationship is almost osmotic. Technological innovation is, in fact, simplification itself. For this reason, users’ incompetence has ceased to be a limitation; it has turned into an asset. Machines and technological products are being designed to augment human limitations and in turn encourage lazy or untrained users. Take the case of Microsoft’s user interface. Back in 1987, it was among the earliest forms of software designed with the goal of simplicity. Two years later, the first iMac was commercialized. The product itself was revolutionary. The User Manual was a stroke of genius. Users were invited to plug in the computer and turn it on. They did not need to know any more. Starting from that moment, collective imagination metabolized the image of ever simplified future technologies. In cinema and literature, technological progress was not depicted by complex instrumentation, flashing lights, and myriads of buttons anymore. The era of mastodontic electronic calculators, surrounded by busy scientists in white coats ended. Suddenly, W.O.P.R. from War Games represented the past. As of that moment, the future belonged to KITT’s minimalist design. Black and sleek.60 57

Zeldman (2001); Drapkin et al. (2002); Jiménez Iglesias et al. (2018). Data from Search Engine Journal, July 14, 2020 (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googlefirst-page-clicks/374516/#close). 59 Propp (2020), pp. 428–458; Della Valle (2020), p. 172. CNIL, Cookies: sanction de 60 million d’euros à l’encontre de Facebook Ireland Limited, 06 January 2022 (https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cookiessanction-de-60-millions-deuros-lencontre-de-facebook-ireland-limited). 60 Glass (1984-1985); Ruzza and Cassini (2010); Weissert (2018); Hancock et al. (2011); Mann (2020); Brock (2006); Dwoskin et al. (2022); Shalf (2020). W.O.P.R (War Operational Plan Response) is the supercomputer programmed to continuously run war simulations and predict 58

2.10

2.10

Simplicity Equals Sanity

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Simplicity Equals Sanity

It is at this point that—to put it with John Maeda’s words—‘simplicity began to equal sanity’.61 DVD players with too many menus, software accompanied by thousand-page manuals, and remote controllers with plenty of unnecessary options—in short, all technology that seemed too complicated—turned into something to be avoided or even to be rebelled against. Maeda makes two important points in his book. The first concerns the cost of simplicity. Technology, he says, makes a good exception to the rule that a simpler and faster product is also more expensive. A direct flight is more expensive than a flight with one or more connections, for instance. But in most instances of digital technology (news-consumption or video-straming, for example) simplicity lowered accessibility and usage costs. The second point made by Maeda regards the link of mutual need between simplicity and complexity. The higher the number of ‘sophisticated’ offerings there are in a market, the better the chance that something ‘basic’ or simple will stand out. Because technology continuously grows in complexity, there is a clear economic benefit in adopting a strategy of simplicity that could help to set a product apart. Strategic simplicity, for example, is the (not quite) secret ingredient that has made Apple’s recipe so successful worldwide. In January 2022, the company set a new record. It was the first company in the world to surpass three trillion USD in capitalization, tripling its average value in just four years. That is roughly double the size of Italy’s gross domestic product. Moreover, in 2021 it was reported that the group’s stock had gained thirty-four percent over 2020.62 The company reached two billion active devices and nearly one billion and two hundred thousand users. The firm averages three hundred and thirty-seven USD per customer per year, a fifth of that on services. possible outcomes of nuclear war, appearing in the 1983 American sci-fi movie ‘War Games’, written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes and directed by John Badham. KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) is the short name of an artificially intelligent electronic computer module in the body of a robotic automobile, appearing in the TV series ‘Knight Rider’. Further cases in point of size-reduction in technology (combined with increasing performance) are rising hard disk capacity described by Mark Kryder (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kryders-law/); fiber-optic capacity described by Donald Keck (https://spectrum.ieee.org/is-kecks-law-coming-toan-end); bandwidth growth described by George Gilder (https://www.netlingo.com/word/gilderslaw.php?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email); and decreasing transistor size described by Moore’s Law. Transistors are now getting so small that Intel has branded their next generation of chips the Angstrom era, the next unit of measurement below nanometers: Intel Corporation, Intel Accellerates Process and Packaging Innovations, July 26, 2021 (https://www.intel.com/content/ www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-accelerates-process-packaging-innovations.html). 61 Moeda (2006). 62 Data provided by Macrotrend, Apple Revenue 2010–2022 (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/ charts/AAPL/apple/revenue); Statista, Global revenue of Apple 2004 to 2022 (https://www.statista. com/statistics/265125/total-net-sales-of-apple-since-2004/).

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Another example is Microsoft. When in 2022 the company announced it would build a one-stop smartphone app that could combine shopping, messaging, web search, news feeds and other services, it did not just reveal its ambition to expand further into consumer services, but also to boost its advertising business leveraging simplicity. 63 It is with mobile phone technology, however, that user experience has achieved a whole other level of ease. As we have already said, most of interactions with smartphones take place with just a few taps on the screen. Technological simplicity is also the cause of many commercial successes and failures. In 2012, with Nokia on the verge of disappearing from the market, the BlackBerry and the iPhone were competing for market shares. The race was compelling. On one side there was the traditional QWERTY keyboard, used by the BlackBerry phones. On the other side stood out the disruptive simplicity brought by the touchscreen. We all know how it turned out. Yet very few at the time would have imagined such a dramatic outcome. In 2011 Blackberry was selling fifty million units a year—twenty percent of the global share. Five years later it had reached an all-time low in sales, with just over two hundred thousand devices sold worldwide. In 2022 the company announced the final switch off, making its last models unserviceable.64

2.11

Digital Singularity

The third standard that is driving consumer tech is singularity. We can introduce it with an anecdote. In 1988 Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, launched the original iMac in a now much-celebrated presentation. In that occasion, Jobs revealed that the capital ‘I’ at the start of the product name—‘Individual’—would, from that day on, accompany all of Apple’s future products. This is the concept of ‘digital singularism’: that the experiences with digital services and products are designed not only to be special, but also to some extent, intended to be unique for the users. The food we buy via delivery apps is not just good; it is the best choice in terms of our needs and financial resources. The route indicated by digital navigators installed on mobile phones or in vehicles is the most convenient to reach a destination. The new words taught to us on a language app are based on our recent achievements and language skills. The parking spot indicated by dedicated mobile apps is the closest to the restaurant or the theatre where we will spend the evening. Even the partners suggested by dating apps’ algorithms are not just a simple match; they are presented to us as potential soul mates. Hence, the success of Tinder, and more generally of

Data provided by The Information, Microsoft Eyes ‘Super App’ to Break Apple and Google’s Hold on Mobile Search, December 6, 2022 (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofteyes-super-app-to-break-apple-and-googles-hold-on-mobile-search). 64 Trivedi (2017); Moussi (2017). 63

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Digital Singularity

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online dating. They offer never-ending prolongations of the satisfaction we get from imagining, searching and finally finding the perfect partner.65 Digital singularity is especially evident in two areas: pricing and social media. Pricing in the digital technology market is increasingly personalized. Digital services are not necessarily valued according to factors such as production or marketing costs, nor according to per-unit revenue expectations. Increasingly, prices are determined by tech companies on the basis of (estimated) spending capabilities of their customers. Producers refer to the ‘reserve price’—i.e., the maximum cost we would be willing to pay for a service or a product that interests us. Reserve price is thus influenced by consumption habits, personal tastes and, of course, budget.66 This, however, is the least troubling aspect of personalized pricing. Its darker (and deeply disturbing) side relates to human labor. The ascent of personalized hourly pay built on data-collection is progressively transferring price discrimination from the consumer to the labor context—a phenomenon labelled as ‘algorithmic wage discrimination’.67 Social media provide another great example of how digital singularity works. How so? To elucidate this point, we need to take a step back in time, to April 2022, when Facebook announced an unprecedented net loss of five hundred thousand daily users. 68 In its eighteen-years history, the platform had never experienced a decrease in users. The founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg commented on these numbers by emphasizing the threats posed by fast-growing rival platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, based on short-form videos that are more attractive to young people. This explanation, however, is only partly true. Undoubtedly, short-form videos are the reason behind the fast growth of platforms such as TikTok, Reels, or Vine. Videos usually have a higher share rate compared to other types of content and for this reason become key to many brands’ marketing strategies. Another digital platform, Spotify, wrap packages of user listening data into shareable slides. Via the Spotify app users watch their data and tap through like viewing an Instagram story. Much of the information is customized for each user, from the number of genres listened (including preferred artists and songs) to the total minutes spent on the platform. As from 2022, a new feature categorizes the mood of the music a user typically listens to at given moments of a day.69

65

Sumter et al. (2017); Timmermans and De Caluwé (2017); Bhattacharya (2015); Couch and Liamputtong (2008); Lawson and Leck (2006). 66 Botta and Wiedemann (2020); Bourreau and De Streel (2018). 67 Dubal (2023). 68 The Washington Post, Facebook loses users for the first time in its history, February 3, 2022 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/02/facebook-earnings-meta/). 69 The feature is called ‘Playlist in a Bottle’ and is designed to let users capture their current music tastes and revisit them one year later. Data provided by Techcrunch, Spotify’s new time capsule feature will let you revisit your musical taste a year from now, January 4, 2023 (https://techcrunch. com/2023/01/04/spotifys-time-capsule-feature-revisit-your-music-tastes-one-year-later/? guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=

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However, there is a second, more important, difference between short-form platforms and traditional ones. This consists of the social bonds linking platforms’ users. On Facebook, a friend relationship is mutual by design. So, in practice, user A requests friendship to user B, who decides whether to accept it or not. In contrast, on Instagram, users follow other users, with no implication of reciprocity. On TikTok, following is even more ephemeral. Users scroll and like content, with no further implication. Translated into social perception, this means that Facebook users are to some extent ‘forced’ to adapt their online personality to the many people they interact with. Being on Facebook is like being invited to a party where you only know a few people. What many would do naturally in such situation is to adapt their tone and gestures to the mood of the party. On TikTok—but the same applies to instant messaging apps—users do not feel the same pressure. The reason for this? Indeed, the capacity of these platforms to adapt and promote users’ singularity. The average WhatsApp user sends one thousand and two hundred messages a month, across multiple chats, using a different tone for each conversation, ranging from professional, or extremely formal, to very informal.70 In 2023 the company introduced a feature named ‘Message Yourself’ to allow users to send messages, notes and documents to themselves. WhatsApp’s main competitor, Telegram, had been offering the same feature for quite some time already. One extra point in favor of digital singularity. You can go even further with digital singularity. Some scholars have gone as far as to suggest that norms could be personalized as well. With ‘smart contracts’, their argument goes, contractual terms could be tailored to contracting parties’ needs and expectations. Cases in point include medical responsibility, testamentary dispositions or even organ donations.71 What are the consequences of digital singularity? Once again, dazzling expectations—as in the case of digital velocity and ease-of-use. We expect consumer tech not only to be delivered quickly, and to be easily accessible, but also to be tailored to our needs. Digital services and products tailored on end-users, however, encourage an individual hypertrophy that makes the average consumer more demanding. Proof of this is given by the technologies that, despite promising commercial outlooks, have turned out to be unsuccessful. Take again the example of Alexa, that we have mentioned in Paragraph Three. The number of ‘skills’—the actions Alexa could perform, often provided by third parties such as brands and media companies—grew nine hundred percentage points in two years.72 User activation and retention, AQAAAKB30V9tKIbzODA8tYfARm9OJUwLnW_6RbDIFLzlZl7Vp4-rc9tPDKgE0 BQNUKqscF8cZMEBsuhI4u856FhVEws0Qu1BWG76zmC0MPSSj9k2g0DHnWr43 f6FasoI9WVV7GB1QI-33uO3tzX5jgFmSi7F6yPStAsTID96H_xCSwes). 70 Data from Statista, Whatsapp Statistics, 2022 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/ whatsapp-global-unique-users/). 71 Rush and De Franceschi (2021); Kolvart et al. (2016); De Filippi et al. (2021). 72 Amazon’s Alexa has gone from having one hundred and thirty skills in 2014 to over one hundred thousand skills as of September 2019. Data from Statista, Total number of Amazon Alexa skills

2.12

Digital Gratuity

35

however, did not follow. According to Bloomberg, a quarter of Alexa users were no longer active with the device in their second week of use, and the majority of longtime Alexa users use the device just to play music, set the timer while they cook, or turn on and off lights.73 This costs Amazon a loss of ten billion USD a year. While voice assistants are still seen as a promising market, they have left many problems unresolved, including the lack of browsability, poor speech recognition, and privacy concerns. In parallel, the personalized interfaces we find on smartphones are improving every day, making it harder for voice assistants to stand out.

2.12

Digital Gratuity

Gratuity is last on the list of design characteristics of consumer tech. It is based on a seemingly simple principle: we can use most of digital products free of charge. Moreover, the principle of gratuity suggests that most technology is affordable and will tend to become cheaper over time. To be clear about this point: gratuity is unrelated to the cost of digital products. Case in point: desktop computers. Undoubtedly, these products revolutionized accessibility to technology. In 1970, the IBM system/370 cost four million and six hundred thousand USD (nearly thirty-five million USD in today’s terms). Ten years later, the entry price for a computer was one thousand times lower—and prices continued to decline for the following twenty years.74 Yet a state-of-the-art technology product can still cost hundreds or even thousands of Euros or USD. Clearly not for everyone—and despite data telling us that high-pricing strategies pay off. The mobile telephony sector, to make another example, in 2022 showed a year-on-year trend growth of nine and half percentage points.75 Moreover, not just direct, but also indirect costs should be considered. Research shows that a computer’s base price typically represents less than twenty percent of its total cost of ownership. The remaining eighty percent is determined by technical support, maintenance, labour costs and user experience.76

from January 2016 to September 2019 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/912856/amazon-alexaskills-growth/). 73 Businessweek, Amazon’ Alexa Stalled With Users an Interest Faded, Document Show, Businessweek Technology, 22 December 2021 (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202112-22/amazon-s-voice-controlled-smart-speaker-alexa-can-t-hold-customer-interest-docs?utm_ source=substack&utm_medium=email&leadSource=uverify%20wall). 74 US Today, Check out how much a computer cost the year you were born, https://eu.usatoday. com/story/tech/2018/06/22/cost-of-a-computer-the-year-you-were-born/36156373/. 75 Data provided by GSMA, The Mobile Economy 2022 (https://www.gsma.com/mobileeconomy/ wp-content/uploads/2022/02/280222-The-Mobile-Economy-2022.pdf). 76 Data provided by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Workers’ compensation claims for musculoskeletal disorders among wholesale and retail trade industry workers – Ohio, 2005-2009, 66(22) MMWR Morb Mortal Weekly Report 2013, 437–442.

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Not to mention the fact that gaining access to products that are perceived as exclusive is usually rewarding to consumers. Sony’s Playstation 5 is a good example in this regard. It arrived on the market in November 2020. By March 2022, according to Sony, fifteen million consoles had been distributed—one million less than had been estimated. This shortfall was explained as a consequence of a global semiconductor shortage and pandemic-related logistical problems.77 It may also have been related to a market strategy that played on the scarcity/perceived value of a good. Dedicated Telegram channels were created for those hoping to get early news about the availability of a few models in their hometown. So, what exactly does digital gratuity consist of? First and foremost, the gratuity factor relates to using rather than just possessing digital products and services. Creating a new social media account, for instance, is free of cost.78 Also interacting with other users on the same platform is usually free of charge. It is certainly no coincidence if the announcement made by Elon Musk as CEO of Twitter to charge verified accounts eight USD a month was received with skepticism and outrage. Among the digital services embracing the free use approach we find mobile apps for food delivery, websites for booking flights and hotels, as well as online banking. In the second place, the principle of gratuity applies to market-competition, with competing operators forced to sell goods or services at rock bottom prices just to stay competitive. Take the example of Amazon. For many years, this company operated at a loss, selling and shipping goods below cost. This strategy was functional to gain access to the capital markets and to subsidize everything customers would buy. Once the platform consolidated its position, it shifted strategy and tarted to harvest the surplus from its business customers. Another example may be made again with the PlayStation 5 console: it is now widely known that the game console contributes negatively to the revenues of its manufacturer Sony. In 2003, the company declared a profit of eighteen USD with each console sold. Two years later, PlayStation3 had a higher price: adjusted to 2022 inflation, at six hundred and fifty-nine USD per unit (a price many complained about). The estimated manufacturing costs, however, had increased to over eight hundred and forty USD per unit, resulting in a net loss for the company of over two hundred USD per unit. In the revenue model of Sony, such losses are offset by the royalties paid by developers for each of the game titles they would sell for this machine.

77

Leslie (2022); Mohammad et al. (2022). In 2023 Sony announced that the shortage of PlayStation 5 was over (The Verge, Sony says the PlaysTation 5 shortage is over, January 5, 2023 – https:// www.theverge.com/2023/1/4/23539918/sony-playstation-5-shortage-over). 78 For a long time, social networks have been thought yielding welfare for the user because she/he is not obliged to pay a price. More recently, however, it has been shown that this approach neglects the costs in terms of information that the consumer is forced to bear in order to gain access to the digital platform.

2.13

2.13

The Costs of Consumer Tech: Ownership, Quality and Contentment

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The Costs of Consumer Tech: Ownership, Quality and Contentment

Fast, reliable, intuitive, tailored to users’ needs and (occasionally) free-of-charge: consumer tech is designed to provide swift responses to users’ demands via simplified interactions. Instant gratification of needs becomes the key yardstick for assessing customers’ satisfaction. However, with the promise of quick rewards and access to (potentially unlimited) resources, there are three costs in terms of ownership, quality, and contentment. In the remainder of this Chapter, we will focus on the first (ownership) and second (quality) cost, and only briefly on the third (contentment). The latter will be analyzed in more detail in Chap. 3. To start, consumer technology transforms the way we relate to our possessions, and thus to ourselves and the world around us. This is especially true with streaming and other Internet-based service consumption.79 Data are telling. Back in 2011, the sale of online music surpassed the sale of physical devices. In 2016 streaming services took over digital purchases. In 2020 digital video game sales outplaced their physical counterparts. Art and collectible markets are also quickly moving to digital forms. At the same time, sales of physical objects are declining everywhere. Digital customers cease to ‘own’ objects (at least in its traditional understanding) and set their consuming habits to the intangible and ephemeral. This implies that digital owners lack basic ownership rights such as the right to repair and the right to sell. Take the example of the Self-Service Repair program announced by major tech companies such as Google and Apple in 2022. The former partnered with repair specialists iFixit. Apple announced it would open an online repair shop, making a huge change from its traditional hostile approach to third-party repairs. However, upon closer examination, Apple’s decision seems to be more an attempt to respond to regulatory attempts to introduce a real right to repair. The announcement was in fact accompanied by the caveat that a ‘vast majority’ of customers should still visit professional repair providers to ensure that their devices are repaired safely and reliably.80 Moreover, it remains unclear whether the parts will be available directly on Apple’s website or only through Apple Support. Without considering that Apple has delayed the service in many countries due to component shortages (initially caused by the pandemic and then exacerbated by the Russia-Ukraine conflict).

79 Tsioutsou et al. (2015); Ho et al. (2009); Doll and Torkzadeh (1988). Mohamed Khalifa and Vanessa Liu (Khalifa and Liu 2003, pp. 31–49) developed and tested a model for explaining the satisfaction of customers with Internet-based services in the context of an on-line knowledge community. The model empirically demonstrates the need to consider not only the expectations of customers but their desires in explaining their satisfaction. Khalifa and Liu also identified specific desires and expectations that drive the satisfaction of customers of Internet-based services. 80 According to Apple, from 2019 to 2022 the company has expanded its repair network, including over 3,000 Independent Repair Providers and more than 5000 authorized service providers worldwide Montello (2020).

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This takes us to the second cost: quality. For the most part, products and services delivered through consumer technology are ‘Lo-fi’.81 The pictures we post on social media, the music we listen to through streaming services, and the news we consume through RSS feeds, online newspapers, blogposts, or podcasts are all qualitatively rounded down. On average, the quality of consumer technology is significantly lower than that of analogical (or professional) services and products.82 For example, much of the music we get online would be considered low in terms of audio quality. In 2021, five hundred million people subscribed to a music streaming service, thereby accessing virtually boundless music databases (and music streaming apps generated twenty-five billion USD revenue in 2021, a thirtytwo percent increase on the year prior).83 The cost of access to vast amounts of music is a sacrifice in listening quality. In order to limit bandwidth space, files are zipped and compressed. More demanding customers may activate the option of high-quality services without decompression, but to the average consumer, the loss in listening quality would be negligible and one would ask: is it worth it? We also read sloppy, misleading or in some cases even false news online, on which we build biased and polarized beliefs and judgments. This is even more surprising considering how technology has empowered us with access to vast amounts of knowledge and information. Yet misinformation is widespread.84 Public health policies provide a good example in this regard. About twenty-five percent of the European population was perplexed or opposed to anti-Covid vaccination campaigns.85 Outside Europe, large segments of the public opinion reported some

81

Mantellini (2020); Cocks and Murdock (2023). Interestingly, this ‘Lo-fi’ quality does not imply a loss in trust in users. Consumer tech design features are often meant to instill in consumers a sense of reliance in the products and services they are using. This is the case, for instance, with the standard lock, shield, and checkmark icons used by ecommerce websites to let users check up on a product. Although the design of these icons has little connection with the technology that powers the transaction, they are effective at representing security and therefore give users the feeling that they do not have to worry about how safe their data is. 83 Data from Business of Apps, Musing Streaming App Revenue and Usage Statistics, 2023 (https:// www.businessofapps.com/data/music-streaming-market/). 84 Di Gregorio (2019); Del Vicario et al. (2016); Flaxman et al. (2016). 85 Already in the 2019 State of Health in the EU report (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/ presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_6336), vaccine hesitancy was stated as a major public health threat throughout Europe. In 2021-2022 polls showed that sizeable numbers of people in the EU were hesitant—or even opposed—to vaccination in general. As regards Covid-19 vaccination, surveys suggested that Europeans were among the most skeptical in the world. A survey conducted in October 2020 reported that 3% of respondents from fifteen countries around the globe said that they would be vaccinated for Covid-19 if a vaccine were available. However, Covid-19 vaccination intent was expressed by just over half of adults in France (54%) and about two thirds in Spain (64%), Italy (65%) and Germany (69%). According to the survey, reasons for not accepting the vaccine included concerns about side effects and concerns that vaccines are moving through clinical trials too fast. Smaller numbers indicated that they did not think the vaccine would be effective, that they were against vaccines in general, and that they believed their risk of contracting Covid-19 was low. 82

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The Costs of Consumer Tech: Ownership, Quality and Contentment

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degree of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ (i.e., the delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccination despite availability of vaccination services86) about Covid-19 vaccination. Or we can take the example of social media. In the eighteen to twenty-nine age group, the primary sources of information are social networks.87 Yet on Twitter— arguably the most ‘content-based’ of the social networks—a post has an average life expectancy of around four hours. Only six percent of tweets gets at least one retweet.88 The average time elapsed between accessing a content posted on the platform and sharing that content among followers (the most common way to measure users’ engagement) is limited to a few seconds.89 Barely enough time for those sharing the tweet to have even read the content. To continue with examples, we watch videos online that are constantly interrupted by commercials. Every minute, YouTube publishes five hundred hours of new content. By the end of the day, globally, users would have ‘consumed’ one billion hours of videos. These are preceded, interrupted (multiple times if the length exceeds a certain threshold) and concluded with short commercials. Again, for those who want it, there is the possibility to switch to the premium formula and eliminate advertising. Once again, this is more expensive. But is it worth it? Finally, we work with more fatigue and less satisfaction. We discussed before the growing figures of ‘working poverty’ globally. According to Tung-Hui Hu, an omnipresent, pervasive and oppressive digital culture is resulting in burnout, exhaustion and restlessness, which Hu terms ‘digital lethargy’.90 What we may add here is that, in recent years, companies and policy-makers have proposed several options aimed at limiting digital stress. One is an employee ‘right to disconnect’, which has gained ground in the corporate sector and, more recently, in the public sector as well.91 Another proposed solution consists of e-mail services that work in line with principles such as slowness and mindfulness. One such service is Pony Messenger, which is marketed as a ‘once a day’ mail service. Emails are sent and delivered only once during a set time, and serves to limit the distraction caused by the constant flow of incoming and outgoing emails for users. Apps like Coffee 86

MacDonald (2015); Scholz (2021). The World Health Organization’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts working group on vaccine hesitancy, defined the hesitancy on vaccines a behavior that is: ‘influenced by a number of factors including issues of confidence (do not trust vaccine or provider), complacency (do not perceive a need for a vaccine, do not value the vaccine), and convenience (access). Vaccine-hesitant individuals are a heterogeneous group who hold varying degrees about specific vaccines or vaccination in general. Vaccine-hesitant individuals may accept all vaccines but remain concerned about vaccines, some may refuse or delay some vaccines, but accept others, and some e individuals may refuse all vaccines’. 87 Data provided by Pew Research Center, Social Media Fact Sheet, 2021 (https://www. pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/); Our World in Data, The rise of social media, 2019 (https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media); Datareportal, Global Social Media Statistics 2023 (https://datareportal.com/social-media-users). 88 Duncan and Zhang (2015). 89 Antonakaki et al. (2021). 90 Tung-Hui (2022). 91 Muller (2020); Hesselberth (2018); Secunda (2019); Pansu (2018).

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Meets Bagel conservatively limit the number of swipes and matches users can make each day. These models help combat choice overload, one of the more anxietyinducing aspects of online dating.92 Until recently Gmail customers could install Goggles, a service that activated by default late at night and on weekends. The intention was to discourage emailing under the assumption that these are times when we tend to write messages we might regret. Yet, despite the many options introduced to safeguard users from digital stress, we still lack effective defenses against the work-sharing software that has been flooding the market for the past few years. Slack, Asana, Trello or Ryver—one is spoiled for choice. In spite of some differences, these apps are based on the same approach: immediate responses and constant measurement of progress. They owe their success to the promise they would enhance productivity in a team. We are not certain on whether they improve the quality of work. But certainly, they impact on the well-being of team members.

2.14

From Digital to Analogue, No Return

It is pointless to ty and run away from digital to avoid these perceived costs—there is simply no escaping it. The discourse on expectations begins with digital, but it later extends to everything that was initially analog but later became digitalized. I will give three examples: retail, politics, and public services. Shopping online is not a recent innovation. Even before the pandemic, many people were already choosing to buy milk, bread, cheese, and other basic food items through the online stores of large and medium-sized retailers. In Europe alone, between 2019 and 2020, e-commerce grew by ten percentage points, with food driving this growth.93 Amazon has made the most innovative approach to retail. The trillion-dollar company has merged what previously seemed impossible: the physicality of retail shopping with the immateriality of digital. Thomas Edison launched the idea as early as 1910, envisioning a future retail without clerks.94 Putting it into practice, however, took another one hundred years. With Amazon, customers enter ‘physical shops’, without a credit card. They choose products and exit. An ecosystem of algorithms takes care of payment, cross-referencing the identification codes of the products chosen, facial recognition data collected by cameras in the store, and those of the credit card registered on customers’ account.95

92

https://tinyurl.com/4u2a7233. Data from Ecommerce Europe, European E-Commerce Report 2022 (https://ecommerce-europe. eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/CMI2022_FullVersion_LIGHT_v2.pdf). 94 Collins et al. (2002); David (1992). 95 Ives et al. (2019); Polacco and Backes (2018); Huberman (2021); Weigel (2023). 93

2.14

From Digital to Analogue, No Return

41

Political communication is another great example of digital expectations. Imperfection is elevated by several political leaders as a major aspect of their approach to politics and communication. This ‘Lo-fi’ communication style becomes a new cultural hegemony in the moment in which voters judge political leaders based on their TV appearances, speeches, debates and social media activities rather than on their jobs.96 ‘Hyper-leaders’ measure their political influence through social media metrics (likes, followers and shares). In communicating to the electorate, they adopt the colloquial and demotic style of YouTubers and Instagram influencers, becoming often histrionic or even excessive (especially when compared to ‘traditional’ politicians). The 2022 Twiplomacy World Leader Power Ranking has identified that the most influential world leader on Twitter is the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, closely followed by US President Joe Biden and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. All global names creating a global narrative. It is worth nothing that, among the key trends of 2022—according to the study—is the major shift away from traditional metrics of online influence (based on how many followers a leader has or how many tweets the leader puts out) in favor of how engaged that follower base is, and how likely they are to interact with a leader’s message.97 ‘Psycho-politics’—to borrow from Han Byung-Chul98—is focused on seduction: instead of forbidding and depriving people and voters with commandments, discipline and shortages, it works through pleasing and fulfilling. It seems to allow voters to buy what they want when they want, become what they want and realize their dreams. It would be a mistake, however, to limit understanding of the transformation of political communication to full democratic regimes. Drawing in part from ByungChul, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman have written about ‘informational autocrats’—i.e., autocrats who, rather than terrorizing citizens into submission, artificially boost their popularity by convincing the public they are competent.99 The consequences are plain to see. One is the irrelevance of contradictory political content as criteria to assess political leaders’ skills and aptitude to deliver. People no longer care about consistency. As voters, we are prisoners of the constant removal of the past of disposable political communication. If everything is new, everything is quick, then every message, even if contradictory, is acceptable because

96

The topic is currently being explored by Nello Barile at IULM University in Italy, with a project dedicated to on lo-fi politics and high-tech society (https://www.iulm.it/it/ricerca/progetti-diricerca/ricerca-dipartimentale/Barile_1). Barile’s analysis focuses on how Matteo Salvini, the political leader of the Lega, cultivates a link with his community through digital platforms. According to Barile, the repositioning of Salvini as a populist/sovereign leader is a consequence of the landslide of the middle class that has put the centrist parties into further crisis, determining the coming together of two opposed but complementary political formations – Movimento 5 Stelle and Lega. Gerbaudo (2018, 2021); Gibson & Ward (2009). 97 Twiplomacy, World Leader Power Ranking 2022 (https://www.twiplomacy.com/world-leaderexecutive-summary). 98 Byung-Chul (2017); Lushetich (2018); Ware (2018); Lin (2020). 99 Gurie and Treisman (2019).

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it opens up to new possibilities.100 Samuel Popkin’s ‘low information rationality’ theory stipulates that the majority of citizens have basic impressions about politics, and thus their voting choices are determined by shortcuts.101 Nadia Urbinati explains that ‘Lo-fi’ political messages are constantly reframed and reshaped and only exist in the moment in which they are created.102 This approach, taken to the extreme, has already produced provocative and grotesque results—like the Synthetic Party, a Danish political party born in 2022, with an artificially intelligent representative and policies derived from AI;103 or SAM—an AI chatbot that simulates a New Zealander virtual politician who interacts with users through Facebook Messenger.104 Third and finally, with constantly improved conditions, greater expectations (rather than greater contentment) follow. The consumer tech quest for making customers happy is on an upward trajectory. As pointed out by Juval Harari in Homo Deus, the interdependence between better conditions and greater expectations is risky in that future achievements might leave us as dissatisfied as ever.105 We will discuss this in depth in the next chapter. Summary • Digital technology and velocity are bound together in a binomial relationship. Digital products and services are expected to reduce to the minimum the time elapsed between the action and its satisfaction. Such ‘digital accelerationism’ has

100 ‘Lo-fi’ institutional communication is encouraged by scarce or non-existent literacy in democratic opportunities. Literacy in participatory channels is modest within the general population, especially young generations, but also among civil society organizations. Three causes are particularly important to low literacy: first is the lack of integration of civic studies into the school curriculum, including a strong dimension of education for democracy and human rights; second, is the inadequate publicity of participatory instruments, often scattered across a variety of webpages; third is the uncoordinated nature of many participatory instruments, with the EU being a case in point. 101 Popkin (1991); According to Philipp Converse (1964), most of the citizenry do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have been at the center of intense political controversies for substantial amounts of time. 102 Urbinati (2013); Deseriis (2020). 103 The party was founded in May 2022 by Computer Lars (an artist collective) and the non-profit MindFuture Foundation. The Synthetic Party’s public face is a chatbot named ‘Leader Lars’, programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970 and meant to represent the twenty percent of Danes who do not vote in the election. For further info: https://detsyntetiskeparti. wordpress.com. 104 Under the slogan ‘You can talk to me anytime, anywhere’, SAM claims to make decisions without bias, based on facts and opinions, and commits to never knowingly lie or misrepresent facts. See V. Kyselova, How SAM chatbot can change political life of New Zealand, Jasoren (https:// jasoren.com/how-sam-chatbot-can-change-political-life-of-new-zealand-2/). 105 In Harari’s (2016) view democracies might just become obsolete over the coming century, especially in the case in which information technology will be partnered with biotechnology, allowing its algorithms to access and act on human thought. Democracies—suggests Harari— might thus be replaced by tech-tyrannies, or just by new, more elaborate, political system.

References

• • • •

•

43

profound consequences on societal standing, the economy, the evolution of language, and customer expectations. Technology and simplicity are bound together in a direct proportionality ratio. Machines and technological products are being designed to augment human limitations and in turn encourage lazy or untrained users. Digital services and products are tailored on end-users. ‘Digital singularism’ suggests that the experiences with digital services and products are designed not only to be special, but also to some extent, intended to be unique for the users. Digital gratuity is based on the idea that most of digital products can be used (rather than just possessed) free of charge. It also suggests that most technology is affordable and will tend to become cheaper over time. Consumer technology transforms the way we relate to our possessions, and thus to ourselves and the world around us. Digital customers cease to ‘own’ objects (at least in its traditional understanding) and set their consuming habits to the intangible and ephemeral. On average, the quality of consumer technology is significantly lower than that of analogical (or professional) services and products. This is functional to gratify end users.

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Lushetich N (2018) Chained to the digital camp: review essay of Byung Chul Han’s Psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new technologies of power. Media Theory MacDonald NE (2015) Vaccine hesitancy: definition, scope and determinants. Vaccine 33(34): 4161–4164 Magnusson L (1994) Mercantilism. The shaping of an economic language. Routledge, London Magun A (2009) Marx’s theory of time and the present historical moment. Rethinking Marxism. J Econ Cult Soc 22(1):90–109 Mann C (2020) The end of Moore’s law? Technol Rev 3 Mantellini M (2020) Bassa risoluzione. Einaudi, Torino Marinetti FT (1914) I Manifesti del futurismo, Firenze Mark G (2023) Attention span: a groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity. Hanover Square Press, New York Mark G et al (2008) The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems McCumber J (2014) Time and philosophy. Routledge, London McKean CA (February 2, 2023) We’ve always been distracted, Aeon McPherson M et al (2001) Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. Ann Rev Sociol 27: 415–444 Moeda J (2006) The laws of simplicity. MIT Press Mohammad W et al (2022) The global semiconductor chip shortage: causes, implications, and potential remedies. IFAC-PapersOnLine 55(1):476–483 Montello S (2020) The right to repair and the corporate stranglehold over the consumer: profits over people. Tulane J Technol Intell Prop 22:165–184 Moussi A (2017) Mini-case study: the downfall of Blackberry, University of Amsterdam Research Paper Muller K (2020) The right to disconnect. European Parliamentary Research Service Brussels Natale S, Henrickson L (2022) The Lovelace effect: perceptions of creativity in machines. New Media Soc 0(0) Norbury JW (1998) From Newton’s laws to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Eur J Phys 19(12):143 Pansu L (2018) Evaluation of ‘Right to Disconnect’ legislation and its impact on employee’s productivity. Int J Manage Appl Res 5(3):99–119 Polacco A, Backes K (2018) The amazon go concept: implications, applications, and sustainability. J Bus Manage 24(1):79–92 Popkin S (1991) The reasoning voter: communication and persuasion in presidential campaigns. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Price D (2008) The Pixar touch: the making of a company. Alfred A. Knopf, New York Propp K, (2020) Google LLC v. Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) and Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland Ltd. (CJEU). Int Legal Mater 59(3): 428–458 Ray RC (1991) Time, space and philosophy. Philosophical issues in science. Routledge, London Riley J (2021) The current status of cryptocurrency regulation in China and its effect around the world. China WTO Rev 1:135–152 Rosa H, Scheuerman WE (2009) High-speed society: social acceleration, power, and modernity. Pennsylvania University Press, Philadelphia Rubechini P (2023) Tecnologia blockchain e fiducia amministrativa. Editoriale Scientifica, Napoli Rush C, De Franceschi A (2021) Algorithmic regulation and personalised law. Hart Publishing, Oxford Ruzza S, Cassini E (ed) (2010) Wargames, ovvero: come applicare la logica del paradosso e vincere una guerra impossibile, in La superficie e l’abisso: Percorsi culturali e politici nel cinema americano degli anni Ottanta, Aracne, Roma: 253–266 Scheuerman WE (2004) Liberal democracy and the social acceleration of time. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimora

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Chapter 3

Digital Aesthetics in the Public Sphere

Abstract In this Chapter we explore the fundamental differences in structures, goals and dynamics separating digitalised public spaces from private spaces. Five are especially important. Namely: inclusivity, longevity, generality, reliability, and publicity. The first (inclusivity) can be summarised as follows: digital public spaces aim to be inclusive. Consumer tech can be—and often is—exclusive. The second difference is longevity. It describes the aspiration of public regulation to be as durable as possible. Consumer tech instead plans its obsolescence. Third on the list is generality. Democratic spaces are designed by governments to serve the interests of large and undifferentiated communities. Consumer tech aims primarily at targeting individual users. Fourth, virtual democratic spaces differ from consumer tech in terms of reliability. Consumers are always offered the chance to opt out and adopt cheaper or more functional alternatives. However, citizens are usually not offered any alternative to the policy-making tools that are provided by a particular governmental authority. That is, they cannot opt out of one tool and then re-engage via a different, more useful or attractive digital technology. Fifth and finally, technological forms of power are structured on the principle of secrecy. Public powers are instead grounded on the principles of publicity and officiality. Keywords Polarization · Broadcast model · One-to-many approach · Cognitive overload · Digital inequality · Sunset clauses · Longevity principle · Programmed obsolescence · Legal dynamism · Digital representativeness · Compulsory digitality · CivicTech · New feudal society · Democratic dissonance · Onlife · Digital undemocratic

3.1

The Problem of Replicability

In Chap. 2 we described the relatively ‘Lo-fi’ attributes of consumer tech. We also stressed that this is done intentionally, by design. Finally, we explored the nature and consequences of the opportunity cost that consumers of technology agree to pay. Let us take our reasoning a step further, by shifting focus from the private to the public sector, and introducing two further questions. The first regards the impact that consumer tech’s design has on individual and collective expectations about © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Sgueo, The Design of Digital Democracy, Springer Textbooks in Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36946-9_3

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digitalized public services. The second goes into more detail and investigates the consequences of the dazzling expectations offered by consumer tech with regard to the digital interactions between democratic decision-makers and their constituencies. We will begin with an empirical observation. As consumers, we understand and accept that digital spaces and connections differ greatly from their offline counterparts, and we behave accordingly—with occasional (albeit significant) exceptions. Psychologist Robin Dunbar, for instance, demonstrated that the structures of social communities and the number of friends people have online tend to resemble closely to their offline counterparts. According to Dunbar, our capacity for friendship online is limited to around one hundred and fifty people.1 Just to be clear: it is not true that we have more friends online than offline. We just fool ourselves that we do. On the other hand, we are generally not very good at separating the dissimilarities dividing digital scenarios. Perhaps more than any other, most people make the assumption that digital public spaces are built using the same standards and guidelines as digital goods and services, and as a result, they should resemble one another. However, this is a fallacious assumption that neglects the existence of fundamental differences in structures, goals and dynamics between digitalised public and private spaces. With that said, I am not implying that no commonalities exist between the formats and standards guiding the design of public spaces for digital interactions between public regulators and their constituencies and consumer tech’s standard design features. What I would like to stress are the problematic aspects stemming from an aesthetical dimension of digital democratic interactions that mocks-up entirely consumer technology. Therefore, my claim is that ignorance or disregard of key design differences separating private from public digital aesthetics is a major—if not the primary—cause of dysfunctional digital democracies. Why most democratic governments worldwide decide to mimic consumer tech may be explained as an attempt to adapt public structures and rules to the pace of technological innovation. Chapter 4 will take this point up at length. But first we need to ponder the reasons that make this approach problematic and flawed. There are five areas in which differences in design separate digital public from private spaces. These are: inclusivity, longevity, generality, reliability, and publicity.

3.2

The Inclusivity Dilemma

The first and by far most relevant difference between the aesthetics of consumer tech and that of digital public spaces is that of inclusivity. It can be summarized as follows: digital public spaces, on the one hand, aim to be inclusive, and for this reason must necessarily be designed not only to include all potential interests, but also do so in a way that is transparent and financially sustainable. Consumer tech, on the other hand, can be—and often is—exclusive.

1

Dunbar (2020, 2021); Dunbar et al. (2015).

3.2

The Inclusivity Dilemma

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This would seem, at least on the surface, to be a simple or even predictable difference. In spite of how they are frequently explained to (and understood by) users and citizens, it becomes apparent that neither the virtual nor the physical aspects of digital aesthetics are necessarily and fundamentally democratic. The terms ‘technology’, ‘digital’ and ‘the Internet’ conceal significant disparities in accessibility, usage, and maturity (the latter refers to the ability of public and private organizations to respond and adapt to shifting trends in technology). Take the example of the Internet. We said already in Chap. 2 that the Internet gave digitally literate individuals direct access to the equivalent of a printing press. Thanks to the Internet, information and knowledge have grown unprecedented levels globally. Back in 1453, it took forty days for Pope Niccolò V to be informed of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.2 Breaking news events such as the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, the attacks to Capitol Hill in 2021, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were broadcasted on television and online, in real time, all around the globe.3 There are, however, other, less positive, elements to consider. Some were discussed in the previous Chapter. Polarization, for instance. The Web has reduced our capability to tolerate opposing and challenging viewpoints.4 Another major critical aspect of this technology relates to the possibility that it may exacerbate the already existing gap between the minority of citizens who care for the quality of their ‘informational diet’ and the majority that seems uninterested in the issue. Why does this happen? For many, the explanation may be found precisely in the undemocratic consequences stemming from the impact of the Internet on information consumption. This is a claim worth further clarification. Media studies separate news-consumption in two broad categories. On one side, we have traditional (analog) democratic systems, where citizens consume and share information following a linear and unidirectional (top-down) pattern. At the apex of the so-called ‘broadcast model’ are located traditional media outlets: print, radio and television. These are responsible for the narration and interpretation of events. At the base we find the readers, listeners, and viewers. They draw on sources passively. Or at the most they share and comment on the news with their small circles of contacts.5 On the other side, we have contemporary (digital) democratic regimes, where the informational diet of most citizens follows a circular pattern. This pattern has four distinctive features compared to its predecessor. The first is that mainstream information sources are losing importance. Only a handful of certified media websites have a significant audience. Countless websites instead struggle to find an audience.6 This is exacerbated by page rank algorithms, that prioritizes websites that are already reputable.

2

Chanda (2007). Sgueo (2016). 4 Hindman (2008). 5 Mcluhan and Powers (1996); Thompson (1996); Noelle-Neumann (1974); Zuckerman (2019). 6 Postman (1987) De Mateo et al. (2010); Raboy and Dagenais (1996); Sampson (1996). 3

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The shrinking number of readers of traditional media is certainly indicative of the generalized waning interest in mainstream sources of information. But it does not necessarily suggest that the demand for information is shrinking. In fact, the latter is intercepted and absorbed by the Web, which replaces the mainstream media as the primary source of information for increasingly large segments of the population. Neil Postman has argued that the crisis of media is related to the growing demand of entertainment by large segments of the public. Seventy-two percent of Europeans aged between sixteen and seventy-four years old regularly access online sources of information.7 This is the second distinguishing feature of the circular model of information transmission. The third feature of this model is the superposition between the author and the receiver of the news. From the one-to-one approach of the traditional model, digital democracies switch to a one-to-many approach.8 Manuel Castells in 1996 argued that a communication technology such as the Internet would soon allow anyone to communicate information from any location simultaneously.9 Geoff Mulgan took Castell’s argument one step further claiming that the growing connectedness of the world was among the most important social facts of our times, and that constant connectedness would force governments to rethink their policies and structures.10 Today anyone can, through the Web, share a piece of content with a number of individuals that largely exceeds the circle of family members and acquaintances. We have already mentioned this in Chap. 2: data sharing occurs very quickly, through one million and three hundred thousand kilometers of undersea cables that convey ninety-five percent of global data.11 In the one-to-many model, each of us is potentially, at the same time, a reader, a broadcaster and an opinion-maker. The last feature of the circular model is the most disturbing: with the breakdown of information monopolies, the subsequent multiplication of information sources, and the resulting ‘cognitive overload’,12 the irrational infiltrates the social fabric, diluting the boundaries between what is true, likely, or demonstrably false. Prolonged exposure to content that conforms to one’s views encourages denialist and polarized opinions.13 According to Nobel prize laureate Robert Shiller, whether true or false, stories transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media and, increasingly, by social media, may have major impacts on the economy 7

Data provided by Eurostat, Consumption of online news rises in popularity Brussels 2022. Cassese (2021). 9 Castells (1996). 10 Mulgan (1997). 11 Burnett et al. (2013); Carter (2010); Coffen-Smout and Herbert (2000). 12 Blair (2010); Orman (2016); Williams (2018). 13 Bentzen (2018); Gnambs and Markus (2017); Kramer et al. (2014). According to Oxford Dictionaries, the use of the term ‘post-truth’, increased by two thousand percent between 2015 and 2016. Researchers at US RAND corporation use the definition ‘truth-decay’ to capture four related trends: growing disagreement about facts, blurred lines between opinions and facts, the increasing influence of opinions over facts and declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information. 8

3.2

The Inclusivity Dilemma

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(by driving collective decisions about how and where to invest, and how much to spend and save) as well as politics.14 In 2016 for instance, the radicalization of positions led the majority of voters to declare themselves in favor of the United Kingdom’s (UK) exit from the European Union (EU). For Thomas Nichols we are witnessing the ‘death of expertise’.15 It is not just large technological infrastructures like the Internet that may hide troubling inequalities. Even the physical components that enable us to enjoy the digital rights we are accorded in democratic systems are profoundly undemocratic, as they often result from exploitation of human and natural resources. Metals make up around half of the mobile devices and computers that control significant portions of our social, financial, and professional lives. These metals come, in part, from advanced economies (North America’s lead and silver, for example) and in part from developing countries (South America’s tin and zinc). Some minerals, however, are rarer than others. Cobalt is one of those. Scarce in nature, difficult to extract and laborious to work with, cobalt is the main component in the lithium batteries powering most of the technological products on the market. Two-thirds of the world’s reserves of this mineral are concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Surprisingly, however, Congo is not the leading global exporter of cobalt. Nearly half of global cobalt exportation comes from China. Through a holding of subsidiary companies, China buys almost all of this mineral from Congo, processes it, and eventually markets it. In doing so, the Chinese government is able to produce more than ten thousand tons of Cobalt annually. This allows China to consolidate a monopolistic position in global markets, maximize profit, and retain formidable political leverage over large companies, from Apple and Samsung and to almost all operators in the automotive sector. This is yet another paradox of the digital agora. The commodities through which we feed the rhetoric of (more) inclusive and transparent digital democracies narrate stories of exploitation, marginalization and prevarication. In the Congo, cobalt mining is left in the hands of unskilled miners, many of whom are under the age of twelve, who use crude instruments to dig the earth without any safety precautions and, most crucially, for a meager daily wage of just one USD and half.16 To conclude on this point, we should add that the inclusivity challenge currently faced by public regulators is not expected to decrease globally. Rather the opposite. According to the Global Trend Unit of the European Parliamentary Research Service, Public sector’s catch-up in digital technology usage for democratic

14

Shiller (2020). Nichols (2017); Eyal (2019); White and Taket (1994). 16 Tech companies are well aware of these facts. Some have even taken countermeasures such as auditing the suppliers that make up the cobalt production chain, making financial information transparent, and supporting humanitarian initiatives against human exploitation. In 2019, the nongovernmental organization International Rights Advocates filed a class action lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia against Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla. The claim seeks compensation for forced labor, unjust enrichment, negligent supervision, and intentional imposition of emotional distress on fourteen Congolese families. 15

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purposes could indeed incentivize inclusivity, but might also increase inequalities, particularly among the lower-skilled, the less educated and less trained.17 Or in choosing to favor some design criteria over others, it could further empower dominant positions in online spaces, while simultaneously undermine those of subordinate actors and minorities. This is typically the case with identification requirements. The more these requirements are complex and demanding, the more they increase the cost of participation, reducing the potential size of the participating group.18

3.3

The Longevity of Law

In a famous letter written by Thomas Jefferson to George Madison, Jefferson argued that ‘neither the representative of a nation, nor the whole nation itself assembled can validly engage debts beyond what they pay in their own time’. In arguing against the possibility that a society could make a perpetual constitution (or indeed a perpetual law) that binds future generations, Jefferson suggested that every regulation should be set to expire within ninety years from its entry into force.19 There is no denying that Jefferson’ argument is valid from a pragmatic perspective. Outdated norms are unjust and inefficient. They force future generations to abide to behaviors no longer acceptable or sustainable. The problem is that the opposite is also true. At least in principle, every public regulation should aspire to durability. In a hypothetical democratic society in which no rules would be granted with reasonably durable application, chaos would prevail. It is not by chance that existing exceptions to the principle of durability are not meant to avoid unjust consequences of long-lasting norms. Quite the opposite: these exceptions are meant to tighten the legal certainty and the stillness of the rule of law. Look at the example of ‘sunset clauses’.20 In a typical application, these clauses complement marketing authorizations for new drugs. Permits expire whether, in the three years following authorization, the authorized drug has not yet been marketed in the country where it was approved. This is a clear attempt to avoid confusion about regulatory frameworks and ensure legal certainty.

17

Norris (2003a); Barber (1998). Deseriis (2021) elaborates this argument by arguing that authentication systems requiring no identification are also more inclusive. Yet lack of identification makes it difficult for system administrators to verify that a user has a right to participate in the process. The decision to favor control over inclusivity has clear political implications insofar it affects the size and composition of the polity and the mode of interaction. 19 The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1958), Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 15:27, 27 March 1789 to 30 November 1789. 20 Kouroutakis (2018); Ranchordás (2015); Ranchordás (2014); Kouroutakis and Ranchordás (2016). 18

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The Longevity of Law

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We can also put it in another way, and describe provocatively the longevity principle in terms of a privilege granted to lawmakers. Public regulators can afford to cherish an ambition forbidden to humans: eternity. This is the exact term (‘eternity clauses’, to be precise) used by constitutionalists to identify legal provisions intended to make amendments to legislation more difficult, or even impossible. The German Grundgesetz is a good example. The Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany protects the principles of popular sovereignty and the democratic, federal and social nature of the German Republic from constitutional revision. It basically makes them immutable.21 Let us now move to the market. Perhaps not surprisingly, durability here is just a secondary matter, or it is even absent. Look around you. We are surrounded by obsolete items. In the fashion industry, collections follow one after another at the pace of one every six months. According to the canon imposed by designers and clothing companies, the garment you wear today will be outdated in less than a year. Schools and academic publishers, to make another example, make a point of updating handbooks every year. The volume you bought in the fall will very likely have a new chapter added next spring. In the automotive industry, newer models are marketed in the yearly-cycles—and the majority of new models give customers not much more than cosmetic updates. Technology takes this pattern to the extreme. Technological obsolescence is based on the idea that digital products become progressively devaluated due to technological progress. This means that new technological products will replace older ones without these being necessarily dysfunctional.22 For years Microsoft updated its operating systems twice every year. In 2021 it announced that the release cadence of updates would be set to ‘only’ one every year. On average, companies replace their printers every two years. On most modern home computers, security software is scheduled to run once daily by default. The list of examples is endless and, in the large majority of cases, is motivated by similar marketing purposes. No company would produce something so resistant to aging that it would never require upgrading or changing. It would be uneconomic. What becomes notoriously problematic is ‘programmed obsolescence’ – i.e., the market strategy consisting of deliberately ensuring that versions of a given digital product or service will become out of date or useless within a known time period. This proactive move aims at bolstering consumers’ demand via programmed need of replacements. An early example of such type of obsolescence dates back as far as 1923, when a few global light bulb manufacturers joined in a cartel to artificially reduce the lifespan of the products they sold. The ‘Phoebus cartel’ artificially cut the life of light bulbs from two thousand and five hundreds to one thousand hours.23

21 Deutscher Bundestag, Basic law for the federal Republic of Germany, https://www.btgbestellservice.de/pdf/80201000.pdf. 22 Ma (2021); Mellal (2020). 23 Krajewski (2014); Friedel (2013); Valant (2016); Sasaki and Strausz (2008).

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Today, many technology transitions take place in twelve to fifteen years, even when these transitions involve hard physical stuff, like factories.24 While law remains at odds with pre-programmed obsolescence, with the digital transition of public services the topic of longevity of rules has become more controversial. As scholarly analysis suggests, this condition might soon change. Those favorable to re-think the longevity of law in a digital scenario, move from the claim that the former has resisted technical transformations longer than most other disciplines. This argument is advanced from two perspectives. Some authors focus on the differences of pace separating the evolution of technology from law. The former evolves exponentially, quickly stretching its effects across all areas of human life: jobs, politics, diplomacy, economy, social connections. The latter instead evolves incrementally. It therefore takes longer (compared to technological innovation) to adapt and react to changes.25 This may have unexpected and unwanted consequences. It may take decades, for instance, to get governmental approvals to build new infrastructures that are essential for digital transition, often due to the antiquated legislation governing such projects. Out-of-date regulations may even favor old-school players, rather than new stakeholders. This line of reasoning raises an important point. To get an idea of the differential of pace between law and technology it is sufficient to remember that it took just fifty years to electricity to reach fifty million consumers in the US. The airplane took sixty-four years—two more than the automobile. For television and computers, twenty-two and fourteen years, respectively. When compared to non-digital technologies—which can take multiple decades or centuries to scale up

24

Foster (1985); Genus and Coles (2008); Geels (2005). A technological transition is described as a collection of theories regarding how technological innovations occur, the driving forces behind them, and how they are incorporated into society. 25 Azhar (2021); Ford (2009); Raikov (2018); Deudney (2018); Kirwan (2001). The history of technology is marked by the first use of stone tools by our ancestors, around 3.4 million years ago. It took 2.4 million years for them to control fire and use it for cooking. The last 12,000 years – a geological period formally known as ‘Holocene’ (later renamed ‘Anthropocene’ by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen) – technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between the invention of agriculture, writing, and the wheel. From 1800 onwards, many major inventions rapidly followed one after another. From the first flight in human history (1903) to the first man landing on the moon, only 66 years have passed (data provided by Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/technology-long-run). Technological change confirms this trend. It took less than a century from the advent to the first modern computers to the pervasive diffusion of technology at all levels of society. In the public sector, the first modern computers were used in 1930 to crack cipher codes of foreign governments. By the 1940s computers were used in the defense establishments of many countries. Between the 1950s and the 1960s, public administrations began to use computers to assist in large-scale operations, censuses for instance. As from the 1990s ICT technologies explode globally. In the year 2000 Lawrence Lessig (Code is law: on liberty in cyberspace, Harvard Magazine, January 1, 2020—https://cartorios.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/11/LESSIG._Lawrence_Code_is_law.pdf) argued that ‘Code is law’, that is to say that software, along with laws, social norms and markets, can regulate individual and social behavior.

3.3

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internationally—advances in the digital realm take relatively little time to mature and disseminate. From the time the first Motorola hit the market—in 1983—to the latest iPhone model, the advancement of mobile phone technology has literally hit the ground running. It took a mere twenty-three years (1993–2016) for the Internet to go from ten percent to eighty-eight percent adoption rate in the US, and a mere seven years for the tablet to reach sixty-four percent of adoption in 2017. In contrast, the period of time needed for the majority of Western democracies to adopt basic democratic rights has remained the same across time. Let us take the example of the US. It took one hundred and forty-four years for women to be granted the right to vote (in 1920); and one hundred and eighty-nine years for black people to be granted the ame right (in 1965); over two hundred years were needed to grant individuals the right to an abortion before fetal viability (which was overturned in 2022).26 The fact that law progresses at a much slower pace than technological innovation can be seen as the main reason behind the many failed attempts to regulate technology in an efficient manner. Cybersecurity and cryptocurrencies are just two examples. Both are characterized by continuously evolving technology and related challenges, partially addressed by a plethora of regulations, legal standards and soft law. ‘Normative hypertrophy’, as someone named it, is a well-known issue at the EU level.27 There is, however, another way to look at the same problem and consists of stressing the potential benefits that are consequential to the rapid expansion of computational approaches into the creation and implementation of law. The theory of ‘legal dynamism’ suggests that a law, by means of computational tools, can be expressed either as a static rule statement, or as a dynamic object that includes system performance goals, metrics for success, and the ability to adapt the law in response to its performance. The regulation of digital assets presents an opportunity for dynamic regulation, as for instance with central bank digital currencies and money-laundering.28

26

Coen-Sanchez et al. (2022); Sun (2022). The decision overturned the longstanding Constitutional right to abortion and eliminated federal standards on abortion access that had been established by earlier decisions in the cases, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 27 Data provided by LSE Blog, Too much EU interference? A look at the areas where critics say the single market overreaches itself, January 28, 2016 (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2016/01/28/toomuch-eu-interference-a-look-at-the-areas-where-critics-say-the-single-market-overreaches-itself/). The ‘Over Regulatocracy’ hypothesis, in the words of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (Vesnic Alujevic et al. 2019), consists of over-protective approaches, which risk suffocating innovation. The first to be concerned by over-regulation are designers and developers. They see excessive legislation as an obstacle to the development of disruptive and creative approaches. 28 Mahari et al. (2022).

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Legal dynamism proposes design frameworks for human-machine systems based on five components: specification of system performance goals, testing, robust adaptive system design, continuous auditing, and reporting of suspicious transactions. This also helps to better seize and appreciate the variations of policy actors’ perceptions of what counts as evidence. Eleanor MacKillop and James Downe described how these perceptions may change as careers progress, and are influenced by the roles taken on by policy-makers, the organizations they work in, and the policy issues they work on.29

3.4

Generality Vs Singularity

The third characteristic separating the design of digital government from consumer tech is generality. The underlying concept is that norms (with occasional exceptions) are designed to serve the interest of large and undifferentiated communities rather than targeting individual stakeholders. Consequently, the digital spaces within which interactions between governments and stakeholders unfold ought to be designed to welcome all potential stakeholders. Private operators in the digital markets follow the opposite logic. Human attention is treated as a commodity. As we saw in Chap. 2, microtargeting, search engine ordering, curated newsfeeds and automated recommendation systems are designed in accordance to the principle of singularity, to maximize user attention and satisfy individual preferences.30 With that in mind, we should also stress the fact that despite the metric of singularity and digital democratic spaces being at odds with each other, reality has often returned a very different picture. Many experiments carried out by democratic governments to enhance participation through digital channels have failed to meet expectations, proving exclusionary and self-selective. Digital consultations neither guarantee that the number of participants is higher than in participatory processes carried out in an analog format, nor do they offer guarantees of representativeness of all interests. They pose, if anything, unknowns (heretofore unseen) issues of regulatory-capture,31 information systems’ security (in 2022, ransomware attacks are

29

MacKillop and Downe (2022). Zuboff and Rigotti (2021); Parisier (2011); Wu (2017); Fogg (2022); Berdichevsky and Neuenschwander (1999); Hamari et al. (2014); Johnson et al. (2002); Xu (2021). 31 Easton (1965); Drutman (2015). 30

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Generality Vs Singularity

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estimated to have caused six trillion USD of losses globally),32 as well as of reliability of digital platforms.33 Of all these problems, the most troubling is the so-called ‘problem of digital representativeness’.34 In democratic consultations it frequently occurs in the form of a clear predominance of some categories of individuals over others. More men than women, for example. Or more elders than young participants. Or, again, more Caucasians than ethnic minorities. This is a familiar issue in online consultations organized by the European Commission in conjunction with the presentation of new regulatory initiatives. These regularly receive solicitations from a narrow pool of interests, always the same.35 So, at least for the moment, full digital inclusion of all stakeholders remains more a theoretical than a realistic scenario. The ‘Future of Government’ simulation funded by the European Commission between 2018 and 2019 on future governmental models, for instance, imagined situation scenarios including the increase of AI in

32

According to the consultancy AAG (https://aag-it.com/the-latest-ransomware-statistics/), 2021 saw 623.3 million ransomware attacks (ransomware is a type of malware that blocks a victim’s access to their data until a ransom is paid) worldwide, an increase of one hundred and five percent over 2020 figures. Also in 2021, more than a third of organizations globally suffered an attempted ransomware attack. Despite a drop of twenty-two percentage points of ransomware attacks in 2022, attack methods evolved from ‘traditional’ ransomware techniques such as encrypting target data and charging victims a fee for the decryption key, to so-called ‘double-extortion’ schemes. 33 Cingolani (2020) compared four hundred and sixty-five open government platforms operating in eighty-seven countries, concluding that while open code remains the potentially most effective standard, it hides reliability and durability pitfalls whose solution requires careful planning and constant updates. 34 Lijphart (1997); Norris (2003b). Studies on participation separate so-called ‘hard-core participants’ from ‘unqualified masses’. The former category includes people who participate a lot. Thanks to their commitment, they become extraordinary experts on specific issues and dominate participation. They are, however, a minority. Only those citizens with preferential access to three fundamental resources – time, money and knowledge—can be included in this category. The hardcore participant’s identikit is easy to sketch: male, college-educated, middle-aged and wealthier than the average citizen. Unqualified masses’ category includes citizens who participate occasionally, who generally do not commit for longer periods, and show little interest in engaging in conventional forms of participation. They include women, racial and linguistic minorities, and often people with poor education. Segall et al. (1996) explain that research based on sample surveys is also frequently affected by representativity biases. Questionnaires are answered primarily by those who have the time and resources to participate. In jargon, they are referred to by the acronym ‘WEIRD’, meaning Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. There are cases in which WEIRD components reached eighty percent of the total participants. In such cases, the data collected through the survey may bring the authors of the study to draw conclusions that are wrong or out of sync with reality. 35 Quittkat (2001); Alemanno (2020); Kohler-Koch (2010); Eising (2007). According to the 2019 audit conducted by the EU Court of Auditors (Special Report no. 14/2019: ‘Have your say!’: Commission’s public consultations engage citizens, but fall short of outreach activities, 2019 – https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=50895) the average participation to a Commission’s consultation ranges between 500 responses (2015–2016) and 2000 responses (2017–2018) each. On average, just over a third of the sample of consultations examined received over 1000 responses, while over a third received under 75.

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government and the concept of citizen-centrism resulting in a new design of government. In this scenario, open governments had a real-time understanding of socio-economic problems, and public services could be offered predictively and individualized to citizens.36 This explains why, along with the progress made with the digitalization of public services, governments worldwide are investing resources to train citizens with limited or no digital skills to enable them to interact digitally with public administrations. The key precondition of digital government is that everyone must have equal access to and use of digital government in order for it to be effective.

3.5

Reliability and Digital Governance

A fourth difference between digital democratic spaces and consumer tech is reliability. Consumers are always offered the chance to opt out and adopt cheaper or more functional alternatives. A glaring example of this was encountered in Chap. 2, when speed and simplicity were identified as two of the key design characteristics of consumer tech. Consumers that are forced to wait for a response from customer service, or to buy a product, would be more likely to look for a competitor that offers a better experience. Already in 2012 American Express quantified as fifty percent the quota of Americans who had scrapped a planned purchase because of a bad customer experience, and seventy-four percent the number of those who had switched brands due to the difficulties in finalizing the purchasing process.37 It should be said, for the sake of completeness, that exceptions apply to the unlimited freedom choice of digital consumers. Recent studies have highlighted how consumers may become entrapped into subtle forms of ‘compulsory digitality’. Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake explored opt-out options of digital products and described how these may be hidden or obfuscated by mazes of confusing or overly complicated information, terms of service and instructions.38 In such cases, opting out from consumer tech may be increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for users. Suppose now, for simplicity, that digital consumers enjoy the right to opt-out in full. What would be their options? As famously pointed out by Albert Hirschman, consumers have two ways to express discontent with organizations with which they do business. They can either voice their complaints, while remaining customers, in the hope that the situation will improve, or they can switch to competing products. It is interesting to note that, according to Hirschman, the latter option is also available

36

Vesnic Alujevic et al. (2019); Vesnic Alujevic and Scapolo (2019). Data provided by Harris Interactive, Costumer Experience Impact Report, 2012 (https://www. slideshare.net/RightNow/2011-customer-experience-impact-report/6). 38 Kunstsman and Miyake (2022). 37

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Reliability and Digital Governance

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to citizens and interest groups in a given political system.39 However, he adds, the decision to exit from the government is ‘deplorably’ infrequent. If we apply Hirschman’s theory to the domain of digital technology and public service, we can argue two things. The first is encouraging. Digital technology has de facto expanded both the number and the range of possibilities for citizens to voice against public sector organizations.40 In the current historical phase, we are witnessing the global echo of new digital civic movements, which is even more surprising considering that these movements lack structures and operate in complete informality. #BlackLivesMatter, #Metoo, #IceBucketChallenge, and #FridaysforFuture, to name some of the best known, are movements without hierarchies, headquarters, or membership. Initiatives as virtual as the symbols by which they are represented, yet celebrated for their potential to decisively affect public decisions, globally.41 Some argue that Twitter is to be credited if African dictatorships have fallen during the ‘Arab Spring’.42 The Turkish uprisings of 2013, as well as the ‘Occupy Wall Strett’ protests that begun in Zuccotti Park in New York in 2011 (and rapidly expanded globally) were bolstered by social networks.43 Multinationals such as Netflix have rescinded multi-million-dollar contacts with world-class actors as a result of the pressure exerted through major digital platforms by millions of individuals from around the world.44 We can even go as far as to say that, unlike their analogic counterpart, within digital spaces, silence and non-participation may empower citizens, as far as we conceptualize and describe them as passive forms of engagement.45 However, none of these considerations reverse our initial assumption. There is no solid alternative for citizens to opt out from participating in policy-making via digital tools and re-engaging via a different, yet more functional or better designed, digital tool. Take the case of digital health. It has been demonstrated that privately owned health apps intertwined with the UK National Health Service may help to reduce the 39

Hirshman (1972). Thomas Schrepel (2020) argued that blockchain’s attributes allow for the creation of an ecosystem in which the rule of law cannot be enforced as easily as in the real-space. As a result, an individual may be offered new possibilities to escape, at least for certain digital activities. 41 Brannen et al. 2020; Jackson et al. (2020). Between 2009 and 2019 mass protests increased annually by an average of eleven and half percentage points. Samuel Brannen suggests that, in stark opposition to claims that democratic values are in decay, these mobilized citizens are the proof that not only does global demand for participation exist, it is thriving. Blossoming engagement practices only need fertile ground to grow and develop. 42 Lynch (2013); Bruns et al. (2013); Axford (2011); Isherwood (2008); Lotan et al. (2011). 43 Tufekci (2017); Kumkar (2019). 44 The reference is to the case of Kevin Spacey, star of the TV series ‘House of Cards’, produced by Netflix. In 2018, the company terminated Spacey’s contract following sexual harassment allegations made against him by a former member of the editorial staff. The Guardian, Netflix fires Kevin Spacey from House of Cards, 4 November, 2017 (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/ nov/04/netflix-fires-kevin-spacey-from-house-of-cards). 45 Pena Gangadharan (2021). 40

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workload of health professionals and enhance affordable services to patients. Yet, at the same time, the terms of engagement of such apps are difficult to patients as well as health workers to understand, hampering opt-out options for the former.46 To conclude on reliability, a provocative remark: by observing the interplay between technology and public services, we come to understand that the political leverage of citizens stemming from disappointing or unsatisfactory experiences with public administrations, compared to that of consumers, is qualitatively inferior.

3.6

Digital Publicity

The fifth and final difference between consumer tech and digital public spaces can be found in the dichotomy between the secrecy that dominates in consumer tech and the publicity that characterizes public spaces. Digital private markets are based on the principle of secrecy. What we describe as technological power is generally an ecosystem of private powers, occasionally partnering with public powers, but remaining independent from the latter. These ecosystems are disaggregated and horizontal, contrary to the vertical and aggregated structures of power characterizing the modern state. Public powers are grounded on the principle of publicity and officiality. Pierre Bourdieau describes the State as an institutional theatre staging truth based on a canon of officiality.47 Civic participation itself has been compared by Matthew Elliot to a theatrical piece: ‘a highly stylized process for displaying in a formal way the essence of something which in real life takes place in other venues’.48 But we need to put this statement into perspective, as we have already done with the other principles. Digital democracy is also data-consuming. Public services that are more targeted, customized, cheaper and faster are, in fact, data-intensive. ‘Citizen-scoring’ systems are a case in point. Described as systems to categorize, segment, rate and rank segments of the population according to a variety of datasets, with the goal of allocating services and identifying risks, such systems are increasingly being used to enhance civic engagement. While governmental approaches vary, they often lack adequate regulatory frameworks, posing serious threats to citizens’ privacy.49 Privacy is further threatened by the growing number of links between public organizations and tech companies applying emerging technologies to innovative policy-making techniques—a field known as ‘CivicTech’. Today the largest and most valuable pool of data is no longer held by governments but by private companies. Civic technology provokes mixed reactions. According to some, it is

46

Kunstsman and Miyake (2022). Bourdieau (2015). 48 Elliott (1992). 49 Dencik et al. (2018). 47

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Digital Publicity

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the ideal solution to the problems of democracies: it creates a channel for conveying citizens’ demands in an orderly manner to institutional venues, which, in turn, benefit in terms of transparency and shared decision-making.50 Mobilize, to make an example, offers (for a fee) the most fitting strategy for mobilizing new connections within the framework of an advocacy strategy.51 The French Parlement et Citoyens was also created to facilitate contacts between French political representatives and their constituencies, to discuss new legislative projects and proposals.52 IssueVoter and Pop Vox collect and sort information related to US decision-making processes (both federal and local) to make them more transparent and accessible to civic stakeholders.53 Others have looked at the economic opportunities offered by the civic technology sector. The European market for participation and deliberation technologies, for instance, in 2022 was estimated to be worth €100 million, and it is expected to reach €300 million by the year 2028. 54 While benefits of civic tech initiatives are tangible and important, the issues raised by skeptics are not being offered comprehensive answers. Critics question the economic sustainability of these initiatives.55 Indeed, we are talking of entrepreneurial activities that, while not necessarily aiming for profit, at least aim to become sustainable. Hence the question: to what extent is the quest for financial selfsufficiency an obstacle to the lasting impact that civic technologies can have on democratic processes? The figure is clear: ninety percent of civic startups ‘shut down’ in less than ten years. It is undeniable, then, that sustainability becomes a decisive element in ensuring the longevity of participation rights. In a nutshell, users are allowed to participate as long as generous investors are willing to support the civic technologies that convey the demand for participation. However, the moment in which we

50

Jäske and Ertiö (2019); Gilman and Peixoto (2019); Mellon et al. (2022). Brabham (2008) places the technology/democracy pair within the broader framework of civic crowdsourcing activities. Other scholars (Scholz 2014) recognize it as an evolution of the ‘platform cooperativism’ conceived by Trevor Smith (https://medium.com/@trebors/platform-co-operativism-vs-the-sharing-economy2ea737f1b5ad), or the ‘open cooperativism’ theorized by Michel Bauwens. Among the most widely accepted taxonomies of the Civic Tech sector is the one proposed by Tom Steinberg (2013), who proposes a breakdown into four segments https://www.mysociety.org/2013/04/09/what-should-wedo-about-the-naming-deficitsurplus/). Another classic distinction was made by Michael Stempeck (2016) (http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2016/04/27/towards-taxonomy-civic-technology/ #sm.0000p1uccywuddxxvc922puxz90gz) and separates ‘conformist’, ‘reformist’ and ‘transformative’ projects. The philanthropic firm Omidyar Network (2016) also distinguishes between ‘Citizen to Citizen’, ‘Citizen to Government’ and ‘Governmental Technology’. 51 https://www.mobilize.io. Since 2016, there has also been Mobilize America, a spin-off designed for political mobilization, organizing and managing the voluntary contribution of voters during election campaigns. 52 https://purpoz.com. 53 https://issuevoter.org; https://popvox.com. 54 The Innovation in Politics Institute GmbH (2023). 55 Spada and Ryan (2017).

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legitimize the expansion or compression of democratic spaces based on the availability of private funding, we end up placing an unacceptable condition on the maturation of a digital democracy: that of capital. Then there is a second problem related to the use of civic technologies. Are we sure, critics ask, that these initiatives ensure that everyone has an equal chance to participate? Here again the answer is negative, for two reasons. The first is wellknown (and cross-cutting with respect to technology): the digital skills and culture gap. So it may be that some benefit from the use of civic technologies, to the detriment of others who, marginalized, see their interests further removed from the center of gravity of public decision-making. Other perplexities emerge when one looks more closely at the usage habits of the audience of adherents to these applications. Namely, it happens that among those who access civic technologies, inevitably some are more active than others. This is not necessarily a problem, except when it returns a result that, once again, sounds paradoxical: exclusion rather than social inclusion. Let us take an example. In 2012, the city of Boston launched a trial with the mobile application ‘StreetBump’.56 Through this, residents could report road surface disruptions to the administration. The reports activate a team of municipal technicians who intervene on the spot, remedying the disruption. All fine, on the surface. The city administration soon realized that the reports came almost exclusively from residents of affluent, predominantly white, male neighborhoods. An application that was created primarily to reduce social inequalities stratified in the urban fabric had ended up exacerbating them. This demonstrates two facts: first, technological plug-in is not enough to smooth out the imbalances that plague a community; and second, unequal access to and use of technology are problems with respect to which the digital democracy offering still fails to experiment with adequate solutions. Let us conclude on this point with a reference to Bruce Schneier from the Harvard Law School. According to Schneier, the pervasiveness of tech companies in our lives has created a new feudal society. In his view, most of us sacrifice complete control over our data and pledge allegiance to large corporations. These corporations, in turn, protect us from security threats. The use of digital tools has increased the control of data by governments and decreased citizens’ control of their privacy.57

3.7

Democratic Dissonances

To recap: the standard design of consumer tech and that of public spaces are at odds with each other. They differ of various levels: the openness and accessibility to stakeholders, the longevity and reliability of the service offered to users, and the

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Brisimi et al. (2016); Carrera et al. (2013). Schneier (2015a, b).

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Democratic Dissonances

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publicity versus the secrecy of information hared between citizens/users and decision-makers. These differences, put together, may help us to answer the two questions posed at the beginning of this Chapter: the first concerned with the impact that consumer tech’s design has on individual and collective expectations about digitalized public services; the second related to the consequences of the dazzling expectations offered by consumer tech with regard to the digital interactions between democratic decision-makers and their constituencies. Answering both questions lead us to a paradoxical outcome: citizens are less (not more) willing to interact with digitalized public powers. Taken further: the most advanced and potentially empowering technologies ever utilized by public regulators are returning the poorest results ever recorded in terms of interest, engagement and retention. Or, to put it more optimistically, they are discouraging meaningful participation from citizens. According to traditional scholarly analysis, such political apathy and citizen non-involvement in state affairs are just another sign of democratic decline or recession.58 This paradox is common across countries, sectors and levels of administration. Take Europe as an example. As of 2019, sixty-four percent of European citizens had used an online public service at least once.59 In 2013, this figure was only forty-one percent. When asked to comment on their experience, however, many reported poorly designed websites, unnecessarily complex procedures and problems with timing of the digitalized procedures. It is under this premise that many voice concerns related to the digitalization of civic life along with persistent differences in access to technology. To borrow from Roberto Garganella, the discrepancy between our expectations of (digital) democratic institutions and traditional political behaviors results in a ‘democratic dissonance’.60 Thus, building on the assumption that unequal participation inevitably leads to unequal outcomes, it could be argued that this democratic dissonance may end up exacerbating existing political inequalities. If, the argument goes, online participants are unrepresentative of the population, then participation outcomes will benefit groups who participate and disadvantage those who do not—sometimes at the peril of ‘empowering the already empowered’. Interestingly, studies that put this critical assumption to test, could not find a direct correlation between unequal online participation and unequal political

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Crozier et al. (1975); Verba et al. (1995); Putnam (1995); Diamond (2015); Hay (2007). Peter Mair (2013) described as a ‘void’ both the space left by a global political class that was abandoning its representative function and was retreating into the institutions of the state, and that left by citizens who were consequently retreating into apathy. Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk (2016) suggest that across the West the percentage of people who say it is ‘essential’ to live in a democracy has plummeted. People, and especially millennials, have become ‘more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives’. 59 Data provided by European Commission, The Digital Economy Society Index (DESI), 2020. 60 Garganella (2022).

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representation. Returning for a moment to the civic tech debate, there is a study published by the World Bank Group in 2022 that examined four civic tech models: digital participatory budgeting in Brazil, constitutional crowdsourcing in Iceland, online citizen reporting in the UK, and online petitioning across one hundred and thirty-two countries. The study shows that none of these models reflect the typical assumption that inequalities in who participates translate directly into inequalities in who benefits from the policy outcome. The authors of the study make the suggestion that technological platforms be considered political institutions that encourage certain types of behavior while discouraging others. They also support moving beyond the demographics of participants to assess the true extent of inclusive participatory and deliberative democracy practices.61

3.8

Post-Consultation Feedback. The Case of the French Convention Citoyenne Pour le Climat

The divergence of expectations is particularly evident in the case of online consultations. As reported in the Digital Economy Society Index, the divergence of expectations in the case of online consultations was particularly evident. Complaints were made that consultations were often occurring late in the legislative process as well as disappointment regarding feedback.62 The 2019/2020 French Convention citoyenne pour le climat is a good example in this regard. The Grand Débat was held in France from January to April 2019, led by two ministers and a Collège des Garants and organized by a dedicated taskforce (Mission Grand Débat). The initiative made use of six different and complementary formats, including a web platform that received over one million and five hundred thousand contributions from citizens. More precisely, one million and nine hundred thousand online contributions were made, ten thousand and one hundred and thirtyfour local meetings were held, over sixteen thousand municipalities reviewed submissions from participating citizens, and twenty-seven thousand and three hundred and seventy-four letters and emails were received. The twenty-one Grand Débat conferences, in particular, were divided into three categories: thirteen were held in the regions of mainland France, seven overseas, and one at the national level specifically for young people. Events took place simultaneously over two weekends (15–16 and 22–23 March) and followed the same structure, with task that included the development of a joint diagnosis to the presentation of collective proposals, alternating between group and plenary work, with the help of facilitators. All of these processes were designed with the help of participatory democracy experts, and the discussion methodologies were prepared through a long development process involving, in the case of the Grand Débat, the members of the Collège

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Mellon et al. (2022). Data provided by European Commission Digital Economy and Society Index 2022 (https:// digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/digital-economy-and-society-index-desi-2022).

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The Aftermath of the Conference on the Future of Europe

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des Garants, who oversaw ensuring compliance with the key principles of the debate. The outcomes, however, were not positive. According to one hundred and fifty randomly picked members from the public who participated in the consultation, the French government did not perform well in ‘implementing’ any of the topics on which the citizen’s climate convention was structured. Citizens expressed dissatisfaction with governmental performance in realizing the six main topics of the Convention (i.e., housing, transport, food, consumption of natural resources, production, and work), rating it with an average of six out of ten points. Citizens’ discontent was motivated by the choice made by the French government to ignore or dilute certain proposals. A survey found that the wider population who had participated in the consultation supported all but one of the one hundred and forty-nine proposals.63 It is arguable that in the French case the trust relationship between citizens and the public administration was damaged instead of being reinforced by the digital interactions between the former and the latter.

3.9

The Aftermath of the Conference on the Future of Europe

The French Convention citoyenne pour le climat is not an isolated case. Another recent example we could take to clarify how insufficient feedback impacts on the legitimacy of governing institutions and citizens’ trust is provided by the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE). It is important to keep in mind that CoFoE was designed with the intention that it be a quick and effective participation process from the moment it began on May 9, 2021.64 Suffice to say that in his introductory speech to the European Parliament in Strasburg, France President Emanuel Macron insisted that democracy be fast and efficient, suggesting that the authority of democracy is ‘the only answer to authoritarianism’, and this authority ‘can only be won through efficiency and speed’.65 Despite a number of interruptions and changes introduced while the consulting process was still ongoing, and some ambiguities related to its outcomes (a final

63 Data provided by Réseau action climat, Sondage: Des Galois pas si réfractaires à l’action climatique, Paris 2020 (https://reseauactionclimat.org/sondage-des-gaulois-pas-si-refractaires-alaction-climatique/). 64 The launch of the Conference was postponed one year due to the pandemic. 65 The speech is available at this website: https://multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/it/package/ conference-on-future-of-europe-inaugural-event_18901.

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report containing forty-nine proposals was presented to the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission66) CoFoE was welcomed with enthusiasm by the large majority of Europeans,67 and the aftermath of CoFoE was characterized by raising citizens’ expectations for greater citizen participation in EU decision-making. According to a poll conducted by the CoFoE secretariat, more than seventy percent of Europeans expect a more regular and meaningful involvement with the EU level of government. This enthusiasm was partly encouraged by the EU institutions—both the European Commission and European Parliament’s follow-up documents called for continuous involvement of citizens’ participation and consultation in the decisionmaking processes of the Union68—and partly sustained by a lively scholarly and policy debate on how the experience of CoFoE should be leveraged and transformed into a more structural participatory process, operating beyond electoral moments and complementing existing initiatives like the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) and the Public consultations held by the European Commission.69 However, already one year and half after the conclusion of the consultation process, it is still unclear how to effectively harness the potential of this innovative participatory democracy experience and incorporate the views of European citizens into a structural procedure that may change the course of Europe. This is due in part to legal arguments (although in principle the forty-nine citizens’ proposals have not been ruled out, far-reaching reforms do not seem likely to take place within the current set-up of the conference70) and in part to political arguments. As noted by the Council of the European Union, CoFoE does not fall within the aim of Article 48 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU.71 Data provided by Conference on the Future of Europe, report on the final outcome, Brussels, 2022 (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/resources/library/media/20220509RES29121/20220509RES2 9121.pdf). 67 Data provided by Eurobarometer, Special Eurobarometer 500 – Future of Europe, European Union 2021 (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/files/be-heard/eurobarometer/2021/ future-of-europe-2021/en-report.pdf). 76% agreed that the conference represents ‘significant progress for democracy’ within the bloc. The strongest levels of agreement with that statement were in Ireland (90%), Sweden and Belgium (both 88%), and Lithuania (87%). On the opposite side of the spectrum, we find Latvia (61%), Romania (67%), Spain (70%), France (72%) and Estonia (73%). When asked whether they would be willing to take part in this democratic exercise, half the respondents said they would do so ‘as a citizen’. However, again, there is a wide gap between EU countries in that regard. 81% of Irish would like to attend, followed by Belgians (64%), Luxembourgish (63%) and Slovenians (63%). Citizens in Portugal (34%), Bulgaria (34%) and Finland (38%) showed the least interest in it. 68 European Commission, Communication on the Conference on the Future of Europe, Putting Vision into Concrete Action, COM(2022) 404 final, Brussels, 17 June 2022; European Parliament, Resolution of 9 June 2022 on the call for a Convention for the revision of the Treaties, 2022/2705 (RSP). 69 Kotanidis (2022); Sgueo (2022); Fabbrini (2020); Pirozzi (2021); Johansson and Raunio (2022); Alemanno (2022); Von Ondarza and Ålander (2021). 70 Von Ondarza and Ålander (2021). 71 Council of the European Union, Conference on the Future of Europe – revised Council position, 5911/21, Brussels, 3 February 2021. 66

3.10

3.10

The Paradox of Digital Democracy: The ‘Digital Undemocratic’

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The Paradox of Digital Democracy: The ‘Digital Undemocratic’

To sum-up, there are three reasons that may explain the paradox of highly innovative public decision-making and the underwhelming response (both qualitatively and quantitatively) or total disengagement of citizens. We encountered the first already when we described the possibility of undemocratic consequences stemming from technologies like the Internet or mobile phones. The second reason is that in digital democratic spaces individuals’ personas as both citizens and consumers overlap, as do their expectations. This is an increasingly common situation. Luciano Floridi claims that as we move into the future, the less sense it will make to separate offline and online spheres. ‘Onlife’, as Floridi names it, is increasingly a status of hyper connection, in which we find ourselves holding multiple identities at the same time, both virtual and real. Onlife, which was later turned into a manifesto,72 builds upon four major cultural and societal transformations: the first and the second consist of the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality, on the one hand, and of the distinction between human, machine and nature, on the other hand. The third transformation addresses the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance. The fourth and final transformation concerns the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks. While Floridi looks at multiple and overlapping online and offline identities, network studies have focused on relatedness and intersectionality as distinctive features of identity. This is the third cause explaining the digital undemocratic. We introduced it earlier, in Chap. 2 (when we discussed how social relations evolve on social media) and in then again in the present Chapter, in connection to the concept of reliability. Social identities are described by social-network theorists as traits of personality. These traits are defined primarily by membership in communities (examples include our professional sphere, ethnic background, religious and political beliefs), by social categories (such as race, gender, or class) or by our interpersonal relations (such as being married, a parent, a friend or a neighbor).73 Within the digital sphere, network identities are often celebrated for being the engine of social and political movements with great impact on policy-making. Networked identities are based on weak—as opposed to strong—social ties. In classic theory about tie strength, information flows through social ties of two strengths: weak ties that are used infrequently but bridge distant groups that tend to possess diverse knowledge; and strong ties, that are used frequently, knit communities together, and provide dependable sources of support.74

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Floridi (2014). Wallace (2019). 74 Granovetter (1973). 73

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Unconventional forms of engagement are built on weak ties. With family members, friends and colleagues, we are linked by strong ties. Weak ties, explains Clay Shirky, differ from these in two fundamental ways.75 First, they are activated by necessity and, second, they encourage tiny acts of participation, like sharing text messages or images relating to a political issue or signing up to a digital campaign. None of these acts, taken alone, is capable of impacting on social or political discourse. Collectively, however, weak ties may be extremely impactful. They may enable large crowds to disseminate information, expose violations, or mobilize for a cause. Furthermore, the number of individuals that can be mobilized online is potentially unlimited. The cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships identified by Robin Dunbar does not seem to apply to weak ties. Having acknowledged unconventional forms of participation, academics have coined new terms to describe unconventionally engaged citizens. Ethan Zuckerman names them ‘participatory civics’.76 Stephan Coleman uses the definition of ‘autonomous citizens’.77 The ‘communities of practice’ theorized by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger consist of groups of citizens collaborating to develop ideas on issues of common concern.78 Finally, the ‘communities of trust’ described by Irene Wu exchange information and ideas through the internet, which in a later stage are the subject of advocacy towards established powers.79 More recently, research for policy has highlighted the importance of converging identities and values between citizens and policy-makers. Policymaker could enhance impact of policies if they addressed citizens’ values and used them ethically.80 This raises again the fundamental question of how digital democratic spaces should be designed. So, as a preliminary reaction to this question, we should acknowledge the limits of digital democracy. Digital democratic spaces can only meet the expectations of citizens but are inherently incapable of satisfying the expectations of consumers. Technology has indeed multiplied the opportunities for citizens to interact with their governments. Hyperconnected citizens have access to the broadest-ever information base, can join networks of peers, and engage directly with public decision-makers. For most public regulators, however, the reality of meeting such demands has not matched the early promises of technology for more participatory and inclusive governance. This is for reasons as varied as structural (due to anachronistic structures, public administrations may be unprepared to meet technological challenges, or may be too

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Shirky (2013). Zuckerman (2014). 77 See Coleman S., in Bennet (2008). 78 Lave and Wenger (1991). 79 Wu (2015). 80 European Commission – Joint Research Centre, Values and Identitites. A policymaker’s Guide, EUR 30800 EN, Brussels, 2021. 76

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slow at adapting to the fast societal changes imposed by technology),81 procedural (increasingly complex regulatory issues demands for coordinated solutions across actors, sectors, and skills)82 and cultural (safeguards from market competition for public regulators also means that they receive limited incentives for change. Result: governments either persist with addressing demands for participation with traditional, inefficient, regulatory approaches, or—worst—they disregard the innovative potential of technological innovation). We will deal with all these aspects in more detail in the next Chapter. Summary • The primary cause of dysfunctional digital democracies is the ignorance or disregard of the key differences separating the design of public spaces for digital interactions between public regulators and their constituencies and consumer tech’s standard design features. • Digital public spaces aim to be inclusive, and for this reason must necessarily be designed not only to include all potential interests, but also do so in a way that is transparent and financially sustainable. Consumer tech instead is exclusive. Large technological infrastructures (like the Internet) and physical components of digital products hide profound inequalities. • At least in principle, every public regulation should aspire to durability. In a hypothetical democratic society in which no rules would be granted with reasonably durable application, chaos would prevail. In the technology market, durability is just a secondary matter, or it is even absent (as exemplified by ‘programmed obsolescence’). • Digital public spaces are designed to serve the interests of large and undifferentiated communities rather than targeting individual stakeholders. Private operators in the digital markets follow the opposite logic. Human attention is treated as a commodity. • There is no solid alternative for citizens to opt out from participating in policymaking via digital tools and re-engaging via a different, yet more functional or better designed, digital tool. This is known a ‘reliability’. In consumer tech, reliability works in reverse. Consumers are always offered the chance to opt out and adopt cheaper or more functional alternatives. • Public powers are grounded on the principle of publicity and officiality, and the structures of power characterizing the modern state are vertical and aggregated. By contrast, digital private markets are based on the principle of secrecy. What we describe as technological power is generally an ecosystem of private powers, occasionally partnering with public powers, but remaining independent from the latter. These ecosystems are disaggregated and horizontal.

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Noveck and Glover (2019). Gray and Purdy (2018); Innes JE, Booher DE (2018).

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• The ‘digital undemocratic’ describes the paradox of highly innovative public decision-making and the underwhelming response (both qualitatively and quantitatively) or total disengagement of citizens.

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Hindman M (2008) The myth of digital democracy. Princeton University Press, Princeton Hirshman A (1972) Exit, voice, and loyalty. Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Innes JE, Booher DE (2018) Planning with complexity: an introduction to collaborative rationality for public policy. London Isherwood T (2008) A new direction or more of the same? Political blogging in Egypt. Arab Media Soc 6:1–17 Jackson SJ et al (2020) #HashtagActivism. Networks of race and gender justice. Penguin, London Jäske M, Ertiö T (2019) The democratic potential of civic applications. Inf Polity 24(1):21–39 Johansson KM, Raunio T (2022) Shaping the EU’s future? Europarties, European Parliament’s Political Groups and the Conference on the Future of Europe, European Parliament’s Political Groups in Turbulent Times, pp 73–197 Johnson EJ et al (2002) Defaults, framing and privacy; why opting in-opting out. Mark Lett 13:5–15 Kirwan B (2001) Coping with accelerating socio-technical systems. Saf Sci 37(2–3):77–107 Kohler-Koch B (2010) Civil society and EU democracy: Astroturf representation? J Eur Publ Policy 17:100–116 Kotanidis S (2022) Uncharted waters: what to expect after the conference on the future of Europe. In Bassot E (ed) Ten issues to watch in 2022, European Parliamentary Research Service, PE 698.852, Brussels Kouroutakis A, Ranchordás S (2016) Snoozing democracy: sunset clauses, de-Juridification, and emergencies. Minn J Int Law 25:29 Kouroutakis AE (2018) The lives and times of temporary legislation and sunset clauses. Am J Comp Law 66(2):453–457 Krajewski M (2014) The great lightbulb conspiracy: the Phoebus cartel engineered a shorter-lived lightbulb and gave birth to planned obsolescence. IEEE Spectrum 51(10):56–61 Kramer ADI et al (2014) Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 111(24):8788–8790 Kumkar NC (2019) The tea party, Occupy Wall Street, and the great recession. Palgrave Macmillan, New York Kunstsman K, Miyake E (2022) Paradoxes of digital disengagement. In search of the opt-out button. University of Westminister Press, London Lave J, Wenger E (1991) Situated learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Lessig L (2020) Code is law: on liberty in cyberspace. Harvard Magazine, January 1 Lijphart A (1997) Unequal participation: democracy’s unresolved dilemma. Am Polit Sci Rev 91: 1–14 Lotan G et al (2011) The revolutions were tweeted: information flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Int J Commun 5:1375–1405 Lynch M (2013) The Arab uprising – the unfinished revolutions of the new Middle East. Public Affairs, New York Ma S (2021) Technological obsolescence. NBER Working Paper 29504, Cambridge MacKillop E, Downe J (2022) What counts as evidence for policy? An analysis of policy actors’ perceptions. Public Adm Rev:1–14 Mahari RZ et al (2022) AML by design: designing a central bank digital currency to stifle money laundering. MIT Sci Pol Rev 3:57–65 Mair P (2013) Ruling the void – the hollowing of Western democracy. Verso, London Mcluhan M, Powers BR (1996) The global village: transformations in world life and media in the 21st century. Oxford University Press, Oxford Mellal MA (2020) Obsolescence – a review of the literature. Technol Soc 63:101347 Mellon J et al (2022) The Haves and the Have Nots. Civic Technologies and the Pathways to Government Responsiveness, World Bank Group, Policy Research Working Paper 10195, Washington DC

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Mulgan G (1997) Connexity: how to live in a connected world. Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge Nichols T (2017) The death of expertise: the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. Oxford University Press, Oxford Noelle-Neumann E (1974) The spiral of silence: a theory of public opinion. J Commun 24:43–51 Norris P (2003a) Democratic Phoenix: reinventing political activism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Norris P (2003b) Preaching to the converted? Pluralism, participation and party websites. Party Polit 9:21–45 Noveck B, Glover R (2019) Today’s problems, yesterday’s toolkit. The Australia and New Zealand School of Government Orman V. (2016) Information overload paradox: drowning in information, starving for knowledge. CreateSpace, 63, 73, 34 Parisier E (2011) The filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. Penguin Press, London Pena Gangadharan S (2021) Digital exclusion: a politics of refusal. In: Bernholz L et al (eds) Digital technology and democratic theory. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Pirozzi N (2021) The conference on the future of Europe: tackling differentiated integration. IAI Comment 21:21 Postman N (1987) Amazing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of show business. Penguin, Harmondsworth Putnam R (1995) Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Schuster, New York Quittkat C (2001) The European Commission’s online consultations: a success story? J Common Mark Stud 49:653–655 Raboy M, Dagenais B (1996) Media, crisis and democracy. Mass Commun 1992:314 Raikov A (2018) Accelerating technology for self-organising networked democracy. Futures 103: 17–26 Ranchordás S (2014) Innovation-friendly regulation: the sunset of regulation, the sunrise of innovation. Jurimetrics 55 Ranchordás S (2015) Sunset clauses and experimental regulations: blessing or curse for legal certainty? Statute Law Rev 36(1):28–45 Sampson A (1996) The crisis at the heart of our media. Br Journal Rev 7(3):42–51 Sasaki D, Strausz R (2008) Collusion and durability, 246 Governance and the efficiency of economic systems, Berlin, Discussion Paper, 8 Schneier B (2015a) Secrets and lies. Digital security in a networked world. Wiley, Indianapolis Schneier B (2015b) Data and goliath. The hidden Battle to collect your data and control your world. WW Norton & Company, New York Scholz T (2014) Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy, in Medium Schrepel T (2020) Anarchy, state, and Blockchain utopia: rule of law versus Lex Cryptographia. In: Bernitz U et al (eds) General principles of EU law and the EU digital order. Wolters Kluwer Segall MH et al (1996) The influence of culture on visual perception. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis Sgueo G (2016) Beyond networks. Interlocutory coalitions, the European and global legal orders. Springer, Berlin Sgueo G (2022) I tre problemi della Conferenza sul Futuro dell’Europa. Rivista trimestrale di diritto pubblico 1:21–48 Shiller RJ (2020) Narrative economics: how stories go viral and drive major economic events. Princeton University Press, Princeton Shirky C (2013) Here comes everybody. The power of organising without organisations. Penguin, London Spada P, Ryan M (2017) The failure to examine failures in democratic innovation. Polit Sci Polit 50(3):772–778 Steinberg T (2013) What should we do about the naming/deficit surplus? MySociety Blog, April 9 Stempeck M (2016) Towards a taxonomy of civic technology, Microsoft Blog

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Sun N (2022) Overturning Roe v Wade: reproducing injustice, BMJ: 377 The Innovation in Politics Institute GmbH (2023) Democracy Technologies in Europe. Online Participation, Deliberation and Voting, Vienna The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1958) Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 15:27, 27 March 1789 to 30 November 1789. Princeton University Pres, Princeton, pp 392–398 Thompson JB (1996) The media and modernity. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto Tufekci Z (2017) Twitter and tear gas. The power and fragility of networked protests. Yale University Press, New Haven Valant J (2016) Planned obsolescence: exploring the issue. European Parliamentary Research Service, Brussels Verba S et al (1995) Voice and equality: civic voluntarism in American politics. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Vesnic Alujevic L, Scapolo F (2019) The future of government 2030+: policy implications and recommendations, EUR 29853 EN. Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg Vesnic Alujevic L et al (2019) The future of government 2030+, EUR 29664 EN. Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg Von Ondarza N, Ålander M (2021) The Conference on the Future of Europe. Obstacles and Opportunities to a European Reform Initiative That Goes beyond Crisis Management, SWP Comment No. 19 Wallace K (2019) The network self. Relation, process, and personal identity. Routledge, London White L, Taket A (1994) The death of the expert. J Oper Res Soc 45(7):733–748 Williams J (2018) Stand out for our light. Freedom and resistance in the attention economy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Wu I (2015) Forging trust communities. How technology changes politics. Johns Hopkins University Press Wu T (2017) The attention merchants. Atlantic Books, London Xu X (2021) To repress or to co-opt? Authoritarian control in the age of digital surveillance. Am J Polit Sci 65(2):309–325 Zuboff S, Rigotti F (2021) Surveillance Capitalism. L’era del Singolo, Einaudi, Torino Zuckerman E (2014) New media, new civics. Policy Int 6(2):151–158 Zuckerman E. (2019) Building a more honest internet. What would social media look like if it served the public interest? Columbia Journalism Review

Chapter 4

The Digital Undemocratic: Dazzling Expectations vs Disappointing Outcomes

Abstract This Chapter investigates the paradox of the ‘digital undemocratic’, with a focus on the rhetoric of digital government as the paradigm of efficient democratic governance. Technical and political arguments will be used to explain why most democratic governments choose ‘cookie-cutter’ replicas of consumer tech design in the formulation of digital engagement mechanisms. On the technical side, digital agendas require governments to completely rethink their roles and functions. Digitization is said to result in greater efficiency, increased sustainability, streamlining of services and renewed competitiveness. From a political perspective, democratic decision-making delivered via digital methods is thought to support the transformation of public policies and bureaucratic structures, while also mitigating existing issues of representativeness in online consultations. Yet, it is argued in this Chapter, this ‘modelling’ of democratic government on consumer tech is flawed, and is inherently incapable of satisfying the expectations of citizens. There are three reasons for this. The first is structural—archaic and inefficient public administrations are unprepared to meet challenges imposed by disruptive events. Bureaucracies are simply too cumbersome to adapt to the societal changes with the necessary pace needed to keep up with events in the digital realm. The second is procedural— increasingly complex regulatory issues require coordinated solutions across a range of actors, sectors, and skills—something that is often lacking in the public sector. The third reason is cultural. Public regulators have limited incentives to change because of existing safeguards from market competition and innovation. Keywords Complexity · Digital transition · Digital efficiency · Democratic innovations · Innovation theatres · Wicked problems · Knowledge scarcity · Bureaucratic anachronism · Skills shortages · Policrises · Global datasphere · Agile stability · Design science

4.1

The Rhetoric of Digitally Efficient Government

Focus. Try to remember the last time you took part in a participatory process in a digital format. What did it look like? Was it through a web portal? Perhaps an app installed on your phone? Or a physical interface—something similar to an ATM © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Sgueo, The Design of Digital Democracy, Springer Textbooks in Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36946-9_4

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machine—through which to check-in and interact with the government? Try to recall if the experience was rewarding and in line with your expectations. Did everything work as it should have? Chances are, you were left disappointed or even frustrated. So, what went wrong? Whatever your experience, you have just been thinking about the aesthetical dimension of digital democracy. This is a dimension tied to both our imagination (how we would like digital democratic spaces to look) as well as to reality (how these spaces look in reality). Our imagination is framed by four parameters. Primarily that of speed (of services-delivery) and simplicity (of services-usage), and secondarily, by (expected) singularity and gratuity. The reality is instead framed on the basis of the following five elements: inclusivity, longevity, generality, reliability, and publicity. In previous Chapters we compared these design methodologies and their different approaches and concluded that their different competencies and models were responsible for the widespread and growing dissatisfaction with the performance of digital democratic spaces—a paradox we named the ‘digital undemocratic’. Continuing along this line of reasoning, this Chapter supplements the analysis initiated in Chap. 3, and investigates further into the die-hard rhetoric of digital government as paradigmatic of effective government. For decades now, public regulators have, if not openly discouraged, at the very least refrained from demystifying citizens’ expectations in digital democracy. Western governments have been at the forefront of efforts to popularize the idea of undifferentiated, easily manageable, cost-free civic participation in public decision-making using technology. Which brings us to the question to be answered: why would the majority of Western governments, when designing digital spaces for consultation and democratic debate, choose to replicate the design features of consumer tech? Or, put another way, why would democratic decision-makers be interested in popularizing the idea of the digitally efficient democracy? The reasons are partly technical and partly political. In one respect, the digital agendas promoted by governments from all around the world, sponsored by supranational regulators and promoted by international organizations are based on targets and milestones to be achieved within given deadlines. These agenda of interventions impose on governments an all-out rethinking of their roles and functions. A rethinking to be shaped primarily in terms of greater efficiency, increased sustainability, as well as further simplification and renewed competitiveness. In a word: innovation. The EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) is a case in point. This is the centerpiece of ‘NextGenerationEU’, the temporary instrument adopted by the EU to repair the economic and social damages brought about the coronavirus pandemic. In the RRF’s mechanism, funds have to be committed by EU’s Member States between 2021 and 2023, and all financed measures have to be completed by the end of 2026. Such funds are distributed to EU’s member states following satisfactory fulfillment (assessed by the European Commission) of milestones and targets as defined

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The Rhetoric of Digitally Efficient Government

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by the national recovery and resilience plans. As a precondition for the approval of these plans, EU Member States have been obliged to dedicate at least twenty percent of their recovery and resilience plan’s total allocation to measures contributing to the digital transition or to addressing the challenges resulting from the plan.1 Furthermore in 2021, the European Commission declared the period from 2020 to 2030 the EU’s digital decade, thus setting strategic digital objectives in four broad areas: digital skills, digital infrastructure, digital transformation of businesses, and the digitalization of public services.2 Hence, the driving philosophy of reform plans and digital transition strategies: to couple the integration of technologies into decision-making processes with reduced legal and administrative complexity, enhanced simplification, improved innovation and maximized efficiency. The arguments are not just technical in nature: the inextricable relationship between digital and efficiency is also supported by two key political arguments. The first suggests that democratic decision-making delivered via digital platforms and applications may not only favor greater legitimacy of public sector’s institutions and trust in public-policy, but also encourage innovation in policy-making and bureaucratic structures. The second argument shifts focus from the output to the process: it argues that the more digitized participatory processes and initiatives are, the greater the possibility for democratic decision-makers of curbing social exclusion and mitigating participatory apathy. Thus, in fact, greater efficiency. Those favorable to the first argument, suggest that digitalization improves performance, by supporting the transition from inefficient to optimal outputs in governance. To achieve this goal, however, they claim governments must commit to deliver decisions in the least amount of time. To this end, public discussion, deliberation and co-creation’s time must also be eroded. According to this political narration, the ‘latency’ (that is, the interval between the consultation and the democratic decision) of digital democracy must be as short as possible.3 Those who support the second argument maintain that the primary purpose of online consultations (and more broadly of digital democratic spaces) is not to generate solid proposals that could be later transformed into public decisions. For the sake of efficiency, the purpose of digital participatory initiatives should be instead that of generating debate, which democratic decision-makers could use to understand better the views of citizens on selected policy issues. Proponents of this argument downplay the relevance of the number and range of stakeholders engaged in debate to assess the success of digital participatory initiatives. The impact (thus, the efficiency) of such initiatives—they claim—should be evaluated against the 1

Lilyanova (2022). The Path to Digital Decade does two things primarily. First and foremost, it establishes a shared governance framework among EU Member States to assess progresses on digitization. To achieve this goal, the Digital Path creates a proper cooperation plan and introduces a monitoring mechanism of EU Member States’ progresses in relation to digitization goals. 3 Chesneaux (2000); Owen (2006); Motupalli (2017); Scheuerman (2001); Barber (2001); Saward (2017); Rosa (2005). 2

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capacity to emphasize issues of interest to the population (or parts of it) and make policy-makers aware of it. Breaking free from quantitative assessment is considered beneficial in terms of accepting that (both physical and digital) democratic spaces are populated by multiple types of publics,4 and of classifying sporadic or low participation as meaningful participation (that is, beside those who neglect participating, there are citizens who participate only when they perceive a threat to their personal interests). Returning to the case of CoFoE (that we have examined in Chap. 3), we know that since launch, some nineteen thousand participants registered on the platform hosting the consultation. They shared around five thousand ideas, left ten thousand comments and endorsed other people’s proposals over twenty-nine thousand times. It might seem a lot, but it is not much when compared to the hundreds of millions of Europeans potentially engageable. There you have a second advantage of not focusing on quantity. Outside academia, this position was supported by the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the EU, in the opinion regarding the ‘Puppinck Case’, in relation to the ECI. The Advocate General argued that the ECI was not designed to impose an obligation on the European Commission to adopt citizens’ proposals. Instead, he argued, the purpose of ECI is to ‘institutionalize’ the emergence of policy issues of interest to (groups of) European citizens. The opinion was aimed at reconciling critical voices with ECI, especially those who had voiced against the excessive cumbersomeness of the ECI (particularly in the face of the modest results obtained until then).5

4.2

The Structural Argument: ‘Innovation Theaters’ and ‘Knowledge-Scarcity’

We will return to ECI in the next Paragraph. But first a recap: governments popularize the idea that digital governance is faster and more efficient—and by analogy, that participatory rights exercised within digital public spaces are quicker and easier to enjoy when compared to physical (i.e., non-digital) forms of participation. A further consequence of the popularization of digital efficiency is that democratic decision-making is postulated to be efficient only when it delivers

4

Those favorable to this approach distinguish between conventional and unconventional forms of participation. Examples include Stephen Coleman’s ‘autonomous citizens’ (2008), that call for creative avenues for engaging in policy-making; the ‘quiet citizens’ described by the Woolf Institute as individuals that place trust in organizations based on their effectiveness, and that decide to contribute positively in their communities, often without recognition or reward of their work; and Nancy Fraser’s (1990) ‘Subaltern counter-publics’. The latter, argues Fraiser include minor voices that coalesce around common issues, circulate counter-discourses and formulate oppositional interpretations of issues. 5 Bobek (2019); Longo (2019); Anglmayer (2015).

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rapid and effective responses to the issues of the day, regardless of complexity. In the rhetoric of digital efficiency, the aesthetic of democratic-decision making is modeled after the design criteria implemented by consumer tech, which implies the exclusion of complexity from the idyllic picture of fully-digitalized public spaces. This is a major mistake. My claim is that digital government is inherently incapable of satisfying the expectations of the users of technology. This is caused by the fundamental differences in structures, goals and dynamics separating digitalized public spaces from private spaces (explored in Chap. 3) and motivated by three reasons (to be described in the present Chapter). One is structural, and will be discussed in the present Paragraph. The second and third are procedural and cultural, respectively.6 These will be analyzed in the following Paragraphs. The bottom line of the structural argument is that governments, and democratic systems more generally, are uncapable of providing the scale and speed of decisionmaking required to tackle ongoing crises, such as climate emergency, public health, rising inequality or inflation, to name but a few. Anachronistic structures make public administrations unprepared to meet these challenges, or too slow at adapting to the fast societal changes imposed by disruptive events. As pointed out by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the public sector will need ‘a major course correction’ to come to terms with the uncertainty posed by globalization, rising inequality and indeed disruptive technologies.7 The structural argument finds many advocates. For example, only nine percent of business executives globally nominate governments and public authorities as top drivers of innovation in society, compared to twenty-three percent and eighteen percent of executives mentioning multinational corporations and startups, respectively. A median of fifty-six percent of people surveyed in seventeen advanced economies believe there should be a major or complete reform of their political systems to make them more innovative and performative.8 Some go as far as to suggest that democracies are outdated, and that it is necessary to move forward and adopt more efficient decision-making systems.9 A more optimistic version of this theory suggests adopting ‘sortition’,10 in which representatives are appointed based 6

Noveck and Glover (2019); Zelikow (2019). Data provided by OECD, Embracing Innovation in Government, 2017, www.oecd.org/gov/ innovative-government/embracing-innovation-in-government.pdf. 8 Data provided by Pew Research Centre, Global Public Opinion in an Era of Democratic Anxiety, December 2021 (Wilke and Fetterolf 2021). (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/12/07/ global-public-opinion-in-an-era-of-democratic-anxiety/). 9 Among those who take this radical line is Jason Brennan (2016) when he claims that less, not more, participation is in fact desirable. Most people, he argues, do not have the knowledge or capacity to understand political discourse. They should therefore not worry at all about politics, but should leave public engagement to a small number of individuals. Others (Gilens and Page 2014) suggest to shift democratic systems that would reflect the opinions of those who actually have a chance to impact on policies. 10 Van Reybrouck (2013). Posner and Weyl (2014) popularised the concept of ‘quadratic voting’. According to Weyl and Posner, decentralized technologies allow, at scale, the sort of public input on a wide range of complex issues that would have been impossible before. Hence, they claim, 7

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on chance, through randomly selected juries. Likewise, political scientist Heléné Landermore envisions a model called ‘open democracy’, in which citizens are selected to serve in legislation much like they would be chosen for jury duty.11 Those who counter this argument usually look at the innovations and experimentations introduced by democratic governments over the last decade (examples include regulatory sandboxes, strategic foresight, nudging, co-creation, systemthinking, etc.) and claim that more innovation may overcome the limitations tied to outdated bureaucratic structures.12 These claims are countered by arguments that these ‘innovative’ approaches have been more apparent than concrete. This ‘innovation theatre’—to borrow from Sean Martin McDonald13 and Bruce Schneier14— includes most of the approaches used by public regulators to convince citizens that ‘wicked’ problems are being solved creatively and by innovating from the past, but actually doing nothing concrete to solve these problems. A further consideration related to the structural argument is that ‘knowledgescarcity’ due to skills shortages is tied to—and encourages—bureaucratic anachronism.15 Accounts of sluggish, unhelpful bureaucracy from Kafka to Balzac and Dickens have imprinted in the collective conscious the cliché that civil servants lag behind workers in the private sector in terms of digital abilities.16 These accounts might be exaggerated—but the fact remains: that is not unheard-of in public administrations. Four distinct gaps afflict the public workforce. First, public administrations lack adequately trained professional profiles. Second, the knowledge of public sector’s workforce is often inadequate to meet technological challenges. The public sector has a surplus of humanistic skills (law, economics and social sciences) and a deficit of technical skills—in particular the skills required to design and implement digital participatory spaces to nurture solid links with stakeholders. Traditionally, for engineers, managers, innovators, and creative people the ideal professional landing place has been in the private sector. Public administrations have recruited in prevalence lawyers, economists, political scientists and sociologists. The resulting overrepresentation of humanists compared to technicians is considered a major cause of the slowdown on digital transformation in many governments. The third gap is the lack of a managerial culture apt to guiding the digital action of public alternatives to traditional voting can be tested. Unlike a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote for or against one thing, quadratic voting allows a large group of people to use a digital platform to express the strength of their desire on a variety of issues. 11 Landemore (2013). 12 Newton and Norris (1999) theorized the ‘institutional performance model’ to demonstrate that lack of innovation in governance corresponds to decline in trust and engagement from citizens. According to Newton and Norris, it is primarily government performance that determines the level of citizens’ trust in public institutions. Once this trust is lost, it takes a long time to regain. 13 McDonald (2020). 14 Schneier (2009). 15 Noveck and Glover (2019). 16 Howard (2019).

4.2

The Structural Argument: ‘Innovation Theaters’ and ‘Knowledge-Scarcity’

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administrations. Those responsible for leading public structures often lack the sensitivity that is needed to translate office expertise into digital services. The fourth and last gap involves investments in training, which are minimized. Combined, these skill shortages make public administrations simply incapable of accessing, interpreting and processing the data they need to make informed decisions. Because of information scarcity, democratic decision-makers are at risk of losing both the trust of citizens and the chance to engage with them meaningfully. On the positive side, it is worth noting that many public regulators worldwide have started to adopt dedicated measures to tackle skills-shortages. In 2022, for instance, more than ninety percent of professional roles required by European public administrations demanded applicants to possess at least a basic knowledge of digital applications and software. A number of EU funding programs are aimed at expanding digital literacy in the talent pool in both public and private sectors.17 Having acknowledged the structural argument and the related issue of knowledge-scarcity (Chap. 5 will return to human factor in democratic government) we can look at two examples illustrative of the impact that structural gaps have on attempts to engage citizens via digital spaces. The first example is Futurium; the second the ECI. Futurium is a foresight project launched in 2012 by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG Connect).18 Initially developed with the primary purpose of hosting and curating visions and policy ideas generated by the ‘Digital Futures’ initiative, it was later transformed into a participatory platform. Futurium aimed at facilitating the joint creation of ideas to help design future policies. It did so by incorporating different variables, ranging from leveraging the potential of social networks, open data, semantic and knowledge mining technologies to engaging stakeholders and harnessing their views and creativity to better inform the policies that matter to them.19 The platform, however, never took off. Participation remained sporadic and engagement low. This was likely due to the gaps in the participatory process and

17 Still in 2022, approximately forty-two percent of Europeans lacked basic digital skills, including thirty-seven percent of those in the workforce. The DESI Index (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa. eu/en/library/digital-economy-and-society-index-desi-2022) shows that four out of ten adults and every third person who works in Europe lack basic digital skills. There is also low representation of women in tech-related professions and studies, with only one in six ICT specialists and one in three science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates being women. The European Commission has set targets in the European skills agenda and the digital education action plan to ensure that seventy percent of adults have basic digital skills by 2025. These initiatives aim to reduce the level of 13–14-year-olds who underperform in computing and digital literacy from thirty percent (2019) to fifteen percent in 2030. 18 https://futurium.ec.europa.eu/en. 19 Franco Accordino (2013) defines Policy Making 3.0 as a model that: ‘brings together a number of concepts and tools in a comprehensive and highly scalable model to ensure incremental adoption of future developments’. Examples include using front-end participatory tools, knowledge-harvesting tools (for both policymakers and stakeholders), data-crawling tools (from social networks), and data-gathering tools (from real world data). Also on this point: Macintosh (2012).

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most importantly to the lack of clarity regarding the outputs of the proposals that were debated on the platform. The ECI was launched in 2012 as the EU’s answer to the quest for greater citizen and legislative participation to EU’s decision-making. Despite being presented as the instrument that would bring to the fore issues that European cared about,20 the ECIs have been ignored by Europe’s political class. In its first ten years of life (2011–2021) a total of one hundred and one ECIs requested registration, at an average of around one per month. However, only seventy-six requests were registered, and just six managed to collect the required one million signatures in at least seven member states. Of these, only two ECIs resulted in a legislative proposal from the European Commission. The meagre success rate of ECI was caused by a number of administrative hurdles frustrating the collection of online signatures (e.g., signature requirements varying across countries) and the European Commission’s monopoly on the legislative follow-up of ECIs.21

4.3

The Procedural Argument: Wicked Problems and Public Regulation

Alongside the structural argument is the procedural argument—explaining why governments are unfit to design digital democratic spaces that are satisfying to the expectations of their constituencies. The procedural argument can be introduced in this way: for over twelve thousand years the earth has benefited from an unusual stability, with no momentous biological or environmental events nor natural upheavals on a global scale. The infrastructures of modern societies and economies, such as states and capitalist markets, developed accordingly. Conceived for operating in steady conditions, the backbone institutions of our societies and economies are poorly trained for handling the radical, human-induced, alterations that our planet is undergoing (and will expectedly be going further into in the near future).22 Every day new environmental, natural, economic and political hazards are posed to states. The pace, geographical scale and degree of complexity of such challenges are unprecedented. There is little doubt that such radical changes will be likely to impact on how public decisionmakers operate and deliver their decisions. In order to settle interconnected, crosscutting and unpredictable regulatory issues, contemporary public sector institutions need to be swift, adaptive, inclusive, and innovative.

20

Kauffman (2012); Greenwood (2012); Cuesta-López (2012); Szeligowska and Mincheva (2012); Bouza Garcia and Greenwood (2014). 21 Anglmayer (2015); Salm (2018); Athanasiadou (2019). 22 Dryzek and Pickering (2019).

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The Procedural Argument: Wicked Problems and Public Regulation

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Authors suggest that collaboration is key to addressing ‘policrises’ that cannot be handled efficaciously by a single regulator.23 Traditional, top-down, nationalistic regulatory approaches are considered ineffective at coping with contemporary problems and alleviating the social, economic and political consequences of such outbreaks. Synergies between ideas, competences and skills are identified as the solution for democratic governments to cope with these issues.24 Yet co-operative and networked policy-makers are not safe either. More often than not, they are impaired by the scarcity of another fundamental resource: time. While access to data has grown exponentially—it has brought with it an expectation of speed and agility in decision-making—yet good decision-making remains a timeconsuming effort. Haste threatens the reliability of sound decision-making because it leaves insufficient time to thoroughly explore consequences. Not to mention the fact that the more novel the tools of policymaking are, the less predictable the results are and, consequently, the more likely it is that they will fail. Data are exemplary of such failures. We have a global ‘datasphere’ that is expected to grow to one hundred and sixty-three zettabytes by 2025,25 yet many governments thus far have underestimated the potential (and the risks) of big and open data. Roughly a decade from the advent of open data, twenty-nine percent of datasets collected by the one hundred and fifteen countries surveyed by the Open Data Barometer are not published online, ten percent are not available free of charge and only seven percent are truly open.26 Digital democratic governance is also exemplary in this regard. Clearly, this is not to say that that regulatory efforts in this field are always unsuccessful—or late—at addressing emerging issues. There are key public policies to prove otherwise. Think about the regulation of the Internet, GPS, or biotech industries.27 The point is that when public regulators have used technology to encourage or expand the exercise of participatory rights, the proposed solutions, with sporadic exceptions, have been disappointing. Or the use of digital participatory tools, combined with offline spaces

23

Wolf (2022); Zeitlin et al. (2020); Belov (2022); Homer-Dixon et al. (2022). To put it in the words of the historian Adam Tooze, (‘Welcome to the world of polycrisis’, Financial Times, 28 October 2022 – https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33) ‘economic and non-economic shocks’ are entangled ‘all the way down’. From 2019 to 2023 the globe experienced an inflation shock emanating from the disruptions caused by a pandemic, the policy responses to that pandemic and an energy shock caused by a war. That war in turn related to the breakdown in relations among great powers. 24 Gray and Purdy (2018); Innes and Booher (2018). 25 Reinsel et al. (2017). 26 The Open Data Barometer (https://opendatabarometer.org/?_year=2017&indicator=ODB) is a global measure of how governments are publishing and using open data for accountability, innovation and social impact. It analyses the existence and quality of fifteen key datasets (such as land registries or government budgets) across all one hundred and fifteen countries. 27 Compton and Hart (2019).

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for interaction, has paled in comparison what would take place at the in-person events, rather than boosting participation.28 On occasions even success stories of democratic innovations—despite being brought forward by political scientists as a response to worrying democratic deficits—have failed at being inclusive, participatory or sustainable over time.29 Two examples out of many: Madrid’s participatory online platform—‘Decide Madrid’—had its budget halved and many supporting participatory activities halted after a change in the government of the municipality. Participation in vTaiwan’s (the digital participatory platform launched in 2014 in Taiwan) has remained remarkably concentrated among a small group of people for years. Only a few thousand people have subscribed to the initiative’s mailing list, and very few contribute to the discussion forum.

4.4

The Cultural Argument: Public Sector and Market Competition

We finally arrive at the final argument: the limited incentive for public regulators to change, transform and innovate at scale because of ‘cultural’ safeguards protecting them from market competition. Schumpeter argued that businesses are driven by the fear of being eliminated by competitors—and for this reason are motivated to constantly innovate and explore new approaches. Companies—or at least successful ones—are on the constant lookout for new assets and to reconfigure their approaches to the market on the basis of perceived opportunities or assessed risks.30 The public sector, by contrast, is not primarily defined by competition. Despite being a major purchaser of goods, services and labour—the public sector accounts for around twenty-five percent of Gross Domestic Product and thirty-eight percent of recorded employment globally31—the average public sector organization does not react to changes in the environment by radically changing its approach and structure. There are reasonable justifications for this condition, but the fact remains that protecting public regulators from market conditions limits their motivation to

28

Nesta (2022). Lindholm and Berg (2022) created a digital democratic innovation in the form of a mobile application called ‘Pocket Democracy’. The basic idea of the mobile app was to present information about municipal decision-making in a user-friendly manner. In the study the authors demonstrated why the app did not fully meet the democratic ideal of inclusiveness at the process stage, especially in reaching young people. 30 Giersch (1984). Lucena Vaz-Corado and Mueller (2019); McKee (1990). 31 This means that generating efficiency gains in the public sector has important implications for a country’s overall economic performance. This argument is well explained by World Bank Bureaucracy Lab, Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (https://www.worldbank.org/en/data/interactive/201 9/05/21/worldwide-bureaucracy-indicators-dashboard). 29

4.4

The Cultural Argument: Public Sector and Market Competition

87

improve and evolve. Result: governments continue to address demands for participation with traditional and inefficient regulatory approaches, or—worse—they disregard the innovative potential of technological innovation. On this point, how most public administrations utilize the Internet is telling.32 Traditionally, public authorities have used the Internet as a one-way publishing and distribution network rather than a medium to connect with citizens and stakeholders. Now, given the limitations of a competitive nature that we have just outlined, we must also look at the views expressed by those who caim that public policies are comparable to products, and therefore need to be marketed and ‘sold’ to citizenconsumers.33 We would then need to answer a new question, namely: how do we measure productivity in democratic decision-making? To begin, we must say that there is no consensus on the criteria for evaluation, and no magic bullet for accurately measuring the productivity of the public-sector. There are a number of reasons for this. One is the lack of market transactions for public services—or, when such transactions exist, often they are distorted by subsidies and other market imperfections. The complexity of most public services means that there is also no way to accurately assess the productivity of public administrations. These normally require inputs from multiple individuals and organizations. Moreover, classic methods used to collect these inputs (online surveys, for instance) often return biased data.34 Yet another reason is the substantial lag time between investments in inputs and the realization of outputs and outcomes. To overcome these limits and define accurate assessments of public sector’s productivity, the World Bank complements traditional ‘macro’ measures of public sector productivity, with fine-grained ‘micro’ measures at the individual organization, employee, and task and process level.35 That said, public sector productivity is conventionally assessed with the ‘Waterfall method’, which operates through a sequence of consequential and rigid steps.

32

Schlosberg et al. (2006); Sack (2005). The idea of government as a product is developed by Donald Kettl (2008), who compared governing institutions to vending machines (citizens put money in, and get out goods and services). This metaphor has been later replaced by the ‘Concorde’ metaphor. The last Concorde flight in 2003 put an end to the golden age of supersonic flight. The public lost trust in the vision that Concorde represented; just as they are now with governments. Bevir and Trentmann (2007) claim that political and governmental discourses on reform have progressively enlisted the figure of the consumer, installing new tensions between ideas and practices of consumerism, and nurturing a problematic relationship to the figure of the citizen. They considered responses from people who use public services: exploring their preferred forms of identification and conceptions of the relationships that are at stake in public services. These responses indicate a degree of skeptical distance from governmental address and point to problems about the effectiveness of strategies of subjection. 34 For the most part, surveys used by public administrations suffer from limitations in data collection and sampling. Such surveys focus primarily on individual interactions and are based only on the feedback of those who decide to answer questionnaires, or other feedback mechanism (undermining the variability and reliability of the sample). 35 Data provided by World Bank Bureaucracy Lab, Public Sector Productivity. Why is it important and can we measure it?, 2021 (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/35165). 33

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The ideation and testing phases precede the release of (an) application. So, to simplify, a policy process is efficacious insofar as it complies with all steps. The drawback of this approach is that it inevitably stretches the time frame and exposes the regulator to the risk of reaching the solution to a problem when the problem itself has already morphed. The alternative options to assess productivity in policy-making are called ‘Orchestration’ and ‘Agile’ and are both based on incremental work and adaptive planning. Orchestrated governance postulates that policy-makers refrain from engaging in regulation in order to facilitate cooperation among multiple intermediaries. The goal of Agile governance is to adapt the solution to the actuality of the problem.36 In their book on bureaucratic innovation, Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo promote the idea of ‘agile stability’ for state bureaucracies. This is described as the balancing act between ensuring stability in the core functions provided to the public while also maintaining the flexibility to evolve and add new capabilities over time. In the ‘Agile model’ governments, businesses, individuals, and communities carry out ongoing analysis of the social situations in which they find themselves; define the goals they seek to achieve; design various systems for achieving these goals; and carry out ongoing dialogue-based assessments of outcomes to make improvements to these systems. Via these cycles, public policies are expected to better adapt to constantly changing societies and economies. Thus, we are in the presence of a more flexible but equally time-consuming system. With specific regard to participatory and consultative initiatives, the assessment of success or failure is usually related to the dissatisfaction with the initiative expressed by either the participants (i.e., the initiative failed due to inability to perform the user’s wishes) or the organisers (i.e., the initiative failed due to the incapacity to put together a consultative process to engage participants). Other scholars—one of whom is Paul Ginsborg37—suggests to assess deliberative democratic initiatives in terms of both the contribution given to expanding the pool of ‘critical’ citizens, capable of engage in dialogue with public institutions, and to the promotion of a more responsible and informed political class. To summarize, we could say that success or failure of participatory initiatives is linked to the capacity of democratic decision-makers to establish a connection with different actors, get them to communicate, and ensure participation from all relevant stakeholders.38 Unfortunately, this assessment methodology neither fixes the timeconsumption problem presented by Waterfall and Agile methodologies described above, nor presents a valid solution to the cultural argument. Case in point: in 2020, a European research consortium was estabished to develop a mobile application designed to boost the political participation and civic engagement of EU mobile citizens (those with European citizenship who live permanently in an EU country other than their country of origin). The research project was

36

https://agilemanifesto.org. Ginsborg (2018). 38 Dean et al. (2020); Fernández-Martínez et al. (2020); Hamm et al. (2021). 37

4.5

The Pandemic Acceleration of Digital Government

89

divided in three steps: field research, information and awareness-raising, and finally the design and development of the mobile application. It took twenty-four months before the mobile application to be ready and usable by citizens, by which time politics and institutions in Europe had gone through numerous changes.39

4.5

The Pandemic Acceleration of Digital Government

There is actually a condition in which the limitations caused by the cultural argument have been overcome. History demonstrates that disruptive events have the ability to transcend cultural barriers, compelling governments to replace antiquated models with modern ones. The web-based participatory platform Better Reykjavik, to name one example, was created in the aftermath of the Kitchenware Revolution, a widespread protest that exploded in Iceland in 2009.40 The launch of vTaiwan followed on from the Sunflower Movement, a student-driven protest that came to a head in March 2014.41 To some extent, the creation of e-voting platforms in Madrid and Barcelona were also fuelled by the rise of Podemos, a left-wing political party advocating for radical change and innovation in the Spanish political system.42 Is it possible to argue that the global health crisis that began in late 2019 has similarly resulted in change? Opinions are mixed in this regard. On the one hand, the Corona virus severely stressed both democratic systems and their basic functions. Curfews, bans on public gatherings, and reductions in religious freedom were just some of the emergency measures taken by democratic governments around the world that imposed severe restrictions on fundamental rights, while autocracies responded by imposing broad measures that threatened the rule of law.43 On the other hand, it is safe to say that the pandemic accelerated the public sector’s journey to digitalization, forcing public regulators to shift from analog to digital services. This was certainly a positive outcome. Technological applications 39

Sgueo et al. (2020). Orriols and Cordero (2016); Chironi and Fittipaldi (2017); Errejón et al. (2016). Barcelona used Decidim, a digital platform created to support civic engagement (https://www.decidim.barcelona); in Madrid the municipal council launched an open-source platform to consult citizens (https:// decide.madrid.es). 41 Rowen (2015). Launched in 2014, in the aftermath of the Sunflower Movement, a student-driven protest, vTaiwan involves a mix of online (e.g., visual clusters of participants who agree and disagree on an issue) and offline activities (typically questions and suggestions collected through the platform and later addressed in public meetings) aimed at encouraging Taiwanese citizens to reach a consensus on specific policy issues. 42 Better Reykjavik (https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/better-reykjavik/) is an online platform for the crowdsourcing of solutions to urban challenges launched by the Icelandic Citizens Foundation in May 2010. It has multiple democratic functions which can roughly be split up into three divisions: Agenda setting, Participatory budgeting and Policy crowdsourcing. 43 Balz (1998); Birkner (2015). Carl Schmitd considered the decision on the state of exception as the purest form of sovereignty. 40

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and initiatives multiplied in efforts to limit the spread of the virus, treat patients and simplify the tasks of overworked essential personnel. Governments used advanced analytics to collect, process and share data for effective front-line responses. For instance, parliamentary assemblies shifted wholly online, with parliamentary votes held virtually. The European Parliament is a case in point. In March 2020 the plenary session in Brussels was moved to Strasbourg, and then reduced to a mere two days. A set of measures is now in place to facilitate the remote participation of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in committees, enabling them to view and listen to proceedings, ask for the floor and speak in meetings. Arrangements to allow MEPs to express themselves in the language of their choice ensure respect for the linguistic regime.44 Structural changes also occurred, as evidenced by the emergence of many new, peripheral, innovation labs and networks of various types (task forces, SWAT, crisis teams, Nudge units, etc.).45 Digitization also flourished in the area of civic engagement activities. Space was opened up for bold innovations. Public sector’s most used public-engagement tools were virtual public meetings, social media, dedicated project websites or webpages, email blasts, and electronic surveys.46 The growing relevance of virtual and hybrid models had interesting consequences, including the increased overlap between democratic innovation and digital participation, due to the importance of online forums for decision-making (from traditional parliamentary debates to citizen assemblies).

44

Del Monte (2020). Sgueo (2020). In 2020 the European Parliamentary Research Service conducted an in-house review of existing policy labs—also named ‘behavioural insights teams’, ‘nudge units’, ‘innovation labs’, or simply ‘task forces’—and how these gained prominence in government as policy advisors. The study identified ten policy labs operating in Europe. It suggested that major contributions to the rising number of these labs were, on the one hand, the scale, haste and complexity of issues to be regulated (and the necessity for public sector institutions to adopt inclusive, innovative and adaptive methods in the exercise of regulatory powers); on the other hand, these depended by the growing relevance of design-thinking approaches in policy venues. The European Union itself relies on a complex system of agile, in-house and external advice. The Commission relies on the DirectorateGeneral for Research & Innovation, the Joint Research Center, and the European Political Strategic Center—the Commission’s strategic think tank (which as of 2019 has a new name: IDEA). The European Parliament, on the other hand, has put in place an original mix of structures between politics and administration. The EU Parliamentary Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (known to most by its acronym STOA) is the group of Members of the European Parliament that deals with issues related to science and technology. The European Parliamentary Research Service is the internal parliamentary research service. Finally, the European Strategic and Policy analysis System (ESPAS) provides a framework for cooperation and consultation at administrative level, on a voluntary basis, between the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Council of the EU, and other EU structures (including the European External Action Service, the European Investment Bank, the Committee of the Regions, the European Economic and Social Committee, the European Institute for Security Studies and the European Court of Auditors) to work together on medium- and long-term trends facing or relating to the EU. 46 Salerno et al. (2022). 45

4.6

From Performance to Approach: The Design of Virtual Democratic Spaces

91

Yet this hasty shift to digital venues revealed the dramatic divide separating the utopia of digital democratic governance from reality. The toxic combination of short-sighted digital initiatives, technical problems and ill-framed communication strategies, together with preexisting problems that remained unsolved, has yet again shown the urgent need for coherent design approaches able to effectively tackle the demand for participation by civil society actors and meet the expectations of citizens.

4.6

From Performance to Approach: The Design of Virtual Democratic Spaces

One important lesson to be drawn from the aforementioned considerations is that the challenge of digital democratic spaces is not necessarily related to their performance. The issue lies with the design of these virtual spaces of interaction, debate and cooperation. Digitalized forms of democratic engagement should focus on encouraging those who show interest in participating, engaging for those who decide to step in and interact with democratic decision-makers in digital arenas, and meet the needs and expectations of participants. This is nothing new. The suggestion that public administrations could, and should, be designed to meet specific goals or fulfil specific needs is not a recent concept. In 1969, Herbert Simon imagined a ‘design science’ applied to public administration. Simon argued that public administrators ought to diagnose problems and devise optimal ways to deal with them.47 Other scholars have followed, underscoring the idea of public administrations as a design science and speculating about the best design of public services.48 In the last decade, designers have finally played a role in designing the relationships between legislators, communities and technology. Today, design-based approaches are credited with opening new options to policymakers and thus helping them to explore potentially more effective regulatory solutions. Despite very little agreement on how policy and design differ, relate and interact with each other,49 a growing number of design methods and approaches have made their way into policy-making worldwide. Policy-makers, designers and stakeholders of various classes (corporations, start-ups, think-tanks and citizens) have created ‘epistemic communities’ engaged in tackling policy challenges from UK and North America to Brazil, South Africa and New Zealand.50 This includes online consultations and initiatives aimed at engaging citizens in co-managing complex processes, mediating between diverging cultures and

47

Simon (1969). Ostrom (1974); Miller (1984); Radine (1987); Shangraw and Crow (1989); Lietdka (2014); Howlett (2014). 49 Bason (2014); Howlett (2019); Buchanan (1992). 50 Haas (1999); Haas (1990); Sand (1991). 48

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interests, and co-creating policies, via digital tools. Public regulators, at both national and supranational levels, explore design with the goal of addressing citizens’ needs and expectations more efficiently.51 This brings us to a new dilemma—what exactly should be re-designed? Having clarified the in-built limitations of traditional design approaches to digital democracy, the next Chapter will address the unraveling of this fascinating dilemma. It will explore various solutions and related challenges, including the role of technology in enabling inclusive online civic engagement, the security and privacy of citizens, and promotion of transparency and accountability in democratic decision-making. Ultimately—as Chap. 5 will explain more fully—the success or failure of digital democracy will depend on the ability to design digital democratic spaces with a commitment to complexity, to ensure that technology serves to strengthen, rather than undermine, democratic institutions. Summary • The aesthetical dimension of digital democracy is tied to both our imagination (how we would like digital democratic spaces to look) as well as to reality (how these spaces look in reality). • The majority of governments popularize the idea that digital governance is faster and more efficient—and by analogy, that participatory rights exercised within digital public spaces are quicker and easier to enjoy when compared to non-digital forms of participation. • Despite the aesthetic of democratic-decision making being largely modeled after the design criteria implemented by consumer tech, digital government is inherently incapable of satisfying the expectations of the users of technology. This is caused by the fundamental differences in structures, goals and dynamics separating digitalized public spaces from private spaces (and motivated by structural, procedural and cultural reasons. • Democratic systems are uncapable of providing the scale and speed of decisionmaking required to tackle ongoing crises, due to anachronistic structures and skills shortages. • Contemporary public sector institutions are unfit to design digital democratic spaces that are satisfying to the expectations of their constituencies because due to the lack of innovative and adaptive approaches to contemporary challenges. • There are limited incentives for public regulators to change, transform and innovate at scale because of ‘cultural’ safeguards protecting them from market competition. This explains why many governments continue to address demands for participation with traditional and inefficient regulatory approaches, or— worse—they disregard the innovative potential of technological innovation • The pandemic accelerated the public sector’s journey to digitalization, forcing public regulators to shift from analog to digital services, including activities in the area of civic engagement. At the same time, this hasty shift to digital venues

51

Fisher and Gamman (2019); Ehn et al. (2014); IBM (2018).

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revealed the dramatic divide separating the utopia of digital democratic governance from reality.

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Gilens M, Page BI (2014) Testing theories of American politics: elites, interest groups, and average citizens. Persp Polit 12:564–581 Ginsborg P (2018) Democracy. Crisis and Renewal. Profile Books, London Gray B, Purdy J (2018) Collaborating for the future: multistakeholders partnerships for solving complex problems. Oxford University Press, Oxford Greenwood J (2012) The European citizens’ initiative and EU civil society organizations. Persp Eur Polit Soc 13(3):325–336 Haas PM (1990) Saving the mediterranean. Columbia University Press, New York Haas PM (1999) Do Regimes Matter? Epistemic communities and mediterranean pollution control. International Organizations, p 34 Hamm A et al (2021) What makes civic tech initiatives to last over time? Dissecting Two Global Cases, ACM Digital Library Homer-Dixon T. et al. (2022) A Call for An International Research Program on the Risk of a Global Polycrisis, Technical Paper #2022-3, July 20, 2022 Howard PK (2019) Bureaucracy vs. Democracy. The American Interest, Washington Howlett M (2014) From the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ policy design: design-thinking beyond markets and collaborative governance. Policy Sci 47(3):187–208 Howlett M (2019) The policy design primer: choosing the right tools for the job. Routledge, New York IBM (2018) Creating the ultimate government experience. How to use design-thinking to put citizens at the centre of public sector services Innes E, Booher DE (2018) Planning with complexity: an introduction to collaborative rationality for public policy. Routledge, London Kauffman B (2012) The European citizens’ initiative pocket guide. Initiative and Referendum Institute Europe Kettl D (2008) The next government of the United States: why our institutions fail us and how to fix them. W.W. Norton & Co., New York Landemore H (2013) Democratic reason: politics, collective intelligence, and the rule of the many. Princeton University Press, Princeton Lietdka J 2014 Why design-thinking works. Harv Bus Rev, 2018 Lilyanova V (2022) Digital public services in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans, European Parliamentary Research Service, PE 739.271, Brussels Lindholm J, Berg J (2022) Why do innovations fail? Lessons learned from a digital democratic innovation. JeDEM - EJournal EDemocracy Open Government 14(2):130–148 Longo E (2019) The European citizens’ initiative: too much democracy for EU polity? German Law J 20:181 ss–181200 Lucena Vaz-Corado SF, Mueller A (2019) The concept of entrepreneur of Schumpeter in comparison to Kirzner. MISES: Interdiscipl J Philos Law Econ 7(3):613–642 Macintosh A (2012) Characterizing E-Participation in Policy-Making. IEEE’s International Conference on System Sciences McDonald SM (2020) Technology Theatre. When the public is focusing on a technology instead of a holistic solution to address complex policy issues, technology theatre is working, Centre for International Governance Innovation McKee DL (1990) On Schumpter, services and economic change: his evolutionary economy could not have foreseen the burgeoning of issue-specific consulting. Am J Econ Sociol 49(3):297–306 Miller TC (1984) Public sector performance: a conceptual turning point. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Motupalli V (2017) How big data is changing democracy. J Int Aff 71(1):71–80 Nesta (2022) Democratic innovation and digital participation. Harnessing Collective Intelligence for 21st Century Decision-Making, London Newton K, Norris P (1999) Confidence in public institutions: faith, culture or performance? Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge

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Chapter 5

Re-Conceptualising the Aesthetics of Digital Democracy

Abstract In order to dispel the notion that digital democratic decision-making can only be successful when it offers quick and effective solutions to current concerns, this Chapter examines three methods for redesigning the aesthetics of digital democracy while maintaining the focus on complexity. The first method is related to storytelling. Public decision-makers are encouraged to elaborate a storytelling approach to digital democratic spaces that shifts the focus from immediacy to complexity. The second recommendation for increasing civic involvement with digital tools is to design public spaces with an emphasis on the interactions rather than the results. This is key for democratic decision-makers interested in nurturing healthy, sympathetic and long-term sustainable bonds with their constituencies. The third and last suggestion in this Chapter is to use innovative methods, namely gamedesign incentives, to promote digital civic engagement. Game-design applied to democratic governance offers a chance for public regulators to engage citizens in co-creation in a sustainable manner, and thus be perceived as legitimate. Furthermore, it helps to align what digital democracy has to offer with the expectations of citizen-users. Keywords Urbanization · Competition · Digitally fragile · Up-skilling · Reskilling · Digital storytelling · Framing · Flow of information · Digital interactions · Crowdsourcing · Collective intelligence · Co-creation · Game-design · Digital aesthetics

5.1

A Look Into a More Technological Future

In 2023, the world population crossed the eight billion mark. There are about seven hundred million more individuals than in 2020 and—according to estimates—about two hundred million fewer than in 2025.1 The year 2023 also marks the fourth 1 Data provided by United Nations—Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects 2022 (https://population.un.org/wpp/). According to the report, global population growth is caused in part by declining levels of mortality, as reflected in increased levels of life expectancy at birth (globally, life expectancy reached 72.8 years in 2019, an increase of almost nine years since

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consecutive pandemic year. For most of the worlds’ population—and with a few notable exceptions—the future is characterized by uncertainty and challenges. We are reasonably certain, for example, that we will experience a more urban future. In 2021 more than half (fifty-five percent) of the global population resides in cities. In the coming two decades, the United Nations estimates that the global share of the urban population will reach sixty-eight percent.2 Other studies estimate that, by 2030, part of the world population will live in so called ‘megacities’—i.e., urban agglomerations with more than ten million residents—and the remaining part will populate medium-sized cities.3 Local governments are already at the forefront of attempts to create distributed, collaborative digital decision-making processes in order to spur creative responses to urban problems, and this trend will only intensify in the upcoming years.4 It will also be a future that is, in its own way, more integrated. In 2020, there were two hundred and eighty-one million international migrants living and working permanently outside their country of origin. In the twenty-seven EU member states alone, mobile citizens (fifteen million in all) account for over three percent of the labour force between the ages of twenty and sixty-four.5 The migration flows, of

1990). At the same time, the report calls governments to adopt policies to tackle overspread reduction in fertility rates as well as targeted welfare measures to support young individuals financially. Data on population growth provided by European Commission—Competence Centre on Foresight, Global population is growing, December 21st, 2022 (https://knowledge4policy.ec. europa.eu/foresight/global-population-growing_en). According to The Brookings Institution, The Unprecedented Expansion of the Global Middle Class, Global Economy & Development Working Paper, 2017 (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_globalmiddle-class.pdf) 5.3 billion people (up from 3.2 billion currently) will be classified as ‘middle class’ (i.e. individuals enjoying between 67% and 200% of the median income in a country). Second, a large chunk of this global middle class will be situated in emerging economies, especially in China. The accumulation of wealth, however, will remain in the hands of a few. 2 Data provided by United Nations – Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects (https://population.un.org/wup/publications/Files/WUP2018-High lights.pdf). 3 Data provided by European Political Strategy Centre, Global Trends to 2030: Challenges and Choices for Europe Report (https://www.iss.europa.eu/content/global-trends-2030-–-challengesand-choices-europe). 4 Ranchordas (2018); Beard (2012). Mayors of big cities have set up policy labs to enhance civic engagement more systematically: New York with Michael Bloomberg, for instance, or Seoul with Park Won-soon and the so-called ‘Sharing City’. Also interesting are the cases of Barcelona (Fab Initiative) and Chicago. Other cities have followed, engaging citizen planners in all phases of urban management, from planning to service provision, by digital means. 5 Herm (2008); Data provided by Eurostat, EU citizens in other EU Member States, 2018 (https://ec. europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/8926076/3-28052018-AP-EN.pdf/48c473e8-c2c1-4942b2a4-5761edacda37) and Migration Policy Institute, The integration needs of mobile EU citizens, Impedments and opportunities, 2018 (https://emnbelgium.be/sites/default/files/publications/ mpieurope_- _integration_mobile_eu_citizens.pdf). Over the last decade (2009–2019) the share of EU mobile citizens has increased of 0.9%—a growth that may have been favored by the consolidation of the beneficial conditions of the European Single Market’s four freedoms, namely: the free movement of people, goods, services and capitals. Encouraged by the possibility to travel

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those who have nothing and those who have a lot, are bound to continue. Energy and climatic shocks, changes in global political balances, and the crisis of traditional Western democratic systems are among the (near) certainties that lie ahead for humanity. But above all, what we are most certain of is that the future will be more technological. Mobility, information, social relations, medicine, financial transactions, electoral systems and democracies as a whole—all these areas will evolve according to digital logics and dynamics. In 2018 there were three billion people connected online, and nearly nine billion connected machines. In 2023 the number of connected devices had doubled, surpassing the fifteen billion globally. By 2030 this number is expected to reach thirty billion.6 This will result in major effects for companies, governments and citizens. For businesses, the present is already characterized by increasing amounts of technological investment and by the race to innovate. This trend is expected to continue—and increase—in the near future. Analysts estimate that the pandemic has produced a seven-year leap forward in the digitalization of businesses globally.7 The race to invest in technology development has just begun. In 2021, the global value of AI was estimated at sixty-seven billion USD. By 2025, this is expected to increase to one hundred and ninety billion USD.8 By the end of 2022, the Metaverse was worth eight hundred billion USD; Facebook alone invested ten billion USD in this area in 2021.9 Also, in 2022, cloud computing was valued at six hundred and sixty-one billion USD; the Fintech sector five hundred and twenty-ninety billion USD; and cryptocurrencies were valued at three trillion USD globally.10

freely, study, work, and live across borders (and benefited with the possibility to access to better prices, higher environmental and social standards, as well as more comprehensive consumer protection) European citizens of all ages have been increasingly moving across EU borders. 6 Data provided by Statista, Number of IoT connected devices worldwide from 2019 to 2021, with forecasts from 2022 to 2030 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1183457/iot-connected-devicesworldwide/). 7 Data provided by McKinsey&Company, How Covid-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point – and transformed business forever, October 5, 2020 (https://www.mckinsey. com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-compa nies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever). 8 Smirnov and Lukyanov (2019); Soni et al. (2020). Data provided by United States of America – Department of Commerce, Top global Artificial Intelligence Markets, 2022 (https://www.trade.gov/ sites/default/files/2022-05/Top%20Global%20AI%20Markets%20Report%204.20%20%282%2 9%20%281%29.pdf). 9 Kastrenakes and Heath (2021); Kraus et al. (2022); Hughes (2022); Knox (2022). 10 According to the consultancy Grand View Research (Cloud Computing Market Size, Share & Trends https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/cloud-computing-industry) in 2022 the global cloud computing market size was valued 545.8 billion USD in and is projected to grow USD 1240.9 billion by 2027. Data on Fintech and cryptocurrencies provided by Statista (Fintech – Worldwide, https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/fintech/worldwide; Cryptocurrencies – Worldwide, https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/fintech/digital-assets/cryptocurrencies/worldwide).

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Increased investment will increase competition. For those prepared to take advantage of them, there will be tremendous opportunities, but there will also be higher risks for market participants. The latter because competition will become fiercer than even before. Not that this is bad news, of course. Competition will result in the creation of fresh connections that will support an ecosystem rich in information, projects, and ideas. This is already populated by operators large and small, ‘Big Tech’ and start-ups, research centres, public-private partnerships, institutions, researchers, digital nomads, policy-entrepreneurs and innovators. Competition and aggregation will determine which players are able to adapt and innovate—and thus survive—and those who will be left behind. Governments will likely need to invest more in innovation in the coming technological era and search for useful regulatory frameworks to balance various and often conflicting influences in technology. The drive for competition will need to be balanced with the protection of rights. In 2021, the public sector increased investment in digitization by over three percent from the previous year, exceeding four hundred and fifty-two billion USD globally.11 In CHAPTER FOUR we mentioned the Next Generation EU stimulus package. This, combined with the EU’s multi-year budget, raised over two thousand billion Euros to finance, among others, the digital transition.12 On-going works on new regulatory arrangements will be particularly challenging for governments. In Europe (but the same is true in many legal systems outside Europe), major regulatory dossiers on digital technologies are being negotiated. These concern digital services and markets, the regulation of AI, cybersecurity and the governance of data.13

11 Data provided by Gartner, forecasts Worldwide Government IT Spending to Grow 5% in 2022, June 13, 2022 (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-06-13-ww-govt-itspending-forecast-2022). 12 Sgueo (2023). As Chapter Three explained, according to EU rules, at least a quarter of the resources used by EU member states in national post-pandemic recovery plans must be allocated to digital transition. 13 Metzger et al. (2021). So-called ‘industrial data’ alone are expected to reach a total volume of one hundred and seventy-give zettabytes by 2025. Data provided by Statista (Volume of data/information created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide from 2010 to 2020, with forecasts from 2021 to 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data-created/). More generally about the public regulation of tech companies, already Colin Crouch (2004) coined the term ‘postdemocracy’ to describe the rise in the power of corporations to influence decisions that were previously taken by national governments in response to popular pressure. A study by the Knight Foundation and Gallup (2020) confirmed that so-called ‘techlash’ is widespread and bipartisan, especially in the US. Long celebrated for harnessing and distributing the energies of individuals, corporations have fallen under public scrutiny for their excessive political and social power. Public sectors’ demands for regulation are well summarized in a note published by Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg in November 2018: ‘What content should be distributed and what should be blocked? Who should decide these policies and make enforcement decisions? To whom should tech companies be accountable?’. In an attempt to address these concerns, Facebook committed to develop oversight and monitoring mechanisms and to filter harmful content proactively. Other companies have adopted different strategies, developing what are referred to (Manfredi 2019) as ‘brand

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Other regulatory dossiers will open soon. These will concern both individual (privacy, copyright, freedom of expression) and collective rights (in particular political and democratic freedoms). The French six-month presidency of the EU (January-June 2022) was accompanied by an impactful slogan: “Relance, Puissance, Appartenance”—where ‘belonging’ was primarily intended as a reference to digital assets, data in particular, whose sovereignty has been debated in Europe for some years now.14 What logic will European governments follow? Proprietary, valuesharing or redistributive? These normative dossiers—as we stated earlier—will be challenged with the need to balance growth and rights. But that’s not all. Public regulators will also be expected to design ‘agile’ rules to govern technological evolution. That is, rules that are efficient, easily adapted to the needs of the recipients, capable of promoting transparency, and scalable across national borders. Finally, technology will make all our lives simpler—and perhaps even (dare we say?) better. There is no doubt that with rapidly advancing digital technology, unprecedented and fascinating scenarios are opening up before us.15 These are scenarios to which we need to look with optimism. However, without underestimating the risks. One in particular is the most significant. We run the risk of forgetting complexity in our unrelenting race to digitize everything. Most importantly, we run the risk of underestimating the significance and universality of complexity in terms of individuals’ choices, collective expectations, and performances of democratic decision-making.

activism’ approaches. According to Sarkar and Kotler (2020), brand activism is a natural progression beyond values-driven corporate social responsibility and environmental, social and governance programs. With brand activism, corporations seek to influence citizen-consumers by means of campaigns created and sustained by political values. In this way, companies aim to contribute to the social production of citizen-consumers’ identity. Exemplary in this regard is the Nike campaign entitled ‘Believe in something’, featuring Colin Kaepernick, a player in the US National Football League, owing to his ties with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. 14 France22, Présidence française du conseil de l’Union européenne, Relance, puissance, appartenance. Le programme de la présidence française du Conseil de l’Union européenne, 2022 (https://wayback.archive-it.org/12090/20221120102926/https://presidence-francaise. consilium.europa.eu/media/zeqny1y5/fr_programme-pfue-v2-5.pdf). 15 According to OECD (How’s Life in the Digital Age? Opportunities and Risks of the Digital Transformation for People’s Well-being, OECD Publishing, Paris, 2019—https://doi.org/10.1787/ 9789264311800-en) ongoing digital transformations affect people’s lives across eleven dimensions, including jobs and earnings, housing, social connections and security. The review shows that these impacts can be positive as digital technologies expand the boundaries of information availability and enhance human productivity, but can also imply risks for people’s well-being, ranging from cyber-bullying to the emergence of disinformation or cyber-hacking.

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Protecting Complexities

Ignoring or underestimating complexity would be an enormous, and inexcusable, mistake. Complexity—indeed, complexities—must be protected. First and most relevant is the complexity of the human factor. The human factor in the digital public service race has already been dealt with in this book, so only a brief recap here is needed. If democratic governments wish to implement effective and efficient systems of digital decision-making, they must work from the bottom up and focus on the people and systems that will be tapping into these digital mechanisms. Let us not forget that, everywhere in the world, the ‘digitally fragile’ (i.e., individuals or groups who may be at disadvantage or face challenges in accessing, using, or understanding digital technologies) still represent substantial portions of the population. A striking statistical figure: in 2022, half of the world’s population was offline; that is, one billion individuals were, and continue to be, without a legal (and therefore also digital) identity.16 To address this challenge, democratic decision-makers will be requested to implement a vast and complex array of measures, starting from digital literacy programs, going through more investments in connectivity infrastructures, up to designing democratic initiatives with an eye for those with limited access to digital technologies. Beyond fragility, the human factor complexity concerns the telluric movements that are violently shaking up the global market of professions (and among them that of civil servants) and the subsequent State programmes for the up-skilling and re-skilling of the workforce aimed at withstanding, and possibly govern, these movements. At present, the picture is as follows: on the one hand, digital technology and automation are changing production processes and the way work is done. The production of tangible goods loses centrality. Instead, there is growing interest in the production of intangible goods, data and services. On the other side, there are professionals experiencing equal and opposing pressures on two fronts. The first pushes them to quickly adapt the skills they have to the market’s demand. This is no easy feat. The World Economic Forum estimates that over the next decade, eightyfive million jobs in the US alone will disappear as a result of digitization. But digital technology will also create another ninety-seven million, in positions and areas that are currently partially or completely non-existent.17 Such change is not unheard-of: 16

Beduschi (2019); Sullivan (2018); Mutung’u and Rutenberg (2020). According to the World Bank Global ID4D Dataset (https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0040787) an estimated one billion people worldwide cannot officially prove their identity. A 2019 report by Mastercard (Unravelling the web of inclusion, 2019 – http://financial-inclusion.com/wp-content/ uploads/2019/03/MCC1-FinInc-Report-Screen.pdf) of fifteen countries accounting for over sixty percent of the global unbanked population, where six hundred and seven million people have a mobile phone, but do not yet have a bank account. 17 Au-Yong-Oliveira et al. (2019); Vochozka et al. (2018); Paolillo et al. (2022); Colombo et al. (2019); Leduc and Liu (2019). Data provided by World Economic Forum, The Future of Job Report 2020 (https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2020.pdf).

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sixty percent of the occupations that exist today perform functions that had not been invented half a century ago.18 But change has never before happened at this speed. The rapidity with which the skills market is ‘cannibalizing’ professions, imposing new standards and new knowledge to access the most coveted job positions, is unprecedented.19 Unfortunately, current systems for skills training are not helping this rapid and ruthless selective process. Everywhere in the West, educational systems are suffering from serious asymmetries with respect to the demand for occupations. Undergraduate and post-graduate education is misaligned with the skills and competencies required by the current and future job market. Industrial restructuring and rapidly evolving skillsets in technologically intensive sectors and occupations like ICT and finance are rendering previously essential skills obsolete. Six years after graduation, the knowledge capital gained in university is already inadequate compared to the market. If we look only at digital knowledge, figures are even more troubling: with every passing year, one in three digital skills becomes obsolete.20 The second front is concerned with professional services-delivery. We may not all like it, but the traditional nine-to-five office setting in 2020 has gone into the sunset. Clearly, it will not disappear completely and immediately. But in many productive sectors, is the very notion of the office that is becoming obsolete. Workers are being asked by the post-pandemic digital evolution to rethink not only themselves, but also the very concept of home, social relations with neighbours, and even their familial relationships.21 What does the intertwining of these multiple human complexities—of digital skills, of professional training, of continuing education, and of job delivery—imply for the public sector? At least two needs. The first: to invest more and consistently in employee recruitment and training. Administrations need profiles and skills that traditionally did not have an interest in bureaucratic work. Second, administrations need to take care of upgrading the skills of those already in the public service. Re-skilling adapts civil servants to understand and use new technologies. Up-skilling makes them more digitally competent. It is not just the challenge to be complex: the steps needed to meet this challenge must also be carefully defined and managed. Governmental measures in this area overlap, depend on each other, have very high start-up costs and equally high

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Data provided by McKinsey&Company, Job lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation, 2017 (https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20 social%20sector/our%20insights/what%20the%20future%20of%20work%20will%20mean%20 for%20jobs%20skills%20and%20wages/mgi%20jobs%20lost-jobs%20gained_report_december% 202017.pdf). 19 These arguments (by far prevalent in both academic and political venues) are criticized and to some extent downplayed by Roose (2022). 20 Walter and Lee (2022); Abe et al. (2021); Cros et al. (2021). 21 Data from Statista, Work from home and remote work – Statistics and facts, 16 February, 2023 https://www.statista.com/topics/6565/work-from-home-and-remote-work/#topicOverview.

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overhead. Furthermore, these measures take a long time to achieve consistent results—and in any case, do not guarantee certain outcomes. Quite a knot to untie. Last is the complexity of public decision-making, which revolves around two elements—one protective, the other pragmatic. The protective element moves from the assumption that, all things being equal, there cannot be different treatment of citizens by a public institution. This is the reason for the widespread scepticism about personalized norms that were mentioned in CHAPTER TWO of this book. What does protectionism mean? Certainly not that administrative procedures should be perverse, involuted—‘Kafkaesque’, some would say. However, these procedures must guarantee above all impartiality of judgment, fairness of assessment and equality of approach. To achieve this result, those who are in charge of democratic decisions will necessarily need more time. In addition, they will be asked to defend all the complications (design and regulatory) necessary to safeguard stakeholders’ rights (including those of the digitally fragile we have mentioned before). From a purely pragmatic point of view, digitalised decision-makers are unable to go along with the cairological trend of digital time. Chapter 3 explained the reason for this: democratic governments must stay engaged in the balancing of all the interests that converge in digitalised fora for debate and negotiation. Paying attention to multiple public and collective prerogatives not only is time-consuming, but also reduces discretionary approaches, and most importantly prevents governments from providing immediate, gratification-oriented feedback. Again, this is not to say that the administrations should not strive to compress decision-making time. When this can be achieved, results are great. But imagining lightning-fast decision-making processes as the standard for democratic decisions is unrealistic. Rather, the standard is precisely the opposite: long lead times. Just two examples: it took nine years for the Laeken Declaration (of 2001) to turn into the Lisbon Treaty (2009).22 It took two years, under a simplified procedure, to amend Article 136 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union with the European Stability Mechanism.23 At the end of all this talk, what will democratic public powers do? How will they save themselves from the market? How will they make digital spaces more attractive but also effective at engaging citizens? The answer is to be found in a deeper, cultural movement. “Dans un monde qui s’annonce plus chaotique et moins prévisible”—suggests Stéphane Grumbach—“gouverner signifiera s’adapter tant aux catastrophes ponctuelles qu’à l’évolution des conditions globales”.24 Adaptive Laeken Declaration on the future of the European Union (15 December 2001) – https://www. cvce.eu/content/publication/2002/9/26/a76801d5-4bf0-4483-9000-e6df94b07a55/publishable_en. pdf. 23 European Council, Decision of 25 March 2011 amending Article 136 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union with regard to a stability mechanism for Member States whose currency is the euro, 2011/199/EU, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/? uri=CELEX:32011D0199&rid=4. 24 Grumbach (2022). 22

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democratic governments must return to defending complexity, to acknowledge— instead of demonising—the conflictual dimension of social interests,25 and to establish realistic and achievable expectations in participants to digital democratic initiatives, starting from the language used to narrate democracy, continuing through the design of the interactions with stakeholders, all the way to using creative approaches to engage and entertain participants.

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The Aesthetics of Virtual Democratic Interactions. Towards a New Narrative of Digital Democratic Spaces

In previous Chapters of this book, we saw how experiments in democratic innovation may fail to endure beyond the piloting stage. Chapter 4, in particular, analysed the ‘Orchestration’ and ‘Agile’ methodologies as proposed solutions by academics and policy-makers to keep policy-making flexible and adaptable to new challenges. This Chapter suggests three further interventions to ensure democratic decisionmaking is aligned with current challenges. Although these interventions differ in structure and content from each other, they share the same goal: to re-imagine the aesthetics of digital democratic interactions with a focus on complexity and impact. The first intervention is related to storytelling and will be discussed in this Paragraph. It recommends building a new narrative of digital consultations. The second intervention (to be discussed in the following Paragraph) involves the framing (or re-framing) of online consultations to focus on the interactions between citizens and public powers, not the outcomes. The third intervention (analyzed in Paragraph Five) proposes the enhanced use of creative and experimental approaches in digital democratic spaces. As a case in point, I will discuss the use of game-design as a promising (although challenging) boost to citizens’ participation and long-term civic engagement. The first intervention, about storytelling, can be introduced with a question: why is it important to narrate digital democracy? The bottom line is that expectations in and comprehension of digital democratic spaces are related to each other. This means that political unintelligibility (understood as people’s actual competence and knowledge in politics and policy-making) is a democratic problem.26 This has been discussed in previous Chapters of this book in analyzing the negative consequences that phenomena such as information overload, polarization, ‘Lo-fi’ political communication and misinformation cause on democratic systems. Authors explain that citizens ‘ignorant’ in politics,27 or possessing very basic understanding of issues at

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Mouffe and Laclau (1991). Innerarity (2021). 27 Somin (2013). According to Somin, the majority of citizens could be defined as knowing nothing about politics. 26

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the center of public debate,28 or just trusting unreliable sources,29 are also less inclined to trust democratic institutions. Therefore, it is crucial to use a storytelling approach in digital democratic spaces that can help move the emphasis from immediacy to complexity by encouraging an understanding of the place of online consultations within larger, more intricate, and stratified decision-making processes. My claim is that governments that are capable of communicating with their constituencies in simple and transparent manners, without excluding elements of complexity (i.e., time-consumption, implementation costs, unexpected outcomes) in their narration, are better protected from political unintelligibility, and thus better able to manage the expectations of citizens. To re-imagine the storytelling of digital democracy is at the same time a structural and a content-related endeavor. Structurally, it demands the acknowledgment of professional figures dedicated to public-sector storytelling. In the US, for instance, public administrations may appoint a Chief Storytelling Officer (CSO).30 This role, generally held by communication professionals, includes responsibility for defining the institutional position in the target market. In the specific case of digitization of services, it is the storytelling officer who is responsible for identifying the needs of the public, measuring their expectations, and then contributing to the work of developers to generate public services tailored to users’ needs. Unfortunately, cases like that of CSOs are quite rare. In Europe, for instance, the only comparable example is that of ‘territorial marketing’, which, however, has a local dimension and is concerned almost exclusively with tourism and culture. 31 As an alternative to dedicated professional figures, public institutions could mandate internal structures with the task of empowers citizens to participate in the decision-making processes, including the ideation and implementation of communication campaigns to promote digital democratic spaces. Until 2021, for instance, the OECD’ Directorate on Public Governance included a team dedicated to innovative citizen participation, tasked with the responsibility to shape a global public conversation on the future of democracy and innovative approaches to democratic policy-making.32

Converse (1964). Following in the tradition of Converse, Samuel Popkin’s (1991) ‘low information rationality’ theory stipulates that the majority of citizens have basic impressions about politics, and thus their voting choices are often determined by shortcuts. 29 Gloria Origgi (2017) clarifies how contemporary society is experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in its relationship with knowledge and reputation. In the age of reputation, claims Origgi, information is valuable if it has a ‘good reputation’, meaning that it has already been filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. It might seem empowering for citizens, but in reality, it has the exact opposite outcome. With reputation becoming the gatekeeper to knowledge, people are acknowledged by relying on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom are not even known to them. 30 Bennett and Orr (2018). 31 Proulx and Tremblay (2006); Eidelman et al. (2016); Āzena and Keišs (2009). 32 The team was dismissed in 2022. More info here: https://www.oecd.org/gov/. 28

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Alternatively, governments can create independent administrative structures and appoint them with the task of promoting citizen participation, including communication and storytelling. One such case was the Minister of Direct Democracy appointed by the Italian government led by Giuseppe Conte between 2018 and 201933; or, at the local level, the Tuscany’s Regional Authority for the Guarantee and Promotion of Participation.34 As a further alternative, governments could create virtual spaces where professionals, civil servants and citizens could work cooperatively to discuss ideas, design future-scenarios and frame content related to proposed policies. Although perhaps less effective than previous hypotheses, this option would have the advantage of involving citizens in imagining future policies, thus contributing to the narration of democratic decision-making even before the actual decision-making process begins. One such example is ‘Witness’, an online open-source participatory space where economists and science fiction writers imagine a range of plausible and economic scenarios.35 Moving now to considering the content of storytelling, three elements are key to delivering impactful stories of digital democracy: one is the simplicity of language; another is the reduction of uncertainties; and a third is the use of appropriate framing. With regard to communication style, the most prevalent scenario by far is where public regulators make use of involuted and unnecessarily complex language. In 2014, a study on the communication of the World Bank (WB) found that thirty-one percent of all publications the WB made available on its website—a total of one thousand and six hundred documents—had not been viewed even once. Just twentyfive reports (that is, one and half percent of the total) had exceeded one thousand downloads.36 A 2022 study of the communication used by the European Commission analyzed almost forty-five thousand press releases, published across a thirtyfive years timespan.37 The study highlights the extremely technocratic style of communication. Both the WB’s and Commission’s language are described as too complex and involute. In the case of the EU, authors of the study explain that technocratic language has led to serious disadvantages in a politicized context: these include criticism of EU institutions’ legitimacy, and widespread belief of the incapability of the EU legal order to be truly democratic and innovative.38 Persistent

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Kauffman (2018). The Authority was created by Regional Law 46/2013 to oversee and ensure the implementation of public participation in regional and local politics. The Authority is charged with the task of creating ‘greater social cohesion through the diffusion of the culture of participation and the valorization of all forms of civic engagement, knowledge and widespread skills in society’. See http://www. consiglio.regione.toscana.it/oi/default?idc=47. 35 For further info: https://edgeryders.eu/t/different-economic-systems-one-floating-megacity-intro ducing-witness/15358. 36 Doemeland and Trevino (2014). 37 Rauh (2022); Kurki (2011); Bertsou and Pastorella (2017). 38 Lebessis and Paterson (2000). See also Kriesi et al. (2013). See Wike et al. (2019). Of the six ‘political tribes’ that, according to Chatham House and Kantar Public (2017) exist within the EU 34

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criticisms of the EU—as democratic deficit and dysfunctional decision-making system run by elites located in Brussels (the so-called ‘European technocrats’)— are evidence of this. An exclusive club of overpaid civil servants—EU critics claim—feeds an overly complex institutional environment, structured to ‘please’ corporate interests at the expense of ordinary citizens.39 Interestingly, similar critics can be found with regard to most supranational regulators.40 The second key element in building a sound and functional narration of digital democratic initiatives is the reduction of uncertainties. Although governments should not completely dismiss uncertainty from the narratives of participatory processes (as this is an essential component of the complexity of such processes) they should, however, strive to reduce its margins. Too much uncertainty in fact is harmful in that it discourages citizens from participating, or impact negatively on long-term engagement. Why would I choose to participate if I am completely unaware of the consequences, either positive or negative, of the consultative process? One typical example of ‘harmful’ uncertainty is the multiple and overlapping options made available to citizens, in the framework of digital public spaces, to interact with policy-makers. This multiplicity of options is likely to cause confusion and encourage discontent, especially when synchronous (i.e., live-chats, videoconferences) and asynchronous modes of interaction (Emails, text-messaging, video-recordings) are mixed together. Another example of harmful uncertainty consists of initiatives that do not state in a clear manner neither the expected benefits of participating in a digital democratic initiative, nor its potential outcomes. Case in

today, ‘hesitant Europeans’, together with ‘EU rejecters’, the ‘austerity rebels’ and ‘frustrated pro-Europeans’, make up sixty-eight percent of the total EU population. The 2020 Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report found that nearly sixty percent of European citizens were dissatisfied with democracy in 2019. According to the report, Europeans fall into two broad categories: those living in the so-called ‘zone of complacency’ across Nordic countries (Scandinavia, Germany and the Benelux) and those populating the ‘zone of despair’, encompassing Southern European countries and France. 39 The European Commission (DG for Research & Innovation, Past, present and future of democracy, Brussels, 2019) writes of a ‘vertical incongruence’ among the many definitions in use to describe the supposed incapability of the EU to be innovative. Eyal Benvenisti (2018) makes the case in relation to the ‘mega-regional trade agreements’. Benvenisti explain that the complexity and variety of the issues regulated in these agreements, combined with the confidentiality under which these agreements are negotiated, make them a perfect target for criticism—and, by consequence, of the EU bureaucracy. 40 According to the International Social Survey Program’s National Identity module series (comprising three cross-national surveys conducted in 1995, 2003, and 2013 –https://www.gesis.org/en/ issp/modules/issp-modules-by-topic/national-identity), one in two world citizens say international organizations are taking too much power away from their country. A dissatisfaction that is further exacerbated by two causes: the complexity of international matters (that puts supranational regulators beyond the immediate capacity of many citizens to appraise) and the remoteness of most supranational regulators from local communities, which encourages a sense of disempowerment in citizens. On complexity in international matters and remoteness of supranational organizations: Dahl (1999a).

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point: the communication of infection-tracking applications experimented with by many governments during the first phase of the pandemic. The storytelling of these applications, in a nutshell, was as follows: citizens were advised to download and install contact-tracing apps on their mobile phones. They were told that with sixty percent of the population tracked, everyone would be safe from infection. A twenty percent portion of the population, however, was indicated as the minimum threshold needed to slow the spreading of the infection. In Europe alone, public investment in contact-tracing were significant. Germany spent sixty-seven and half million euros. The Netherlands nearly nineteen million. France spent two million and half Euros (plus another five million in communication campaigns). Indeed, European governments invested around one hundred and six million Euros in tracking applications41—yet these ended up tracking less than five percent of confirmed Covid-19 cases. So, what happened? Beyond the numerous cases of malfunctioning, governments did not adequately protect the public opinion from hoaxes and misinformation. Widespread uncertainty contributed to the diffuse (and irrational) perception of contact-tracing apps as tools of control and surveillance. Third and last is framing. The scholarly literature devoted to assessing the impact that information framing can have on behavior is endless, and this is not the place to delve into it.42 We therefore limit ourselves to pointing out the importance of highlighting practical (for example, the procedural steps planned for the postconsultation, or the administrative structures involved in analyzing and processing the opinions shared by participants) over emotional (for example, vague references to democratic values) aspects in the presentation of new democratic initiatives. Another recommended framing approach consists of balancing potential gains (e.g., ‘if you participate, your ideas will contribute to co-create this policy’) with potential losses (e.g., ‘if you don’t participate, your position could not be reflected in full in the policy’). Long-established behavioral studies have shown that lossaversion (the desire to avoid loss) is twice as powerful as the pleasure of acquiring equivalent gain.43

41 Data provided by VoxEU, A cross-country comparison of contact-tracing apps during COVID19, 2 August, 2021 (https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/cross-country-comparison-contact-tracingapps-during-covid-19); World Health Organization, Tracking health expenditure on COVID-19 within the System of Health Accounts Framework: technical note, Geneva, 2022. 42 In their popular book on nudge theory, Nobel Prize-winners Thaler and Sunstein (2008) suggest that nudges may be used to promote (a more preferred) collective behavior, rather than obstruct it. Nudges—argue Thaler and Sunstein—may help regulators to avoid some of the challenges and potential pitfalls of traditional regulation, for example costly procedures and ineffective campaigning, or invasive choice regulation, such as bans. More on this topic: Frederick (2002); Abdukadirov (2016); John et al. (2020); Alemanno and Sibony (2015). On nudge and evidenceinformed policy-making: Davies and Nutley (2020); Truijens (2022); Barton and Grüne-Yanoff (2015); Cartwright et al. (2009); Cartwright and Hardie (2012). On the correlation between information-framing and policy-making Yang and Hobbs (2020); Nabi (2003); Lee et al. (2008). 43 In their famous study Tversky and Kahneman (1979) demonstrated that people underweight outcomes that are merely probable in comparison with outcomes that are obtained with certainty. This tendency, which they call ‘the certainty effect’, contributes to risk aversion in choices

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To give one final example of the importance of proper framing in public communication, we can mention another case from recent history: the public announcement that Boris Johnson, at the time UK Prime Minister, made in the aftermath of the first pandemic wave. Johnson justified the decision to avoid restrictive measures in order to shield the UK economy from the damage that would inevitably follow a more severe lockdown. At that time Johnson also had to explain the estimated cost of this decision—and unfortunately this was not good news. The policy would come at a cost in human lives, especially of the most fragile individuals in the community. A painful price to pay, but one that—Johnson explained—was bearable if the health crisis would be overcome quickly. It did not work. The UK government quickly backtracked, very few days after the announcement. The backlash from the public, both domestically and internationally, was decisive in the change.

5.4

Re-Framing Digital Consultations: Interactions Not Outcomes

The second idea to redesign the aesthetics of digital democracy is concerned with the physiognomy of interactions between policy-makers and citizens within digital public spaces. In his book on the future of democracy, Graham Smith discusses how and whether democracies could be designed to give due weight to the interests of future generations. In Smith’s opinion, ‘democratic myopia’, as he terms it, consists of the tendency of contemporary democratic systems to be shortsighted—i.e., unfit to adequately consider long term visions and challenges. Smith describes four causes of this myopia and indicates future-proof design among the solutions to this issue.44 Another academic, Catherine Fieschi, has written that the generally inadequate response of public institutions to overcome gaps in immediacy and ease-of-use for citizens, has transformed democracies into ‘populocracies’—that is, democratic institutions self-reinforcing the sense of inadequacy by remaining unreceptive to the new dynamics unleashed by social media.45

involving sure gains and to risk seeking in choices involving sure losses. On the basic principle of loss aversion and how it can explain why penalty frames are sometimes more effective than reward frames in motivating people: Tversky and Kahneman (1991); Cubitt et al. (2011). Recent studies (Dorison et al. 2022) examined information framing in relation to COVID-19 health information, investigating whether it is more effective to frame health messages in terms of potential losses or potential gains. Authors of the study judge the latter option more effective and highlight the emotional toll of loss-framed messages. 44 Smith (2021). The four causes are the non-presence of future generations in public policies, the electoral cycles, the resistance from incumbent interests, and the dynamics of the capitalist system. More generally about the future of democracy: Bobbio (1984); Luhmann (1990); Dahl (1999b); Alonso et al. (2011); Schlesinger (1997). 45 Fieschi (2019).

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Drawing from Smith’s and Fieschi’s arguments, I suggest that digital interactions between democratic governments and citizens, to be future-proof, should be re-designed in terms of a service rather than a product. Said otherwise, virtual public arenas should be re-conceptualized as places where policy-makers and participants engage in a ‘flow’ of information- and ideas- sharing, rather than just as places where future decisions are negotiated among stakeholders and decision-makers.46 With this approach, it is my claim, stakeholders might find more compelling the choice to engage in consultations or to contribute to participatory initiatives held online by governments. Digital public arenas would in fact serve as the Greek ‘synoikismos’— places to harmonize diversity of cultural backgrounds, conflict interests and multiplicity of ideas through discussion.47 So how can this be done? We said earlier that, aesthetically, current digital democratic interactions are based on a simple formula: replicating reality in a virtual scenario. For example, by creating digital counters, or allocating (virtual) rooms within which to gather users, assigning them a place in a queue, which is also virtual. This approach—we also clarified—is flawed, and should be abandoned. Dematerializing bureaucracy within a digital scenario, in fact, does not necessarily solve the shortcomings of public administrations operating in analogic formats; instead, it may generate new reasons for dissatisfaction in citizens (and we return again to the problem of expectations). Among the most frequent cases of design-malpractice, perhaps most insidious is where access to digital public spaces occurs ‘in hiccups’, during set times and days. Beyond the legitimate organizational needs of the public administration, closing a digital space is at odds with the logic of a system that is perceived as open and accessible by default. Said in other words, it is like being in a virtual room, with a closed door. Let us further elaborate this concept: a digital interaction framed within a specific timing responds to the idea of a product. Users may access at given moments, and only for a limited amount of time. A service, on the other hand, is activated as often as users need it. To achieve this result, digital interactions between citizens and public powers should be conceptualized, designed and implemented in the context of an ongoing relationship—one that is activated as many times as the stakeholders 46

Csikszentmihalyi (2008). Sennett (2016). In Aristotle’s politics (See Stanford’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Aristotle’s Political Theory, July 1, 2022—https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-politics/) the synoikismos described the drawing together of different families and tribes, competing economic interests, and natives and foreigners. Urban environments were up to the task of letting diverging interests co-habit peacefully; Greek cities were designed for that purpose. In amphitheatres, citizens could listen to public debates and take collective decisions. They would sit in assigned places, with members of their tribe, and listen to the orator’s speech, replying if they so wished. The town square, the ‘agora’, served a different purpose. It exposed citizens to differences in a less mediated way. Typically, public squares hosted various events simultaneously. It was common, while walking across the square, to be caught up in debates: a trial occurring in the law court, for instance. So much so that, by leaving the square, citizens would symbolically step back from engagement, transitioning from the public to their private space. 47

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need it. This would help democratic decision-makers to promote a more holistic understanding of digital spaces for activism and civic engagement. To get an idea of service-design, you need to look at private digital platforms. Contents such as a Facebook post, a picture on Instagram, or a tweet on Twitter—are designed with the precise goal to feed an ecosystem of interactions in which the author and the recipient of content overlap. So, basically, the outcome of a service design process is in itself a process, where value is ‘co-created’ (a concept to which we will return shortly, in the next few pages) between users and producers. 48 Service-design cases in the public sector are infrequent. The best acknowledged practice in this area is ‘prototyping’—which is used with the aim of testing policy options in a protected environment, in order to trial potential interventions at a really early stage.49 In 2022, for instance, the UK government designed prototypes in a project on marine plans with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Marine Management Organization.50 Another noteworthy example— although still in an embryonic stage—may be found in the EU proposal to establish an ‘EU digital citizenship’. Based on five pillars (digital foundations, digital wellbeing, digital engagement and media literacy, digital empowerment, and digital opportunities) the EU digital citizenship aims at giving European citizens equal access to all public services, including the right to participate in online consultations and other participatory opportunities organized at the EU and national levels, possibly via a single digital platform.51 On this matter, it is worth being remembered that in 2023 a new ECI was submitted to the European Commission with the goal of lengthening the functionalities of the CoFoE Platform, by including petitioning and consultation tools that would allow European citizens to open in-depth debates involving institutions and policy stakeholders, and collect consensus on proposals to be submitted to the European institutions.52 Looking instead at cases that have already been implemented, an interesting example of participatory design focused on (engaging participants in) the process rather than (asking for their contribution to) an outcome is ‘Empaville’, a 48

Spagnoletti et al. (2015); Viglia et al. (2018); Thies et al. (2016). Specifically on service-design: Polaine et al. (2013); Holmlid (2012); Yu and Sangiorgi (2018). 49 Data provided by UK government Policy Lab, Open Policy Making toolkit, 2017 (https://www. gov.uk/guidance/open-policy-making-toolkit/4-delivery-prototyping-and-improving-ideas). 50 Other acknowledged benefits of prototyping include the possibility to implement ‘Lo-fi’ solutions that reduce risk and costs when an idea would be complex and time consuming to develop; the possibility of keeping multiple options open to examination; and the possibility of fostering engagement of citizens. 51 Tomasello (2022); Calzada (2022); Fernández-Prados et al. (2021). 52 The ECI also demands to appoint a participation office for each European commissioner, acting as a bridge between the Commission and citizens request collected via the platform and other existing direct democracy tools; to implement recommendations Eighteen and Thirty-nine of the CoFoE Citizens’ Panel ‘EU democracy, values, rights, rule of law, security’—the first related to the introduction of a EU-wide referendum in exceptional cases on extremely important matters to all European citizens, and the second related to the introduction of a citizen’s assembly on EU matters through legally binding and compulsory law or regulation.

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pilot-experiment produced by the EU funded-project ‘Empatia’.53 The purpose of Empaville was to test the deliberativeness of participants to a participatory budgeting experience in a fictitious city. Between 2017 and 2019, several municipalities in Portugal, as well as in the rest of Europe, hosted sessions of Empaville to assess the receptivity of local communities to the introduction of participatory budgeting. Interestingly, such sessions were not designed to reach consensus among participants. Quite the opposite: participants were challenged with the complexities related to consensus-building, and exposed to elevate risks of failure of the negotiations.54 We have now reached a crucial point. One must be realistic, though. I concede that digital participatory processes with the sole purpose of generating debate, however useful they might be in generating ideas, would be a ‘downward play’ on any democratic system aspiring to generate collective decisions via technology. So now the question is: how do we tie the suggestion of digital aesthetics of democratic spaces focussed on enhancing interactions (over outcomes) with the legitimate aim of generating democratic decisions? A standard answer to this question is provided by the body of scholarship that explored ‘crowdsourcing’—an umbrella concept used to describe a model of distributed problem-solving and production that leverages the collective efforts of online communities for specific purposes set forth by a crowdsourcing public organization. The topic has become quite popular in academic and practitioners’ circles. Since 2018, for instance, a ‘Crowdlaw Manifesto’ call for legislatures, technologists and the public to participate in creating more open and participatory law-making practices.55 Meanwhile, political scientists and lawyers have tried to give a sense to the manifold hypotheses of tech-based approaches to crowdsource policy-making. One of the best-known categorizations (but there are also others) describe four different types of crowdsourcing, each corresponding to the function that is crowd-sourced.56 The first is ‘information generation’, and is exemplified by Wiki-type forms of collaboration57; the second is ‘service co-production’ and has as 53

https://empatia-project.eu/the-project/. Meloni et al. (2018); Sgueo (2016); Allegretti and Sgueo (2022). Participants in Empaville (https://www.empaville.com) were asked to identify and point out the needs of the main districts of the city (Downtown, Midtown and Uptown), engaging as equal partners on issues of public significance, arriving from individual preferences to collective decisions. 55 The CrowdLaw project (http://manifesto.crowd.law) is run by the NYU GovLab and incorporates a section with suggestions for the thoughtful design of participatory platforms. Recommendations include the clarification of demand of participation, optimisation of resources, better information systems and diversification of engagement opportunities tailored on diverse publics. A repository of CrowdLaw cases includes over one hundred examples from local, regional and national administrations, spanning thirty-nine countries and six continents (https://crowd.law). 56 Liu (2017). 57 Szpir (2002); Gulick et al. (2010); Moon and Sproull (2008). One may take the example of ‘Clickworkers’(http://www.nasaclickworkers.com), initiated in the year 2000 as a pilot study by NASA to determine whether or not online volunteers would be interested in contributing, and if they could produce data useful to answering interesting science questions, it asked users to identify craters or asteroids. The project helped scientists and researchers to build an extensive database of 54

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its objective the production of services58; the third type of crowdsourcing is named ‘creation’59; the fourth type of crowdsourcing is known as ‘policy-making’.60 As we are discussing public policy, it is inevitable that, in the opinion of many, the preferred hypothesis of crowdsourcing is the one in which stakeholders and policy-makers not only share knowledge and ideas via a digital platform, but also integrate this knowledge into policy. ‘Co-creation’—as this hypothesis is commonly referred to—works as a ‘democratic boost’ that help policy-producers (i.e., public officials) and users (i.e., citizens) to come closer and work together. Everyone in the policy process has something to profit by co-creating. Policy-makers enhance their legitimacy by harnessing the skills and expertise of citizens into future decisions; citizens, in turn, are empowered in that they gain the opportunity to shape new policies in line with their needs and expectations.61

landforms from data captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment. 58 Noveck (2006); Bestor and Hamp (2010). In a famous article published on Wired in 2006, Jeff Howe (The Rise of crowdsourcing, Wired, June 1, 2006—https://www.wired.com/2006/06/ crowds/) described crowdsourcing as a new business practice deriving from outsourcing. With the latter, business organizations would assign tasks to identified participants (for example through online surveys). With Crowdsouring firms could harness the labour of anonymous and unattached task contractors, who would replace the traditional workforce. In the public sector, an interesting example is provided by ‘Peer to Patent’ (https://www.peertopatent.org), an initiative sponsored by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that opens the patent examination process to public participation. It consists of an online system that enables the public to supply the USPTO with information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications. 59 This is exemplified by digital platforms where public institutions post their problems, set conditions and rules for the participants, and occasionally award prizes to the best ideas. One such type of platform is the US Congressional App Challenge (www. congressionalappchallenge.us) sponsored by the US house of representatives to host district-wide congressional app challenges for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. Another examples is ‘Grand Challenges (www.grandchallenges.org) which is aimed at solving global health and development problems. 60 Katsonis (2019); Doyle (2009); Williamson (2016); Benjamin (2005); Epstein et al. (2012). Examples of the latter include ‘Future Melbourne’ (https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/aboutmelbourne/future-melbourne/Pages/future-melbourne.aspx) in Australia and the ‘e-Rulemaking Initiative’ (https://www.law.upenn.edu/institutes/ppr/erulemaking/) in the United States. The first was launched in 2008 by the City of Melbourne with the aim of outlining the city’s values and goals on the long term. In 2015 the City Council decided to refresh the plan, taking into account the changes and developments that had happened since 2008. An extensive community engagement process started in 2016. The process was divided in three phases (sharing ideas, bringing ideas together, deliberation) and concluded with the decision of a citizens’ jury. The ‘eRulemaking Initiative’ was developed by Cornell University to create an online public participation platform, named “Regulation Room”, to offer citizens selected an area for policy discussion. The aim was to foster citizens’ participation in decision-making processes. 61 For this reason, citizens engaged in co-creation via digital tools are also described as ‘prosumers’. Dahlberg (2010); Alderete (2017). Prosumerism describes a market in which the basic needs of consumers are already satisfied by mass production and companies initiate processes of mass personalization through mass-producing highly personalized products: Toffler (1984).

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Someone pairs the concept of co-creation with another notion: collective intelligence. The argument goes as such: public institutions that experiment with crowdsourcing rely on the intelligence (that is, the cultural background, professional expertise, as well as other skills and competences) possessed by participants collectively, to feed with fresh ideas the policy-making process and build consensus in support to public decisions.62 In this context, digital technology has been indicated as a further support to policy-makers interested in harnessing the ‘civic surplus’ (yet another definition of the same concept) of citizens and provide smarter solutions to regulatory challenges. French philosopher Pierre Levy was among the first, in 1997, to speculate on the collaborative potential offered by technology to human intelligence, suggesting that the Internet could foster the emergence of a ‘meeting of minds’.63 In 2010, a team of researchers in Zurich estimated that if a million individuals were to contribute towards answering a problem, they would have a ninety-seven-percentage chance likelihood of solving it correctly.64 It might be also argued that the combination of AI and collective intelligence is going to play an ever-increasing role in the future, augmenting human capacities in quests and problem-solving.65 The best known (and certainly the most celebrated) experiment in using digital tools to gather the collective intelligence of citizens is that of the rewriting of the Icelandic Constitution. In 2011, Iceland was recovering from a financial crisis so serious that it undermined trust in the financial sector and public institutions. In order to rebuild trust in democratic decision-making, the government decided to involve

62 Blum and Merkle (2008); Kennedy (2006). Please note that collective intelligence is not inherently human. Animals and algorithms can also engage in forms of ‘swarm intelligence’ and collectively gather pieces of information and combine them through social interaction. Humans, however, are among those species that are particularly good at developing collaborative and imaginative capacity. According to Geoff Mulgan (2017) ‘collective intelligence’ may be understood according to three quantitative variants. The ‘narrow’ variant is concerned with modalities of online cooperation of groups of people. This reflects the research of Joseph Licklider (1960), who pioneered the study of artificial intelligence. Licklider claimed that the most effective intelligences will not replace humans with machine capability. Rather, they will couple humans and digital networks. The ‘large’ variant of collective intelligence indicated by Mulgan encompasses the whole of human civilization and culture. Mid-variants include forms of intelligence occurring on a large scale. The latter have also been described as ‘wisdom of the crowd’. The phenomenon was first observed in 1907 by Sir Francis Galton (1952). Galton described a carnival game in which participants could guess the weight of an ox. As people made their estimates, Galton recorded them and observed that the median—which at the time he described as Vox Populi—was remarkably close to the correct answer. Over the years scholars have attempted to find the wisdom of the crowd through scaling up or scaling down group interactions in deliberative processes: Goel and Lee (2010); Milotay and Sgueo (2020). 63 Levy (1997); Levy (1999); Smith (1994). American journalist James Surowiecki (2004) demonstrated how large groups of independent, motivated, and well-informed people can, collectively, make better decisions than isolated individuals. 64 Fellermann et al. (2010). 65 This topic has been recently discussed by Hélène Landemore (https://hai.stanford.edu/events/ helene-landemore-can-ai-bring-deliberation-masses).

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Icelanders in the constitutional reforms. The crowdsourcing process was therefore divided into four phases. In the first phase, citizens were invited to participate in national assemblies, where they shared their views and perspectives. The second phase consisted of the election of twenty-five representatives chosen from among ordinary citizens. The elected representatives would then make up the Constitutional Reform Council. The third phase, lasting for two months after the election, consisted of the writing of new drafts of the Constitution and their publication on a specific website as well as on the Facebook page of the Council. Icelanders had the chance to comment on these drafts and to send an email or a letter to Council members. The fourth phase consisted of a referendum, which returned a positive result with two thirds of the votes in favor of the final draft. In the end, however, the proposed Constitutional reform did not find the necessary majority in the newly elected Parliament.66 Can we claim that the coupling of digital tools and co-creative approaches to public policy is a winning trade-off between interaction-focused aesthetics of digital public spaces and the legitimate expectation of public institutions to make democratic decisions? On the one hand, digital co-creation seems to effectively bridge the gap between expectations and reality of digital democracy. But a word of warning: on the other hand, the results achieved by digital co-creation are less promising compared to their academic account. Hence, the concerns shared by those who have looked critically at co-creation. These concerns can be separated in three broad categories.67 The first and second relate to technical and inclusive features, respectively. On a technical level, criticism of co-creation is essentially the same as the core argument defended in this book: it is not enough to claim that citizens and public decision-makers could engage in co-creation via digital tools. Thought also needs to be given to the most appropriate design of digital spaces dedicated to co-creation—that is, a design capable of motivating citizens to collaborate with public decision makers. Concerns about inclusivity remind us that multiple forms of digital exclusion separate those potentially able to use technology from those who, although they want to, lack the tools and knowledge to do so. The third concern is logistic and claims that, so far, co-creation has been used primarily in local contexts. The proximity between institutions and stakeholders makes the ideal condition for co-operative efforts. Hence, they question whether co-creation could be scaled-up in national and supra-national venues. Case history in this regard is not very encouraging. We have just discussed the unsuccessful constitutional reform in Iceland. Similar outcomes could be seen in the Estonian ‘Rahvakogu’.68 66

Aitamurto (2012); Hudson (2018); Landemore (2017); Popescu and Loveland (2022). Sancino et al. (2018); Gebauer et al. (2013); Lund (2018). 68 Jonsson (2015); Toots (2019). As in the Icelandic case, this initiative was structured in four parts. During the first phase, Estonians were encouraged to share ideas and comments about five issues that had been selected in advance. The second phase consisted of classifying the input provided by citizens into fifty-nine categories. The third phase consisted of five subject-specific seminars organized for the authors of the proposals and experts. The fourth phase consisted of a gathering 67

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5.5

Game-Design and Digital Democratic Spaces

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Game-Design and Digital Democratic Spaces

There is a fourth problem with digital co-creation initiatives which is arguably of far greater concern than the critical elements we mentioned in the previous Paragraph: it consists of the ‘sustainability’ of crowdsourced democratic decision-making. As it is already the case with most participatory processes, both online and offline, the greatest challenge for policy-makers is not to attract citizens and engage them in participating once, but to ensure consistent levels of participation over time by stakeholders. A possible solution to this problem—and at the same time the last proposed intervention to re-design the aesthetics of digital democracy—consists of behavioral incentives applied to digital interactions between policy-makers and citizens. Gamedesign in particular, offers a potentially highly remunerative way of engaging demanding audiences while maintaining high levels of trust in the institutions.69 Let us begin by saying that this is not a recent subject. Games and rewards have been used throughout human history to generate approval of the exercise of public power.70 Back in the 1930s, Johan Huizinga discussed the huge potential of linking public powers, human relations and play.71 In his study, Huizinga argued that play is a cultural foundation of society. Later studies have investigated further into the matter, and concluded that public decision-making and play share common traits: in both cases there are rules to be followed, a goal to be achieved and unforeseen outcomes.72 Academics have used game theory to describe the dynamics of public regulation,73 or have resorted to the metaphor of play to illustrate processes of transformation of public administrations.74 Contemporary game-design experiments in public policy have touched on a vast range of issues, including urbanism, aid to development, education and cooperation.

of more than three hundred people in Tallinn for the ‘Rahvakogu deliberation day’—a microcosm of Estonian society in which gender, age, local origin, and education were taken into account. In the end, fifteen initiatives were selected by the Estonian parliament. However, only three made into laws. 69 Sgueo (2018). Please note that I am intentionally using the definition of ‘game-design’ in order to include all linguistic and conceptual variations of this topic. These include, among the others, the term ‘gamification’, ‘games with purpose’ (i.e., games that encourage collaboration among individuals possessing competences that cannot be replicated by an electronic computer) and ‘serious games’ (i.e., games in their own right; however, they have the purpose of teaching players to perform a particular activity, or more generally aim). 70 Games were part of the inner public sphere in Greek and Roman societies and have existed in some form or other throughout the history of public power. In ancient Rome, for instance, it was common to provide poorer citizens with free wheat and circus games as a means of gaining political power. 71 Huizinga (2013). 72 Gastil and Black (2007). 73 Medda (2007). 74 Picci (2014).

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These experiments differ greatly in purpose, duration, and target audience. They also vary in terms of complexity, costs, and time of implementation. There is, however, one recurring element, that is the use of playful design features (such as scores, leaderboards, challenges, virtual currencies, and liking/disliking options) to retain citizens interested and foster long-term engagement. Hence, I assert that by routinely incorporating game-design into digital democratic spaces, it will be possible to engage citizens, to amuse them, and most importantly even to encourage them to think of themselves as ‘architects’ of democratic decision-making. To borrow from Ricardo Blaug, I posit that game-design nurtures ‘incumbent’ forms of democratic engagement—a form of democracy that is primarily interested in channeling, simplifying, and rationalizing participatory inputs.75 Among of the most interesting cases of game-design in digital public spaces there are the following three: at the municipal level, Decide Madrid; at the national level, the US ‘Challenge.gov; and, at the supranational level, the WB’s Evoke. Decide Madrid was already discussed in CHAPTER FOUR. The creators of this platform report that over twenty-seven thousand people over the age of sixteen have been regular visitors of the website. According to the rules of the platform, ideas are moved to the voting phase if at least one percent of its visitors express interest in them. At the beginning of 2017, the municipal council enacted the first two ideas submitted through the platform. Similar to Decide Madrid are ‘Buenos Aires Elige’, created by the municipality of Buenos Aires, ‘Decidim’, operating in Barcelona and the ‘Active Citizen App’ in Moscow.76 Moving now to the national level, the Challenge.gov digital platform is designed to support US federal agencies to mature and scale prize competitions in order to advance their missions. Participants are invited to share their ideas and solutions to policy-challenges. Since 2010, the US government has run over one thousand and two hundred prize competitions—engaging students, professionals, small business owners and academic researchers into collective ideation and problem-solving.77 To conclude with the list of examples, the most renowned case of supranational gamified democratic governance is Evoke, a graphic novel game developed by the WB in 2010. The game allowed players to impersonate the participants in the ‘Evoke Network’—a network of the best scientists and thinkers worldwide—and challenged them with real issues of cooperation for development. During its initial run,

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Blaug (2002). Since its creation in 2017, Buenos Aires Elige (https://baelige.buenosaires.gob.ar) crowdsourced over 26,000 ideas. Decidim (https://www.decidim.barcelona) was launched in February 2016 to allow the direct participation of residents in decisions concerning the city. The preparation of the Municipal Action Plan engaged more than 40,000 people and received over 10,000 suggestions. Via the Active Citizen app (https://ict.moscow) Muscovites can vote on non-political city decisions, such as naming a new subway station or setting the speed limits. They are awarded points for every vote they cast. City-wide votes are afforded more points than district-level ones. 77 https://www.challenge.gov. More on this topic: Mergel (2018); Mergel and Desouza (2013); Hameduddin et al. (2020). 76

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according to the WB, the host website drew one hundred thousand visitors from one hundred and fifty countries.78 Despite some minor shortcomings, the examples we just mentioned received positive feedbacks and helped the organizing institutions to overcome described issues of decreasing interest. Is this enough to say that game-design is the ultimate solution to the problem of the sustainability of digital democracy? Yes and no. Indeed, it should be pointed out, for the sake of completeness, that gamedesign embodies a number of weaknesses, both practical and theoretical in nature. First and foremost, game dynamics are not democratic a priori. Said otherwise, game-incentives are generally modelled to meet the needs and please the expectations of certain categories of users. Players are in competition with each other for most of the time they play. Translated into practice, this means that implementing gamification strategies into policy-making in order to make it more inclusive may end up returning the opposite outcome: lower engagement. Or may lead to the ‘capture’ of the regulators by dominant interest groups. Especially in the case of large-scale participation, participants may end up being orchestrated by advocacy groups that can generate hundreds of thousands of submissions that are not informative nor reliable indicators of citizens’ informed value preferences. Solutions to this dilemma (and more broadly to the issue of representativeness in digital democratic spaces) exist, but are not fully convincing. The best known of these solutions is the one devised by John Dryzek, Graham Smith, Matthew Ryan (and many others) who propose the formation of small groups of citizens composed of the non-elite.79 Such ‘mini-publics’ would involve using more localized or taskspecific fora to reach consensus. As further clarified by Frank Fischer, via these mini publics, citizens gain a better control of their relationship with experts, and for this reason can be understood as a mode of ‘democratizing’ expertise.80 Contrary to this idea, I posit that digital democratic spaces should not address a single societal environment, but rather operate on the logic of mini-publics; that is, designing digital participatory processes in a way that could attract diversified audiences at different stages of the participatory process. Ideally, the aesthetics of digital

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Waddington (2013). The basic rationale for the mini-public approach is that relatively small groups of citizens, usually recruited through random sampling, could deliver effective decisions and overcome the issues commonly faced by democratic decision-making. Thus, the root notion of mini-publics is that democracy requires a balance between diverging arguments in a context of mutually civic and diverse discussion. Citizens’ juries, deliberative polls and consensus conferences are all exemplars of mini-publics. John Dryzek (2011) envisages in mini-publics a solution to the risk of antidemocratic representation. He explains that deliberative processes involve mechanisms for driving and supporting interactions within and between governance networks. These networks, however, are often populated by society’s elites. Hence the risk of anti-democratic representation that could narrow the context for deliberation. Dryzek proposes as a solution the formation of small groups of citizens composed of the non-elite. These mini-publics would involve a more localised or taskspecific forum purposed to reach consensus. Further on this topic: Ryan and Smith (2014); Smith and Setala (2018); Farrell and Stone (2020). 80 Fischer (2000). 79

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democracy should be responsive to as wide a range of publics as possible in order to attract (and benefit from) skills, social leverage and personal/direct engagement. Second, increased use of game-design could lead participants to behave as consumers, expecting fun and engagement as a permanent, rather than occasional, component of digital participatory processes. We thus return to the starting point of this volume. Once citizens get used to fun-incentives they may no longer respond to different stimuli, leaving public regulators with no choice but to gamify policymaking.81 Third and finally, instances of game-deign are necessarily (and inevitably) privacy-intrusive. Issues of privacy and anonymity are pervasive in most of the experimental forms of digital civic engagement. Anonymity, on the one hand, has positive outcomes because it allows people to express critical and controversial views without worrying about potentially adverse effects. However, user anonymity can lead to uncivil forms of behavior, as it reduces people’s accountability for their conduct. Uncivil forms of communication, especially those that are interpersonal, can undermine people’s willingness to take part in deliberative processes, and prevent them from expressing their views freely and sincerely. Privacy is related to anonymity, but does not overlap with it entirely. The cases show that there can be various degrees of intrusiveness in citizens’ private spheres. In some cases, such as Decide Madrid, users had to register and identify themselves to participate.

5.6

Concluding Remarks

We have started our journey by asking whether democratic governments could make digital spaces more attractive—but also effective—at engaging citizens—and how they could do so. To answer this question, we have explored various aspects of the relationship between technology and democracy, including the role the former has in strengthening our collective intelligence, nurturing empathic relations between citizens and institutions, and supporting processes of political aggregation, deliberation and collaboration. But we also investigated the challenges brought by technology to the security and privacy of citizens within digital democratic spaces, the negative impact it has on growing social polarization, fake news and hate speech and the many ways in which digital technology may encourage the concentration of power in the hands of few actors, and thus undermine representation, transparency and inclusivity in democratic decision-making. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we arrive at the end of this long journey into the aesthetics of digital democracy with some—few—certainties (one of which is certainly the crucial importance of digital design) and many questions that are still without clear answers. The many persuasive arguments we have met in favor of using digital technology to the goal of engaging citizens in policy-making are

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Grant (2012).

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contrasted by equally persuasive claims about the drawbacks of digital technology. So, if everyone is right, then is no one right? Four points are worth a final and brief reflection. These points—and related questions—will serve as the basis for a future research agenda interested in analyzing the multiple design-challenges of digital democracy and possibly overcoming them. Let us look at each of these points briefly. The first is that technological progress is transforming both the state and society. The former in its constituent components: people, territory and sovereignty. The latter both with regard to individual relations among citizens and its collective dimension. These transformations are made dramatically evident by the different pace of social progress compared to technological progress: one evolves progressively, the other exponentially. We thus asked ourselves whether democratic rights would evolve at the frenetic pace imposed by technological innovation. We said that the conquest and expansion of many of these rights (e.g., voting rights, gender equality, jurisdictional protections) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries advanced slowly, mostly through incremental changes. Will this change with digital formats? It is too early to say. It seems, however, that digital transition of governments and societies is not accelerating the evolution of participatory rights, either in one direction (more rights) or the opposite direction (fewer rights). Rather, it seems to have triggered a subtle and, in many ways, uncertain transformation: the osmosis between individual and collective spheres. Digital participation appears to be more vivid and incisive in the second dimension—the collective, reticular, and disaggregated dimension that matures through networks. It is less so in its singular dimension. Second point: the democratic model of government is in crisis. It is a different and, in some ways, autonomous crisis than the one triggered by the spread of digital technologies in contemporary societies. Above all, it is a paradoxical crisis, since it is exacerbated at a historical moment when the supply of participation and the social capital willing to embrace it are increasing. It is a crisis of the democratic model—we said—not necessarily of representation—which is just one, but not the only, outcome of the former. The point (third in our list) is that those who extol the digital tool in the service of deliberative contexts often merge the two concepts. But the (to date unfulfilled) ambition to involve more and better all citizens in collective decisions through digital tools is primarily a matter of representation. Instead, the democratic crisis is also (and, perhaps, above all) caused by other issues: the intricate and frequently overlapping public-private spheres, demographic decline, digital skills illiteracy, as well as lowering social mobility. And the list goes on. The question to be asked in this regard is: can digital tools surrogate these gaps? This question can be answered in different ways. If we want to follow an optimistic reasoning, we could say that digital technology is not impacting democracy per se, but its infrastructure (i.e., how individuals relate to each other, how they interact with public administrations, access and exchange information, and so on). The digital transformations we have discussed in this book may well change the

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functioning of a democracy, not its idea. Or we could follow a provocative reasoning, and go as far as to argue that for those with (at least) adequate digital skills, the democratic divides brought about by digital technology are of less concern. Even social mobility and social inclusion may appear to us to be less serious problems when placed in a digital perspective. A young person who is not affluent but digitally savvy, for instance, has more opportunities to be heard within digital public spaces than a senior citizen who is affluent but lacks adequate skills in the use of technology. We should also be mindful of the fact that non-participation and silence, transposed in digital democratic spaces, may indicate a desire to engage outside of traditional forms—and should therefore be treated as participation. So perhaps we should start reconsidering traditional understandings of citizens’ non-involvement in public affairs as a sign of unavoidable democratic decline. The fourth and final point sums up all the previous points. The benefit (or shortcoming, depending on one’s point of view) of technological advancement is that it has forced contemporary democratic structures to grapple with issues of scarcity and foresight. Scarcity (mainly due to the widespread perception of fewer opportunities for social progression, as well as the perceived risks of marginalization and control) is countered by technology, which ‘propels’ those who make use of technological products into the future (here it is the foresight). Democratic structures—we said—struggle to manage these two opposing drives. The result is the tensions that are shaking up democratic systems. Digital citizens, compared to their analog counterparts, have dazzling expectation. These, however, are frustrated by disappointing realities. Is this a story with an already written ending then? Not necessarily. Conflicting scenarios are created by the described conflict between expectations and reality. There is indeed a chance that the next chapter in the story of digital democracy will be written by few, selected, elites. This unfortunate hypothesis would be equivalent to a betrayal of the values of participatory democracy. Or we can look at current disenchantment with digital democracy with a longer-term viewpoint. We could speculate that, in the long run, current efforts to digitalize democratic decisionmaking will progressively become more ordered and meaningful, thus lessening social exclusion and abuses. This second hypothesis, however, comes at a greater cost to those who support it. It imposes a belief in the ability of democratic governments to be adaptive reshape the aesthetics of digital democratic spaces. It also demands a confidence in the resilience and adaptability of democratic systems. Summary • Mobility, information, social relations, medicine, financial transactions, electoral systems and democracies as a whole are evolving according to digital logics and dynamics. This will result in major effects for companies (with increasing amounts of technological investment and the race to innovate), governments (challenged by the quest for regulatory frameworks balanced between competition and the protection of rights) and citizens (confronted with profound changes in the job market)

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• Digital democratic governments must return to defending complexity, to set-up realistic and achievable expectations in participants to digital democratic initiatives, starting from the language used to narrate democracy, continuing through the design of the interactions with stakeholders, all the way to using creative approaches to engage and entertain participants. • It is crucial for democratic decision-makers to use a storytelling approach in digital democratic spaces that can help move the emphasis from immediacy to complexity by encouraging an understanding of the place of online consultations within larger, more intricate, and stratified decision-making processes. Structurally, this demands the acknowledgment of professional figures, offices or working spaces dedicated to public-sector storytelling. In terms of content, three elements are key to delivering impactful stories of digital democracy: one is the simplicity of language; another is the reduction of uncertainties; and a third is the use of appropriate framing. • To re-design the physiognomy of interactions between policy-makers and citizens within digital public spaces, digital interactions between citizens and public powers should be conceptualized and implemented in the context of an ongoing relationship—one that is activated as many times as the stakeholders need it. This would help democratic decision-makers to promote a more holistic understanding of digital spaces for activism and civic engagement. • Digital co-creation seems to effectively bridge the gap between expectations and reality of digital democracy. Yet the results it achieved in practice are less promising compared to their academic account. Those who have looked critically at co-creation remind us of its technical, inclusive and logistic limitations. • Behavioral incentives (and specifically game-design) applied to digital interactions between policy-makers and citizens offer a potentially highly remunerative way of engaging demanding audiences while maintaining high levels of trust in the institutions. By routinizing game-design into digital democratic spaces could serve the goal to capture citizens’ attention, entertain them and stimulate in participants the perception they are architects of their collective life.

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