Network Publicy Governance: On Privacy and the Informational Self 9783839442135

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Information
2. The Privacy Paradox
3. Publicy
4. Governance
Conclusion
Literature

Citation preview

Andréa Belliger, David J. Krieger Network Publicy Governance

Digital Society | Volume 20

Andréa Belliger is director of Learning Services at the University of Teacher Education in Lucerne and also director of the Institute for Communication & Leadership. Her research focuses on digital transformation, new media, communication science, e-health, and fintech. David J. Krieger is director at the Institute for Communication & Leadership in Lucerne, Switzerland. His research focus lies on new media, communication, system theory, and network theory.

Andréa Belliger, David J. Krieger

Network Publicy Governance On Privacy and the Informational Self

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Typeset by Francisco Bragança, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4213-1 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4213-5

Table of Contents

Introduction | 7 1. Information | 23 1.1 The Question of Technology | 23 1.2 The Difference a Stone Makes | 25 1.3 Technical Mediation | 27 1.4 Links, Interfaces, Associations | 33 1.5 What is Information? | 37 1.6 Information and Networks | 40

2. The Privacy Paradox | 45 2.1 Misuse of Personal Information | 48 2.2 Surveillance | 50 2.3 Secrecy | 57 2.4 Targeting | 59 2.5 Gaming the System | 62 2.6 Political Profiling | 63 2.7 The Privacy Paradox | 65

3. Publicy | 77 3.1 Publicy not Privacy is the Default Condition | 78 3.2 Affordances and the Socio-Technical Ensemble | 82 3.3 Participatory Culture | 86 3.4 The Socio-Sphere | 92 3.5 Reconstructing Neoinstitutionalism | 97 3.6 Network Norms | 105

4. Governance | 121 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Sources of Governance Theory | 122 Resource Governance | 125 Reconstructing Governance Theory | 128 Governance by Design | 142

Conclusion | 151 Literature | 155

Introduction

The occasion for this book is the growing conflict between the call for a “datadriven” society on the one side and the demand for ensuring individual freedom, autonomy, and dignity by means of protecting privacy on the other. Gathering and exploiting data of all kinds in ever greater quantities promises to create value and efficiency in business, education, healthcare, social services, energy, transportation, and almost all other areas of society. But at the same time, fears of loss of privacy lead to ever more prohibitive regulations. The European Union offers a concrete example of this conflict. In the name of a single digital market, the European Commission proclaims that “the internet and digital technologies are transforming our world. But existing barriers online mean citizens miss out on goods and services, internet companies and start-ups have their horizons limited, and businesses and governments cannot fully benefit from digital tools.”1 Among the “existing barriers” are not only inadequate infrastructure and the many different legal frameworks in Europe but also the strong data-protection laws. While extolling the benefits of good infrastructure and free flows of information, the EU has at the same time ratified a new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR takes a strong stand on privacy as a fundamental human right and prohibits, at least in principle and intention, any use of personal data that is not based on the informed consent of the “data subject” or is not anonymized. From the perspective of big data analytics, which does not allow for complete knowledge of uses of data in advance, and therefore prevents any consent of data use based on this kind of knowledge, the vision of a data-driven society becomes unrealizable. One cannot base the development of new knowledge and products and services on data, while at the same time prohibiting the gathering and use of data. This becomes especially embarrassing when it is a matter of developing personalized products and services in all areas while at the same time demanding that data be anonymized and strictly separated from any personal references. It would 1 | https://ec.europa.eu/commission/priorities/digital-single-market_en. Of course, this conflict is not merely European. The situation in the USA is not essentially different.

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seem that we are entering the 21st Century with society divided into those who believe that as much information as possible should be integrated into decision-making in all areas and at all levels and those who believe that human freedom, autonomy, and even dignity depend on secrecy and the withholding of as much information as possible. This book is an attempt to analyze the causes of this deep conflict in Western societies. Furthermore, it attempts to offer a perspective on how we might move forward into a world which is at once based on data and on a self-understanding of the human individual as an informational self whose freedom and dignity do not depend on privacy. The vision for the future we propose is entitled “Network Publicy Governance.” At first glance, it is not apparent what this title has to do with privacy, individual liberty, and issues of social injustice. After all, where does the individual appear in this title? What about freedom and human dignity? Even if the subtitle, “On Privacy and the Informational Self” promises to address these issues, the major focus seems to be on networks, governance, and something called “publicy.” What does network publicy governance, which suspiciously sounds like a merely technical or administrative problem, have to do with protecting privacy, freedom, and the dignity of individuals? These questions are legitimate, and at least one reason why we have chosen this somewhat unusual title is to provoke questions such as these. But this is not the only reason. The idea of network publicy governance is intended to be more than mere provocation. It is intended to reframe contemporary privacy discourse beyond the constraints of traditional dichotomies such as private vs. public, individual vs. society, and human vs. technology; that is, outside of and beyond the conceptual constraints of Western modernity. Indeed, although the book is apparently about privacy and the human subject, the reader will look in vain for a discussion of these topics along the well-known lines of modern ontological, epistemological, and moral individualism. Focusing on network publicy governance intends to move away from the autonomous rational subject of Western Enlightenment as well as the free and unique individual of the Judeo-Christian-existentialist tradition. Both Cartesian mind/body dualism and Judeo-Christian internal immediacy clearly distinguish an inner realm of meaning that is essentially private from external reality. It is these forms of subjectivity that are implicitly or explicitly the central figures and starting point of most contemporary privacy discourse. For something essentially human to become something private, subjectivity or mind must first be separated from the rest of the world, from other people and things. There must be an inside and an outside. Mind must be ascribed to the inside. There must be a unique realm of meaning inside each one of us that is distinguished from everything that is outside or beyond this boundary. Only then does privacy become possible and only then can privacy be understood as a fundamental right to be protected by law. We will argue against the deeply

Introduction

ingrained and enormously influential conviction of the bounded self. We will claim that what humans have become in the digital age could be called an “informational self.” The informational self consists of information and, as we will see, information exists in networks that are not clearly bounded. Whereas it could be expected that one tackle the many problems facing individuals in the information age by emphasizing personal privacy management, we want to go exactly in the opposite direction by focusing on networks instead of individuals, publicy instead of privacy, and governance instead of government. In the digital age, personal privacy management becomes network publicy governance. We will not rehearse the usual narrative of freedom, autonomy, and dignity in terms of inequalities and power struggles between weak individuals on the one side and overpowering corporations and governments on the other. Instead, we will attempt to reformulate these issues in terms of networks. Why networks? Castells (1996) has convincingly shown that we are entering into a global network society based on digital information technologies. The affordances of these technologies are so influential and pervasive, that networks are becoming the dominant form of social order. In the global network society, neither individuals, nor organizations, nor institutions, nor governments are basic units of social order. More radical even than Castells is the appraisal of contemporary society proposed by actor-network theory, or ANT as it is known.2 ANT claims that society is a “collective” of many different actor-networks. In the radical formulation that ANT proposes, the network is the actor, and the social actor is always a network. Following ANT, we will claim that the primary unit of social order and the dominant form in which cooperative action takes place today, and in the future, are networks. This is the reason why privacy, as well as the self-understanding of the human as autonomous, free and/or rational subjectivity which is the basis of privacy discourse, need to be reformulated in terms of networks. From the network perspective, social theory in general and privacy discourse, in particular, can no longer proceed from the assumption that we are dealing with clearly bounded unities, whether individual, organizational, or governmental. When actors become networks, that is, when actors are constituted in networks and exist as networks, then they enter into a condition that can be considered to be the “default” condition of humans in society. This condition, following Stowe Boyd, can be termed “publicy.” Publicy is not publicity. It is not the state of being known, but the condition of being an informational self. In contrast to the essentially private individual of Western modernity, the informational self is not an isolated individual that somehow secondarily enters into social contracts, but a hybrid and heterogeneous ensemble of associations that are always already social. The informational self is constitutively linked 2 | See above all the work of Bruno Latour.

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up to others, both human and nonhuman. Indeed, the self is inherently an ensemble of associations. That the self is made up of heterogeneous elements is in itself nothing new. Whether it be body and soul, reason and passion, good and evil, freedom and determinism, the Western self – both individual and collective – has always understood itself within the tension of opposing forces and qualities. Typical strategies of creating unity have been to subsume the particular under the universal as in Descartes ego cogito, or submit the whole contradictory lot to the fiat of absolute freedom as in existentialism, or even to confine mind to the material brain. The goal in all these cases is to construct a bounded unity. In distinction to this traditional notion of subjectivity, the informational self we are proposing is not a constructed unity, that is a system of parts integrated somehow into a whole, but a network of associations. It is one thing to impose unity upon diversity, and it is another thing to take account of as many diverse voices as possible through ongoing negotiations that never define clear boundaries. The informational self is based on the fact that the links that construct networks can be understood as the product of such negotiations which we call information. The network actor is an informational self because actor-networks are constituted by information. Information, we will argue, is neither rational nor irrational, neither public nor private. We will argue that the digital transformation has created a situation in which the informational self, whose default condition is publicy and not privacy, has increasingly come to the fore and is both theoretically and practically replacing the unitary and bounded individual of Western modernity. The information age and the global network society have changed the playing field and the rules of engagement for conceptualizing subjectivity and protecting liberty, autonomy, dignity, and justice. In this situation, our longcherished assumptions about self and society have become inadequate. The standard narrative of contemporary privacy rights, privacy legislation, privacy theory, and privacy strategies tells of an individual subject who is locked into a constant and futile struggle to maintain a balance of power against overwhelming social actors, usually personified in the form of large corporations and governments. In the information age, it seems that the only weapons at its disposal are withholding, disguising, and blocking flows of information. The futility, impracticability, and theoretical inconsistency of this struggle are indications that new thinking is needed. This book suggests a way out of the present standoff between information networks and private individuals by reframing not only the notion of network but also the self-understanding of the human and therefore the way in which privacy is understood. We attempt to place discussions of subjectivity, identity, and personhood on a different terrain, namely, on the terrain of networks. Instead of the autonomous, rational subject of the Western Enlightenment, or the absolute freedom of existentialism, we propose the informational self, and instead of privacy, we

Introduction

offer publicy. We claim that by shifting the grounds of debate, we will be able to escape the fruitless opposition of private and public or individual and society that characterizes much present-day theory as well as practice. To speak of the “informational self” is to locate information at the center of the human. This raises questions not only about the nature of human existence but also about the nature of information. What is information? Can information constitute the human? Whereas privacy was once a matter of protecting property and the sanctity of the home, today it is more and more conceived of in terms of information. Privacy has become an informational issue, a matter of “informational self-determination.”3 Privacy is the right to decide what information about oneself one wishes to communicate and what not. Not only that but in some more radical formulations, privacy is defined in terms of certain kinds of information or informational contents. It is supposed that some information about a person should never be communicated. This leads to the assumption that privacy rights are inalienable and fundamental rights that under no circumstances can be traded off for other rights or gains. In this view, which is typical of the European tradition, privacy has to do with information that is so intimate and personal that it demands to be protected regardless of any supposed advantages to giving it away. This “fundamentalist” view raises the question of the extent to which human beings are constituted by information, that is, as Floridi (2014) says, whether human beings are “inforgs.” Inforgs are informational organisms which inhabit a world that is made up of information, the “infosphere.” How is information to be understood such that human individuals and the entire world can be conceived of as in some way informational? If information is a fundamental ontological characteristic of the world, and if humans are indeed inforgs, what does this mean for privacy? Questions such as these do not usually stand at the beginning of legal or philosophical discussions of privacy. Nevertheless, privacy discourse today revolves around information, especially what is termed “personal information.” This indicates that the fundamental question of the nature of information 3 | The term “informational self-determination” comes from German “informationelle Selbstbestimmung,” which was used by the German Federal Constitutional Court (1983) in ruling that “[...] in the context of modern data processing, the protection of the individual against unlimited collection, storage, use and disclosure of his/ her personal data is encompassed by the general personal rights of the German constitution. This basic right warrants in this respect the capacity of the individual to determine in principle the disclosure and use of his/her personal data. Limitations to this informational self-determination are allowed only in case of overriding public interest.” In the USA, Westin’s (1967: 2) famous definition of privacy as “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others” comes closest to this idea.

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should no longer be simply taken for granted when it comes to adequately conceptualizing privacy or human freedom, autonomy, and dignity. Not only privacy theory, but also an adequate self-understanding of the human should be based upon a coherent and appropriate theory of information. Only then can an understanding of privacy be developed that can move beyond the seemingly irresolvable conflicts that surround not only the theory, but also the way in which freedom, justice, and flows of information in the digital age are realized. Part 1 of this book, therefore, begins with an attempt to define information. We will argue that information is not a semantic content. Information is not necessarily or essentially “about” anything or anyone. Instead, we propose a definition of information based upon actor-network theory in which information can be defined as that which links together actors into a network while at the same time constructing the roles and identities of these actors.4 We propose interpreting Latour’s principle of “irreduction” and what he describes as “technical mediation” in terms of a theory of information. Irreduction says that “nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (Latour 1993: 158). Technical mediation describes what this cryptic statement means. Using the simple example of a stone ax, we will argue that technical mediation, that is, the mutual affordances of translation and enrollment that both human and nonhuman actors bring with them when humans use tools, or do anything for that matter, can be understood as the process of constructing information. Translation and enrollment is the process of establishing links between humans and nonhumans in actor-networks in such a way that no actor is either reduced to another or completely independent. We will interpret technical mediation, or the making of associations, as an information process. If we recall Bateson’s well-known definition of information as a difference that makes a difference, then from an ANT perspective, information is a difference making a difference. The emphasis is on the making, that is, the process of information construction. This process is the ongoing and ever-volatile dynamic of linking things together in such a way that something new comes into being. Information arises from the mutual and symmetrical construction of associations, interfaces, differences, and relations in the world. Indeed, it is information that makes the world, that is, the human world of meaning in which we live. This means that information is not a thing of some kind that could “belong” to any individual social actor. Information is much more like, but not the same as, a common good or a common-pool resource that neither belongs to individuals alone nor everyone equally. Information constitutes the network in which actors become who they are. With regard to privacy theory, this means 4 | In a previous work, “Organizing Networks” (Belliger/Krieger 2016) we argued that this is a “narrative” process. The focus here is not on narrative, but on what narratives are made of and which narrative we want to tell.

Introduction

that even if it can be said that in some way information constitutes social actors, they do not “own” this information, nor are they exclusively constituted by it. Contrary to what traditional privacy theory assumes, individuals do not have sovereignty over information. They cannot unilaterally and without regard to all participants in a network create information, distribute it, withhold it, destroy it, or use it in any way they wish. This view of information has consequences for how privacy, as well as the exploitation of information in a digital world, can adequately be understood. Part 2 of this book takes a deeper look at the reasons offered for privacy and the claims that are made for linking privacy to freedom, autonomy, and human dignity. There is no doubt that privacy matters in society, and perhaps more than ever in the digital age, but there is little consensus about why and how. We propose taking a fresh and unorthodox look at the meaning and value of privacy. We will naively ask the question: Who or what is privacy supposed to protect and why? To be sure, privacy is not a merely academic matter. Everyone is “personally” concerned. But are these concerns reasonable? Are they grounded in real threats or harms that could and do arise from flows of information? Does the free flow of information in itself violate property rights, endanger security, or even amount to a violation of fundamental human rights? Do freedom, autonomy, self-determination, and human dignity rest upon privacy? And if so, what kind of privacy? Do calls for a “data-driven” society, the advent of big-data, the lure of personalized products and services, and the seemingly inevitable advance of algorithmic automation in all areas of life necessarily threaten human integrity, freedom, and fundamental rights? We will take a close look at the claims made both for an instrumental value for privacy as well as for privacy as a fundamental right in itself. The instrumental view, which is typical of American law and privacy theory, understands privacy as a value for ensuring other rights, such as property rights or the right to security. Privacy in this view is not a fundamental right in itself, but an instrument for protecting more basic rights. The European view, on the contrary, is anchored in the Universal Declaration of Humans Rights and proceeds from the assumption that privacy is an inalienable right in itself. If privacy is an inalienable human right, then there can be no tradeoff of privacy against other rights such as property or security. Regardless of where one stands on these issues, it is undeniable that contemporary convictions about the value of privacy, whether as an instrumental or as an intrinsic right, are tangled up in what we will argue can be understood as the dichotomies and paradoxes of Western individualism. Our claim is that contemporary privacy discourse revolves not only around information but also around seemingly irresolvable conflicts, if not fundamental contradictions. We will argue that this leads to a “privacy paradox” in which privacy in both theory and practice tends to undermine and endanger much of what it is supposed to protect. Furthermore,

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we will argue that it is for this very reason that privacy has become an “obligatory point of passage” from the industrial age to the digital age. Privacy can be seen as the form in which the autonomous, rational subject of Western modernity takes a last stand in the digital age.5 Privacy forces us to think through the basic assumptions of modernity and to assess the implications of publicy and the informational self for concerns such as freedom, autonomy, and human dignity. Privacy, therefore, has become the “narrow gate” (Matthew 7:13) through which we must pass if we are to enter the promised land of the digital future. If we do not come to terms with privacy and the core concerns of privacy legislation and privacy theory, we will not be able to realize the full potential that a digital society promises. In Part 3 we turn to the second word in our title, Network Publicy Governance, namely, “publicy.” We make the daring and provocative proposal to replace the term “privacy” in all its theoretical and practical uses by the term “publicy.” If the social actor is always a network constituted by information, and if information is more like a common good than private property, then the first step in moving beyond the privacy paradox might well lie in dropping the idea of privacy altogether. The informational self cannot be adequately conceptualized in terms of privacy. Stow Boyd has offered an interesting alternative. Boyd argues that digital network society has made transparency instead of secrecy the norm: There is a countervailing trend away from privacy and secrecy and toward openness and transparency, both in the corporate and government sectors. And on the web, we have had several major steps forward in social tools that suggest at least the outlines of a complement, or opposite, to privacy and secrecy: publicy. [...] The idea of publicy is no more than this: rather than concealing things, and limiting access to those explicitly invited, tools based on publicy default to things being open and with open access. 6

Boyd goes on to explain what publicy consists of: From a publicy viewpoint…a person has social contracts within various online publics, and these are based on norms of behavior, not on layers of privacy. In these online publics, different sorts of personal status – sexual preferences, food choices, 5 | In a survey of 800 executives, the World Economic Forum (2015) singled out 21 technology shifts that will impact society in the near future. Among these are implantable technologies, digital presence, wearables, ubiquitous computing, supercomputing, data storage, IoT, smart homes and cities, big data, driverless cars, AI, robotics, blockchain, sharing economy, 3D printing, designer beings, and neurotechnology. In almost all cases privacy related concerns were listed as either hindrances or disadvantages. 6 | http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/765122581/secrecy-privacy-publicy

Introduction geographic location – exist to be shared with those that inhabit the publics. So, in this worldview, people are the union of a collection of social contracts, each of which is selfdefined, and self-referential. […] In this worldview, a person is a network of identities, each defined in the context of the form factor of a specific social public. There is no atomic personality, per se, just the assumption that people shift from one public self to another as needed.7

Contrary to the private self, the informational self derives its freedom, autonomy, and self-determination from rights that guarantee free expression, access to information, and free assembly. The tensions, if not antagonisms, between rights to privacy on the one side and rights to free expression on the other are not new. The advent of the digital age casts a new light upon this well-known controversy by focusing on information. If individuals are defined by information, it becomes more difficult to maintain the bounded, pre-social character of subjectivity. The default condition of human existence becomes publicy and not privacy. The advent of publicy as the default condition of human existence need not signal the rise of a digital communitarianism or the demise of Western respect for the individual in favor of collectives such as family, clan, class, or state. We need to move beyond the sterile opposition of individual and society. Freedom, autonomy, and dignity are realized in communication and not before or outside of communicative action. Modern social theories of both systemic (Luhmann) and action-theoretical (Habermas) provenience have come to locate the foundations of the human person as well as society in communication. Legal philosophy formulates this view in rights to free expression and free assembly. Contrary to what privacy advocates claim, it is not the right to be left alone, but the right to have access to information, to create information, and to distribute it that lies at the basis of a democratic society. Speaking out makes a difference. Secrecy doesn’t change anything. Paradoxically, privacy supports the injustices of the status quo that it is supposed to mitigate. Publicy on the contrary, demands that the right to speak must be protected and even actively enabled. What publicy emphasizes is that the informational self is essentially participative. Characterizing the informational self in terms of publicy does not mean simply trying to transform natural persons into juridical persons. The self, whether natural or juridical, is not first and foremost a bounded individual who somehow enters into relations, whether cognitive, volitional, or emotional, beyond its borders. The informational self is constituted by associations, not only with others but also with non-humans. Associations are always mutually constituted by all actors involved in a network and cannot be dictated top down. 7 | http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/797752290/the-decade-of-publicy

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Traditional metaphors of subjectivity and identity as something internal, as an internal vision, the eye of the mind, as free will and decision, or as emotion and desire are replaced by metaphors such as listening, negotiating, associating, and cooperating. The Cartesian ego and the autonomous rational subject of Western modernity must painfully acknowledge that cognition, action, and identity are distributed among many different voices and programs of action. This raises the question of how publicy is regulated. How does the mind keep its house in order if it is not its own independent and individual ruler? In the place of concepts and assumptions of immediacy, the universality of reason, and self-government (autonomy) which ground not only our understanding of subjectivity, but also privacy rights and regulations, publicy regulation must be conceived of as participatory, decentralized, distributed, and collaborative. Whereas it was possible in modernity to understand social order as based on the internal rationality of Cartesian egos and the external rationality of contracts and law, once the self has become information this no longer works. Publicy is the unique mode of human existence that can be described neither as an individual nor as a society in the modern senses of these terms. Neither autonomous rationality for the individual nor the social contract for society can account adequately for publicy. What kind of order does publicy have? We argue that understanding the default condition of the informational self as publicy lays the foundation for reconceptualizing not only subjectivity but also social order. This opens up the possibility of framing the legitimate concerns behind privacy regulation, data protection, and ideals of informational selfdetermination in a new way. We propose reformulating the problem of human self-understanding and social order in terms of network governance instead of (self)government. The third term in the title of this book, Network Publicy Governance, namely, “governance.” In Part 4 we turn to the question of regulating publicy. Doing away with the autonomous rational subject of humanism creates a vacuum with regard to the source of order. When the “rationality” of isolated individuals no longer bridges the gap between the one and the many, and when the social contract, as well as the representative government arising from it, no longer suffice to bring order into the global socio-sphere, where does order come from? How is the chaos of many-to-many communication to be channeled and ordered? The default condition of the informational self is publicy, that is, the condition of existing as information when information is neither private nor public. This raises the question of sovereignty and regulatory power as well as regulatory legitimation with regard to information. Information “belongs” to the network and the network is, therefore, the actor. Modernity located the source of order within universal reason which individuals possess and reason’s collectively binding expression in law. Traditional discussions of either individual or collective regulatory power reflect this modern Western

Introduction

understanding of the individual and society. They are bound up with the forms of social order typical of modern industrial society, that is, Hobbesian Leviathans and Weberian bureaucracies, with an occasional reference to chaotic revolution. The traditional term for describing social order is “government.” Merriam-Webster defines government as “authoritative direction or control.” This is what the ego does within the mind as well as what the king or president does within the state. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that government in one form or another has been the dominant form of social order, at least for large populations, for the greater part of human history. In the modern period, however, government was understood largely in opposition to another organizing force, the market. Government was often understood as a necessary correction of the inadequacies of market organization, whereas the market symbolized individual freedom. In this tradition, there are only two models of social order, either markets or hierarchies. Practical politics, as well as humanist ideology, was and for the most part still is divided into either “right” or “left” or a mixture of the two. During the entire modern era, there was and for the most part still is no third alternative. This is where governance comes in. Networks are neither markets nor hierarchies, nor a mixture of the two, but a different form of order. Although networks have always been with us, as a consequence of the digital transformation networks have come to the fore. Castells has pointed out that networks are not new. “What is new is the microelectronicsbased, networking technologies that provide new capabilities to an old form of social organization” (2005: 4). The digital transformation makes global networked organizations possible. Following the slogan, “governance without government” (Rosenau/Czempiel 1992), new decentralized, non-hierarchical, collaborative, and distributed forms of regulation typical of networks have become central topics in almost all areas of today’s world. Of course, even in a network society, people must accomplish certain tasks and solve certain problems to make cooperative action possible. Goals must be set, stakeholders must be identified, roles and responsibilities must be assigned, processes must be designed, and compliance and controlling must be defined and implemented. Governance does not change the basic tasks of organizing cooperative action, but it attempts to solve them on a different basis and in a different way than does bureaucratic government. Governance is a term with many different but associated meanings and has become the focus of discussions in various disciplines from international studies to policy administration, organization theory, and sociology. Governance is a matter of a complex overlapping of rules of many different kinds based on many different sources and not merely formal laws instituted and enforced by centralized authorities. What governance studies in many areas have shown is that both hierarchical and market models are inadequate when it comes to

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understanding how heterogeneous networks are regulated. Actors of many different kinds play constructive roles in shaping regulatory measures outside of and beyond formal, state-sanctioned laws. Neoinstitutionalist economics, for example, has focused on various forms of governance as ways of regulating that are based neither on markets nor hierarchies. Decades of empirical work have shown the limitations of traditional economic models of either private property regulated by a free market or government-owned property regulated by hierarchies. Instead, what has become increasingly important in economic theory and actual practice are “self-organized resource governance regimes” (Ostrom 2000: 138). The public/private dichotomy, whether applied to resources or actors, has become increasingly dysfunctional. This is above all the case when actors are seen as networks constituted by information. Information is neither exclusively private nor exclusively public. Informational selves and the publicy networks in which they exist do not dissolve into chaos when markets and hierarchies become dysfunctional. Governance steps in where market exchange or governmental command and control fail. Problems of regulating flows of personal information are therefore not adequately conceptualized either by privacy or by government protections and restrictions. Informational self-determination is a problem of governance and not of government. We propose using the resources of contemporary governance discourse interpreted from the point of view of actor-network theory and the affordances of digital technologies to describe network publicy governance. We argue that successful strategies of common-pool resource governance,8 such as clear identities, proportionate equivalence of benefits and costs, collectivechoice arrangements, rights to self-organize and to establish flexible and locally appropriate conflict resolution mechanisms, as well as open and flexible boundaries can be theoretically anchored in a general theory of governance by design. Based upon ANT, we propose a reconstruction of governance theory that focuses on processes and not on structure. Networks, as opposed to traditional organizations, are not ordered by governing structures, but by governance processes. Each actor in a network, whether human or nonhuman, has a “voice” of its own, while at the same time contributing with this voice to building a collective capable of cooperative action. This implies that networks regulate themselves by taking account of all possible voices or actors that could claim to contribute to the network. This process of taking account of allows for new stakeholders to be integrated into the network, while at the same time raising the question of which stakeholders play decisive roles. Since not all stakeholders are equally important, prioritizing the relative importance of different actors and institutionalizing relatively stable roles and identities are 8 | See for example. Ostrom (1990); Wilson/Ostrom/Cox (2013).

Introduction

important regulatory processes. Institutionalized actors tend to be constituted by many links and associations so that if one tries to change any single link, one has to change them all. This characteristic of network governance is the basis for what is often called “structure,” that is, repeatable, relatively fixed identities and processes. Although institutionalizing reduces the complexity of networks and thereby excludes certain actors, roles, and processes, it does not eliminate flexibility. Unlike traditional organizations, the boundaries of networks are not constitutive, but merely regulative. Networks exclude not to become networks but to practically deal with a particular problem or pursue a specific goal. This is the localizing function of network regulation. Networks reduce the complexity of many different and diverging possible activities by focusing on a local problem or goal. Localizing creates a limited and goal-directed program of action or what can be called the trajectory of a network. The effects of localizing are well-known in social theory and have been described in a variety of ways. The description of society as consisting of different domains or sub-systems, for example, business, politics, science, education, religion, and art and of different levels such as the micro, meso, and macro can be seen from the network perspective as the results of localizing. Furthermore, Goffman’s famous dramaturgical account of social interaction in terms of actors, scripts, and frames can be understood as a description of the network governance process of localizing. In terms of privacy theory, Nissenbaum’s (2004) well-known notion of “contextual integrity” makes privacy expectations dependent on social contexts. Contextual definitions, however, are not merely given. In a quickly changing world, social contexts are no longer guaranteed by tradition. Neither can they be derived from fundamental rights nor dictated by governments. Local contexts must be constructed and for this reason there is no guarantee that privacy always plays an important role or perhaps any role at all. This leads directly to publicy. Publicy means that it is the localizing function of network governance that defines the context of information use as well as the relevant identities of the actors. Publicy, however, is not merely local. Social contexts are always linked up to others in many different ways leading on up to a global dimension. The answer to the question, who am I? is never merely local. The fundamental openness and the flexibility of networks prevent any local regime from becoming a closed system with uncontestable boundaries. Localizing, therefore, implies also globalizing and both are important network governance processes. Globalizing means that localized networks are always in many ways linked to each other and thus integrated into a global dimension, a global “socio-sphere” or what is usually called a “world.” Localizing is only possible against an open horizon of a global collective, just as every local situation is part of the world and affected by global events. Finally, network governance also includes processes of balancing the

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powers of closure and openness, the local and the global, the institutional and the unexpected. The processes of network governance derived from ANT become interesting for a theory of network publicy governance when the affordances of digital information and communication technologies are taken into account. When digital technologies become our most significant nonhuman others in the construction of information, social order, and ourselves, then the processes of network governance follow network norms. The governance process of taking account of possible actors is manifested as connectivity and flow. Every actor or device added to the network brings new information, new “voices” into the collective. Every actor or device, be it ever so inconspicuous and of apparently only local importance, gains access to global networks and participates in global flows of information. Smartphones, smart homes, smart cities, smart automobiles, smart energy, smart communication and transportation networks, smart logistics, industry 4.0, data-driven organizations, personalized products and services, machine learning, data science, and much more all testify to the connective imperative. What makes these connections “smart” – and also threatening – is, of course, the flows of information they enable. Network governance processes of producing and prioritizing stakeholders are influenced by the network norms of communication and participation. Producing stakeholders under the affordances of ICTs is much more distributed and complex than in hierarchical government, but also much less chaotic and opportunistic than in free markets. In the global network society, bottomup, collaborative, and self-organizing practices of prioritizing stakeholders and institutionalizing roles, identities, and processes are more effective than traditional forms of regulation. In addition to this, the effect of digital affordances has been to create many more stakeholders in all kinds of networks than were possible under the conditions of informational scarcity and one-tomany communication. This wide distribution of stakeholders has been termed “participatory culture.” The digital transformation has placed the means of the production of information into everyone’s hands. It has empowered consumers to become prosumers not only in business, but also in education, healthcare, social service administration, and politics. The advent of many-to-many communication in the digital age has brought the participatory potential of networks to the fore. Networks not only produce stakeholders in new ways, but they also set priorities and institutionalize roles, identities, and processes on the basis of the norms of transparency and authenticity. If publicy and not privacy is the default condition, it becomes increasingly costly to attempt to set agendas and maintain political or commercial advantages by means of secrecy. In the digital age, knowledge is only then power, when it is shared and used collectively. This, in turn, requires that the sources, the quality, and the intended purposes of

Introduction

information are transparent and that actors do not misrepresent themselves. Networks operate on the basis of trust. Trust is based on transparency and authenticity. Privacy, on the contrary, is based on mistrust and obfuscation. Not knowing who one is dealing with, not knowing what information is valid, and not knowing what information is intended to be used for make organizations inefficient, costly, and at least in the long run bound to fail. When the norms of transparency and authenticity are not followed, the wrong stakeholders are prioritized and others who should not are excluded. Inadequate structures become institutionalized and are no longer questioned or revised. Finally, the norm of flexibility takes network governance a step further and influences how processes of localizing/globalizing and the balancing of openness and closure are implemented. Large networks encourage the autonomy and selforganizing capabilities of local networks so that they can adapt to unforeseen problems and take advantage of unique and unexpected opportunities. This is a problem that systems theory clearly recognized but could not solve. Systems find themselves in the paradoxical situation of being able to reduce environmental complexity only by increasing internal complexity, which creates ever greater strains on system organization.9 There is an inherent tension in the primary purpose of systems to reduce complexity on the one hand and on the other hand the necessity of having to constantly increase internal complexity to maintain viability in the face of an ever more complex environment. Network publicy governance deals with complexity in an entirely different way. When networks that are influenced by the affordances of ICTs localize programs of action against a global horizon of possible network extensions they realize a flexibility or adaptability for which cut-throat evolutionist theories have to pay much too high a price. In the Darwinian world, it is a matter of either change or die; whereby radical change amounts to the same as death. Network publicy governance, on the contrary, follows the norm of flexibility by means of channeling the opposing forces of localizing and globalizing and taking account of and institutionalizing/excluding on the basis of the normative affordances of connectivity, flow, participation, communication, transparency, and authenticity. From the point of view of network publicy governance, many of the problems that characterize the conflict between privacy protection and data exploitation simply don’t arise. Information is from the outset neither private nor public. There is no inherent violation of rights when so-called personal information is used to create value since not only information but also value is defined as belonging to the network and therefore to be regulated by the network’s own governance processes. Misuse of information in all its forms remains just 9 | See Ashby’s famous “law of requisite variety” (Ashby 1956), as well as the vast literature on systemic management which attempts to deal with this problem.

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what it is, misuse that must be prevented and sanctioned. Based on a theory of information, a critique of the basic assumptions of privacy discourse, a vision of the human as an informational self, as well as an ANT-inspired reconstruction of governance theory, we propose a theory of governance not as external regulation but as an internal and ongoing design process. This demands a new narrative, the narrative of the clever designer who carefully takes account of all voices and who ensures communication and participation instead of the heroic but tragic individual of modern humanism. This book builds upon but does not presuppose, earlier work that we have done on the meaning and effects of the digital transformation. In Interpreting Networks (2014) we examined how the order of knowledge has changed due to the affordances of digital technologies. In Organizing Networks (2016) we looked at what digital transformation means for the order of society. In this book, we raise the question of what living in a post-humanist, global network society means for human self-understanding. It is perhaps in these three areas, knowledge, society, and human existence that the digital revolution has most dramatically transformed the world we live in. The guiding light in these investigations and thought experiments has been actor-network theory (ANT). We chose ANT because we believe that its provocative inclusion of nonhumans in society and its programmatically non-modern conceptual repertoire are best suited to understand the world we are entering into, a world in which, as Floridi puts it, humans must share the attribute of intelligence with machines. If the “fourth revolution” is indeed a revolution, then much has changed and will continue to change in the ways in which we interact with information, construct social order, and experience ourselves as actors and creators of meaning. We are well aware that these changes will most probably not be foreseeable and calculable. They will constantly surprise us. The conceptual tools we use today will undoubtedly prove inadequate in the future. Nonetheless, we hope with this book to contribute to a constructive and heuristically useful discussion of our common future.

1. Information

The concept of “information” is not very informative. There are just too many different meanings to the word. Almost every scientific discipline has their own definition, from physics and chemistry to biology, informatics, mathematics, philosophy, and even sociology, which has long been talking about an “information society.”1 So what does “information” mean? What is information? Obviously, we need to decide, that is, to filter out much of what can and perhaps ought to be discussed about the topic and select those meanings of the term that are useful for our purpose, namely, attempting to understand what is meant when speaking of our world as essentially defined by information and of humans as informational beings. In order to do this, we propose taking a close look at something that does not appear to be information at all, namely, a primitive stone ax. We choose this very simple and not at all high-tech example not only because it stands at the beginning of human culture and society, but because it illustrates quite well what it means to live in a world of meaning. Long before Homo sapiens and long before there was language and even longer before there were digital information technologies, prehumans were using stone tools and developing an informational ecosystem that formed the environment in which humans evolved. Becoming human, that is, entering into a world in which everything is in some way “meaningful” happened gradually over many hundreds of thousands of years. Perhaps the early steps along this road can help us understand what information is and what it means to speak of humans as informational beings, that is, as beings whose freedom, autonomy, and dignity have something to do with information.

1.1 The Question of Technolog y Despite all their differences, what the stone ax and the computer have in common is that both are technologies. This is, of course, a platitude and would not be worth mentioning were the understanding of what technology is and 1 | For an overview see Floridi (2010).

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how it relates to human existence as easy as one might think. No one today would dispute the importance of technology for human life and society. Still, as important as technology was and is for the development of human existence, it was not until the height of the industrial age that technology became a central question for philosophers.2 This is not to say that earlier periods of history were not concerned with technology. Long before the industrial age, human life was inextricably bound up with tools, machines, and technologies of many kinds. It is well known that Aristotle set the stage for later discussions when he distinguished between techné, that is, artifacts that are brought forth by humans and physis, that is, natural things that come into being on their own. In today’s world technology seems to be so much involved in almost everything that happens one could question whether there is anything at all that comes to be entirely on its own, that is, without any form of technological influence or mediation. Even if the omnipresence of technology be admitted, there still remains the question of how it is related to human life. Does technology determine human existence or is it merely a neutral tool that can be used for good or bad? Regardless of how we answer this question, the relationship between humans and technology has come to the fore in modern times as a central concern for thinkers in all areas. The question of technology has dominated discussions both positive and negative since the beginning of the 20th Century.3 An important insight that has come out of these discussions is that a close, if not inseparable, relationship between humans and technological artifacts is not new. It has been a part of human evolution ever since the homo line branched off from apes and chimpanzees. This relationship was mostly taken for granted and did not appear as problematic until it began to dominate present-day discussions. The tendency of these discussions was generally critical.4 Despite much modern enthusiasm for scientific progress, this critical appraisal of technology has played a major role in framing contemporary theoretical positions. The critique of technology as a form of alienation or domination is well known. Ever since 2 | For a historical review see Bradley (2011). For an overview of the development and diversity of thought on technology see the Article “Philosophy of Technology” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://iot-for-all.com/mood-predictingwearables-1dc88c26fc70#.xopr893hp. For the significance of the concept of the “machine” in and beyond cybernetics, see Malapi-Nelson (2017). For the most part, the discussion has focused around either a technological determinism or social determinism. 3 | Most recently the question of the meaning of technology has been raised by Science and Technology Studies and actor-network theory, which we will discuss below. See also Stiegler (1998) for an alternative interpretation. 4 | See for example Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977).

1. Information

Descartes radical distinction between mind (immaterial and purely rational) and body (purely material and subject to deterministic causality), technology and machines have been understood as essentially in opposition to human freedom and mind, as an alien force that is “colonizing” (Habermas) the human life-world. Nonetheless, Heidegger, whose negative judgment on technology is notorious, pointed out that our everyday way of being in the world is a practical using of tools. Human existence is first and foremost a practical dealing with the world and not a distanced and impartial theoretical reflection. As Heidegger (1962: 95) put it, “[the] kind of dealing which is closest to us is […] not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge’.” What kind of “knowledge” is this? This is the question we will attempt to answer by looking more closely at a simple stone ax.

1.2 The Difference a Stone Makes The first documented use of stone tools is 3.3 million years ago, which predates the earliest fossil evidence of Homo habilis from 2.8 million years ago.5 During the following million years, the cranial capacity of hominins in this line doubled as is shown by the appearance of Homo erectus and Homo ergaster about 1.8 million years ago. Archaic Homo sapiens branched off from the Neanderthals and other non-extant species around 400,000 years ago, whereas anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens appeared only around 300,000 years ago.6 The fossil record clearly shows that stone tools were used by our evolutionary predecessors many hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans with their big brains and specifically human linguistic and cognitive capacities appeared on the scene. This fact should alert us to the importance of “practical knowledge” or “embodied cognition” when it comes to attempting to understand the meaning of technology today. The earliest stone tools used by the genus Homo are known as “Mode 1” tools and are primarily related to the so-called Oldowan Industry of the Lower Paleolithic dating from about 2.6 to 1.7 million years ago.7 These tools were made of oval or almond-shaped rocks found in riverbeds that were hammered by larger stones into forms with sharp edges by breaking away flakes. The 5 | See http://www.calacademy.org/press/releases/scientists-discover-oldest-evide nce-of-stone-tool-use-and-meat-eating-among-human. 6 | Until the publication of dating of the findings at Jebel Irhoud (“The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age,” in: Nature V. 546, 293-296, June, 2017) the appearance of modern Homo sapiens was estimated at 200,000 year ago. 7 | See Clarke (1969).

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one end was pointed and used for chopping, cutting, digging, etc., and the other end was rounded thus fitting into the hand. This primitive “hand ax” is probably one of the first and surely one of the longest-used tools in human history. It was the predecessor of our modern steel ax and other similar tools and should not be underestimated both in its significance as a cultural object and in its influence on human development.8 Let us look more closely at what it means to use a stone ax. In order to use a stone ax there needs to be a special kind of “fit” between the hand and the stone on the one end and on the other end there must be a similar fit between the stone and whatever it works upon, such as the flesh of animals or enemies, wood, earth, etc. Without this two-sided fit, the hand cannot hold and wield the stone in such way that the stone could cut wood or other objects. As noted above, hominins or pre-humans have a long history of using stone tools. Nonetheless, it is the use of tools that has become one, if not the distinguishing characteristic of humans. What is so special about tools? Why can it be claimed that humans are tool users and that this is what makes us human, even when primatologists have long shown that even baboons and chimpanzees also use tools? How is it that when a (pre)human uses a tool like the stone ax, this is fundamentally different from the way a chimpanzee picks up a stone and uses it to open a coconut? We are tempted to think there must be something very special about how humans and also those creatures who became our direct ancestors used stones as tools. Keeping in mind that the evolution of human culture and technology was a very long process consisting of uncountable incremental changes not documented in the fossil record, it cannot be denied that a great transformation did, in fact, take place. There is a world of difference between the ways in which apes use tools and the way in which pre-humans and humans do this. Paradoxically, it could be claimed that when things turn into tools, they literally “get out of hand.” This means that they are no longer a tool only for the moment, that is, only as long as being held in the hand. What is unique about tools, as opposed to those stones that apes use, is that after being dropped and left behind, they still somehow stay with us. It has often been observed that at a certain moment both the ape and the human may hold a stone in their hands and use it for some purpose. What happens next is that the ape drops it and moves on. For the ape, what shortly before looked like a “tool,” an object being used to help get food, has disappeared. To an observer, it may well appear that 8 | “The study of hand axes is made complicated because its shape is the result of a complicated chain of technical actions that are only occasionally revealed in their later stages. If this complexity of intentions during the manufacture of a hand axe is added to its variety of forms [...] we realize that the hand axe is one of the most problematical and complex objects in Prehistory.” Benito del Rey (1982: 314-315).

1. Information

the stone has been used like a tool. But for the ape, this is merely a momentary episode that is limited to one particular situation and one immediate purpose. After the purpose has been achieved, the “tool” is dropped and left by the wayside. It disappears together with its episodic use.9 The human, or rather for a long time before Homo sapiens, pre-humans may also drop the stone, but the important point is that they hold on to something else. The stone has been dropped, but it does not simply disappear. In place of the stone something else is being held on to, or to put it the other way around, something is holding onto them. What remains beyond the momentary and episodic use of the stone, is not the stone, but the use itself. What is held on to after this or that particular stone has gotten out of hand is its use. For the ape, both are gone, that is, both the stone as well as its particular use in a particular episode. The stone has not gotten out of hand, it has simply blended back into the natural environment from which it momentarily appeared when it was picked it up for a particular episode of food-gathering. The tool, however, is a “tool” precisely because it takes on a life of its own when it is not being held in the hand. It is somehow still “there,” even if it is not physically carried. It is there to be used again in the right place at the right time and in the right way. When things like stones get out of hand, but somehow still remain with us, they take a unique place in our lives and assume specific roles in our activities. This is what Latour (1994) calls “technical mediation.”

1.3 Technical Mediation Technical mediation describes the way in which technology works. This does not mean it describes the technical functioning of a tool or an artifact. This would be a purely “technical” or perhaps even “mechanistic” question best answered by engineers. Technology (Technik), as Heidegger remarked, is not itself something technical. Technology is not a tool or a machine, but that which makes something into a tool or machine. Heidegger spoke of the “essence” (Wesen) of technology.10 Technical mediation is a name for that which 9 | Donald (1991: 149) describes the “culture” of apes as “episodic.” “In fact, the word that seems best to epitomize the cognitive culture of apes […] is the term episodic. Their lives are lived entirely in the present, as a series of concrete episodes and the highest element in their system of memory representation seems to be at the level of event representation.” 10  |  For Heidegger the essence of technology was the “Gestell,” that is a purely functional, system oriented form of mediation typical of the industrial age. Latour emphasizes that technical mediation is not the same as Gestell. Malapi-Nelson (2017:115 ff.) points out the nearness of Heidegger’s view of technology to the algorithmic concept of the machine that originated in cybernetics and early AI.

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makes something, a mere stone, for example, into a stone ax. The stone ax is a specifically human tool or an artifact, but as we will see, it does not neatly fit into the Aristotelian dichotomy of either what has originated by itself (physis, nature) or what is made by another (techné). Technological mediation is what happens when things literally get out of hand, but nonetheless somehow still remain with us. It is that which is still holding on to us after we have dropped the stone. In order for the stone to become an ax, a series of links has to be established between the user, the tool, and the object that the tool is supposed to work upon. These three elements must be linked in specific ways. Latour (1994: 32) speaks of a “detour” that must be taken by the agent in order to accomplish a certain goal. If a (pre)human wants to chop wood, and they can’t do this with their bare hands, they take a detour via the stone ax. This detour can be understood as a kind of “translation.” Translation is transformation. It transforms all elements involved in the action. The person with only their bare hands is translated into someone wielding an ax, and the stone is translated into a tool held in someone’s hand which is wielded in a certain way and therefore able to chop wood. And even the wood in this example is participating because it also has to contribute the right characteristics to be chopped at all. This double translation “mediates” the activity of chopping wood in such a way that all three elements, user, stone, and wood become linked together and bound up into something that did not exist before. As Latour puts it: Translation does not mean a shift from one vocabulary to another, from one French word to one English word, for instance, as if the two languages existed independently. Like Michel Serres, I use translation to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents. (Latour 1994: 32)

Let us look more closely at these links. The first link is that between the hand and the stone. The hand has to be able to grasp the stone in the right way. This is the contribution of the specific anatomical form and dexterity of the hand. Not every kind of hand can do this. Most animals do not have the anatomical prerequisites to hold stones. It is important, however, to emphasize that the hand is not alone in setting up this link. Not just any stone can be held in the right way. And not any stone, even if it could be easily held by a human hand, is not able to cut wood. The link can be considered “two-sided” because it is not only the hand but also the stone that contributes something. The stone, for its part, has to have the right shape, consistency, weight, etc. in order to be able to be held by certain kinds of hands. Together, the hand and stone both contribute to making the stone ax possible. But this is not all. There also has to be a link between the sharp end of the stone and the wood that it works upon.

1. Information

Here again, the stone contributes the right weight, consistency, shape, etc. in order to be able to cut wood or to be chipped and formed by another stone so that it has a sharp end. This link is also two-sided since the wood cannot be just any kind of wood. The wood must contribute a certain texture, consistency, shape, etc. in order to allow the stone to cut it. What makes the stone into an ax is therefore not just one, but two two-sided links. These links are symmetrical not only because they point in two directions, but because they are established equally by all elements contributing to the action. This is why Latour (33) can claim that technical mediation is “wholly symmetrical” in that all elements are equally involved and are equally translated, or transformed. This simple series of two two-sided links is what Floridi (2014: 26ff.) calls a “first-order technology.” A “first-order technology” is when a human works upon a thing, which in turn works upon some other thing. The human swings the stone ax which cuts the wood. In a first-order technology such as the stone ax, there are three elements linked to each other. There is the hand, the stone, and the wood. There is a link between the hand and the stone and also a link between the stone and the wood. Each of these links faces in two directions. The link between the hand and the stone faces on one side toward the hand and on the other toward the round part of the stone. The link between the stone and the wood is also two-faced since one side faces the sharp end of the stone and the other side faces the wood. To say that these links are two-sided means that they can only be established if all elements involved contribute something. There is no pure activity on the side of the hand, nor a pure passivity on the side of the stone or the wood. There is no pure subject and no pure object. Both stone and wood do something. In a certain sense, both may be considered to be “agents.” In order to express the agency of all participants, both human and non-human, in technical mediation Latour (1994: 34) speaks of a “symmetry” between human and non-human. The human is not a pure subject and the stone and wood are not mere objects. The one is not active while the others are completely passive. The one does not causally determine and the other is not causally determined. No amount of wielding will make just any stone cut wood. Not just any wood can be cut. The hand, the stone, and the wood all “do” something and therefore can be said to have a kind of agency. They all must contribute something to establish the links between them. To the extent that they all actively participate, there is a symmetry between them.11 11 | For a recent discussion of “distributed agency” see Enfield/Kockelman (2017). Summing up research that has come to called the “new materialism,” Iovino and Oppermann (2014: 3) write: “Agency assumes many forms, all of which are characterized by an important feature: they are material, and the meanings they produce influence in various ways the existence of both human and non-human natures. Agency, therefore, is not to be necessarily and exclusively associated with human beings and with human

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This broad concept of agency, which includes not only humans but also nonhumans, is very important for understanding what technical mediation is all about. When wielding a stone ax, the hand does not act alone. It needs the stone to cut the wood. And the stone does not cut wood all by itself, it needs the right kind of wood and a hand that chips it and wields it properly. The hand must swing the right kind of stone in the right way in order to cut the right kind of wood. The hand must not only be able and willing to do this but must learn how to do it. This is because the stone in its own way “challenges” the hand. It does not allow just any kind of hold or any kind of swing. The stone influences and teaches the hand how it is to be worked upon, held, and wielded. In the same sense, it can be said that the wood teaches the stone how sharp, hard, and heavy it must be in order to cut it. This was surely a very long and complex trial and error process taking place over many hundreds of thousands of years in many different situations. Chopping wood, cutting meat, foraging for food with a stone ax is something that involves various actors who all participate in a specific kind of association. Participation does mean simply that actors are somehow involved. It implies that they are actively involved, or as Latour puts it, they “insist on being part of the same collective” (2004: 84). The usual term for the way in which things or artifacts influence humans and thus contribute in their own way to an activity is “affordances.” According to Gibson: [A]n affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. (Gibson 1979: 129)12

To speak of the links that bind hand, stone, and wood together as resulting from affordances means that the association between them is a result of the influences of all the heterogeneous actors involved, and not merely of the activity intentionality, but is a pervasive and inbuilt property of matter, as part and parcel of its generative dynamism.” Instead of agency or action, we follow Gibson (1979) and speak of “affordances” but we interpret these to be operations of “translating” and “enrolling” of actors into networks which, in turn, are defined as information construction. 12 | The Wikipedia editors offer a succinct definition: “An affordance is a relation between an object or an environment and an organism that, through a collection of stimuli, affords the opportunity for that organism to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling. As a relation, an affordance exhibits the possibility of some action, and is not a property of either an organism or its environment alone.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance. See also the discussion in Hutchby (2001).

1. Information

of a human subject alone.13 Hand, stone, and wood all mutually offer something to each other – Latour (1999: 309) speaks of a “proposition,” that is, an attempt to influence each other – Latour calls this a “program of action” (Latour (1994: 33; 1999: 309) – in such a way that something comes into being that was not there before.14 From the perspective of ANT, these actors can be said to “translate” and “enroll” each other into an “actor-network.” Translation means, as we mentioned above, transformation. A mere stone lying in a riverbed becomes, for example, an ax. It is no longer a “natural” entity but has become a tool, an artifact. Enrollment means that the transformation has a certain direction, trajectory, purpose, or goal. This goal is not the intention of a human mind, but the result of the interaction of all participants to the network. Of course, in our example of the stone ax, the trajectory of the network is, for example, to chop wood. Technical mediation “translates” and “enrolls” animals and things into an association that has its own character and function. Functions are concerns, goals, or purposes. This is what in traditional philosophy and sociology has been termed “intentionality.”15 Intentionality, however, at least from the point 13 | Latour does not use the term affordances for the contribution of humans or nonhumans to an actor-network. Instead he speaks of “programs of action” or “propositions” (Latour 1999: 309). A proposition is what “an actor offers to other actors” (309). 14 | As Hutchby (2001) argues, this implies that neither constructivist nor realist accounts of the interaction between humans and nonhumans are correct. Tool use is neither a human social construct nor an activity determined by the inherent qualities of things. It is something that arises from the mutual influence of both and which did not exist previously. “This ‘third way’ between the (constructivist) emphasis on the shaping power of human agency and the (realist) emphasis on the constraining power of technical capacities opens the way for new analyses of how technological artifacts become important elements in the patterns of ordinary human conduct” (443). Grint and Woolgar (1997) liken this process to hermeneutic interpretation of texts. See Krieger/ Belliger (2014) for a discussion of ANT in relation to philosophical hermeneutics. Lanamäki et al. (2016) refer to this as the “enactive approach, which understands affordances as completed actions within social practices” (132). Affordances, as they put it, “emerge in practice” (135). 15 | See Brentano (1995: 88-89): “Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We

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of view of ANT, is a product not of the big brain, or of an immaterial rational soul, or of language use but arises when both human and nonhuman actors are mutually translated and enrolled into programs of action. Chopping wood is a program of action because it is neither an inherent property of human intentionality or cognition nor is it an inherent property of the stone, but the result of an association, a linking up of affordances. A program of action is ascribed to an actor-network as a whole and not to any one of the elements that participate in it and are transformed by it. For this reason, a program of action should not be confused with the traditional idea of “intention.” Intentionality refers to a mental state, an idea in the mind.16 Intentional behavior is usually ascribed to an individual human being, to consciousness, or to a Cartesian subject who can reflect upon itself and use language to account for its actions. From the point of view of traditional cognitive science, mental states take place within the big brain characteristic of Homo sapiens. This would imply that it was only long after stone tools were already in use that a program of action arose. In other words, it was only long after stone tools were being used, that this activity had meaning at all. The rather unacceptable consequence of this view is that the actual and ongoing use of stone tools would have had to wait almost a million years before it had an official purpose or became in any way meaningful. Would it not be more reasonable to assume that a (pre)human chopping wood with a stone ax is not a Cartesian subject but an actor-network? The links that construct the actornetwork allow something meaningful to be done without intentionality in the Cartesian sense. Agency, therefore, is a quality of the actor-network. It is the network and not merely the (pre)human alone that is the actor. Michel Callon offers a succinct definition of an actor-network. An actor-network is: …reducible neither to an actor alone nor to a network […] An actor-network is simultaneously an actor whose activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a network that is able to redefine and transform what it is made of.” (Callon 1987: 93).

could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.” 16 | Mind, of course, need not be understood mentalistically. Mentalism is the view of mind that confines meaning within the borders of either an idealistically conceived rational soul or a material brain. Both idealistic and materialistic notions of mind sharply distinguish between inside (the mind) and outside (the mind) and differ only with regard to what is inside, either an immaterial principle of rationality or the workings of the brain. See Brinkmann (2018) for a discussion of the philosophical and psychological roots of the idea of mind as something bounded and internal to a specific subject.

1. Information

The symmetry that ANT describes between human and nonhuman in technical mediation “forces us to abandon the subject-object dichotomy, a distinction that prevents understanding of techniques and even of societies” (Latour 1994: 34). We must also abandon traditional notions of cognition and intention that limit meaning to the confines of the big brains of Homo sapiens. For Latour, “Responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants” (34). This is what technical mediation means. It means that neither constructivism nor realism adequately describe a human social order inextricably bound up with nonhumans, artifacts, and technologies.17

1.4 Interfaces, Links, Associations Floridi (2014: 35ff.) does not speak of mediation when describing how technology works. Instead, he speaks of “interfaces.” According to Floridi, the special link between human and non-human can be understood as an interface because it “faces” in two directions. Looking again at the stone ax, an interface is constituted by neither hand nor stone alone, but by both hand and stone together. The interface can be said to be “distributed” between them. If we take a modern ax, the situation is no different. The hand is linked to the ax by the handle, and the ax is linked to the wood by its metal blade. The modern ax depends on both of these links properly fitting just as did the stone ax millions of years before. Even when the tools become more complex, technology in all its forms depends on these interfaces. Floridi (2014) argues that not only simple first-order technologies such as the stone ax but also more complex second and third-order technologies depend on the same kind of interfaces. In secondorder technologies, humans work upon technologies, which work upon other technologies. The hand uses a screwdriver to turn a screw which fastens a plastic handle to a metal pan. This is a second-order technology because the screwdriver works upon another piece of technology, the screw, which works upon another technology, the plastic handle, and so on. All the parts are constructed to fit together, as anyone who has attempted to hammer a nail with a screwdriver knows. Second-order technologies can form very long chains of links, but no matter how long there is a distinction between them and what Floridi calls a “third-order technology.” A third-order technology is one in which a tool works upon another tool in a long series of operations that eventually lead back to producing the tool that stood at the beginning. In principle, the human can be taken out of the loop. A 3D printer, for example, produces tools, which in turn produce electronic components that are used to build 3D printers. A present-day automobile production plant prides itself on being over 90% free 17 | See Hutchby (2001) for a discussion of the inadequacies of both the realist and constructivist positions with regard to the human-technology association.

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of human intervention. The complete automation of many kinds of production is on the near horizon. Generally, for all orders of technology, it can be said that the more complex the technology becomes, the more links are needed to translate and enroll the various human and nonhuman actors into the network. But it is still the links, the interfaces that constitute what is being done and also who is doing it. It is the network that does something that could not be done by any of the participating actors alone. What makes this possible are the many mutually translating actors or, as Latour often says, “actants” who can be said to mediate each other such that something comes into existence that was not there before. Humans and nonhumans are equally, that is, symmetrically involved in building actor-networks. And it is actor-networks that do things. A (pre)human wielding a stone ax can do things that an ape can’t do, and he or she lives in a different world, a world of raw materials, and a world in which wood can be chopped, where shelters can be built instead of merely found. In this world, building is a different activity from hunting and hunting is not merely an episode, but a specific task distinguished sequentially from others. When things get out of hand, but still hold on to us by means of associations, links, and interfaces their durability transforms a world which would otherwise be unstable and episodic. Paradoxically, what distinguishes human social order from that of apes is the many non-humans that give stability to our activities. As Latour puts it: Nonhumans stabilize social negations. [...] they can be shaped very quickly but once shaped, last far longer than the interactions that fabricated them. […] What was impossible for complex social animals to accomplish becomes possible for prehumans – who use tools, not to acquire food but to fix, underline, materialize, and keep track of the social realm. (Latour 1994: 61)

It can, therefore, be said that we humans owe our humanity to the affordances of the many nonhumans that form associations with us. It is because of them that different activities appear, such as hunting, chopping wood, building, etc. all of which are linked not only to specific artifacts but also to specific forms of being. These activities stay with us because they do not depend exclusively on us, but are embedded in artifacts. Human social order and human forms of being do not depend merely on humans, but on things, that is, on the actor-networks in which both humans and nonhumans are linked together. These links reduce the complexity of a situation and limit the activities that are possible. Apes have only their bodies to reduce the options of any particular situation. This means that for them at any one moment literally everything is possible. For apes, every particular action is open to the full possibilities of simian behavior. They cannot focus only on one thing at a time. Their “self” consists of the limited memory and social skills they physically bring with them. Technical

1. Information

mediation, however, links actions to things such that cognition and selfhood is distributed beyond the body into the environment. The world takes on an order that it did not have before the links and associations that construct an actor-network arose. Of course, the world is still full of wood and stones, but they are no longer merely parts of the natural environment. They become part of a “world” in which there are tools, specific activities that can be done with them, and specific kinds of selves that do these things. The stone is no longer an ad hoc implement bound to an episodic experience, but part of a network of associations whose affordances create human actors who play human roles. Latour sums up the distinction between human and simian life as follows: What do human collectives have that those socially complex baboons do not possess? Technical mediation – which we are now prepared to summarize: Technical action is a form of delegation that allows us to mobilize, during interactions, moves made elsewhere, earlier, by other actants. It is the presence of the past and distant, the presence of nonhuman characters, that frees us, precisely, from interactions (what we manage to do, right away, with our humble social skills). That we are not Machiavellian baboons we owe to technical action. (Latour 1994: 52)

It is not merely kin-selection, reciprocal altruism, the ability to walk upright, the shape of the hand, and big brains that transform the natural world into a human world. Contrary to what has always been assumed, it is not primarily language that makes the difference. Things such as stones and wood are also involved. Using a stone ax to chop wood is a program of action that cannot be ascribed to the intentionality of a Cartesian subject. Rather, it is an activity of a network created by two-sided links and interfaces that are held in place not only by human intention but by the affordances of nonhumans. An actor-network is an association of humans and non-humans which inherits qualities from all participating actants. It can, therefore, have a meaning that is independent of this particular hand, this particular ax, and this particular wood. The stone has a role to play as well as the hand and the wood. Technical mediation describes how these actors become enabled to do something specific, repeatable, and identifiable, that is, something that does not disappear the moment the stone is dropped and something that did not exist before. Without technical mediation, there is no functionality, specification, differentiation, and identity. Not every stone will do and not any hold on the stone will work. An unpracticed hand will fumble and drop the stone, or the wrong stone will not cut properly. Once the links have constructed the network, hand, stone, and wood all appear differently than before. They make up an actor-network that works to accomplish a specific task. A (pre)human is transformed into a hunter, a builder, a warrior, and so on. It is not the isolated, individual who can act, but instead “the prime mover of an action becomes a

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new, distributed, and nested series of practices whose sum might be made but only if we respect the mediating role of all the actants mobilized” (Latour 1994: 34). To become an actor by being translated and enrolled into an actor-network means to take on a certain role, to play a part, to be assigned a function that exists only because of the network. There were hunters and builders long before big brains evolved and language arose. It is the tools that make the builder, the weapon that makes the hunter. For a hunter or a builder to appear in the world, and for a world made up of identifiable, repeatable, and therefore meaningful activities to appear, what was necessary was not big brains but the affordances of things. The stone must transfer its qualities to the hand and the wood in the right way. What makes the fit “right” are the interfaces or links that translate and enroll actants into an actor-network. The links become “normative,” that is, they become rules or guidelines that govern who is to do what with what for what purpose. No single actor alone can arbitrarily decide what is right. The hand cannot force the stone to do what it wants if the stone is not doing its part to make the fit right.18 Interfaces, links, and associations are not things, but they do inherit the durability, stability, and continuity of things. When things get out of hand, hands that hold by means of interfaces have an evolutionary advantage over those that do not. The episodic and very limited representational connection that determines how apes perceive and handle objects is replaced by an actornetwork in which things remain with us even when we are no longer holding them in our hands. Big brains become useful. They can process links. This ability amounts to an evolutionary advantage over those animals that have trouble holding on to links. Technical mediation is a motor of evolution. New directions in cognitive science support the view that practical activities, as well as things located outside the brain in the environment, are a constitutive part of cognition. Just as the links and interfaces that construct an actor-network are distributed among the actants, cognition can be said to be “distributed” in the environment. It is therefore not a property of the brain alone. Non-Cartesian cognitive science claims that mind is “embodied,” “embedded,” “enacted,” and “extended.” As Rowlands puts it: The idea that mental processes are enacted is the idea that they are made up not just of neural processes but also of things that the organism does more generally – that they are constituted in part by the ways in which an organism acts on the world and the ways in which world, as a result, acts back on that organism. The idea that mental processes

18 | We will return to the discussion or the normativity of affordances below when we discuss the “network norms” that condition how social order in the digital age is effectively realized.

1. Information are extended is the idea that they are not located exclusively inside an organism’s head but extend out, in various ways, into the organism’s environment. (Rowlands 2010: 3)

To speak of cognition as distributed and extended into the environment locates mind in the links, associations, or interfaces between the organism and entities in the environment. It is these links and associations that hold on to us when we put the tools we are using aside. They transform an episodic simian experience into meaningful action. If these links are not things and if they do not exist as mental states in big brains what are they? What is the link that makes it possible to hold on to something once it has been let go of? It is important to emphasize that the interface, the relation, the mediation is not some third thing in-between the hand and the ax. It is the “fit” between them. The round end of the stone has to be formed in a certain way. The stone has to have a certain consistency and weight in order to be held at all and to be usable for a particular purpose. The hand must have a certain anatomical structure in order to wield a stone of this kind in the right way. What makes hand and stone into the stone ax wielded by a hunter or a builder is the links associating them in a particular way. These are the interfaces. Interfaces are not things in themselves. They do not lie around in the environment waiting for a certain ape with a big brain to stumble over them. Interfaces are relations. They have their own unique mode of being. We do not pick them up like stones or try to cut wood with them or throw them at enemies. Still, without them we cannot become hunters or builders or farmers and are no different from the baboons who have only their bodies to work with.

1.5 What is Information? If (pre)human tool users were not holding onto things in the same way that apes do, what were they holding onto? Posing the question in this way may be misleading. Recalling the methodological symmetry between humans and nonhumans which ANT recommends, we can turn the question around and ask, what was holding on to (pre)humans? Let us assume that what was holding on to all participants in actor-networks are the interfaces, relations, differences, and functions that arise from technical mediation. Although interfaces are not things, they nonetheless have their own specific mode of being. They survive the fleeting moment and the episodic here and now of simian activities. It is tempting to speculate that the specific mode of being of interfaces may be called “information.” The ontological status of information is notoriously perplexing. Norbert Wiener (1948) proclaimed that information is information and neither

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matter nor energy.19 Many have pointed out that this definition says more about what information is not, than what it is. Floridi (2004) also discusses this problem. He suggests that information might be thought of as “a special relation or interface between the world and its intelligent inhabitants” (574). What makes this relation special is the fact that without it there would be no intelligence and no relation between humans and the world at all. Relations are important. The world, as Heidegger pointed out, is a “Verweisungszusammenhang,” that is, a network of relations and references. From a linguistic perspective, Saussure applied a similar idea to language, which he claimed was nothing but a system of differences. Finally, Latour expresses this insight in his claim that “reality grows to precisely the same extent as the work done to become sensitive to differences” (2004: 85). It is, therefore, at least plausible to argue that the world is a meaningful world because it arises from, depends on, and consists of information. Latour (1993) has proposed a relational ontology in which whatever is, is because of the associations it has entered into with other actants in order to build an actor-network. The ontological status of relations is expressed by Latour in the principle of “irreduction.” Irreduction means that “nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (158). In other words, being is relational, that is, everything is a mediating mediator. Whatever might have happened in the evolution of Homo sapiens, something changed also for the world. Perhaps it could be said that a new order of being emerged. Being became mediation. The world is not made up of things, entities, substances, or whatever name we choose to designate individual entities or ourselves as either active subjects or passive objects. Instead, the world is made up of links, associations, interfaces, or relations, that is to say, information. Of course, this is not what meets the eye. Western philosophy has trained us to perceive a world made up primarily of things or substances, to which we can then add on various relations and so-called secondary qualities. First, there are things, and then they enter into relations with each other and also with knowing subjects. A relational ontology challenges these traditional convictions. Whenever 19 | See Wiener (1948) for the foundational ideas of cybernetics, which, together with Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949) have largely shaped how we think of information today. Of course, Wiener defined information as negative entropy and thought of it as well as its delivery via communication as foundational forces of order in the universe, material, biological, and cognitive/social. In the meantime, it has become almost necessary to distinguish data, information, and knowledge. From our point of view, data, bits and bytes, transistors, protocols, algorithms, code, textbooks, laboratories, etc. are all actors in complex networks from which they derive their current definitions by means of what we propose to define as information, namely, translating and enrolling of actors into networks.

1. Information

something appears as independent of associations, this is, according to ANT, an illusory effect of what Latour calls “black-boxing.” A black box is an activity whose many internal constitutive links and associations have become invisible and all we perceive is an external input and output. But every black box can be opened up to reveal the many associations, links, and interfaces that it consists of. The relational ontology of “irreduction” can be understood as an answer to the question of the origin and nature of information. In similar terms to Wiener’s famous statement about information being information and neither matter nor energy, we could say, information is irreduction and not matter or energy. We propose interpreting Latour’s principle of irreduction and what has been described as “technical mediation” as a theory of information. Technical mediation constructs information. Processes of translation and enrollment create information. This means that translation and enrollment, the establishing of those two-sided links that Floridi calls interfaces, are information processes. If we recall Bateson’s well-known definition of information as a difference that makes a difference, from an ANT perspective, information is a difference making a difference. The emphasis is on the process of information construction. Information arises from the mutual and symmetrical introduction of associations, interfaces, differences, and relations into the world. This is not merely something that happens in an already existing world of things. It is an ontological event. Information makes the world, that is, the human world. The human world is a world of meaning. Meaning, however, should not be equated with consciousness, mind, or language. Meaning is not imposed upon the world by a knowing subject.20 The world of meaning is constructed not by human subjects alone, but together with things. Things are not purely passive. They actively bring their affordances into the network. This is why non-Cartesian cognitive science can consider cognition to be distributed and mind to be extended into the environment. This is why the stone ax is a part of the human world and not a part of the simian world and why the human world is also inextricably bound up with nonhumans. This is a “mixed reality” of both humans and nonhumans.21 In other words, it is a world made up of information. This means that it is information that makes mind and cognition and not the other way around. It means that information is not something 20 | The General Definition of Information (GDI) arising from informatics and associated disciplines assumes that information = data + meaning. This describes the process of information construction from a linguistic perspective, that is, the distinction between syntax and semantics, whereby something (data) must be so composed (syntax) that it “means” something that can be expressed in signs. See Floridi (2010) for a discussion of this view. 21 | On the concept of “mixed reality” see Krieger/Belliger (2014: 127ff).

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added onto an already existing world of things by something called mind. Information is constitutive of and not constituted by human actors, who come into existence not as pure observers or autonomous rational subjects, but as actor-networks, that is, as hunters, farmers, builders, etc., who are already inseparably entwined with nonhumans.22

1.6 Information and Networks The theory of information we are proposing assumes that information does not originate in an exteriorization of human consciousness into the environment only to appear much later along the evolutionary road in the form of signs, symbols, and language. Information is neither specifically cognitive in the Cartesian sense, nor is it specifically human since it is equally constituted by the affordances of things. One important consequence of this view is that information cannot be an attribute attributed to any single actor and cannot be the exclusive property of any individual actor, whether human or nonhuman.23 Information exists in actor-networks; indeed, it is what makes networks possible. To speak of conditions of possibility recalls typical themes of transcendental principles. Information, however, should not be considered a transcendental condition of the possibility of networks, at least not in the sense of an ideal or 22 | Stiegler (1998) speaks of the “invention of the human” in which technical artifacts (Stiegler prefers the term “technics”), following Leroi-Gourhon, are an “exteriorization” (17) of individual experience which then allows this experience to influence the evolutionary development of the species. Technical artifacts make “epiphylogensis” (135) possible and thus the invention of the human in a “transductive” (Simondon) relation with technology, that is, the human and technics are co-constitutive. We follow Latour rather than Stiegler in assuming an active contribution of things in the constitution of meaning. The affordances of things are not an exteriorization of human cognition or intention. Nor are they in terms of cognitive science merely an “off-loading” of cognition onto otherwise non-cognitive, purely passive objects in the environment. Stiegler is concerned with a genealogy of the “human” within modern epistemic alternatives of either empiricism or transcendental reflection. Following Latour, we are concerned with a theory of information independent of modern epistemological dichotomies. For a historical review of contemporary philosophy of technology as well as a critique of Stiegler’s position see Bradley (2011). 23 | As we will discuss later in terms of publicy and governance, this definition of information brings information much closer to a public good, a common-pool resource, or as Rose (1998) has proposed, a “limited common property” than to something that could become private property. Rose discusses the inadequacies of contemporary property law from the perspective of information and cyberspace. For an attempt to reassert traditional private property law in the digital age see Fairfield (2017).

1. Information

virtual dimension of reality somehow laid over the physical enabling it to have meaning. This would lead us back to assuming some kind of transcendental subjectivity. If we were to somehow strip away all information, the network and everything that it constitutes would also disappear and we would be back in the situation of baboons. The stone ax would disappear and we would be left with episodic, simian experience. We would not find ourselves in the position of Kant contemplating pure reason. Without information, there would be only the apes. In distinction to the world of apes, human reality is a networked reality. This kind of reality we have described in terms of links, associations, and interfaces. As a two-sided link or an interface, information constructs networks. Another way to put this is to say that the actor is the network. This at once explains Floridi’s notion of the “infosphere,” that is, an informational realm of being in which humans are said to exist, as well as the idea that humans are themselves “inforgs,” informational organisms. These are terms describing a networked reality, that is, a reality that is based on and originates from relations. This is why subjectivity, cognition, agency, and identity cannot be thought of as bounded unities. This is important because, as we shall see, the notion of the human subject as a bounded unity is the philosophical foundation of privacy theory. Instead of bounded individuals, what the infosphere consists of is distributed actor-networks.24 Networks demand not only that cognition, agency, and identity be distributed, but that questions of sovereignty, property, ownership, control, and regulation be settled on a different basis than is the case for closed systems and bounded unities. The (pre)human wielder of a stone ax is constituted by information. The evolution of Homo sapiens is the story of the emergence over many hundreds of thousands of years of an actor constituted by information. It is important for our purposes to note that the informational self exists as information, but does not “own” information. Information is distributed throughout the network. The wielder of the stone ax, whoever he or she might be, is not alone the informational self. Information belongs to the hand as much as to the stone and the wood.25 It is precisely for this reason that humans are different from 24 | This view is diametrically opposed to “mentalism” in all its forms. “Mentalism is the view that there are self-contained mental states (e.g. beliefs or emotions) that underlie human actions – that there is a dualism between the mind and the world, and that there is an external relation between mental states and observable actions, such that private mental states cause the actions that other people can see” (Brinkmann 2018: 3). 25 | We differ from Floridi’s idea of information as constitutive of a unique individual in the same way as a particular human body does. Floridi’s view is influenced by the JudeoChristian-existentialist notion of a spatially/temporally/spiritually bounded individual. Information, however, is not mine in the same sense in which my body is mine. As noted above, information is much more like a common good or a common-pool resource than

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apes. The fossil record shows that information came first, before humans. What makes Homo sapiens sapiens is information. Information sets the evolutionary stage to select big brains. But, of course, once big brains appear, many more links can be established than previously possible. Language and signs appear on the scaffold that tool use over many hundreds of thousands of years erected.26 Signs, symbols, and language link the links and compress and extend information way beyond physical objects. Information, however, was not created only after the big brains appeared and only by use of language. To speak about information is to speak about a network. It is the network and not the individual (pre)human that is the actor, an actor that is capable of chopping wood, hunting animals, etc. The gap between an ape picking up a stone and using it to break open a coconut and a human using a stone ax is filled by hundreds of thousands of generations in which (pre)humans and things mutually and symmetrically influenced each other to create links, fits, and interfaces that didn’t disappear each time a stone was dropped. The emergence of the infosphere, to use Floridi’s term, needed not only apes with ever bigger brains but a myriad of things with their own affordances. The gap between the first hominid that used a stone tool and modern technologies that condition every aspect of life in today’s global network society is filled with hundreds of thousands of years of mutual influencing, symmetrical mediation, of doing, testing, adapting, and translating.27 What we do not see when we look back into the fossil record or look something that can be privately owned. We will argue that this implies that information would not automatically suffer the fate of the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968) without strong government regulation. On the contrary, the view of information we are proposing allows for understanding social order in terms similar to the development of “self-organizing resource governance regimes” (Ostrom 1990) or what we will call network publicy governance. 26 | Stout and Chaminade (2012: 82) conclude their review of recent research on the relation of stone tools to the evolution of language as follows: “Accumulating evidence is increasingly supportive of technological hypotheses of language origins, and goes a long way towards allaying concerns that the similarity in the hierarchical, combinatorial organization of the two domains is a superficial one or that the ‘imitative‘ learning of toolmaking skills is fundamentally distinct from intentional communication.” 27 | Based on recent work done under the title of “New Materialism,” “Material Culture Studies,” “Thing Theory,” as well as ANT, Hodder (2012) has argued for speaking of “entanglements” instead of networks. In a critique of Latour’s concept of network, he emphasizes “dependencies” as foundational associations between humans and nonhumans. Entanglements are mutual dependencies between humans and things, things and things, things and humans, and humans and humans. The concept of dependence, however, is only meaningful with regard to the possibility of independence.

1. Information

over the wall of the zoo into the monkey cage, is the process of adding link to link, fit to fit, and relation to relation in order to build a world step by step out of ever longer and more complex chains of translations, enrollments, associations, or in short, information. This gives us the feeling that we are standing on one side of an unbridgeable chasm between human and animal or society and nature. It also gives rise to the idea that humans, despite the distributed and extended character of cognition, agency, and identity are clearly bounded individuals who owe their existence to their big brains, their linguistic abilities, and their free will alone.28 It becomes quite easy for these rational, autonomous individuals to assume that information, or at least some information, belongs entirely, exclusively, and even “constitutively” to themselves alone and therefore defines an inviolable domain of privacy. The question that we have attempted to raise is: How can I be my information when information exists only in a network and only by means of the mutual agency of all participants in the network? Perhaps I can be my information only if information is not exclusively mine but instead belongs to a hybrid actor made up of many heterogeneous participants. Our simple phenomenology of the stone ax intends to show that information belongs to the network and not to any of the actants in the network. In other words, my Facebook profile does not belong to me alone. It is an effect of a complex network of digital infrastructures, software, algorithms, smartphones with cameras, business plans, venture capital, government regulation, gregariousness if not exhibitionism, and much more. The same can be said of my genomic data, my racial or ethnic identity, my financial data, my social security number, my religious affiliation, my sexual preferences, my medical data, and even my name, which, the last time I checked in Google, I found to be shared with at least several hundred other people on the planet. The question we now turn to is: What does this mean for privacy and for the attempt to define freedom and human dignity in terms of information?

From the perspective of ANT, that is, the relational ontology of irreduction and our concept of information, this would presuppose the possibility of a reducible, relationfree reality and thus would surreptitiously reinstate an ontology of substance. 28 | For a recent attempt to describe the anthropological features that define what is distinctively human such as self-transcendence, adaptation, responsibility, language, reflexivity, etc. and to define a universalistic principle of humanity against trans- and posthumanism see Chernilo (2017).

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2. The Privacy Paradox

Perhaps the most important legacy of Foucault and postmodernism is to have made the business of critique much more difficult and complicated than it was back in the days when all workers wore white hats and all capitalists black. Today one has become wary of seeing any cultural, social, or political value as simply good in itself and worthy of protection, without investigating the extent to which it participates, however unwittingly, in a larger regime of a certain kind of knowledge and power. Hegel long ago pointed out that the master and the slave need each other. Each helps to make the other who he/she is. They work together in order to construct and maintain a certain regime of knowledge and power without which neither of them could exist.1 This is paradoxical. That the master needs the slave makes the slave into the master and the master becomes a slave. For Hegel, this was a dialectical contradiction that drove the logical-historical movement of Geist to fulfillment and completion. Postmodernism, of course, does not share Hegel’s optimism that contradictions will be resolved by progress or even Marx’s faith in revolution. What is left is unresolved contradiction, or in other words, a paradoxical complementarity, or a never-ending struggle of opposites. This means that critique cannot escape falling into its opposite when it takes sides and tries to single out the bad guys and champion the good guys. The bad are always in some ways good and the good are always in some ways bad. Postmodernism has left critical theory with the task of showing the many complex interdependencies that constitute a society riddled by contradictions that no dialectic will resolve. It may seem that this situation means the end of critique. This is indeed true in the sense of traditional critical theory that assumed a neutral observer and the possibility of objective, value-free knowledge. Perhaps the lesson that postmodernism has 1 | For Foucault “[Power] is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.” (Foucault 1982: 789).

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taught us is that social theory must find a new way of constructing knowledge beyond the binary oppositions that modernity was built upon. That this is a hard lesson to learn is illustrated by the lengthy report of the Committee on Privacy in the Information Age, Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age.2 Admittedly, the Committee does not understand its mission to be the elaboration of critical social theory. Nonetheless, it aims to “raise awareness of the spider web of connectedness among the actions we take, the policies we pass, the expectations we change, the ‘flip side’ of impacts policies have on privacy.” The aim of the Committee is to “paint a big picture that would sketch the contours of the full set of interactions and tradeoffs” and “take into account changes in technology, business, government, and other organizational demand for and supply of personal information…” (20). The upshot of this ambitious program is that privacy as an undeniable and inalienable personal and social value that demands to be protected by law. On the international level, this view is echoed in the Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age (2014), which declares that “there is universal recognition of the fundamental importance, and enduring relevance, of the right of privacy and of the need to ensure that it is safeguarded, in law and in practice” (5). The American Committee on Privacy in the Information Age (Waldo et al. 2007) does not go this far. The Committee holds the view proposed by the United Nations and the European Union, which sees privacy as an absolute value and a right in itself, to be “fundamentalist” (66) and to lead to the difficult position that “if privacy is an intrinsic (and absolute) good, then there are no cases in which any lack of privacy can be justified” (66).3 Since it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find cases in which certain information is absolutely or intrinsically private and can 2 | Ed. by J. Waldo, H. S. Lin, L. I. Millett, National Research Council (2007), hereafter cited as Waldo et al. (2007) or simply, the Committee. 3 | Floridi (2005; 2006; 2014; 2016) is a staunch supporter of the fundamentalist view. He proposes an “ontological interpretation of informational privacy” which claims that privacy is an absolute, intrinsic, and non-instrumental value. Floridi defines human beings as “constituted” by information. Humans are informational organisms, or “inforgs.” They do not merely have personal information, they are “their” information and therefore any transfer or use of this information is automatically a violation of privacy. The problem with this fundamentalist view of privacy is not that people are not their information, but that the information they are is not their own. Instead, as we have argued above, personal information is constituted in heterogeneous networks in which not only cognition, but also agency and identity are distributed. In short, there is a contradiction between the concept of information considered as a network effect and the modern Western idea of the bounded and autonomous individual. Floridi sees his theory as a philosophical justification of the strong position on privacy taken by the

2. The Privacy Paradox

under no circumstances be shared, the Committee favors the “more common view” that holds privacy “to be of instrumental value rather than intrinsic value…,” that is, privacy “sustains, promotes, and protects other things that we value” (66). These other values, which privacy is supposed to serve and from which it derives its value are usually defined as property, bodily security, freedom, autonomy, self-determination, equality, and dignity. Whether privacy is defined as an intrinsic value or as an instrumental value, the underlying assumption of both views is that whatever may be wrong with society, privacy is not part of the problem. It is the solution. Privacy is a solution that must at all cost be defended against threats arising from the digital transformation of the 21st Century.4 This raises at least two important questions. What is the value of privacy for individuals and society? Why has privacy become a central issue in attempting to understand the digital transformation and the advent of a global network society?5 The answer to the question concerning the value of privacy is acknowledged by all to be extremely difficult. The reason for this is that there is no such thing as privacy in general, abstracted from the many different contexts in which what is seen as the loss of privacy might lead to harms for persons and society. It is no accident that the Committee report formulates this situation as a paradox stating that privacy “is an ill-defined but apparently well-understood concept” (21). Although the concept of privacy is said to be “well-understood,” the report admits that “specifying the concept in a way that meets with universal consensus is a difficult if not impossible task…” (21). Accordingly, the Committee finds that “Privacy is an important value to be maintained and protected, although it is not an absolute good in itself” (308). Instead of basing the value of privacy on an absolute good as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well European Union and the Declaration of Human Rights. We will return to the difficluties of this view below. 4 | Swire (2013: 848) cites four developments impacting the privacy discussion: “First, social networks such as Facebook enormously increase the quantity and variety of information online about many individuals. Second, the pervasiveness of smartphones and other mobile computing devices increases the usefulness of computing in our daily lives, while also leaving detailed records of our location and other activities. Third, online behavioral advertising has rebounded from a low level a decade ago to become a large industry that gathers and acts on detailed records of individuals’ activities across multiple sites. Fourth, the emergence of cloud computing means that far more of our personal information is stored in remote data centers, often in other countries.” To this list should now be added the entire circle of issues surrounding surveillance, Internet of Things, and big data analytics. 5 | A short historical review of the development of privacy legislation in America and Europe can be found in Swire (2013).

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as the OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy (1980/2013) and also the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2009) – which in Art. 8 for the first time explicitly interprets this right in terms of “data protection” – and as does the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR 2016), the Committee takes the more pragmatic route of offering a list of concrete examples that are intended to illustrate the value of privacy by showing the adverse effects or harms that may come from its loss.6

2.1 Misuse of Personal Information A major harm arising from the loss of privacy arises from crimes such as fraud, identity theft, stalking, as well as defamation, slander, libel, blackmail, and extortion. If personal information such as name, address, telephone number, social security or credit card number, movie and reading lists, photos, videos, religious affiliation, race, sexual preferences, etc. become accessible or are stolen, this can harm individuals. Even if a data breach does not make personal information available freely, this can nonetheless cause real harm, whether financial or social. In the case of a data breach, simply knowing that hackers or unauthorized persons have gained access to personal information can cause anxiety and foster mistrust in the institutions that have been hacked. Misusing information of any kind to hurt people in any way is wrong and in many cases is subject to legal sanctions. With regard to how personal information is obtained, while no one would dispute that hacking is harmful, it is at least questionable if this is primarily a privacy issue. Whether burglary or hacking, stealing something from somebody or misusing information to cause harm is in the first place a crime and not a violation of privacy.7 Identity theft, blackmail, extortion, 6 | In general, this leads to what may be termed as “risk-based approach to privacy.” See CLPL (2014) for a European outline of risk-based privacy concerns and a definition of “harm” as “any damage, injury or negative impact−whether tangible or intangible, economic, non-economic or reputational—to an individual that may flow from the processing of personal data” (2). 7 | Assumed harms to reputation arising from information made public were at the origin of the idea of a “right to privacy” in the famous Warren and Brandeis paper (1890). As specified in the Katz decision, this depends upon “reasonable expectation” of privacy. Nissenbaum (2004) has shown that this in turn depends upon the social context in which stakeholders may or may not have conflicting expectations about what privacy means. Since expectations in today’s world are varied and quickly changing, determining privacy violations would mean asking all stakeholders about their expectations and then attempting to decide which of these might be considered by all to be “reasonable.” Even if an agreement could be reached, it would be tenuous, since expectations can change quickly depending upon technological developments and social change.

2. The Privacy Paradox

libel, slander, etc. are crimes in themselves because they violate laws protecting property, reputation, and other rights.8 It seems beside the point and at best redundant to add a violation of the right to privacy to the already serious crimes of theft, fraud, extortion, or slander. In addition to this, it can be argued that the issue in cases such as these is much rather data and information security than privacy. The problem of data and information security is twofold. On the one hand, there is the negligence and irresponsibility of hardware producers, software developers, internet service providers, data centers, organizations of all kinds and at all levels, and individual users that allow hackers or unauthorized persons relatively easy access to personal data.9 This aspect is further exacerbated by the lack of incentives to ensure security and the high costs involved. On the other hand, there is a problem of inadequate regulatory, legal, and law enforcement measures which would deter the theft and misuse of data. Problems of data security are not in the first place privacy problems. Data is what needs to be protected and not privacy, whereby “data protection” does not necessarily mean the restriction of access to data or ensuring authorized control, but more importantly, identification and prosecution of misuse of information. Even information that has been disclosed by consent can be misused, and absolute control is probably an impossible ideal. By focusing on privacy, regardless of whether privacy is understood to reside in restricted access or consent, the immense problem of inadequate data security coupled with legal unclarity about what constitutes misuse of information and ineffective sanctions is overlooked or minimized. This means that in the case of privacy harms resulting from the misuse of information such as identity theft, fraud, extortion, or slander, the “value” of privacy seems, in the end, to lie in diverting attention from the real problems, that is, problems of data security and weak deterrents and sanctions. The problem is not that information is available, but that it is misused. In a technical, legal, and social context in which misuse is largely accepted as inevitable, privacy participates inadvertently in maintaining the status quo. We demand privacy but forget about demanding effective sanctions for misuse of information. For example, instead of recommending enforceable accountability and data security, the Committee seems to assume that lawmakers, regulators, and courts need not go after those who negligently allow hackers access, or even the hackers themselves. The Committee 8 | See for example Thompson (1984) for an extensive defense of the idea that privacy rights are derived from other rights. 9 | In the face of increasing damage both financial and social caused by cybercrime, calls for “privacy by design” or “privacy-enhancing-technologies” have become louder without, however, resulting in legally binding or even effective security standards or technologies.

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considers privacy to be “a matter of individuals’ control over information about themselves” (Waldo et al., 69) and therefore individuals are told to beware of giving out any personal information. Quite apart from the fact that it is increasingly difficult to participate in any social activity without giving away personal information, it could be concluded that the harms that are said to arise from loss of privacy including loss of trust seem to come more from lack of accountability, lack of clear legal sanctions, an unwillingness to effectively prevent or prosecute cyber criminality, and in general, from an avoidance of the real issues facing the network society.10

2.2 Sur veillance A further example of the value of privacy cited by the Committee lies in the common belief that “under public surveillance, many people change their behavior” (Waldo et al. 2007: 309). This often cited “chilling effect” (310) of surveillance, which goes back at least to John Stuart Mills’ defense of privacy as individuality and freedom to make “experiments in living” (On Liberty), means that when people are observed by others, this “often has the effect of influencing the behavior of people in the direction of greater conformity and homogeneity” (309).11 In this view, privacy has not only a personal value, but it protects society against a suffocating conformism and thus “supports many democratic social values, such as the right to freely associate, the embrace of social diversity, and even the use of secret ballots in support of free elections” (310). Although practically no one would disagree with legal scholar Julie Cohen’s (2013: 1905) claim that “privacy shelters dynamic, emergent subjectivity from the efforts of commercial and government actors to render individuals and communities

10 | On the many complex issues in the area of cyber security and privacy see the ongoing discussion in IEEE Security & Privacy and the report “Companies, digital transformation and information privacy: the next step” (2016) from The Economist Intelligence Unit. For a discussion of ethical issues see “Network Publicy Governance and Cyber Security” (Blogpost http://interpretingnetworks.ch/network-publicy-governance-and-cyber-security/). 11 | In a similar vein, Erving Gofman’s dramaturgical theory of social identity as role-playing requires that social actors have access to a “backstage” where they are hidden from view and can experiment with roles, prepare for social performances, and change roles to fit different contexts. Meyrowitz (1990) argues, however, that privacy is a subjective, social, cultural, and historical dimension of social existence and that therefore the dramaturgical notion of the backstage cannot be equated with any particular understanding of privacy.

2. The Privacy Paradox

fixed, transparent, and predictable,” the question can be raised of whether it is the best way to do so.12 How can politically effective free associations, the acceptance of diversity, and free elections be guaranteed by meeting anonymously in secret places and disguising one’s religious beliefs, gender, sexual preferences, subcultural affinities, family status, disabilities, national origin, etc. in public? Furthermore, can we truly speak of free elections and democratic processes, when the only way to avoid political retribution and coercion is by means of secrecy? Has society not learned to “embrace diversity” by just the opposite of secrecy? If women, homosexuals, minorities, and other disenfranchised or marginalized groups had remained in hiding, quietly sitting at the back of the bus, and not carrying their differences into the public arena and demanding recognition and respect, racism, bigotry, discrimination, and inequality would have remained unchallenged. Justice and equality have not been attained in any society by means of secrecy and privacy. On the contrary, only by “coming out” have minorities been able to gain recognition and equality before the law. It may well be that human dignity, which is often cited as the foundation of privacy along with freedom and autonomy, demands that one does not attempt to disguise who one is and how one is different from others. Neomi Rao (2011) has pointed out that acknowledging the fundamental value of human dignity “creates a political demand for the state and other individuals to accept and approve of one’s lifestyle and personal choices” (243). How can this ever happen when all experiments with life, as Mill put it, are conducted in secret spaces? Privacy in the sense of disguising oneself and withholding information about race, religion, sexual preference, etc. does not further human dignity but works to prevent it from being socially and politically recognized. Citing Taylor’s influential work on the importance of recognition as a basis for human dignity and the idea of a “politics of difference” (Taylor 1994) Rao argues: The ‘politics of difference’ relates to individuals in their particularity and, sometimes, to the racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural groups to which they belong. Accordingly, 12 | Although Cohen (2012; 2013) emphasizes the social construction of subjectivity, she nonetheless falls back on the modern antagonism between agency and structure in order to legitimate the right to privacy. She seems unable to envision a society in which creativity and innovation are based on connectivity, the flow of information, communication, participation, and transparency instead of secrecy. As she puts it, “gaps” or “interstices” in information flow create safe harbors for privacy and therefore creativity. This rather existentialist view unnecessarily opposes individual to society and freedom to information. For a critique and a corrective of this widespread position see Balkin (2004; 2013), who emphasizes the right to free expression based on access to information as essential to a “democratic culture.”

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Network Publicy Governance this type of recognition is often connected to multiculturalism, nationalism, and group identity generally. Recognition of difference depends upon a conception of the person as an essential part of a community. In this view, one can have dignity and a sense of self only through recognition by the broader society. Accordingly, recognition matters tremendously and is important in itself. Many constitutional courts have associated dignity with this form of recognition. Dignity as recognition focuses on how a community values and validates the unique personality and choices of individuals and groups within society. (Rao 2011: 244)

Contrary to what most privacy advocates claim, it may well be that values such as freedom, autonomy, and human dignity rest more upon the fundamental value of free expression than privacy and require access to information, transparency, open communication, and participation in public culture instead of secrecy and disguise. The history of the struggle for equality and justice shows that the right to privacy is not the only right that supports democracy. Legal scholar, Jack Balkin (2004; 2013) has argued for the primacy of the right to free speech for guaranteeing a democratic culture. This means that it is not a privacy-oriented policy of creating gaps in information, or even of “obfuscating” information in a futile attempt at disguise, but much rather it is an information and knowledge policy that supports access to information, transparency, and information usage that creates the foundation for freedom and human dignity. Making it clear that free speech should be understood in the broad sense of all forms of participation in culture and not merely political speech Balkin writes: The purpose of freedom of speech … is to promote a democratic culture. A democratic culture is more than representative institutions of democracy, and it is more than deliberation about public issues. Rather, a democratic culture is a culture in which individuals have a fair opportunity to participate in the forms of meaning making that constitute them as individuals. Democratic culture is about individual liberty as well as collective self-governance; it is about each individual’s ability to participate in the production and distribution of culture. (Balkin 2004: 3)13

In addition to this, Peter Swire (2012) has argued for “data empowerment” instead of “data protection” on the basis of a fundamental right to free association. Swire points out that advocates of strong privacy regulations often attempt to frame the discussion as an opposition between foundational rights on the one side versus utilitarian gains on the other. Privacy advocates argue that privacy is a basic right, whereas possible gains from unrestricted access to information are only of a utilitarian nature, for example, commercial profits, 13 | For an attempt to reconcile contradictions between privacy and free speech see Richards (2005).

2. The Privacy Paradox

enhanced security, or efficiency. Weighing basic rights against utilitarian advantages in this way always tilts the scales towards the side of basic rights. Swire disputes this approach. He argues that access to information and the ability to use it can also be seen as a basic right and not merely as a means of gaining utilitarian advantages. Citing the right to freedom of association afforded by social networks, he argues: By recognizing the centrality of freedom of association to social networking, we realize that the debates are also rights vs. rights. For a new use of data, there are possible violations of the right of privacy. For a new restriction on data use, there are possible violations of the right to freedom of association. (Swire 2102: 138)14

The ability to freely produce, access, transform, and distribute information, which is what the rights to free speech as well as free association guarantee, and which also lies at the basis of the interpretation of human dignity as recognition, also challenges the common assumption that surveillance leads to conformism. Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon, a prison in which all inmates are subjected to observation from a central tower, but themselves cannot see whether they are being observed or not has dominated assumptions about the effects of surveillance for decades.15 Bentham theorized that the prisoners would come to internalize the behavioral expectations of the observers, even if they were not actually being observed. This model and metaphor of what surveillance means has become as ubiquitous in social theory as is surveillance itself in reality.16 It may be that some kinds of surveillance have a chilling effect on some people, but it may well be that for many others it does not. How otherwise can we explain the everywhere visible celebration of diversity in today’s world under today’s equally ubiquitous regime of surveillance? At no 14 | The debate between privacy advocates and proponents of free speech and freedom of association is not new. There are three major positions: 1) Privacy is a fundamental right and has priority over free speech and freedom of association; 2) all three rights are equal and must be balanced against one another; 3) freedom of speech has priority over privacy rights. It is not our intention to review this debate here. Instead, we wish to focus on the question of the extent to which the digital transformation has set new terms for the debate and opened up new possibilities for understanding these opposing rights. Interestingly, it is only the privacy advocates who seem to find in new media above all a threat and not a blessing. 15 | See Foucault (1975). 16 | For a current review of surveillance studies see Lyon (2006). Barnard-Wills (2012) analyzes surveillance with regard to social identity construction and Mann (2016) argues that surveillance has long ceased to be merely a top-down affair and is distributed throughout all levels of society and among many different social actors.

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time in the history of the world has surveillance become as widespread as it is today. One would expect complete conformism and social homogeneity. Quite the opposite is the case. One only needs to point to city-cams, home webcams, body-cams, drones, Reality TV, Facebook, YouTube, CCTV, Instagram, Blogs, remixing, “culture jamming” (Day 2016), and many other forms in which observation is being transformed into free self-expression in order to see that diversity – not only despite surveillance, but because of it – is everywhere. At no time in history have so many non-conformists come to the fore to claim equal rights, recognition, and social acceptance.17 And at no time in history has nonconformism been so successful. If surveillance had the alleged chilling effect that would demand defense of privacy, we should expect exactly the opposite of what we are witnessing today. Commenting on today’s ubiquitous surveillance. John Lyon (2012: 15) points out that not “not self-repression, but self-expression characterizes this surveillance, which, importantly is on the terms of the watched not the watcher.” Mann (2016) has pointed out that there are many different types of “veillance” including not only surveillance, or watching over, but also sousveillance, that is, watching from bottom up, to “equiveillance,” or the situation in which everyone is watching everyone.18 Although there are CCTV cameras on every street corner and in every building, everyone also has their smartphone watching the watchers, recording police activities, documenting corporate violations of environmental regulations, etc. Perhaps Facebook has replaced the Panopticon as the central metaphor for understanding “veillance” in the global network society and perhaps it is time to give up the idea that autonomy, freedom, and dignity depend on secrecy, withholding information, and hiding from public view. Emphasizing only one form of veillance and casting the role of information exclusively as a tool of oppression and exploitation in the hands of the powerful, assumes that the weak can only be protected by blocking flows of information. This is something that powerful actors have always been good at. Contrary to its purpose, privacy unwittingly supports and maintains a hypocritical society in which stereotyping, social ostracism, and discrimination are accepted as unchangeable facts. Instead of recommending that people attempt to disguise who they are in order to avoid ostracism, discrimination, and repression, the Committee could have recommended not only stronger laws and more effective measures against discrimination, but also the gathering and using of 17 | One could summarize this celebration of diversity under the title of “postmodernism” and the politics of recognition. 18 | As Mann (2016: 2) puts it: “Surveillance happens when we’re being watched and sousveillance happens when we do the watching. And with social networking, we now have co-veillance (side-to-side watching, e.g. when people watch each other). Thus, we must think of Veillance in a broader sense beyond merely Surveillance.”

2. The Privacy Paradox

even more personal information in order to identify needs and possibilities to alleviate them. The “panoptic sort” (Gandy 1993) is only problematic because it is not really panoptic, that is, not all information is being gathered and used when profiling people. The more one knows about someone the less can they be classified and identified by such highly visible and grossly inaccurate stereotypes as gender, religious affiliation, race, etc. Profiling, or assigning group identities on the basis of personal information, becomes less discriminative the more – and of course the better – information is used and the smaller the set becomes. Micro-profiling on the basis of big data analytics could in principle go down to a set of one, which automatically eliminates all stereotypes.19 Indeed, it could be argued that the “inviolate personality” that Warren and Brandeis were attempted to protect by means of legally defining privacy, may be better protected by open access to complete and reliable information. It is simply not true that the more information about someone that is available, the less this person can be authentic, autonomous, and free. If we accept Floridi’s claim (2006; 2016) that humans are constituted by information, then it would seem that one could draw exactly the opposite conclusion from this as does Floridi himself, namely, the more we share information the more human we become. There is no reason to assume that secrecy, disguise, and the withholding of information contribute to freedom and human dignity.20 Despite the obvious weaknesses of the argument for privacy in the name of creativity, there is no question that surveillance by government, industry, or even by the neighbors poses a threat. The question at issue, however, is whether privacy is the best way to deal with this threat. Emphasizing the value of privacy amounts often to a general acceptance of secrecy by all parties to society. This includes governments and large corporations. Privacy cuts both ways. The advantages that individuals might gain from rights to privacy must be weighed against uses of privacy to sustain a regime of secrecy that in the 19 | O’Neil (2916) points out that one must also consider the quality of the data, the algorithms, models, tweaking, etc. Sandvig et al. (2014) point to the need for accountability and auditing of algorithms. These are not arguments for privacy, but for more and better data processing. 20 | When Floridi writes that “personal information plays a constitutive role of who I am and can become” (2016: 2), this may be true without implying that this information must be disguised, withheld, or otherwise not communicated or made available. Information that makes a person unique is useless and ineffective when not communicated. If we argue instead that it is not the information itself that counts, but the choice to disclose or not to disclose, then we have lost the informational self and opted for a self that is constituted alone by choices, by free will. This option, however, leads directly into the paradox of absolute freedom, namely, one can choose to be unfree, choose not to be able to choose.

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end does more to enhance government and corporate power than individual liberties could do to balance them out.21 If we want to have a society that values innovation, diversity, and non-conformism, then values such as freedom of speech, access to information, and the right to use information are perhaps more important than privacy.22 A third example of the value of privacy in the area of surveillance that is cited by the Committee is harm that is done by workplace surveillance. Workers are not trusted and “are treated like children” (310) which leads to dissatisfaction, stress, and loss of productivity.23 Although there are many different reasons for employee monitoring, such as performance tracking, compliance, security, business intelligence, business analytics, and even employee well-being, the problem addressed by the Committee is real. The value of privacy in this view lies in preventing workers from being reduced to mere functions that can be constantly monitored for efficiency. The value of privacy in this situation is based on the assumption that human dignity, respect, freedom, and a certain degree of autonomy can only be achieved by invisibility. Not being observed amounts to freedom from sanctions. If human dignity can only be preserved outside of observable activity, one must ask whether the real problem does not lie in an exploitative economic system instead of loss of privacy. To locate the value of privacy in maintaining blind spots amounts to instrumentalizing privacy as a surreptitious support of dehumanizing labor. As long as there are sufficient blind spots allowing workers to become invisible for certain periods of time during the workday, the present situation can be tolerated. If workers are allowed to disappear, to have islands of freedom and autonomy, if only to smoke a cigarette in the bathroom, then the system need not be fundamentally called into question and changed. Here again, privacy seems to be a value precisely because it makes the system livable without challenging its basic 21  |  Despite the claims of internet anarchists, fostering a culture of secrecy and anonymity by maintaining technologies such as the Tor browser, Bitcoin, and the Dark Web seem to tip the balance of power even more to the side of governments and criminal networks who are their principle users. See http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40810771. 22 | This is the claim of writers such as Balkin (2008; 2012; 2013; 2016) and Swire (2012; 2014). 23 | A Washington Post review (http://www.washingtonpost.stfi.re/news/the-switch/ wp/2016/08/05/are-per formance-monitoring-wearables-an-af front-to-workersr ig ht s/?sf=la x zopd&ut m _campaig n=buf fer&ut m _content=buf fer 3eca6&ut m _ medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&wpisrc=nl_tech&wpmm=1#aa) and a recent Rackspace study (http://www.rackspace.co.uk/sites/default/files/Human%20Cloud% 20at%20Work.pdf) show the opposite. Productivity goes up and job satisfaction as well. See also McKinsey http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckins ey-analytics/our-insights/how-advanced-analytics-can-drive-productivity.

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inhumanity. Instead of warning against workplace surveillance, the Committee could have warned against inhuman labor conditions which are the reason why workplace surveillance can become problematic in the first place. By valuing and protecting privacy, a situation of exploitative labor remains stable and need not be questioned.

2.3 Secrecy The Committee also finds a value for privacy in secret voting. This is because “a voter without privacy is subject to coercion” (310). If those in power discover that a particular person does not vote the way they are expected to, this person could be subjected to coercion or retribution. Coercion and retribution are obvious abuses of political and economic power. In the past, when clear laws against this kind of abuse of power and effective accountability were not yet in place, privacy in the form of secret voting supported democracy. The problem, however, is not in the first place a problem of privacy. The problem is abuse of political and economic power. Upholding the value of privacy as a way of escaping coercion and retribution amounts to accepting the abuse of power as a fact that cannot be changed. Again, it seems that the value of privacy lies in its complicity with a corrupt political system and an inadequate system of justice. What is needed is not more privacy, but clear laws, effective accountability, and transparency, instead of secrecy, and this on all levels.24 It should be remembered that perhaps the most important political act is not voting, but speaking up publicly and entering into a debate on issues affecting the community. This is the exact opposite of secrecy, of withholding information, and of disguising oneself from public view. Public responsibility and political engagement have less to do with privacy than with open communication, participation, transparency, and authenticity. Paradoxically, privacy tends to undermine the democratic political processes it is supposed to support. A quick glance at history can help explain why privacy has become so complicated. Democratic political procedures emerged in the West on the basis of distinguishing the private from the public and locating the arena of political action in the public sphere. So-called “private” interests were allowed free reign in the economic sphere but seen as fundamentally conflicting with the public good. The public realm has come to be understood as diametrically opposed to the private. This means that the privacy paradox is deeply rooted in Western 24 | Against Brunton and Nissenbaum’s (2015) support for privacy as “obfuscation,” which is basically using false information in order to disguise who one is, Richards and Hartzog (2017: 1197) argue that “The sustainable path to fixing a broken world is through social movements, participation in the democratic political process, and the rule of law.”

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political thought. On the one hand, freedom of expression, as well as freedom of association which are the basis of democratic processes, require coming out into the open, showing who one is, and saying publicly what one believes. On the other hand, it is claimed that these beliefs can only be freely developed in private, under the protective mantle of secrecy, and apart from public scrutiny. On the one hand, autonomy, freedom, and self-determination are only socially and politically meaningful in public, but on the other hand, they are thought to be possible only in private. This dilemma rests on the assumption that there is an ontological distinction between individual and society. The individual is, as the term itself suggests, non-divisible, unitary, clearly bounded on all sides, indeed, a “closed system.” Society is essentially the opposite, an open system in which all can participate. Nonetheless, the political Leviathan of modern nation-states, erected upon linguistically and culturally distinct peoples, is modeled upon the bounded and sovereign individual. For both individual and society in the modern age, the most important thing is boundaries, that is, the distinction between self and other. We know who we are both as individuals and as nations when we know who we are not.25 This casts the problem of privacy into a problem of “boundary maintenance.” The basic assumption behind the dominant “individualistic” privacy discourse is that identity is constituted by boundaries.26 To the extent that being a part of a collective compromises individual boundaries, the individual is constrained to attempt to maintain his or her own identity in opposition to the community. As the individual is opposed to the collective, so is the private opposed to the public. The private individual is always cast in an adversarial or conflictual role over against society and social relations. Modern social and political theory has accepted this construction and thus burdened itself with the impossible task of attempting to explain how isolated individuals can come together to form a society consisting of organizations and political institutions. The mythical social contract magically bridges the gap. The science of society, sociology, is born of the distinction between micro individuals and what Durkheim called “social facts,” that is, macro structures such as organizations, institutions, and cultures. Take away these social facts, so the myth goes, and there are only naked, isolated individuals involved either in a war of all against all or hopelessly attempting to celebrate an impossible anutonomy and freedom within a dominating collective. Much of modern social theory is based upon the ontological and epistemological distinction between the micro and the macro and the ensuing 25 | See Luhmann (1995: 10) who declares that “Self-reference can be realized in the actual operations of a system only when a self (whether as element, process, or system) can be identified through itself and set off as different from others.” 26 | See the critique of individualism in privacy theory by Richards and Hartzog (2017).

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drama of agency and structure which is also known as the conflict between individual autonomy and institutional constraint. This could be the reason why the idea of privacy generates so many contradictions. It is rooted in the contradictions of modernity which create a self that is at once bounded and unbounded, at once individual and social, micro and macro. The questionable heritage of modern conceptions of privacy has been documented by Cohen (2012), Richardson (2016), and Richards and Hartzog (2107). In various ways, these thinkers plead for reconceptualizing privacy in legal and social theory not on the basis of an abstract autonomy and radical individualism, but on the basis of the essential embeddedness of humans in society. Austin (2015) argues that we should “move away from a focus on privacy harms to a focus on what kind of legal norms can facilitate our social interactions” (189). In a simlar vein, Richards and Hartzog (2017: 1185) say that we must “take into account more complex social contexts, the increasing importance of information relations in the digital age, and our need to rely on (and share information with) other people and institutions to live our lives.” Perhaps we have never been modern (Latour 1993) and neither the isolated individual nor the transcendent society of modern mythology ever existed. Fully acknowledging the social and informational constitution of human beings could require a new understanding of privacy, that is, an understanding of privacy on different grounds than modern Western individualism and the ontology of boundaries.27

2.4 Targeting A further example of the value of privacy is the often-cited use (or misuse) of personal information for purposes of targeted advertising or offering personalized products and services. In the words of the Committee, “the availability of personal information about an individual enables various organizations to provide him or her with information or product and service offerings customized to the interest and patterns reflected in such information” (310). Apart from feelings of “creepiness” (Tene/Poltentsky 2013a), it is difficult to find a problem, even a privacy problem, with regard to personalized advertising or personalized products and services. We live in a world of advertising. Without advertising, there is no market. Markets of all kinds depend on information being accessible to both buyers and sellers. Sellers, or providers of all kinds of goods and services, have always conducted customer profiling. How else are they to know who might be interested in buying their products? In general, the less that is known about customers, the more irrelevant, useless, and wasteful 27 | This is the course we will pursue below on the basis of actor-network theory which goes beyond social constructivism to include artifacts and technologies in the social realm.

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is the advertising. In addition to this, the less known about customers, the more advertising there is because marketing becomes dominated by an economy of attention. Everything depends on gaining the attention of as many people as possible. Shouting as loudly as you can in the hope that more people will hear about what you are selling may be effective in the local bazaar, but in today’s world we can call this “dumb” advertising since it is based on ignorance. Dumb advertising is usually referred to as spam. Smart advertising, on the contrary, offers a person those products and services they might truly be interested in, thus saving everyone, both customers and advertisers, time and effort.28 Of course, the same is true on the other side of the trading table. Consumers are interested in knowing as much as possible about the quality of products and the reliability of sellers. They want to know how valuable products and services are, if they meet up to the sellers’ claims, what previous buyers have to say, etc. Transparency on all sides fosters trust and fairness in markets. In general, it can be argued that it is transparency and not secrecy that makes markets not only efficient but also free and fair. Where then is the harm with personalized products and services?29 What is the advantage of secrecy and where is the value of privacy when it comes to making markets efficient? What harm comes from smart advertising and why would anyone prefer dumb advertising? These are important questions, not only because of the obvious social harms of dumb advertising30 but also because many arguments for the use of big data are based on the indisputable social advantages of personalized products and services not

28 | For those who nevertheless prefer dumb advertising an association of researchers has created the opportunity to opt-out of profiling research, see ResearchChoices.Org http://researchchoices.org/. 29 | Swire (2014) points to a contradiction in privacy theory and public service administration. One the one hand the personal information of “protected classes” should not be used for targeted advertising, while on the other hand it is expected from government and other providers that these groups be targeted with information about specific products and services. 30 | It is well-known that dumb advertising has created an “attention economy” in which the scramble for consumer attention leads to false incentives for media to do anything in order to get clicks. This situation has been seen as the cause for increasingly refined and effective design of persuasive or manipulative media (https://journal.thriveglobal. com/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-designethicist-56d62ef5edf3) as well as loss of trust in media and the proliferation of sensationalism and “fake news”( https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/medium-and-thereason-you-cant-stand-the-news-anymore-c98068fec3f8#.iu5w4fsij).

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only in commercial markets, but also in education, healthcare, and other areas of society.31 As an example of the harms arising from personalized products and services, the Committee refers to a situation in which a person is targeted with advertising for a specific medication which could lead to social stigmatization when family members or others find out the person has a certain “socially unacceptable” disease. Often also cited as a clear harm caused by personalized advertising in the privacy literature is the case of a teenage girl who received offers of pregnancy-related products to her home before her parents knew she was pregnant.32 It is undeniable that social ostracism and stigmatization are harmful. But here again, one must ask if secrecy is the best solution. Would it not be better to confront prejudices and deal with the real social problems instead of attempting to use the supposed right to privacy to avoid conflict? Sooner or later the relatives and friends will find out about the disease, just as the parents of the pregnant teenager and the general public as well could not be kept in the dark for long. Apart from public health issues arising from not disclosing information about dangerous diseases, the somewhat questionable value of privacy in such situations would seem to amount to surreptitiously supporting prejudice and practices of social ostracism by not challenging them and facing them openly. In relation to public health research, privacy has proven to be a hindrance and not a help.33 When it comes to algorithmic profiling, fears that algorithms determine what products, services, and even the information one is able to see and thus reinforce prejudices and allow for manipulation may be alleviated by measures to guarantee algorithmic transparency and a competitive market for personalized services. If one suspects that one-sided or prejudiced information is being offered, one can demand to see what criteria the algorithm is using and compare these criteria to those of competing providers.34

31 | See the Presidents Report on Big Data (2014) for the USA https://www. whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/big _data_privacy_repor t _may_1_2014. pdf) and Cavanillas et al. (2016) for the EU. 32 | See Duhigg (2012) and Crawford/Schultz (2913) for discussions of targeted advertising. 33 | Discussing privacy based restrictions on access to patient data, Wartenberg and Thompson (2010: 407) state that “these restrictions, and the research impeded or precluded by their implementation and enforcement, have had a significant negative impact on important public health research.” 34 | See Goodman (2016) for a discussion of algorithmic accountability with regard to the GDPR and in general Mittelstadt (2016) and Mittelstadt et al. (2016) for the problem of algorithmic targeting in all areas of society including politics.

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2.5 Gaming the System It is a commonplace in discussions of privacy and data protection to claim that certain kinds of information are especially “sensitive” and must, therefore, be kept private at all cost. Throughout current privacy discourse, one finds a shared conviction that medical or health-related information is especially sensitive since the disclosure of this kind of information can lead not only to fraud and stigmatization, but also to discrimination in obtaining healthcare services, health insurance, employment, or educational opportunities. As the Committee notes, “Adults who purchase health insurance often assert privacy rights in their medical information because they are concerned that insurers might not insure them or might charge high prices on the basis of some information in their medical record” (312). The value of privacy, in this case, amounts to the right to withhold information, that is, to lie so that one gets a better deal on insurance. Similar situations can be cited in education, where people do not disclose certain information in applications to schools, or in applying for jobs, where not only medical information but also information about religious affiliation, sexual preferences, political views, etc. are considered sensitive, since the disclosure of such information might lead to discrimination. As Posner (1978) put it, the right to privacy amounts to little more than a person’s “right to conceal discreditable facts about himself” (46). In order to avoid discrimination, gain access to products and services, save money etc., it seems perfectly acceptable to invoke the right to privacy as a right to disguise who one is and even to lie about oneself. Here again, the value of privacy in many situations appears counterproductive with regard to correcting social inequality. Instead of openly criticizing an opportunistic healthcare system and discriminatory practices in education or employment and demanding that false incentives and unjust business-models be changed, invoking the right to privacy accepts and condones these practices and structural inequalities. Privacy becomes valuable as a means of “gaming the system,” or attempting to protect the weak from the strong without challenging institutional opportunism and misuse of power. The argument seems to amount to this: Because bigotry, discrimination, racism, opportunism, etc. are to be expected and cannot be eradicated, privacy becomes a value as a means to mitigate these social ills. Privacy is a useful workaround, but it does not challenge the system of inequality and injustice that it supposedly protects us from. Under these conditions, privacy contributes to social injustice. Instead of transparency and a regime of social equality that can be built upon it, we are told to accept secrecy, disguise, misrepresentation, and opportunism from all parties to the social contract. Gaming the system does not change the system, it doesn’t even subvert it, it indirectly reinforces

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the status quo by encouraging efforts to make the system even stronger and less vulnerable to workarounds.

2.6 Political Profiling Just as personal information can be used by advertisers to target specific persons or groups with personalized products and services, so too can this information be used to profile persons and groups for many other purposes. Apart from the obviously discriminatory uses of profiling, for example, denying services, housing, employment, etc. to members of minority groups, one such purpose that the Committee mentions is political profiling. “Political campaigns can use collections of personal information to tailor different messages to members of different groups that are designed to appeal to their particular views and attitudes” (311). This is nothing new. Politicians, just as advertisers, have always tried to tell people what they want to hear. How else are they going to motivate voters to support them and their party? The assumption is that political campaigns are going to become even less truthful and even more manipulative if more is known about voters.35 Is this assumption warranted? Let us recall that transparency is not one-sided and that when digital technology allows more to be known about voters, it also allows more to be known about governments and politicians. Given the open access to many sources of information and many different media in the global network society, and the ever-watchful opposition, politicians today stand under more pressure than ever before to maintain a minimum consistency in their messages. Only a society that openly acknowledges political discourse to be a lie and accepts manipulation of the media would need to invoke the right to privacy in order to, albeit futilely, attempt to ensure the honesty of political communication. It is difficult to understand how secrecy can further democratic processes. Where is the harm that comes from the loss of privacy, that is, from access to information and transparency with regard to all parties involved? It must, of course, be emphasized that indeed all parties and not just some are subject to transparency. In this context, it is perhaps helpful to point out that not knowing about their constituency, about the views, preferences, needs, etc. of voters, makes it very easy for politicians to invoke a “silent majority” to legitimate their programs. Citizens and constituencies have little to lose by coming out into the public arena with as much information about themselves as possible. They must be careful, however, to demand that transparency be symmetrical and that information about how political campaigns are being conducted also be made available. That contemporary marketing both in business and in politics 35 | This assumption supports current discussions of a “post-truth politics.” See the good summary in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics

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is moving away from traditional demographic audience segmentation and combining behavioral science, targeted messaging with big data analytics in order influence, manipulate, nudge, and persuade is no secret. On the basis of big data analytics, it is possible to assemble such detailed profiles of consumers and voters that messages can be designed that speak to the deep behavioral drivers of each individual.36 In the face of such overwhelming media force, it might seem imperative to attempt in the name of privacy to restore voter and consumer anonymity as a first line of defense. The problem with this strategy is that the cat is already out of the bag and it is hard to imagine which technological or regulative measures could get the cat back in. Furthermore, in a “post-truth” era of political discourse,37 it may be assumed that secrecy of any kind will be contra-productive. The postmodern situation is characterized by a public discourse that has become an ideological free-for-all without guaranteed access to sources of “objective truth.” In this situation, attempts to limit the flow of information will only add fuel to the fire. The solution is not less information, but more.38 As Weinberger (2012) points out, digital media have transformed the nature of knowledge and made information non-hierarchical, inclusive, connected, complex, and public. Paraphrasing Newton’s famous law, Weinberger claims that this means that for every fact on the Internet, there is an equal and opposite fact.39 When truth is a matter of consensus and there is no consensus on anything, we are facing an entirely new situation in the realm of knowledge. Navigating in these uncertain waters without traditional authorities, experts, and elites who can serve as stable beacons of truth is what needs to be learned today. It is difficult to imagine how this could be done by withholding information, disguise oneself, and everywhere fostering secrecy in the name of 36 | See the speech by Julian Wheatland from Cambridge Analytics, the company that claims to have 5, 000 data points on every American voter and which selfadmittedly put Donald Trump into the Whitehouse http://zukunft.business/fileadmin/ content/videos/2017/Zukunftskongress_2017/170620_Keynote_Wheatland_Julian. mp4?utm_source=Newsletter_DE_170906&utm_medium=Link. 37 | “Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored.” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics. 38 | It is important, of course, that this information is used properly. On bias and misuse of information in algorithmic targeting for political purposes see Mittelstadt (2016) and Mittelstadt et al. (2016). 39 | “We have so many facts at such ready disposal that they lose their ability to nail conclusions down, because there are always other facts supporting other interpretations“ (Weinberger 2012: 38).

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privacy. In a public sphere in which free expression, open communication, and transparency are the best ways to ensure democratic processes the supposed value of privacy is at least questionable and at most dangerous. Indeed, it could be argued that what we need is not privacy, but trust. Trust is based on information.40 The more we know about who is knocking at the door, the more we are able to decide if we should open it or not. In the information age, it is perhaps not only futile but also misguided to suppose that trust and cooperative action can be safeguarded and maintained by attempting to withhold or disguise information or by avoiding using information.

2.7 The Privacy Paradox The idea of a “privacy paradox” became popular as a name for the oft-noted fact that although people seem to be concerned about privacy, they do exactly the opposite.41 Saying one thing and doing another is not unusual. Furthermore, it is much rather hypocritical than paradoxical.42 Many people, for example, say they are concerned about their weight, but instead of going to the gym they order a pizza and turn on the television. Many say they want to quit smoking, but few do. With regard to privacy this kind of hypocrisy is usually attributed to either ignorance or indifference, that is, people either don’t understand what happens with their data, or they don’t care as long as they get something in exchange. Contrary to this common understanding of the privacy paradox, we have attempted to locate the paradox of privacy on a deeper level. In distinction to most privacy discourse today, one can at least argue that it is 40 | Not “privacy by design,” as the GDPR and many privacy advocates argue, but “trust by design” is the most promising way forward in the information age. 41  |  See Barnes (2006); Norberg/Horne/Horne (2007); Brandimarte/Acquisti/Loewenstein (2010). 42 | Hull (2014: 1) asks how is it “that the standard regimes of privacy protection featured in ‘notice and consent’ policies and other examples of ‘privacy selfmanagement’ so completely fail to represent how individuals actually conceptualize and attempt to manage their privacy. Second, given the totality of their failure, why are they so persistently taken to present a normatively adequate understanding of privacy?” Following Foucault, his answer is that informed consent serves an ideological purpose of disguising new-liberal techniques of power, an ideology of entrepreneurship, as well as convincing data subjects that they have a choice when they actually do not. Contrary to Hull we locate the problem not with a supposed misuse of informed consent, but with the very idea of privacy as protection of personal information. The contemporary regime of power/knowledge needs privacy. Many companies have entered into a competition in offering more and better privacy, not to dupe consumers, but to maintain a system in which privacy colludes in making injustice tolerable.

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paradoxical that the value of privacy seems to derive mostly from its complicity with and surreptitious support of a society in which discrimination, bigotry, opportunism, exploitation of labor, and abuse of political power are taken as facts that can only be mitigated by workarounds and fix-ups aimed to create a more or less acceptable way of living with an admittedly unjust situation. This may well be a pragmatic and perhaps in some cases prudent solution to the problem of protecting the weak from the strong. It may also be understandable that the United Nations and many newly formed nation-states after the horrors of National Socialism and the threat of Stalinism attempted to formulate basic human rights with a view to protecting individuals against an evil state. Nonetheless, history moves on and not only democratization but also new forms of communication and association may well have made the opposition of individual and collective that dominated Western political discourse in the 20th Century obsolete. Admittedly, from the international point of view, there are still many states that are de facto dictatorships and it is undeniable that human rights are everywhere being violated. Intrusion into house and home, confiscation of property, incarceration, oppressive surveillance, torture, and more are everyday facts of life in many parts of the world. This is the context in which one must understand many discussions of privacy as a human right or as a means to attaining a modicum of social equality. It is also the context of much privacy legislation which focuses on the relation of citizens to governments, or people to the police. The major issue in this context is unwarranted and illegitimate intrusions by government into people’s lives. The issue at stake, however, is rule of law itself and not privacy (Austin 2015). This was also the context that informed the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the USA and basic rights to privacy in the constitutions of many democratic nations. Finally, it is also the context in which much legal practice with regard to privacy has taken place. However, regardless of how important the situation of ongoing political injustice and the lack of rule of law in many parts of the world is, it would be wrong to assume that this is the model for understanding what privacy in all contexts is about. Looking at the developed nations and the prospect of evolving democratic institutions, perhaps what is needed is a new interpretation of privacy for the digital age, an interpretation that is not based on the assumed antagonisms of free individuals on one side and oppressive governments and opportunistic corporations on the other. Perhaps what lies at the foundation of the privacy paradox is not the difference between what people say and what they do, but between a self that assumes it is constituted by clear and inviolable boundaries and an informational self that is “distributed” throughout many different networks and exists without clear boundaries. Current ideas of privacy arose historically in the European Enlightenment together with the idea of a public sphere, whereby the private sphere was seen

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as the locus of the free, autonomous individual. The private, as well as the public, are structures of Western modernity founded on age-old assumptions that existence and identity are bounded, unitary, and non-relational. This can be termed the “metaphysics of substance” and it supports the opposition between individual and society, as well as between micro and macro levels of social order. These fundamental distinctions are supported by an economy of scarcity in knowledge and the necessity of one-to-many or hierarchical communication in large groups. The metaphysics of substance and its many effects have been called into question by the digital transformation. Not only the Internet and Facebook have changed the world, but the coming Internet of Things, big data analytics, freedom-of-information laws and open data policies, data-driven organizations, etc., are creating a situation in which being and identity arise in networks and there is no longer an economy of scarcity in knowledge and information. The digital transformation has created a situation in which it is no longer necessary to communicate either face to face in private or one-tomany in a clearly demarcated public. Instead, for the first time in history, manyto-many communication has become possible (Shirky 2008). A knowledge economy of abundance and the capability of many-to-many communication are game-changing. A society in which there are no secrets and everybody can communicate with everybody no longer needs to compensate informational asymmetry and the hierarchical power structures that result from it by means of workarounds such as privacy. After the digital transformation, knowledge is no longer automatically the same as power and secrecy no longer a way to guarantee freedom. Individuals need no longer base freedom, autonomy, and dignity upon withholding information. Attempting to re-affirm the central values of freedom, autonomy, and dignity by reinstating an outdated and increasingly dysfunctional notion of privacy can hardly be an adequate response to the challenges of the global network society. Nevertheless, this seems to be what most present-day discussions of privacy and much new privacy legislation are trying to do. An important example of the paradoxical situation in which privacy discussions, as well as privacy legislation, find themselves today can be found in recent EU legislation. In 2010 the European Union launched the Digital Agenda in Europe as part of the Europe 2020 Strategy for the purpose of developing “a digital single market in order to generate smart, sustainable and inclusive growth in Europe.”43 This initiative proceeds from the conviction that “Europe 43  |  https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/europe-2020-strategy; and https: //ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-single-market_en. The Digital Single Market Strategy is made up of three policy areas or pillars, 1) improving access to digital goods and services, 2) creating an environment where digital networks and services can prosper, and 3) fostering a data driven economy. A revision of the “ePrivacy Directive” from 2002

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needs to foster the development and wide adoption of big data technologies,” and that the “availability and access to data will be the foundation of any datacentric ecosystem” (Cavanillas et al. 2016: 8). This means not only acquiring data from many sources, but also “combining data from different sources and across sectors” (8). The aim is to create a “data ecosystem” or a “digital single market” which would “bring together data owners, data analytics companies, skilled data professionals, cloud service providers, companies from user industries, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, research institutes, and universities.”44 Value propositions of big data analytics lie in all areas of society. In healthcare, organizations are encouraged to “make use of comprehensive heterogeneous health datasets as well as advanced analytics of clinical operations” for purposes, among others, of “predictive modeling,” “personalized medicine,” and “analyzing disease patterns” (ibid: 6).45 In the public sector, it will be necessary “to share data across government agencies and to inform citizens about the trade-offs between the privacy and security risks of sharing data and the benefits they can gain” (6). In telecom, media, and entertainment, it is apparent that the “domain of personal location data offers the potential for new value creation… including location-based content delivery for individuals, smart personalized content routing,” and “geo-targeted advertising” (6). Manufacturers can develop new business models based on “individualized products.” For retailers, big data analytics will permit new “interactions between retailers and consumers” grounded in “location-based marketing, in-store behavior analysis, customer micro-segmentation, customer sentiment analysis” (6) and similar methods. According to the Single Digital Market initiative, data-driven innovation in areas such as education, environmental management, open data, and smart cities are also of the highest priority. It is apparent that almost all of the positive gains from a data-driven economy and big data analytics listed above are based on gathering, aggregating, evaluating, sharing, recombining, repurposing, etc. personal information. For those who have followed the development of privacy legislation in the EU, above all the new General Data Protection Regulation, it is equally apparent that almost all the stated goals of the Digital Single Market Strategy constitute violations of privacy and are in principle prohibited. This is the case because is included under policy area two as a measure to reinforce trust and security in digital services and the handling of personal data. 44 | A European strategy on the data value chain. DG Connect: https://ec.europa.eu/ digital-single-market/en/news/elements-data-value-chain-strategy. 45 | A detailed list of recommendations to the EU Commission for use of big data in healthcare can be found in Study on Big Data in Public Health, Telemedicine and Healthcare – Final Report 2016. https://ec.europa.eu/health/sites/health/files/ ehealth/docs/bigdata_report_en.pdf

2. The Privacy Paradox

privacy from the European point of view is a fundamental right which is defined as “informational self-determination.” Access to and use of personal information constitutes in itself a harm regardless of whether any physical, social, financial, etc. harm comes from it and regardless of any economic or social values that may come from it. This is explicitly stated in the new General Data Protection Regulation ratified by the EU April 2016, which declares that “the protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data is a fundamental right” (Art. 1). Although the GDPR immediately relativizes this claim by stating that the protection of the privacy of individuals “is not an absolute right” (Art. 4), and “must be considered in relation to its function in society and be balanced against other fundamental rights” (4), this caveat does not mitigate against the fundamental right of “control of … personal data” (7). Control means that individuals, conceived of as relatively powerless “data subjects” who are opposed to overpowering government and corporate “data controllers” have the following rights guaranteed by law: the right of notice, that is, to be informed about the gathering and using of personal data. This enables informed consent, which is similar to “notice and choice” in the USA and is the legal basis for collection and use of personal data (Art. 6,1a). Informed consent is defined by the GDPR (Art. 4,11) as “any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.”46 Furthermore, individuals have a right to gain access to any data that has been collected about them (Art. 15). Third, they have the right to correct false or incomplete data (Art. 16). Going beyond this, they also have the right of “erasure,” which is also known as the right to forget (Art. 17). Fifth, individuals have the right to object to any collection or use of their personal data and withdraw consent (Art. 7, 3; Art. 21). This also implies the right not to be subject to automatic or algorithmic data processing or profiling without informed consent (Art. 22). Individuals also have the right to restrict the use of data processing to explicit purposes, times, etc. (Art. 18). Finally, they have the right to data portability, that is, to obtain a copy of all data they have given to data controllers as well as the right to transfer this data to other controllers (Art. 20).47 46 | That the right to privacy is not as “fundamental” as is claimed is reflected in the fact that for very many situations, such as social services administration, taxation, military, law enforcement, insurance, banking, education, healthcare, business transactions, housing, etc., because of legal or contractual obligations or because of “legitimate interests” (Art. 6, 1f) on the part of the service providers, individuals do not have the right to informed consent or to refuse access to personal information. 47 | For a non-binding USA version of very similar rights see the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World: A Framework for Protecting

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This is a very strong position with regard to the protection of privacy that effectively prohibits the gathering and use of personal information in almost all real situations in today’s digital world. Especially within the context of big data this strong stance on privacy is problematic. Of course, the GDPR makes room for the necessary exceptions for uses of personal data that serve the public good, such as law enforcement, security, public health, economic development, and scientific research. The important point, however, is that these are formulated as exceptions and not as the rule. Privacy in the strong sense defined by the GDPR is in every case the rule, and any use of personal data not legitimated by informed consent and the many rights derived from it are always exceptions. This position on privacy follows directly from the claim that privacy is a fundamental and inalienable human right in itself and not a means of achieving other values and rights. What does this mean for the Single Digital Market Strategy? Proponents of the digital single market favor exploiting the opportunities of a data-driven economy and big data analytics. From this perspective, it is privacy that appears as the exception, and data exploitation appears to be the rule. Almost as an afterthought, then Commissioner Kroes, after proclaiming the priority of big data analytics for Europe goes on to the say that “Mastering big data means mastering privacy too” (Kroes 2013). What does this mean? From the perspective of the GDPR, big data is an exception to the rule, whereas from the perspective of the Single Digital Market Strategy, the priority is the optimal use of data and it is privacy that must somehow, almost as an afterthought, be taken account of “too.” This situation reflects the deeply rooted European dichotomy between individual and society, private and public and anchors the specifically Western antagonism of the individual to society together with all its contradictions and paradoxes into law. Although the contradiction is never openly confronted and most are happy finally to have a single regulation for all member states of the EU, in effect, it looks a lot like the one hand prohibits what the other proposes.48 Fundamental rights to privacy contradict equally fundamental rights to pursue economic development, scientific knowledge, public health and social services administration, which, especially within the context of big data analytics cannot be achieved by informed consent and associated rights such as data minimization and specified purpose. With regard to usage of data in scientific research, the authors of the report “Perspectives on Big Data, Ethics, and Society” state that “it has become clear that informed consent at the beginning Privacy and Promoting Innovation in the Global Digital Economy. The White House (2012). 48 | Already in the consultation phase of the GDPR, Rubinstein (2013) pointed out that especially with regard to big data the EU regulations have not kept up with technological advances and are outdated even before being implemented.

2. The Privacy Paradox

of research cannot adequately capture the possible benefits and (potentially unknown) risks of consenting to the uses of one’s data” (Metcalf et al. 2016: 7). The Report goes on to point out that “even experts struggle to determine what they are consenting to because big data and its sister disciplines such as biobanking now stretch the utility of data far beyond the horizon” (7). Furthermore, it is more and more acknowledged that the distinction between scientific research and commercial uses of big data is becoming blurred the more commercial analytics is aimed at producing new knowledge and uses the same data and methods as do publicly funded scientific research programs. And finally, because of the costs, the complexity, and the many different stakeholders involved, exploiting data for economic growth, scientific progress, education, healthcare, and policy administration is being done by public-private partnerships in which citizens, patients, and civil society organizations are also data controllers. Commenting on the EU regulations, Rubinstein (2013: 6) states that “the informed choice model is broken beyond any regulatory repair.” And in a recent publication covering the entire range of issues surrounding human rights and digital technology, Perry and Roda (2017) point out that informed consent “poses a challenge for the digital environment in that ‘all the relevant facts’ are rarely known, either by the server or by the user” and that consequently “an understanding of what constitutes legal consent for the use of online personal data in the USA has yet to be conclusively defined by the courts” (76). This situation provokes initiatives that lead precisely in the opposite direction to privacy protection, namely, “those who are attempting to build research infrastructures to take full advantage of big data methods are often staking a complementary claim about developing new ethical modes that emphasize the right or duty of individuals to share useful medical or personal data widely” (Metcalf et al. 2016: 7).49 It would appear that European privacy protection legislation is based upon an entirely different perception of what the world is all about compared to current efforts to foster a data-driven society 49 | The Study on Big Data in Public Health, Telemedicine and Healthcare (https:// ec.europa.eu/health/sites/health/files/ehealth/docs/bigdata_report_en.pdf 2016) which aims “to identify applicable examples of the use of Big Data in Health and develop recommendations for their implementation in the European Union” (3) acknowledges the problematic opposition of privacy and healthcare research, but recommends only “to align the existing legal frameworks and internal policies, especially regarding the aspects of data-ownership, confidentiality of data and patient consent” without indicated how this could be done. Furthermore, one cannot but wonder at the naïve optimism of the authors of the recent report for the DECODE Project of the European Union (Symons/Bass 2017) when they assume that once European citizens have been given data sovereignty they will happily give their personal data away for the public good.

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and the use of big data in research, business, healthcare, education, and policy administration. Even the definition of “personal information” in the GDPR is problematic, since it refers to “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person” (Art. 4,1)50 Within the big data context, any and all information can be used in such a way that even anonymized data lead to re-identification or inferred identification of individuals. Crawford and Schultz (2013: 107) summarize opinions of many experts when they say “Big Data’s analytics are simply too dynamic and unpredictable to determine if and when particular information or analyses will become or generate PII [personal identifiable information].” Where does the boundary lie that clearly demarcates what is personal information from what is not? Who can decide in case of doubt? How can a risk-utility tradeoff analysis be done when many factors are unknown or unknowable?51 Big data analytics depends upon using all possible data from all possible sources in ways that are not completely known at the time of data collection and for purposes that are also not necessarily known in advance, within an indeterminate time range, and involving parties, technologies, and methods that are not easily identifiable and perhaps do not even exist at the time of data collection.52 This makes, as above mentioned and as many experts confirm, the 50 | In the USA one speaks of “personal identifiable information” (PII). The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, McCallister/Grane/Scarfone 2010) defines PII as “any information about an individual maintained by an agency, including (1) any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity, such as name, social security number, date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, or biometric records and (2) any other information that is linked or linkable to an individual, such as medical, educational, financial, and employment information.” This means, as Milne (2015: 18) puts it, “information that can be used to identify or locate a single person in context.” 51 | This situation calls into question Floridi’s (2005; 2014) distinction between data or information that is somehow “constitutive” of a person and data that is not. If an inforg cannot itself know which information constitutes itself and which not, and if any and all information can in some constellation be considered personal or lead to identification of a person, the very idea of basing autonomy, self-determination, and dignity on the right to withhold information is questionable. 52 | Collmann and Matei (2016) speak of the “4Rs” of big data: reuse, repurposing, recombining, and reanalysis, and Crawford and Metcalf (2016: 5) speak of big data as “infinitely connectable, indefinitely repurposable, continuously updatable, and easily removed from the context of collection.” Sources for big data apart from publicly accessible information are “online transactions, email, video, images, clickstream, logs, search queries, health records, and social networking interactions; … pervasive

2. The Privacy Paradox

idea of informed consent within the context of big data meaningless or at lest ineffective. Furthermore, even if informed consent in some form were possible, the entire value proposition of big data lies in developing personalized products and services in all areas. It is difficult to understand how personalization and anonymity can be made compatible. If it is in principle not allowed to know who data refers to, how can individuals be offered personalized services? Austin (2015) has argued that the individualistic foundation of informed consent and the rights that derive from it are structurally inadequate to deal with the challenges of the global network society and she has suggested, along similar lines as Cohen (2012), Richards (2105), and Richards and Hartzog (2017) that we stop attempting to protect personal information – whatever that may be – and turn our efforts toward attempting to understand privacy in terms of rights that enhance social interaction, communication, cooperation, and “information relationships” (Richards/Hartzog 2017).53 Tene and Polonetsky (2013) argue convincingly for user control and access to data instead of attempting to limit data collection, to restrict the use of data, or even to purposely spread false data. This view starts from an assumption of digitally empowered citizens and participatory culture instead of the traditional opposition between powerless “data subjects” and powerful corporate and government “data controllers.” It may well be that what we need is more information and more data accompanied by transparency and participation instead of privacy protected by a paternalistic government who is always the prime suspect when it comes to possible privacy harms. It may be that the romantic myth of free, autonomous, and anarchistic citizens attempting to throw sand into the oppressive government machine is a futile and counter-productive gesture of revolt. If we are to move toward a data-driven society and also a just society, the key may lie in participation instead of exclusion and trust based on information instead of mistrust based on secrecy. It is important to insist on the fact that both participation and trust are based on information. The more we know about a person, the more difficult it becomes to discriminate against them or treat them inhumanely. Bigotry sensors deployed in infrastructure such as communications networks, electric grids, global positioning satellites, roads and bridges, as well as in homes, clothing, and mobile phones” (Tene/Polonetsky 2013: 240). 53 | This approach contradicts the strategy of “obfuscation” proposed by Brunten and Nissenbaum (2015) which recommends that individuals use a variety of tools and technologies in order to spread false and misleading information about themselves throughout the Internet. Not only does this lead to corruption of data used for law enforcement, public health, education, and scientific research, but it damages trust in these institutions. As Richards and Hartzog (2017) point, this fundamentally misguided approach is derived from a sterile and outdated conception of both individual and society.

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is not based on knowledge, but on ignorance. Stereotypes are the opposite of information. To the extent that cooperative action in all areas of social life is based on trust, and trust is based on information, that is, on knowing who one is dealing with, then it is plausible that a democratic culture that prides itself on the distribution of power is necessarily coupled with the distribution of knowledge and information. Let there be no doubt, privacy matters, but perhaps not for the reasons that are usually offered by privacy advocates. Perhaps privacy is not the last bastion of defense in the face of those digital forces attempting to transform us into completely transparent “glass” human beings. Perhaps privacy is much rather an “obligatory point of passage” in the transition to the global network society. Maybe it is time to admit that much of current privacy discourse is motivated by a nostalgia for the industrial age or an inability to imagine a different form of society.54 Perhaps it is time to admit that privacy cannot save Western modernity; a world in which unique individuals attempt to pursue their interests pitted against powerful corporations and more or less effective governmental agencies. In another but related scenario, workers and capitalists face off in a ring set up and refereed by a wavering, uncertain, and often partial state. Finally, to complete the modern narrative, we have a world in which autonomous rational subjects can only maintain their creativity and human dignity by means of secrecy and disguise. If we can distance ourselves, if only for a moment, from the modern narrative, it becomes possible to imagine that in the digital age privacy creates a “trust gap” by disguising or withholding information that would otherwise 54 | Both of these failings are well illustrated by Zuboff’s (2015) influential critique of “surveillance capitalism.” Zuboff nostalgically bemoans the loss of “the historical relationship between markets and democracies” which was constituted by “traditional reciprocities in which populations and capitalists needed one another” (86). She acknowledges that the digital transformation has created a new world in which an “intelligent world-spanning organism” (85) replaces older social structures. The situation is new, but surprisingly nothing new is happening. Instead of acknowledging the many changes that networking has brought about, she revives the old myth of almighty digital capitalists exploiting an unwitting digital proletariat. Zuboff blinds out digitally empowered citizens, conversational markets, participatory culture, sharing economy, platform cooperatives, transparent organizations, and digitally empowered social movements. Big Brother is replaced by “Big Other.” The names have changed, but it’s the same old story. This dystopian view is shared by Cohen (2014: 1912) who claims that “citizens who are subject to pervasively distributed surveillance and modulation by powerful commercial and political interests…increasingly will lack the capacity to form and pursue meaningful agendas for human flourishing.” It may be that this wellknown agenda of critical social theory has lost its relevance in the digital age and those concerned to protects citizens’ rights should look for new foundations.

2. The Privacy Paradox

build trust among social actors.55 Furthermore, if we decide to move beyond the dichotomies and paradoxes of modernity, this does not necessarily mean that privacy is dead and that engaging privacy in the digital age is irrelevant. On the contrary, the heated debate on privacy today is an indication that privacy has become a pivotal point, an obligatory point of passage that we must go through to enter into a connected, data-driven society. Privacy matters, but we claim that it matters not because individuals need to be able to withhold or disguise information, but because privacy can, and perhaps must, function as a bridge from the old world to the new. Privacy offers the opportunity to pose the question of how freedom, autonomy, and human dignity are to be defined in a society that is no longer conditioned by scarcity of information and the paradoxical dichotomies of modernity.

55 | This point is made by Richards and Hartzog (2017) who argue that secrecy and obfuscation create a “trust gap” that is actually undermining the “information relationships” upon which human dignity, freedom, and self-determination in the digital age are based.

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There is a fundamental difficulty with attempting to define freedom, selfdetermination, and human dignity in terms of the control of information. Contrary to age-old convictions and omnipresent Machiavellian practice, information cannot be controlled. No one has an absolute choice about the creation, use, deletion, or communication of information. This would put humans in the position of Gods, who could create or annihilate the world at will. Quite against his intention, Floridi (2014) comes to a similar conclusion when he speaks of a “fourth revolution.” He agrees with Castells and other contemporary theorists in arguing that digital technologies are “revolutionary” and not merely an extension of older technologies. Floridi likens the revolutionary significance of ICTs to that of Copernicus’ dislocation of humankind from the center of the universe. This was the first revolution. Similarly, the second revolution, which Darwin initiated, dislocated humans from their privileged place in the animal kingdom. The third revolution was Freud’s psychoanalysis, which dethroned human consciousness from its sovereignty within the realm of mind. The fourth revolution, the age of information and communication technologies, has finally denied human intelligence its claim to be the only “intelligent” form of being. What is left? Floridi answers that humans have become “inforgs” – not cyborgs which Floridi considers science fiction. Inforgs are beings who are information and who exist within a world of information, an infosphere. If information has become the very substance of the world and human existence, then it is not the private property of anyone, and no one can dispose of it as they wish.1 1 | This claim is not contradicted by recent discussions of digital identity management and secure authentication under the title of “self-sovereign identity” (see for example https://www.altoros.com/blog/the-journey-to-a-self-sovereign-digital-identity-bu​ ilt-on-a-blockchain/; and https://www.coindeskcom/path-self-sovereignidentity/). Quite the contrary, a self-sovereign digital identity aims to enhance user participation, transparency, and authenticity in data exploitation and is not aimed at obfuscation, increasing anonymity, secrecy, and hindering data driven products and services.

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To speak of a fourth revolution in which humans are informational beings who share intelligence with technologies amounts to dethroning the autonomous rational subject of Western individualism and with it, any fundamental right to privacy. For the self is not only social but also networked. What the affordances of information and communication technologies have brought to the fore is the networked nature of information. Information is that which is “by itself, neither reducible nor irreducible to anything else.”2 Information, as we have argued above in Part 1, is mediation, links, interfaces, associations, differences, and relations. Information, as the humble example of the stone ax was intended to illustrate, constitutes actor-networks. If information exists in networks, then no individual can claim exclusive and absolute rights over information. No individual actor and not even organizations or governments can say that information is mine alone.3 The creation and flow of information happens in networks and are therefore subject to the nature, characteristics, and rules governing networks. In networks, all actors contribute to the construction of information, but no one actor can claim an inalienable and unconditional right to control information. This is what publicy means. This is what the fourth revolution means. Publicy and not privacy has become our default condition.

3.1 Publicy not Privacy is the Default Condition Cooperative action and social relations are based on the availability and abundance of information instead of on attempts to restrict access to information or to disguise or conceal oneself. Stow Boyd, among others, has proposed the term “publicy” – not to be confused with “publicity” – for the default situation of persons in the digital age.4 Boyd argues that we must reassess the meaning 2 | This is Latour’s principle of “irreduction” (1988: 158) which we interpret as a definition of information. 3 | As we have noted above and will discuss in detail below under the title of “governance,” information is much more like a common good or a common-pool resource than private property. With regard to property Schlager and Ostrom (1992) have pointed out that rights to control resources of any kind are varied and cannot be reduced to only two modes, either private or public ownership. They cite rights of access, withdraw, management, exclusion, and alienation to which should also be added mixed private and public forms of ownership. Information networks challenge us to rethink what property means and how ownership works in society. 4 | http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/972996214/the-definition-of-publicy. Boyd de-​ fines “publicy” as “the quality or condition of openly sharing personal and relational information with others; the state of participating in open social discourse online, and the social relations that arise from that: a person’s right to publicy: the state of living in public, and identifying with others that do so; publicness.” For Federman (cited in

3. Publicy

and function of privacy since digital network society has made transparency instead of secrecy the norm: There is a countervailing trend away from privacy and secrecy and toward openness and transparency, both in the corporate and government sectors. And on the web, we have had several major steps forward in social tools that suggest at least the outlines of a complement, or opposite, to privacy and secrecy: publicy. [...] The idea of publicy is no more than this: rather than concealing things, and limiting access to those explicitly invited, tools based on publicy default to things being open and with open access. 5

Boyd goes on to explain what publicy consists of: From a publicy viewpoint…a person has social contracts within various online publics, and these are based on norms of behavior, not of layers of privacy. In these online publics, different sorts of personal status – sexual preferences, food choices, geographic location – exist to be shared with those that inhabit the publics. So, in this worldview, people are the union of a collection of social contracts, each of which is selfdefined, and self-referential. […] In this worldview, a person is a network of identities, each defined in the context of the form factor of a specific social public. There is no atomic personality, per se, just the assumption that people shift from one public self to another as needed. 6

A network theory of the informational self would, therefore, be a theory of publicy and not of privacy. It would aim to describe how publicy is regulated in networks of all kinds. Boyd speaks of communities, contracts, and norms. He is above all thinking of social network sites and Web 2.0 services. Of course, this is only part of the story when it comes to the digital transformation of social actors

MacDougall 2012: 83), publicy is best represented by the blogsphere: “Blogging is an ‘outering’ of the private mind in a public way (that in turn leads to the multi-way participation that is again characteristic of multi-way instantaneous communications.) Unlike normal conversation that is essentially private but interactive, and unlike broadcast that is inherently not interactive but public, blogging is interactive, public and, of course, networked.” For MacDougall, this amounts to “a mode of existence which constitutes a new kind of political identity and consciousness” (84). Today we would have to go beyond the blogsphere and locate publicy in the context of big data, data driven services, self-tracking, and a digitally empowered many-to-many communication. 5 | http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/765122581/secrecy-privacy-publicy 6 | http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/797752290/the-decade-of-publicy

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into informational beings, or inforgs.7 Contrary to understanding the nature of inforgs from the traditional Western perspective of bounded individualism and privacy, publicy must be understood on the basis of the affordances of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs). Just as for perhaps millions of years stones and pieces of wood played important roles in what humans could be and do, so today it is ICTs that “translate” and “enroll” humans into networks. The affordances of ICTs become apparent in the ways that networks today are constructed, namely, on the basis of norms of connectivity, free flow of information, communication, participation, transparency, authenticity, and flexibility.8 These network norms, as we will argue below, condition and guide the construction of social order in the global network society. To say that information exists in networks implies that “personal” information is not truly personal, that is, it is part of a network in which persons, as well as many other things, participate.9 This claim is nothing new. Social constructivism has long asserted that personal identity is a product of social interaction and therefore can only exist in social relations.10 The fourth 7 | Birchall (2016) speaks of “sharing” instead of publicy and locates this new condition of human subjectivity in network infrastructure: “sharing, I want to argue, has to be understood today not as a conscious and conscientious act but as a key component of contemporary data subjectivity. Data does not unproblematically belong to us in the first place in order for it then to be ‘shared.’ Rather, we are within a dynamic sharing assemblage: always already sharing data with human or non-human agents” (5). From our point of view, this means that subjectivity is never purely immediate, but mediated by translation and enrollment, that is, by information. 8 | For the derivation and justification of these norms from the affordances of ICTs see Krieger/Belliger (2014). 9 | This is the reason why attempts to define personal information, such as in the GDPR of the EU, are doomed to failure. For any and all information in some way involves persons, proceeds from them, and leads back to them. Information cannot be “anonymized.” Anonymization and all the hopes invested in so-called privacy by design could therefore be described as the futile attempt to uphold the modern ideal of bounded and unmediated subjectivity in a networked world, paradoxically, by erasing the name of the subject. 10 | Those legal theorists who argue against a radically individualistic foundation of privacy base their argument on social constructivism. For social constructivism see Mead, Goffman, etc. but also Luhmann who adopts this position from the perspective of systems theory in order to claim that society does not consist of individuals, but of communications. It should be noted, that social constructivism adds yet a further dimension to the privacy paradox, namely, privacy is paradoxically a public construct, defined by laws, enacted by courts, legitimated by public philosophical and moral discourses.

3. Publicy

revolution and the age of ICTs extend the social sphere to include “intelligent” machines. Not only do humans depend on other humans as well as things like stones and wood for the constitution of personhood, but also on intelligent machines. Applied to information, this amounts to the claim that information is neither uniquely constitutive of any individual nor the exclusive property thereof. The somewhat disturbing conclusion we must draw from everything we have discussed above is that one neither exclusively is, nor exclusively owns information. This is not because social actors are not information or because there is no such thing as property rights over information but because information is by nature relational and inclusive and not exclusive. This is so for all information as such and has nothing to do with specific contents such as names, identity numbers, religious affiliations, racial or ethnic identities, bank accounts, passwords, medical records, genomes, biometric data, etc. As our discussion of the privacy paradox intended to show, labeling certain kinds of information as “private” represents one way of dealing with issues of social injustice, the asymmetric distribution of social, economic, and political power, dangers of conformism, and bigotry. We argued above that privacy is not a quality of some specific kind of information, but a social and political strategy for dealing with structural inequality and opportunistic institutions. Privacy as either a right or as a value cannot be derived from the nature of information. The informational self is constituted by publicy and not privacy. Information links the actors in a network together while at the same time transforming them into something that did not exist before. Information translates and enrolls both humans and non-humans into programs of action from which they derive their identities, that is, the roles that they play in the world. Indeed, it is only by means of information that actors appear at all in the world. This is because meaningful action, as opposed to mere instinct, first becomes possible in the form of an actor-network. As we saw above in the discussion of a primitive stone ax, a “builder” or a “hunter” is not merely an individual animal using a stone or a stick as a tool, but an actor-network mutually and symmetrically constituted by human hands, specific stones, certain kinds of animals that are prey and some kinds of wood. It is links, associations, or interfaces that enable humans and non-humans to enter into actor-networks, and it is actor-networks that distinguish humans from baboons, chimpanzees, and other primates. Baboons and other primates drop their stones and move on. They are not integrated into a network that holds on to them and changes them into something other than an animal. Humans may also drop a stone, but the information linking them to these stones remains and cannot be willfully discarded. Even if humans drop their stones and other tools, information holds on to them. This is what Latour calls “technical mediation.” Technical mediation shows that not only cognition but also agency and identity are

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“distributed” throughout the network.11 Non-Cartesian cognitive science has confirmed this view when it describes mind as embodied, enacted, extended, and embedded in the environment.12 We are not proposing that people don’t have any rights over information, or that a human being has no unique and constitutive identity. On the contrary, all these cherished beliefs we have about ourselves are part and parcel of our everyday sociotechnical networks. They are values that can be more or less explicitly articulated or made morally or legally binding in many different, community-specific “contracts.” Privacy legislation and ethical discussions of the value of privacy reflect the kinds of networks in which we live and not any assumed characteristics of human nature. Exactly this is implied, if not explicitly declared, by the well-known theory of contextual privacy.13 In her foundational work on privacy theory, Helen Nissenbaum argued that there is no privacy in itself, but privacy relative to the expectations of a certain community. If we admit that the digital revolution has radically changed the communities and the networks in which we live, indeed our very being as informational selves, then it could also be the case that values, contracts, expectations, and ways of being “personal” are also changing. This is what “publicy” means. To speak of publicy is to attempt to give a label to the new values and expectations surrounding what we call personal information in today’s global network society. Furthermore, the concept of “publicy” allows us to reinterpret a certain “individualistic” human self-understanding that has dominated Western society and culture for more than two centuries.

3.2 Affordances and the Socio-Technical Ensemble Understanding the impact of digital media on society is not a simple task since there are many different perspectives, disciplines, interests, and ideological conflicts involved in assessing any major social and cultural transformation. It is, therefore, necessary to concede at the outset that the views we will present are incomplete and to a certain extent biased. Just as with historical interpretations of the past, contemporary social theory cannot claim pure, disinterested objectivity. Science is a part of society, culture, and the ongoing construction of the world. Every assertion in science is at best a useful hypothesis until “proven” otherwise, that is, replaced by a more useful hypothesis. We propose interpreting the digital revolution from the perspective of Science and 11 | On many different aspects of “distributed agency” see Enfield/Kockelman (2017). 12 | For a discussion of non-Cartesian cognitive science from the perspective of ANT see Belliger/Krieger (2016). 13 | See Nissenbaum (2004; 2010). For the ethical implications of distributed agency see Mittelstadt et al. (2016).

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Technology Studies (STS), as well as the school of thought known as the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT).14 Both of these schools of thought are associated with actor-network theory, although they differ in certain respects. It is less the theoretical nuances that interest us than the broad approach to society as inherently technological that will guide our appropriation of these views. What contemporary science studies have shown is that technology and society not only mutually influence each other but are mutually constitutive. Together, they create a “sociotechnical ensemble.”15 This idea confirms ANT’s understanding of technical mediation, namely, humans and technologies enter into mutually constitutive associations, or what ANT calls “actor-networks.” Technologies, therefore, are neither purely neutral tools in the hands of human users, nor are human users determined by them. The one position is wellknown under the name of social determinism, whereas the other is known as technical determinism.16 Technical mediation means that humans and non-humans mutually condition each other. There are no purely passive objects, just as there are no purely active subjects. To emphasize this point, Latour often speaks of “quasi-objects” and “quasi-subjects.”17 It may be that the modern distinction between subject and object, as well as that between society and nature, are no longer useful hypotheses. Throughout the modern period, these dichotomies have greatly influenced how technology and its place in society were understood. Most modern discussions of technology represent either technical determinism or social determinism. It is difficult and seems almost impossible to avoid falling into either the one position or the other. Marx exemplifies the technical deterministic position when he argues that industrial modes of production created a society divided into opposing classes, capitalists and workers. A social determinist position has dominated discussions of gun laws in the USA with the argument that it is not the gun that makes the criminal, but the human who misuses the gun. Both of these positions have been expressed in many different forms throughout the 20th Century. The basic assumption of both forms of determinism is that technical artifacts, 14 | See Bijker et al. (1987) and Pinch/Biker (1984) for programmatic statements of SCOT with corresponding empirical studies. 15 | As Bijker (1995: 274) puts it: “Each time the ‘social institution’ is written as short hand for ‘socio technical ensemble’ we should be able to spell out the technical relations that go into stabilizing that institution. Society is not determined by technology, nor is technology determined by society. Both emerge as two sides of the socio technical coin during the construction processes of artefacts, facts and relevant social groups.” 16 | For a critical overview of the classical theoretical positions see Grint/Woolgar (1997). 17 | For a discussion of “quasi-objects” and “quasi-subjects” see Latour (1993: 51ff.).

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as well as humans, are individual entities. Once this is granted, it becomes possible for one to affect, influence, or causally determine the other. In the 21st Century, however, the picture has become much more complicated. Not only is technology so apparently a part of everyday life, but it has become more and more apparent that humans and technologies have entered into a kind of symbiosis that cannot be described by deterministic theories of any kind. It is difficult, if not impossible, to chemically “isolate” a pure human or a pure technology such that discussions of who might be determining whom have any meaning. This more differentiated understanding of the relation between humans and nonhumans as an inseparable and mutual conditioning is largely the achievement of science studies and actor-network theory. STS and SCOT arose as a corrective to technological determinism. Despite the fact that both schools of thought have often been understood to support the opposing social constructivist thesis, as Oudshoorn and Pinch (2003) point out, recent formulations tend much rather to support the idea of a “co-construction” in the relations between humans and technologies. Neither do humans determine technologies, nor do technologies determine society, but “Users and technology are seen as two sides of the same problem – as co-constructed” (3). Artifacts, machines, and technologies are not entities “outside” of society that create “social impacts.” Nor are technologies merely neutral tools in the hands of human users; tools that are conceived, designed, produced, and used entirely as social and cultural forces might dictate. Castells, who is often seen as a technological determinist, argues that the network society “is a social structure resulting from the interaction between the new technological paradigm and social organization at large” (2005: 3). There are not two distinct and opposing things, the social on the one side and the technological on the other. Technology is society, and society is technological.18 If we are not speaking about active human subjects on the one side and passive tools on the other, what are we talking about? The “co-construction” of the social and the technical can be called a “sociotechnical ensemble” (Oudshoorn/Pinch 2003: 3). The focus of research in this area is on “the co-construction or mutual shaping of social groups and technologies” (Bijker 1995). Just as the simple example of the stone ax shows, human social order does not consist of technologies on the one side and humans on the other. There simply was no such being as a “hunter” or “builder” apart from the stone ax. There was not a naked human with fully 18 | For similar views arising within contemporary philosophy of technology see Stiegler (1998) and Bradley (2011). As Bradley puts it, the traditional distinction between human subjects characterized by freedom and self-determination on the one side and technical objects under the regime of causal determination on the other “necessarily excludes an empirico-transcendental middle ground where physis and techné, the living and the non-living, mechanism and organism, come together” (9).

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developed brain first and then, after a long evolutionary development, humans who had learned how to use tools. Meaningful activities arise only as actornetworks, and actor-networks are constituted by those links, associations, and interfaces that we have termed information. We humans participate together with our technologies in a co-constructed world made up of “sociotechnical ensembles.” Indeed, we are these sociotechnical ensembles. These may be very simple, like the stone ax, or very complex, like a space station. Regardless of how simple or how complex the network is, it is the characteristics of the network and not the individual actants that need to be described and theoretically conceptualized. The network is the actor. Today it is not technologies such as stone axes and activities such as chopping wood which command our attention. The dominant technologies whose affordances characterize the networks we live in are information and communication technologies (ICTs). The affordances of digital technologies and the sociotechnical ensemble of networked communication and cooperative action have radically transformed age-old assumptions about the nature of social order. Perhaps the greatest difference can be understood in terms of communication structures. The affordances of ICTs have created a situation in which it is no longer necessary to erect social order along hierarchical processes for producing, distributing, and controlling information. As Shirky (2008) points out, ICTs have freed us from being forced either to communicate oneto-one in small temporally and spatially limited social interactions or one-tomany in large groups. Since it was physically impossible for large groups of people to all speak to each other and reach a consensus upon which cooperative action could be based, a leader, chief, boss, king, prophet, etc. had to take on the role of speaker. The moment many people got together to do something, the spatial and temporal limitations of communication forced social organization into top-down, hierarchical structures. On account of these limitations to communication, human social order was either lateral for small interactions or hierarchical for the coordination of large groups or organizations. Shirky points out that the affordances of ICTs make many-to-many communication for the first time in history possible. Looking back on the history of media, Shirky summarizes the influence of ICTs as follows: Communications media was between one sender and one recipient. This is a one-toone pattern – I talk and you listen, then you talk and I listen. Broadcast media was between one sender and many recipients, and the recipients couldn’t talk back. This is a one-to-many pattern – I talk, and talk, and talk, and all you can do is choose to listen or tune out. The pattern we didn’t have until recently was many-to-many, where communications tools enable group conversation. (Shirky 2008: 86-87)

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The effect of many-to-many communication has been to transform what could be referred to as relatively unimportant small-talk that took place in local faceto-face conversations into what is now known as “user-generated content.”19 The moment face-to-face interaction becomes a form of spatially and temporally independent media production and distribution, everyone who has access to the Internet becomes a media producer. Jenkins et al. (2005) speak of a “participatory culture.” Characteristics of participatory culture are 1) low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, 2) strong support for creating and sharing creations, 3) some informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices, and 4) participants believe their contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another. With the development of the Internet, forms of participatory culture include communities of practice, collaborative problem solving, open source software, open educational resources, information sites such as Wikipedia, crowdsourcing, sharing economy, social networking, platform cooperatives, and much more. Jenkins notes that these new forms of communication enable “peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship” (xii).

3.3 Participator y Culture The rise of participatory culture can be considered revolutionary because asymmetric, one-to-many communication and the hierarchical social structures which for centuries have been a precondition of cooperative action in large groups no longer restrict flows of information in networks. As Castells noted, the global network society has created a “timeless time” and a “space of flows” in which the temporal and spatial limitations on communication no longer force hierarchical structures upon cooperative action. Along similar lines, Weinberger (2012) has argued that the Internet has created a fundamentally different form of knowledge that is at odds with traditional media. According to Weinberger (2012), user-generated content and the relatively uncontrolled flow of information in global networks have transformed the structure of knowledge. Traditional mass media, whether broadcast or print, operate under an economy of scarcity. Printing presses and radio and television studios require great financial and material resources. They are simply not things to which 19 | “User-generated content (UGC) is defined as any form of content such as blogs, wikis, discussion forums, posts, chats, tweets, podcasts, digital images, video, audio files, advertisements and other forms of media that was created by users of an online system or service, often made available via social media websites” (Wikipedia https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-generated_content).

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everybody has access. The amount of information that can be produced, stored, and distributed in print is limited by the physical attributes of the medium. The costs of production, distribution, and storage require that information be limited both in quantity and access. The same can be said of broadcast media since the production costs are so great that only a few can become producers and distributors of media content. Just as only a few could own and control a newspaper or a publishing house, not everyone can own a radio or television network or movie studio. Control of the production and distribution of information lay in the hands of a few. These few are the ones who have a say in society. They stand at the top of a pyramid. The pyramid is an age-old symbol of hierarchical power. It has a broad base with successively narrower layers stacking up to a point which represents what is highest, most valued, and also most rare. At every step up the pyramid, there must be gatekeepers and rules of inclusion and exclusion that limit access and determine what is valuable and what is not, who has access and who does not. These gatekeepers are the experts, authorities, and the elites of society. At the top of the pyramid are the large media corporations controlling production and distribution of information and at the bottom are the passive consumers. Weinberger argues that the pyramid structure of knowledge is characterized by hierarchy, limitation, exclusion, and reduction. At every level of the pyramid gatekeepers such as teachers, librarians, scientists, journalists, government agencies, telecommunications providers, or media conglomerates apply rules of exclusion and inclusion. The pyramid illustrates a one-to-many form of communication. Mass media have been criticized extensively for their inherently non-democratic, manipulative, top-down form of communication.20 According to Weinberger, after the digital revolution, knowledge is more like a cloud than a pyramid in that it is non-hierarchical, inclusive, connected, complex, and public. There is no limit to the amount of information that can be produced, stored, distributed, and accessed. There is no need for gatekeepers to limit production or access to information. Instead of a stable edifice of truth built on indisputable facts certified by experts, there is an unlimited amount of information on all conceivable topics available to everyone. We can no longer settle disputes with reference to authorities, experts, or even with reference to the “facts.” There is so much information available that everyone has their

20 | See the discussion of the “culture industry” launched by the Frankfurt School of social theory including such thinkers as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas. The production of cultural content was seen to be organized like a factory. Media in all forms were industrial products understood as functioning to form the masses into docile consumers.

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own facts to support their own views on any issue whatever.21 The result is that consensus and cooperative action can only be achieved by negotiation and compromise. Instead of a secure and acknowledged body of facts certified by experts and authorities upon which society can base collective decisions, the digital revolution has created an unbounded, heterogeneous, and uncoordinated network of links and associations. Age old one-to-one, as well as one-to-many forms of communication, are being replaced in all areas by various forms of many-to-many communication. New media is changing business, science, education, and politics, as well as the structure of society itself. As Benkler puts it: The fundamental elements of the difference between the networked information economy and the mass media are network architecture and the cost of becoming a speaker. The first element is the shift from a hub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional links to the endpoints in the mass media, to distributed architecture with multidirectional connections among all nodes in the networked information environment. The second is the practical elimination of communications costs as a barrier to speaking across associational boundaries. Together, these characteristics have fundamentally altered the capacity of individuals, acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the public sphere as opposed to its passive readers, listeners, or viewers. (Benkler 2006: 212)

Legal scholar Jack M. Balkin (2004; 2016) has argued that the digital media revolution has created a new and challenging situation for democracies by elevating citizen participation in media production to the status of “democratic culture.” The public sphere, which traditionally had been equated with political discourse, deliberation on public issues, and democratic processes such as voting, has been extended and transformed such that it now includes every form of user-generated content. Balkin proposes revising the traditional understanding of the doctrine of free speech based on the first amendment of the US constitution. For Balkin, the right to free speech must be extended beyond deliberation on political issues. The right to free speech guaranteed by the US Constitution should be understood to include expressions of popular

21 | “We have so many facts at such ready disposal that they lose their ability to nail conclusions down, because there are always other facts supporting other interpretations” (Weinberger 2012: 38). This is one possible explanation of the rise of “post-truth politics.” “Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored” (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics).

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culture and forms of personal and creative expression that are not obviously related to politics. Balkin’s concept of a democratic culture emphasizes: (a) individual creativity and expression made possible by the digital age; (b) participation in culture, and the ability to appropriate culture and use it in ever new ways; (c) new methods of organization for cultural production and sharing of cultural products; and (d) the democratization of the means of cultural production, and the creation of new telecommunications infrastructures and software tools that have made this democratization of cultural production possible. (Balkin 2016: 8) Democratic culture means access to information and the ability to create new information by remixing and transforming already existing information. Balkin speaks of “routing around” and “glomming on.”22 A flourishing democratic culture has consequences not only for traditional views of privacy but also for intellectual property issues. Emphasizing privacy tends to limit access to information, whereas overly restrictive intellectual property laws tend to restrict creative and transformative uses of information. As Jenkins noted, participatory culture brings with it “a more empowered conception of citizenship.” Participation in a democratic culture, which is what according to Balkin the right to free speech and expression guarantees, implies that information is allowed to flow freely through networks and is not unduly restricted in use by overly protective privacy and intellectual property laws. Enabling, preserving, and fostering a democratic culture is a matter of “knowledge and information policy.”23 A knowledge and information policy that fosters democratic culture is based on the fundamental rights to free speech and free assembly. In the USA, these rights are solidly anchored in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Internationally, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 states clearly that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression…and to seek and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Article 20 states that “everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.” Furthermore, these fundamental rights are reflected in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union as well as in many constitutions of nations throughout the 22 | “Routing around” means “reaching audiences directly, without going through a gatekeeper or an intermediary;” whereas “glomming on” is “the creative and opportunistic use of trademarks, cultural icons, and bits of media products to create, innovate, reedit, alter, and form pastiches and collage…” (Balkin 2004: 9, 11). 23 | Balkin (2013a).

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world. In the UK, for example, these rights are guaranteed under Common Law. German Basic Law explicitly provides for these rights in Article 5 and Article 8.24 What all these pronouncements have in common is the deeply rooted concern of democratic societies for free and ubiquitous access to information and for the ability of citizens to use and transform information.25 The right to freedom of expression is the right to create information and thereby to participate in the constitution and transformation of society. Freedom of expression is essential to the very concept of democracy. It is important to note that although these rights are formulated as individual rights, Balkin argues that the doctrine of freedom of expression defines “freedom” not primarily in terms of individuals in opposition to society, but as “participation” and “interaction with others.”26 In contrast to privacy theories that assume creativity and innovation to depend upon the freedom and autonomy of the individual in opposition to society, rights to free expression need not assume that the isolated individual is the center and source of creativity. Freedom, as well as creativity, can be realized only in community. Quite the opposite of the usual assumption that it is only in private and apart from others that one can be different and express oneself in innovative ways, a democratic culture depends on an open and accessible information and communication infrastructure as well as a culture of participation which allows for “making new meanings and new ideas out of old ones” (2004: 4-5).27 24 | See German Basic Law Art. 5: “Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible Sources.” See also Art. 8: All Germans shall have the right to assemble peacefully and unarmed without prior notification or permission.” For an overview by country see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Freedom_of_speech_by_country. 25 | Of course, there are many limitations on what can legally be expressed. Despite rights to free speech, lies, hate speech, child pornography, incitement to terrorism, etc. are legally sanctioned. In the face of increased use of social media for these purposes and the detrimental effects of “fake news” democratic societies find themselves walking an increasingly controversial and uncertain line between free speech and censorship. 26 | Let us recall that privacy theorists such as Cohen (2012) Richardson (2016) and Austin (2015) all plead for reconceptualizing privacy not on the basis of an abstract autonomy and radical individualism, but on basis of the essential embeddedness of humans in society. As Lisa Austin (2015) argues, we should “move away from a focus on privacy harms to a focus on what kind of legal norms can facilitate our social interactions” (189). 27 | Understanding information as a common good to which all contribute as well as make use can be seen as the basis for yet another fundamental human right, namely, the right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” as formulated in Art. 27 of

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The fundamental right to freedom of expression points not only to a view of information as a common good that should be available to all but also to a different understanding of the relation of the individual to society than do rights to privacy or rights to intellectual property. The purpose of freedom of speech…is to promote a democratic culture. A democratic culture is more than representative institutions of democracy, and it is more than deliberation about public issues. Rather, a democratic culture is a culture in which individuals have a fair opportunity to participate in the forms of meaning making that constitute them as individuals. Democratic culture is about individual liberty as well as collective self-governance; it is about each individual’s ability to participate in the production and distribution of culture. (Balkin 2004: 3)

For Balkin, the right to freedom of expression must be radically reconceptualized. Freedom of expression in the digital age has four different components. First, it implies a right “to publish, distribute to, and reach an audience” (43). Second, freedom of expression implies the right “to interact with others and exchange ideas with them” (ibid.). This includes the right “to influence and to be influenced, to transmit culture and absorb it” (ibid). Third, freedom of expression implies the right “to appropriate from cultural materials that lay at hand, to innovate, annotate, combine, and then share the result with others” (ibid.). And finally, free speech means everyone has a right “to participate in and produce culture,” implying the right “to have a say in the development of the cultural and communicative forces that shape the self” (ibid.). These rights redefine the meaning of freedom, autonomy, and self-determination in a non-individualistic way. As Balkin puts it, they are not “self-regarding,” since “communication is interacting, sharing, influencing, and being influenced in turn” (ibid.). The constitution of the informational self, therefore, does not define a unique and indivisible individual who depends upon privacy to maintain freedom and autonomy. The informational self is not constantly worrying about boundary maintenance. On the contrary, constructing the informational self is a “project that one shares with others” (ibid). Recalling Mill’s influential notion of freedom as something that can only flourish when others are not looking, or Cohen’s claim that freedom can only be realized in the “gaps” or “interstices” of information, Balkin’s view implies that freedom is much closer to publicy than to privacy. Publicy is freedom that consists in access to information, participation in creating and using information,

the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In many areas, for example, that of genomic and health research as exemplified by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (https://www.ga4gh.org/), science depends on open access to data and information.

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communication, and acceptance of transparency. Although he does not use the term, Balkin defines freedom in a way that sounds a lot like publicy: Freedom is participation. Freedom is distribution. Freedom is interaction. Freedom is the ability to influence and be influenced in turn. Freedom is the ability to change others and to be changed as well. […] Freedom is appropriation, transformation, promulgation, subversion, the creation of the new out of the old. Freedom is mixing, fusing, separating, conflating, and uniting. Freedom is the discovery of synergies, the reshuffling of associations and connections, the combination of influences and materials. Freedom is bricolage. (Balkin 2004: 44)

The obligation of protecting freedom understood as publicy sets the agenda of legal, administrative, and regulatory institutions in an entirely different way than does the obligation to protect privacy. Legal and administrative institutions must now be primarily concerned with guaranteeing a “technological and regulatory infrastructure” (Balkin 2004: 48) that supports participation, transparency, connectivity, and the free flow of information.

3.4 The Socio-Sphere Reorienting knowledge and information policy around publicy instead of privacy has important implications for understanding what has traditionally been called the “public sphere.” The public sphere has usually been understood as a societal domain in which citizens come together to deliberate issues of common concern and build consensus motivating and legitimating political action. As Habermas put it, the public sphere is the place where “private people came together as a public” (Habermas 1989: 27). In this uniquely democratic “place” neither rank nor wealth nor power nor religious affiliation, but solely the nonviolent force of the better argument legitimates cooperative action. This long-standing idealization of political discourse has become increasingly questionable. Practically speaking, how can large groups enter into unrestricted dialogue on complex issues and come to any common understanding or decision? Instead of rational deliberation, modernity has settled for mass media persuasion. Egalitarian, face-to-face communication may work for small groups of people, but the moment many people come together and attempt to discuss important issues face-to-face communication breaks down. Habermas (1987: 181) acknowledges this explicitly when he admits that attempts to coordinate action among large numbers of people “’overburden’ the communicative resources of the population and so some form of ‘relief mechanism’ must be found.” It was mass media that took over the task of “relieving” public communication from the burdens of a face-to-face interaction among large numbers of people and transformed the public sphere into a form of top-

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down, one-to-many communication that was assumed to legitimate a system of representative politics. Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out that the mass media did not function as impartial channels of truth and arbiters of rational discourse, but much more as a “culture industry” aiming to transform the public into an anonymous crowd of passive consumers.28 Although Habermas continued to hope that the media could and would serve democratic processes, he was forced to admit long before the “post-truth” era that “Reporting facts as human-interest stories, mixing information with entertainment, arranging material episodically, and breaking down complex relationships into smaller fragments – all of this comes together to form a syndrome that works to depoliticize public communication” (1996: 377). The digital media revolution has radically changed this situation. Castells speaks of the new structure of communication that has arisen from the affordances of ICTs as “mass self-communication”: In recent years, the fundamental change in the realm of communication has been the rise of what I have called mass self-communication – the use of the Internet and wireless networks as platforms of digital communication. It is mass communication because it processes messages from many to many, with the potential of reaching a multiplicity of receivers, and of connecting to endless networks that transmit digitized information around the neighborhood or around the world. It is self-communication because the production of the message is autonomously decided by the sender, the designation of the receiver is self-directed and the retrieval of messages from the networks of communication is self-selected. Mass self-communication is based on horizontal networks of interactive communication that, by and large, are difficult to control by governments or corporations. Furthermore, digital communication is multimodal and allows constant reference to a global hypertext of information whose components can be remixed by the communicative actor according to specific projects of communication. Mass self-communication provides the technological platform for the construction of the autonomy of the social actor, be it individual or collective, vis-àvis the institutions of society. (Castells 2015: 6-7)

Castells is describing nothing less than a radical transformation of the traditional public sphere which has been dominated by mass media and representative politics. In the place of top-down broadcast media and the silent majority of passive media consumers, there has arisen a new social and political domain. This is a social domain that is not characterized by the typically modern dichotomy of public versus private, nor by the theoretical antagonism of agency and structure. We propose designating this new form 28 | See the Chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).

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of public domain as the “socio-sphere.”29 In the socio-sphere, there is neither public nor private, neither citizens nor foreigners, neither monopolistic media producers on the one side nor passive media consumers on the other. Instead, there is publicy. To claim that publicy has become the default condition in the digital age amounts to giving up both a specifically private sphere as well as the traditional public sphere of political deliberation. Publicy is not merely just another form of the public sphere, one characterized by digital media. Unlike the traditional public sphere, publicy is not opposed to a private sphere. Publicy is neither public nor private. It designates a socio-sphere that can no longer be defined by the traditional dichotomies of modernity.30 The socio-sphere and the condition of publicy that corresponds to it should not too quickly be identified with what has come to be known as “civil society.” Civil society has at least three different but related meanings, all of which are derived from opposition to the governmental apparatus of the Westphalian nation-state.31 First, civil society is often defined as a public sphere in the traditional sense of an arena for deliberation on issues concerning the common good. This view goes back to Kant and the Enlightenment which asserted the right and duty of citizens to be informed about state activities and voice their opinion, an opinion which through the channels of representative democracy legitimates state power. This is civil society understood as the public sphere which Habermas (1989) saw as the foundation of democracy since it allows citizens to exercise a form of power in terms of “rational-critical public debate” (28). The traditional public sphere is the social arena in which public opinion can be voiced and influence government actions and policies. The second meaning of civil society is also understood to be the social domain of free associations, but in this view, it is to pursue private interests, whether economic or otherwise. Whether it be business ventures, hobbies, religious associations, or charitable institutions, it is within civil society that individuals and groups pursue their interests apart from governmental intervention. This view goes back at least to Hegel’s (Philosophy of Right) concept of civil society as “system 29 | See Krieger/Belliger (2014: 157ff). 30 | Szabo (Blogpost February, 2017: http://unenumerated.blogspot.ch/2017/02/ money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html) has argued that decentralizing technologies such as Blockchain reinforce publicy by opening up a principally universal domain of transparency and trust: “Trust in the secret and arbitrarily mutable activities of a private computation can be replaced by verifiable confidence in the behavior of a generally immutable public computation.” 31 | “Civil society constitutes those areas of social life – the domestic world, the economic sphere, cultural activities and political interaction – which are organized by private or voluntary arrangements between individuals and groups outside the direct control of the state” (Held 1993: 6).

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of needs” located between the intimacy of the family and the political realm of state government.32 Today the private business sector is often seen as a domain of its own whereas civil society consists of not only non-governmental but also non-profit organizations. Whatever civil society might be, it seems to be neither government nor private enterprise. Finally, civil society is often defined as the domain of communal solidarity on the basis of shared values and common worldviews. This is the cradle of communitarianism in its many forms.33 Whatever aspect of civil society one looks at, there is always a sharp distinction between civil society and traditional business organizations, governmental agencies, and established institutions of healthcare, education, research, etc. For the most part, civil society has come to be defined within and in opposition to the modern nation-state. If it can be safely assumed that the Westphalian nation-state no longer plays the dominant role that it had before globalization, this implies that civil society no longer needs to be understood in opposition to the nation-state. In the “postnational,” global network society, civil society must redefine itself apart from a constitutive opposition to the government and business. Spini formulates this demand as follows: Civil society organisations are actors in what used to be the space of international politics, a space that is now better represented by the image of a multi-level and multitiered Mobius knot of governance functions than by the traditional Westphalian vertical architecture. State and non-state actors interact at various levels of governance, and civil society organisations do not need to go through the filter of state institutions, but can exercise autonomously a protagonist role in many fields that used to be the exclusive province of states. (Spini 2011: 21)

We propose reinterpreting the role and function of civil society in terms of the global socio-sphere which encompasses both state and non-state actors, both 32 | Spini (2011: 20) points to an inherent contradiction in these two traditions: “civil society can be seen as the antagonist of the state but, at the same time, it has to become the source of its legitimacy.” 33 | The World Bank defines civil society as “the wide array of non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations that have a presence in public life, expressing the interests and values of their members or others, based on ethical, cultural, political, scientific, religious or philanthropic considerations.” http://web.worldbank.org/ WBSITE/EX TERNAL/TOPICS/CSO/0,,contentMDK:20101499~menuPK:244752~pa​ gePK:220503~piPK:220476~theSitePK:228717,00.html. For an overview, see the discussion in Setianto (2007). And for a discussion of the history and structure of civil society see Edwards (2013). For communitarianism see Etzioni/Volmert/Rothschild (2004).

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private and public domains and is not limited by the borders of or traditional oppositions to modern nation-states. The socio-sphere is constituted neither by shared values, nor by nongovernmental or non-profit organizations, nor by political deliberation among the citizens of a nation-state, but by many-to-many communication, or what Castells above referred to as “mass self-communication.” The affordances of ICTs have created a socio-sphere that is global, non-exclusive, non-hierarchical, and open to all.34 The socio-sphere is not defined or delimited by organizational, communal, institutional, or national boundaries. The sense in which we use the term “socio-sphere” comes close to what Albrow (1996: 161) spoke of within the context of a discussion of the global age as the end of modernity. Albrow speaks of a “sociosphere” as a global phenomenon fundamentally opposed to modernity.35 According to Albrow, the nation-state is no longer the primary control instance for identity and economic and political activity. Furthermore, the global sociosphere as Albrow defines it empowers consumers instead of producers. And finally, Albrow defines it by the activities of transnational associations and the growing influence of bottom-up international social movements. The appearance of a new and unprecedented form of a global public sphere is usually associated not only with the end of modernity but also with the rise of new media. Bohman, for example, (2004: 135) argues that “computer-mediated communication offers a potentially new solution to the problem of the extension of communicative interactions across space and time and thus, perhaps, signals the emergence of a public sphere that is not subject to the specific linguistic, cultural and spatial limitations of the bounded national public spheres that have up to now supported representative democratic institutions.” For Bohman, this calls for “rethinking both democracy and the public sphere outside the limits of its previous historical forms” (151). We consider these views to be indicators that a proper understanding of publicy must go beyond modern Western conceptions of a public sphere as well as of civil society. At first glance, the idea of a global socio-sphere seems to have much in common with the related concept of “world polity,” or “world culture” that has been developed by neoinstitutionalist thinkers such as J. W. Meyer, J. Boli, G. M. Thomas and others.36 Neoinstitutionalism is important because it clearly distances itself from liberal, market-oriented interpretations of social order. It locates the sources of order in norms, values, models, and general expectations about how society should be, how nations states should be structured, how 34 | See Weinberger’s (2012) discussion of the new knowledge economy. 35 | We hyphenate the term “socio-sphere” in order to distinguish between our usage and Albrow’s definition. 36 | See Meyer (1980); Meyer et al. (1997); and Boli/Thomas (1997).

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organizations should be constituted, and what rights and duties individuals within society have on a transnational plane of “world culture” or “world polity.” Formally, the global socio-sphere we propose and a world polity may seem to have certain common characteristics. For example, organization and identity are guided by general norms and expectations independent of and beyond the borders of state governments, formal organizations, or legal regulations. Nonetheless, there are significant differences between what we intend with the term socio-sphere and what neoinstitutionalism has termed a world polity or world culture. These differences appear in three areas: 1) the question of the origins of norms, 2) the distinction between the normative and the factual, and 3) the content of what is considered normative. In order to clarify what we mean by publicy and the global socio-sphere, we will take a closer look at what we consider distinctive characteristics of our proposal as opposed to neoinstitutionalism’s concept of a world culture.

3.5 Reconstructing Neoinstitutionalism We agree with neoinstitutionalism when it comes to an understanding social order as guided and influenced by norms. Furthermore, we agree in rejecting realist and individualist foundations of society.37 We follow neoinstitutionalism in understanding the social not to be a secondary phenomenon that arises from the originary actions of self-interested, autonomous, rational subjects. The rejection of realist individualism implies that it cannot be the proper task of social theory to explain how the parts are somehow integrated into a whole, or how individual agency gives rise to but is also conditioned by macro social structures.38 In opposition to institutionalism, however, we argue that the sociosphere is constituted by network norms arising from the affordances of information and communication technologies.39 What these norms are, we will discuss below. The question at hand is where the norms constituting the socio-sphere come from. Recalling what was said above about the nature of technical mediation and the construction of actor-networks on the basis of information, it can be argued that it is the network that is the actor and the actor is always already a 37 | Meyer (2010) contrasts neoinstitutionalism’s “phenomenological models” to “realist models” in which “rational actors are natural entities, in some respects prior to the social life under analysis;” … “in realist models, the relation of actor and action is causal, with society and its structure as a product” (4). 38  |  An example of this view of social theory is Giddens’ (1984) influential “structuration theory.” According to this view, “in and through their activities agents reproduce the conditions that make these activities possible” (2). 39 | See Krieger/Belliger (2014) and Belliger/Krieger (2016) for detailed discussions of the network norms.

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network. Callon’s (1987) succinct definition of an actor-network as “reducible neither to an actor alone nor to a network” is helpful when it comes to moving beyond dichotomies of subject and object or agency and structure. For Callon, “An actor-network is simultaneously an actor whose activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a network that is able to redefine and transform what it is made of” (1987: 93). This view depends neither on individual actors, nor macro-structures, nor any dialectic between them, but defines the social as the process of networking.40 Our humble example of a stone ax in Part 1 above was intended to illustrate how social order in a human world of meaning can be understood. The hunter or builder is neither a human alone nor is the stone a piece of something called nature, a mere object opposed to a subject, a neutral instrument in human hand. Together, the human hand, the stone, and also the animal or wood that is being worked upon translate and enroll each other into an actor-network. A stone ax is neither a piece of culture or a natural object, but an actor-network. Translation and enrollment create information, that is, the links, associations, and interfaces that bind together and transform all participating elements. It is a symmetrical process in which all participants contribute something and in which all participants are transformed into something else by entering into a network. Information is not added to something that is already there. Information is not a mental, cognitive, symbolic or otherwise kind of entity that leaves all else as it is. It belongs neither to a subject nor to an object. Information constitutes the world as a world of meaning in which humans – together with non-humans – exist in certain ways. Information arises from efforts of translation and enrollment undertaken by all participants to the network. Activities of translation and enrollment, that is, processes of constructing information, are ontological determinants of the real as well as the constitutive processes of the “social.” Society does not stand outside of or alongside nature. There are neither micro-actors nor macro-structures outside of, before, or after these processes. Social order is nothing other than the process of networking and networking is nothing other than the process of information construction. If one still wishes to speak of social actors, then these are networks both constituted of and constituting information. We wish to call this kind of actor the “informational self.” The informational self participates in and is transformed by an everexpanding array of networks that can, following Floridi, be termed the “infosphere.” The default condition of the informational self, following Boyd, we have termed “publicy.” Publicy is a process of information construction that, as Boyd puts it, it consists of entering into contracts and associations of 40 | See Krieger/Belliger (2014) and Belliger/Krieger (2106) for a detailed discussion of the concept of “networking.”

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many different kinds. It is a process of negotiating, of trial-and-error, of testing, and of coming to tenuous and uncertain “agreements” that allow a network to take shape and enter upon a specific trajectory that may be termed a “program of action.”41 The norms that guide processes of information construction are derived from the kinds of translating and enrolling that participants in the networks do. Not only humans do translating and enrolling, but also nonhumans. The many things, artifacts, and technologies with which we build our society and our world also condition the ways in which we can or cannot construct networks. Wirth regard to the symmetrical role that nonhumans play in processes of networking, we may speak of the contribution of nonhumans to effective ways of translating and enrolling as “affordances.” The stone translates and enrolls a hand or a piece of wood in a different way than does a modern sawing machine or a computer. Building in the Paleolithic is different from building by CAAD, computer modeling, and 3D-Printing. We do not usually construct information today with the help of stones and pieces of wood, and therefore we do it in a different way than did our ancestors. This is not only because we have changed but also because our technical partners have changed. The most significant of our nonhuman significant others today are no longer stones or axes, which undeniably played an important part in human history, but ICTs. The affordances of ICTs are different from the affordances of stones and wood. To the extent that norms arise from the interactions of social actors and to the extent that ICTs have become important social actors, they condition what norms are guiding networking in today’s global network society. Following this line of thought, we propose to derive the norms of the socio-sphere from the affordances of ICTs. In opposition to neoinstitutionalism, we find the source of norms not to be located in formalized scripts, models, schemes, ISO standards, regulations, or laws conceived of as influencing and constraining actors more or less behind their backs. Instead, network norms are descriptions of how networking is being effectively done in the digital age. This view understands governance and regulation to be something that is happening in the here and now and not an idealized plane of what “ought” to be but for the most part is not put into practice. This brings us to the second difference between what we wish to designate as the default condition of publicy within a global socio-sphere and what neoinstitutionalism describes as world culture. From the perspective of publicy, the normative is not a level of reality that resides in a hypothetical or ideal domain of what “ought” to be in distinction to what in fact is. Network norms become visible in the ways in which networking effectively takes place. Norms describe the agency of both humans and non-humans involved in symmetrical processes of translating and enrolling actors into networks. Contrary to expectations 41 | See Latour (1992) for a discussion of the term “program of action.”

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that norms prescribe what ought to be done, network norms describe what is actually being done. If we wish to locate norms, rules, guidelines, etc. in the domain of “culture,” then culture should not be understood as ideal rules in opposition to real practice, and it should not be interpreted as a symbolically constituted realm of meaning that is ontologically opposed to nature and technology. Things and artifacts such as stones and wood do not lie outside of culture but are cultural actors in their own right. Norms are not opposed to facts but are the ways in which actually existing socio-technical ensembles operate. Against neoinstitutionalism, norms are not ideal types or myths of rationalized organizations. For neoinstitutionalism, however, the distinction between the normative and the factual is of great importance because it explains the apparent formal “isomorphism” of organizations regardless of national or sectorial boundaries on the one hand, and the equally apparent factual diversity and heterogeneity of local social practices on the other hand. This gap between the “is” and the “ought,” which is constitutive for neoinstitutionalism, has been given a special name. It is termed “decoupling.” Decoupling designates the difference between fact and value, or in other words, between saying one thing and doing another. Karl Weick (1976) introduced this term into organizational theory to account for obvious discrepancies in the systems model of organizations and what organizations, in fact, look like. A system is an integrated whole consisting of elements organized into functional relations. As unified systems of functional elements, organizations would be expected to display tight connections between differentiated units, that is, roles and processes. The reality of organizational behavior, however, shows the disconnected, if not chaotic actions of more or less “loosely coupled” units. People do not strictly follow the chain of command; processes are not seamlessly adapted to each other, etc. The loosely coupled organization found in reality does not correspond to the theoretical model of bureaucratic command and control embodied in formal statements, declarations, strategies, standards, organograms, charters, constitutions, and so on. In short, theory and practice do not correspond. Despite these discrepancies, the clean, tightly connected, bureaucratic model was claimed to express the formal structures of the organization correctly. Instead of placing the theory in question, the solution was to place formal structure on an ideal, normative level and generously allow for factual divergences, or “loose coupling” on the ground. On the one hand, organizations of all kinds pay lip service to ideal models, while on the practical level they are everything else but what they should be. Institutionalism carried this solution over onto the international and global level as an explanation of

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isomorphism of organizations on the formal level and heterogeneity on the local, practical level.42 All over the world state governments, constitutions, educational institutions, and businesses look alike, at least formally, but in reality, they all reflect local traditions and diverge from the official formal rules and standards. They do not embody the ideal, normative model as it is portrayed, for example, by the “good governance” guidelines of the World Bank. For example, everyone formally subscribes to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but many do not implement these rights. Every nation-state formally subscribes to democratic processes, but many do not implement them. Businesses and public administrations everywhere have to conform to international standards of good governance, at least formally, but what happens on the ground looks quite different.43 Neoinstitutionalism explains this situation as “decoupling” which implies that the “institutions” of world culture exist primarily in the virtual realm of values as opposed to the realm of local, messy, and heterogeneous matters of fact. Basing institutionalized world culture on the distinction between fact and value has the curious effect of creating the situation in which “precisely the actors least able to comply with institutionalized scripts are most likely to adopt these scripts” (Meyer 2010: 14).44 In distinction to this approach, the network norms that we are proposing as guiding publicy and constituting the socio-sphere are not “normative” in the sense of being opposed to a completely different realm of factual reality characterized primarily by abnormality, non-conformity, or “decoupling.” Instead of contra-factually attempting to save the theory by distinguishing between fact and value, we propose revising the theory to reflect what is actually going on in globalization. 42 | See Tröhler (2009) for a discussion of this basis for neoinstitutionalism. Meyer (2010: 13) summarizes the empirical findings: “At the individual level, there is the notorious inconsistency between values and actions. [...] At the organizational level, there are the great gaps between structures and practices […] or formal and informal structures. […] At the nation-state level, disconnections between policies and practices are extreme […].” 43 | As Chhotray and Stoker (2009: 131) point out in their discussion of the socio-legal critique of the “good governance” concept developed by international development institutions such as the World Bank, “outcomes are all too frequently associated with legal prescriptions that are enshrined in law or management policy which may be drastically different form the ‘informal rules’ governing access to resources or services.” This accounts for the “decoupling” of the norms of world culture from the actual situation on the ground. 44 | “The institutional theory of decoupling observes that, in the modern system, actor identities – structures, policies, plans and constitutions – are statements about what should happen, but will probably not happen” (Meyer 2010: 14).

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Pacquet (1999: 8) points out that globalization does not favor bureaucratic hierarchies. Quite the contrary, “globalization has led to localization of decisionmaking, to empowerment, to the dispersion of power, and to a more distributed governance process.” The absence of any central authority in the international arena creates the need for new forms of cooperation and regulation. The reality of globalization corresponds to a model of networked organizations much more than the Weberian bureaucracies that neoinstitutionalism proposes. We will return to this in our discussion of network governance below. From the point of view of a relational ontology that defines a specific realm of information, an “infosphere” in which society, as well as nature, constitute network phenomena consisting of information, norms cannot be “decoupled” from factual realities. The now default condition of publicy and the global socio-sphere do not constitute a realm of symbolic or cultural values distinguished from empirical facts. The difference between fact and value is based on the typically modern distinction between subject and object. This distinction suggests the notion of a realm of objective facts that are known by science and a realm of symbolically expressed subjective interpretations, opinions, and emotions constituting culture or society. In the modern world, society is the realm of subjectivity and is fundamentally opposed to nature understood as the realm of objective facts. Things, artifacts, and technologies are governed by determinate causality, whereas the social realm is governed by more or less irrational emotions and arbitrary acts of will under the sway of norms, rules, expectations, and more or less legitimate violence. Of course, modernity assumed that even the social and cultural realm could be subjected to the methods and assumptions of objective science. The human sciences of psychology and sociology discovered soft-causal mechanisms of social order, macro social structures, norms, and institutions, or as Durkheim put it, “social facts.” Recently, this modern “constitution” (Latour 1993) of knowledge has been put into question by science studies.45 Science studies has not only shown that so-called objective science is also a social phenomenon, but that “facts” are also matters of value. It is important to emphasize that value can no longer be 45 | See Latour (1993; 1999; 2005) for a discussion of significance of science studies. Latour (1993: 13ff) describes the modern constitution as a world divided into four distinct and opposing domains: nature out there, knowing inside the human mind, God transcendent and beyond the world, and finally, society as a kind of imminent God, that is, a realm of macro social structures transcending the individual, but nonetheless defined by irrational emotions, opinions, and the weaknesses and shortcomings of human nature. Modernity is based on a series of dichotomies; subject/object, humans/ nature, nature/society, God/world. Knowledge is divided into objective, value free knowledge, the domain of science, and subjective opinions, prejudices, ideologies, and more or less legitimate violence.

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conceived of as opposed to fact. Latour (2004) speaks of “matters of concern” instead of matters of fact.46 The typically modern dichotomies of subject and object, nature and society, fact and value no longer adequately describe the world. Latour proposes that we not speak of society or nature at all anymore, but instead, we should speak of both humans and non-humans constituting a “collective.”47 A global network society cannot be adequately conceptualized within the boundaries of the “modern constitution.” New categories and new theories are needed to grasp and make meaningful the transformation we are going through. Following this appeal, in the place of modernism or institutionalism, we are proposing a theory of network publicy governance. A third important difference between a global socio-sphere and the “world culture” which neoinstitutionalism proposes can be seen to lie in the content of the norms that are supposedly guiding the construction of global social actors. The models, norms, expectations, and scripts that neoinstitutionalism identifies as constitutive of world culture are similar to the Weberian bureaucracies of the industrial society.48 Regardless of the type of organization, sector, nation, or function, so the argument, in organizations everywhere goals are set in similar ways, means to achieve these goals are discovered by use of evidence-based methods, and the implementation of means relies on command and control communication. Following these institutional norms, both organizations and individuals become “rational” actors in the modern Western sense of rationality that Weber described. Rationalization designates the pervasive influence of instrumental reason, the logic of means-and-ends enacted by autonomous actors. The forces that structure the world polity or world culture are conceived of as norms and expectations that guide the construction not only of public and private sector organizations but also of nation-states and international governmental and non-governmental organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. The central thesis is that “institutions and indeed, organizations, are the product of common understandings and shared interpretations of acceptable norms of collective activity” (Suddaby et al. 2010: 1235).

46 | “A matter of concern is what happens to a matter of fact when you add to it its whole scenography, much like you would do by shifting your attention from the stage to the whole machinery of a theatre. This is, for instance, what has happened to science when seized by the recent ‘science studies’ […]” (Latour 2008: 39). 47 | See Latour (1999: 174ff.) for a discussion of the collective. 48 | “World society theory is a theory of modernity. […] Drawing on Weber and other accounts of modernity, world society scholars emphasize rationalization, universalism, belief in progress, and individualism as foundational cultural assumptions that undergird global discourse and organization” (Schofer et al. 2012: 59).

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From the perspective of neoinstitutionalism, norms are said to “exert pressure” (ibid.) on organizations to at least formally comply with standard rules, models, and schemes that “explicitly differentiate and then seek to link means and ends” (Drori/Meyer/Hwang 2009: 22). As mentioned above, following Weber, this worldwide cultural influence is termed “rationalization.” According to the proponents of neoinstitutionalism, “through the transformation of social life around means-ends logic, the celebration of efficiency, and the valorization of credentialed expertise, rationalization becomes a most pervasive cultural force” (ibid.: 22). Rationalization in this view exhibits four “basic dimensions:” 1) formalized planning, or strategic planning, including the formal and explicit depiction of overall goals, means, and resources; 2) personnel deployment on the basis of explicit role specification, professionalized credentials, training, human resources, and standardized managerial titles; 3) rationalized structure, that is, the articulated differentiating and justification of production and control processes, core tasks, quality control, and widespread use of metrics for assessment; and 4) standardization in all areas (ibid.: 26-27). The description of world culture proposed by neoinstitutionalism suggests that it has not adequately taken account of the digital transformation. This should not be surprising considering that the foundations of institutionalism were laid in the 70’s and 80’s before the rise of the Internet and during the major post-World War II expansion of international organizations. In the midst of this largely Western and industrially dominated first wave of globalization, it is understandable that neoinstitutionalism would discover formative influences upon the constitution of social order that reflect the society of the time.49 These influences are described as “collectively shared scripts, frames, and taken-forgranted assumptions” (Suddaby et al. 2010: 1234), which are not represented or enforced by any central instance of power or government. In the absence of any real global government, neoinstitutionalism marks the attempt to elevate the ideals of industrial society onto the contra-factual, normative plane of world culture. This move is promising but misguided. It is promising because it is based on a much-needed rejection of the typically modern scenarios of both leftwing Marxist critique of capitalism, in which macro-actors in the form of governments and large corporations dominate society, as well as of rightwing neo-liberalism, which assumes the “invisible hand” of market relations will bring about order. The basic insight informing the neoinstitutionalist program is that at the end of modernity neither markets nor hierarchies emerge as the dominant forms of social order. This is an important insight and should not be 49 | “European dominance and colonial expansion propagated Western ideas on a global scale. The allied victory of World War II and the emergence of the U.S: (rather than Germany) as a dominant power shifted global culture in a more liberal, individualistic, and arguably ‘American’ direction” (Schofer et al.: 2012: 60).

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disregarded. Nonetheless, neoinstitutionalism is misguided when it attempts to project the management models of industrial society into a supposed sphere of global norms. If we resist this assumption and do not cling to the values of industrial society, it becomes possible to accept the consequences of the digital transformation and to reconstruct the program of neoinstitutionalism. What is needed is a theory that can describe the at once normative and factual forces that guide the constitution of a global network society.

3.6 Network Norms With the advent of the global network society, it is at least questionable that the normative assumptions of the industrial society can be carried over into the digital age without important changes and reinterpretations.50 Not only do authors such as Castells and Albrow plead for a postmodern understanding of world culture, but more radically Bruno Latour has recommended that we avoid modern social theories altogether and drop all talk about the social and society and speak only of the “collective.”51 The collective is “a shared definition of a common world” (Latour 2005: 247). The important point about such a shared definition is not any particular content or belief, but the task that it imposes on all social actors involved in working it out, assembling all the participants, and taking account of all the different “voices” that contribute to it. This shifts the focus away from substantive norms to normative processes. Not the what, but the how is important. This claim raises the question: If we are not talking about culture as opposed to nature, or norms as opposed to facts, or even the values of modern Western industrial society as opposed to those of non-Western cultures or developing nations, then what are we talking about? To speak of norms as processes and practices implies understanding social reality as an ongoing activity and not a set of fixed states, structures, or institutions. Society, or in the words of ANT the collective, does not consist of anything other than the processes and practices that assemble it, transform it, continuously link up new actors into existing networks, and break down provisional organizational and institutionalized boundaries to reconfigure and extend networks in all directions. This dynamic, which we term “networking,”52 has become so entangled with the affordances of ICTs that the norms guiding processes of networking can be described along similar lines as descriptions of the social influence of digital media. Present day social reality obviously does not correspond to modern bureaucratic models of order. This fact may well 50 | See Belliger/Krieger (2016) for a discussion of new management principles and practices for the digital age. 51 | See Latour (2005: 247ff). 52 | See Belliger/Krieger (2016).

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imply that we are dealing with networks rather than traditional organizations. If this is the case, it would be more useful to conceptualize social order in terms of dynamic networks than in terms of static hierarchical institutions constantly failing to attain their envisioned normative goals. The affordances of digital technologies and new media shed new light on how networked forms of social order are everywhere being constructed. In organization theory neoinstitutionalism attempts to relate organizations to norms and values reflecting industrial society. We argue that creating networks today is done differently from the way it was done in the industrial age. Admittedly, this difference is due to many factors. Nonetheless, we argue that primary influences come from what can be termed “network norms.” It would surely be premature and even counterproductive to claim that we have completely understood what these norms are and how they guide processes of networking today. This being said, we propose listing some of the most obvious normative affordances of ICTs. These are connectivity, flow, communication, participation, transparency, authenticity, and flexibility. In the following, we attempt to give an idea of how these network norms can be understood and what influence they have on assembling the collective. Connectivity Connectivity is perhaps the most important of the norms that characterize the sociotechnical ensemble of the global network society. Links, associations, and relations of all kinds are translated into digital information which, in the words of Feldman (1997) can be said to be “manipulable,” “networkable,” “dense,” “compressible,” and “impartial.” The universal digital form makes every kind of information easily compatible, combinable, transferable, and transformable. Digital devices “want” to be connected because the information they produce as well as their influence within a network gains in “value” – economic, scientific, political, educational, etc. – the more it can be aggregated and combined with other information from other devices. Before the digital transformation, analog information faced enormous spatial, temporal, and physical hindrances that needed to be overcome with costly, dangerous, uncertain, and time-consuming efforts of inscription, mobilization, transcribing, archiving, etc.53 Digital affordances, on the contrary, cut these costs enormously by linking not only every kind of information but also every producer of information to every other with negligible spatial and temporal constraints.54 For example, there is 53 | The well-known laboratory studies and historical studies in the tradition of ANT have demonstrated the complex and painstaking efforts of linking information in the analogical age. 54 | “Connectivity refers to the quantitative and qualitative degree of relations, connections, and ties between nodes in a network. […] Generally, it can be said that

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in principle no hindrance to combining the digital contents of the Library of Congress with all other research libraries throughout the world and making these contents available to anyone at anytime from anywhere. Searching for information in the days before the Internet meant spending much effort to overcome spatial and temporal distances between repositories. The very idea of the World Wide Web is based on connectivity. Hyperlinks and the Internet allow one to move seamlessly from one source to another in an instant. Although connectivity is not new – information essentially and inherently consists of links and associations – digital affordances radically reduce the spatial, temporal, and material conditions of association and bring connectivity to the fore as a dominant influence in the construction of social order. For this reason, the network infrastructure of the Internet has become an iconic representation of connectivity. The Internet, however, is not the only example of connectivity. All forms of networking are based upon the imperative to connect as many participants as possible, whether these be people, computers, buildings, automobiles, factories, animals, rivers, volcanoes, power plants, stock exchanges, cities, governments, or whatever. Perhaps the most representative illustration of connectivity is the impending “Internet of Everything” or “Internet of Things” which is based on the principle of transforming all things into nodes in a network. With regard to connectivity, Castells (1996: 407ff., 460ff.) speaks of a unique “space of flows” and a “timeless time” that is characteristic of the global network society. Networks operate in a way that was not possible under the affordances of industrial technologies. Manovich points out that the affordances of industrial technologies no longer condition society. Much rather, “the world […] is now defined not by heavy industrial machines that change infrequently, but by software that is always in flux” (2013: 1-2). From this point of view […] when you play a video game, explore an interactive installation in a museum, design a building, create special effects for a feature film, design a website, use a mobile phone to read a movie review or to view the actual movie, and carry out thousands of other cultural activities, in practical terms, you are doing the same thing – using software. Software has become our interface to the world, to others, to our memory and our imagination – a universal language through which the world speaks, and a universal engine on which the world runs. What electricity and the combustion engine were to the early twentieth century, software is to the early twenty-first century. (Manovich 2013: 2)

Connectivity means that it has become imperative to link up all sources, producers, and users of information in a global, unbounded, and uncontrollable connectivity stands in reverse proportion to the quantity of time and space that a network requires in order to operate” (Krieger/Belliger 2014: 138-139).

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network, which, as Weinberger (2012) has pointed out, is non-hierarchical, inclusive, connected, complex, and public. This is the global socio-sphere.55 In the socio-sphere the default condition for informational selves is publicy.56 The advent of the socio-sphere has important consequences for social theory. Since nothing should be excluded from the network, social order and forms of organization cannot be theorized in systemic terms. Systems are forms of order and organization that are constituted by boundaries and inclusion/ exclusion codes. A system must be distinguished from its environment, or it is not a system at all. This is because systems consist of only a limited selection of elements related to each other in order to accomplish certain functions. There is no system of everything, no world system, for the simple reason that the system is always necessarily less complex than the environment. Without sharp boundaries created by a selection of certain elements, relationing of these elements in specific ways, and steering of systemic operations, there is no systemic order, only chaos. Systems are therefore not decentralized, distributed, and non-hierarchical. Networks have a very different structure. Whereas a system cannot consist of everything, a network can and in principle must. A system cannot do everything, but a network, at least in principle, can pursue multiple and even conflicting goals. The Internet (of Everything) is itself a good example of this fundamental difference between the system model and the network model. As a network norm, connectivity means not only that networks are decentralized, but also heterogeneous, open, participative, and flexible. Regarding institutionalism, one could argue that connectivity is a new kind of institution. Connectivity is an important socio-cultural-technical norm in the global network society. Flow Connectivity implies a second network norm which we term flow. Linking up everything to everything in such a way that information can be produced, aggregated, combined, transferred, and transformed by all nodes implies that hindrances, blockages, gateways, etc. which attempt to limit the free flow of information are not valued. Hindrances to the flow of information do not increase value, even if in the short term it may appear so. Like connectivity, flow is an imperative that influences all aspects of society. Castells (1996: 460) speaks of a 55  |  Despite fears of the centralizing tendencies of new Internet monopolies – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are usually named – the vision of radical decentralization and a peer-to-peer Internet infrastructure lives on in technologies such as Blockchain. See for example https://blockstack.org/. 56 | This remains so even if digital identity is conceived of and technologically implemented as “self-sovereign” identity, since the driving force behind self-sovereign digital identity is participation and inclusion and withdraw and exclusion.

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“space of flows.” Flow is an affordance of the sociotechnical ensemble of today’s networks. For Castells (2004) “networks process flows, […] flows are streams of information between nodes circulating through the channels of connection between nodes” (3). Flow is a network norm that expresses the imperative of unexpected, unpredictable, and uncontrollable movement of information, but not only information, also people, goods, money, etc., through global networks. Every node in the network is participating not only by channeling, but also by generating, modifying, and distributing content. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to implement command and control, or hierarchical, exclusive, and restrictive forms of communication. It becomes increasingly costly and inefficient to attempt to channel information in only certain directions, for example, top-down or to restrict access to information. The affordances of flow have caused many people to feel threatened by uncontrolled distribution and usage of personal information and have fired much current privacy debate. The affordances of ICTs are indeed working against privacy and are working for publicy. The informational self is constituted not by the ability, or even the fundamental right to withhold information, but by negotiations, associations, contracts, and flexible communities based on the flow of information. Publicy is open, non-hierarchical, inclusive, and non-bounded. Instead of a fundamental right to privacy in the sense of withholding information, connectivity and flow support much more the “democratic culture” that Balkin, as mentioned above, finds grounded in the rights to free speech and expression. Democratic culture is an expression of freedom to the extent that information can be accessed and used to bring forth novel, unexpected, innovative, and perhaps even subversive communication. Flow refers to the unpredictable and uncontrollable movement of information in networks. Quite the contrary to Mill’s influential assumption that secrecy fosters experimentation with life and fends off pressures to conform, it can be argued that it is precisely because information moves in networks in unforeseeable ways that new and unexpected associations are made possible. Flow is an inherently anti-hierarchical principle. It is a nonconformist norm that is constitutive of networks. Despite all efforts to control, limit, and censor information flows, the affordances of the network undermine such efforts in countless ways and raise the question of whether basic strategies for security should not be realigned with the new network norms.57 Communication Closely related to connectivity and flow is the network norm of communication. Elsewhere we have defined communication as “all practices, techniques, 57 | See http://interpretingnetworks.ch/network-publicy-governance-and-cyber-secu​ rity/ for a discussion of cyber-security from the point of view of network norms.

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activities, influences, and negotiations that contribute to integrating nodes into a network and connecting them to each other” (Krieger/Belliger 2014: 144). This definition attempts to place the concept of communication on a level of abstraction comparable with major theories of society such as those of Habermas and Luhmann.58 For both these thinkers, communication is not merely one social phenomenon among others. Communication is the foundation of the social and consequently the foundational concept of social theory. Luhmann goes so far as to proclaim that society does not consist of human beings at all, but of communications.59 Human beings understood as either biological or psychological individuals are for Luhmann not part of the social system. This radical view is important because it shows how far postmodern social theories have moved away from traditional humanist assumptions. Furthermore, it allows for an important clarification of the differences between the systems model of society and the network model. Luhmann’s theory of social systems invites comparison with ANT on many levels. For Luhmann as for Latour, there is only one world-encompassing social order.60 For both thinkers, traditional humanist and modern categories, such as agency and structure, are placed in question. By far the most interesting comparison, however, is the opposition between the different basic models of social reality that inform both theories, that is, the opposition between systems and networks. In the view of actor-network theory, society, or as Latour prefers, the collective, is a network of humans and nonhumans constituted by processes of translation and enrollment. The collective, at last in principle, does not exclude anything or anybody. A system, on the contrary, is a functionally related selection of elements, a whole that is always and necessarily more than the sum of its parts, and which is constituted by a sharp boundary between itself and the environment.61 Constitutive of systemic order is a sharp boundary of identity and exclusion. Systems emerge in order to solve the problem of complexity. They arise by reducing complexity. A system cannot contain everything. It is 58 | Habermas (1984; 1987) and Luhmann (1995). 59 | Luhmann (1984: 346ff). 60 | Luhmann speaks of “world society” (1982), whereas for Latour the central concept is the “collective.” 61 | See Luhmann (1995: 16-17): “the point of departure for all systems-theoretical analysis must be the difference between system and environment. Systems are oriented by their environment not just occasionally and adaptively, but structurally, and they cannot exist without an environment. They constitute and maintain themselves by creating and maintaining a difference from their environment, and they use their boundaries to regulate this difference. Without difference from an environment, there would not even be self-reference, because difference is the functional premise of selfreferential operations. In this sense boundary maintenance is system maintenance.”

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always less than all possible states. A system is always necessarily a selection of only some elements among all possible things in the world. Selected elements are then related to each other in specific ways that enable operations peculiar to the system. A table, for example, is made up only of legs and a top. Everything else is excluded from the system. In addition to this, the legs and the top have to be related to each other in such a way that together, they function as a table. The room where the table is placed, the floor, the walls, the books on the table, the people who might use it, etc. all this belongs to the environment. If one could not distinguish between the table, the chairs, the room, the walls, etc. then one wouldn’t have a table at all, but perhaps something else, or perhaps nothing but a pile of useless pieces of wood. In opposition to a network, a system is therefore constituted by difference, by strict rules of inclusion and exclusion.62 To say that the elements or operations of the social system are communications as Luhmann does means that communication has to be defined in such a way as to make inclusion and exclusion readily possible. If society is able to refer its operations to itself, linking one operation to another in a continuous series and thus carry on its autopoiesis, it must be able to clearly distinguish between what communication is and what it is not. As for all systems, the social system is also based upon selection of elements, related in specific ways for a certain purpose or operation. Communication is no different. “Communication is the processing of selection” (Luhmann 1995: 140). The social system processes selections of “information,” “utterance,” and “understanding” (137ff.). The basic model is that someone says something to someone. What is said is information, how it is “said” – written, danced, sung, signaled in some way – is utterance, and why it is said, that is, the way in which it is “understood” by others and in so doing the way in which it leads to further communications, is what Luhmann calls “understanding.” “Understanding,” for Luhmann, does not mean that other people agree with what is said, or even that they know what is being talked about, but simply that they react communicatively, that is, that they also say something to someone. According to this definition of communication, which goes beyond the simple sender/ receiver transmission model, when communication takes place it necessarily leads to further communication. One operation of the social system connects up to further operations of the social system and so on. As long as this process goes on, society as a system of communications exists. If communicative operations cease, then so does society. In other words, communication communicates for the purpose of further communication. This is the social system. It does not matter what is being said as much as the fact that something is being said, and whatever it is, that it leads to something else being said.

62 | See Krieger (1996) for a discussion of the general principles of systemic order.

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Communications, according to Luhmann, are operations of the social system and not actions of human individuals, even if distinguishing between information and utterance (something was said by someone) has the effect of “constructing” a social actor, a “person” to whom communication can be ascribed. The seemingly unavoidable ascription of a communicative intention is important insofar as it explains why we usually assume that society consists of human beings. It also implies that since human beings are constructions of communication, anything that can be ascribed a communicative action, whether it be dolphins, ETs, or computers, all can be considered social actors.63 Of course, communication is not all the same. There are different kinds of communication. Different kinds of communications can be grouped together by different “generalized media” and differentiate themselves as semi-autonomous sub-systems of society. These sub-systems are business, politics, jurisprudence, art, religion, science, education, etc.64 Furthermore, communications that occur face-to-face are termed interactions whereas communications that can be grouped together on the basis of communicating decisions are termed “organizations.” The social system consists of large, semiautonomous subsystems, organizations, and interactions, all of which can be understood as different kinds of communication. According to Luhmann’s systems theory, everything that does not communicate is excluded from the social system. Things, artifacts, technology, and nature cannot become part of the social system because they do not communicate. They do not communicate because, according to Luhmann, in the case of things it is not possible to distinguish between the selections of information and utterance. A table is just and table. This may be information but it is not utterance because the table does not “say” that it is a table and if we were to (mis)understand such an utterance and speak back to it, the table would probably not answer and communication would come to a halt. Communication, let us recall, is a synthesis of selections of information, utterance, and understanding. In the case of the table, there is no selection of utterance. For this reason, there also cannot be “understanding” in the sense of further communications arising from the mere presence of the table. If the table did start talking, then this would be truly amazing and would definitely lead to further communications; most probably one would suspect 63 | Since it is the ascription of communicative action that constructs the social actor and not the human being as such, Luhmann’s theory is principally open to nonhuman social actors which marks a certain similarity to ANT. Nonetheless, communication for Luhmann is not translation and enrollment as for Latour and it does not include artifacts in the social system. Although society consists of communications and not human beings, in the end all we find are human beings speaking to one another. 64 | For a succinct summary of the different social subsystems see Luhmann (1989).

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a ventriloquist behind everything and start looking for the prankster. Francois Cooren (2010) does precisely this, but he leaves the question open as to who or what is speaking through who or what. When a judge pronounces the verdict in a court of law, then the “bench” is also saying something through the persona of the judge. It is at least plausible to argue that the judge is being ventriloquized by the law, by the institution of justice, the bench, etc. Without the many scripts, props, settings, etc. that make up a court of law – or any other social situation as Goffman pointed out –, there would be no such thing as judges, lawyers, plaintiffs, policemen, etc. In short, things like tables or benches seem indeed to have something to say in constructing social actors. Cooren’s theory of ventriloquism is based on ANT. ANT goes a step further than Luhmann in ascribing agency to things, artifacts, and technologies such that even for a table it is necessary to distinguish, as Luhmann would say, between information and utterance. This allows nonhumans to become social actors. If one stretches Luhmann’s definition of communication this far, then the systems model breaks down and it becomes necessary to conceive of social reality in terms of heterogeneous networks with fuzzy boundaries. The moment everything starts talking, nothing more can be excluded from the social system and it becomes impossible to maintain a system/environment boundary. The system disintegrates into the environment. What constitutes the social in ANT is not speech acts, even when defined as systemic selections, but processes of translation and enrollment, or what we have discussed at length above under the title of “technical mediation.” These are processes of information construction in which both humans and nonhumans symmetrically participate. Information constitutes an actor-network in which identities and activities appear. The simple stone ax, we saw, can be considered an actor-network in which identities and activities for human hands, stones, wood, etc. are created by means of the links, interfaces, and associations between all participants in the network. Of course, for social constructivism in general as well as for Luhmann’s systems theory, communication also has the effect of constructing social actors. From the point of view of ANT, however, a much broader and non-anthropomorphic definition of communication and of what it means to be a social actor becomes possible. Translation and enrollment should not be understood to construct information merely as semantic content but instead as links, interfaces, and associations that integrate nodes into a network while at the same time giving actors identities and roles to play in the network. This is what information does. Information is not any particular content, semantic or otherwise. It is not a selection about “what” is being talked about. Information does not lie about in the social system waiting to be selected and “synthesized” with other selections, such as utterance and understanding. In distinction to Luhmann’s model of communication, it could be claimed that communication for ANT is information “in action.” It is dynamic information.

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Extending and modifying Bateson’s famous definition of information as a difference that makes a difference, it could be said that information is a difference making a difference. Information is a process. It is the process of meaning construction and not merely the meaning constructed. From the point of view of the guiding norms of the sociotechnical ensemble of today’s global network society, this process can be called “communication.” Communication is information making a difference, that is, a relation, an association, an interface, integrating nodes into a network while at the same time transforming them and thus constructing identities and roles. As a network norm, communication is information in action. This is one way to appreciate the famous remark of Watzlawick that one cannot not communicate. Communication is constitutive of meaning and not merely something humans may or may not do. Humans cannot construct information as they wish.65 This is admittedly a very broad understanding of communication. As Latour puts it “…speech is no longer a specifically human property, or at least humans are no longer its sole masters” (2004: 65). One could say that the collective is the result of distributed communication in which both human and nonhuman actors participate. This means that communication is possible for both humans and nonhumans and, therefore, does not automatically exclude anything. In opposition to Luhmann’s social system, ANT’s collective has very fuzzy boundaries and does not mark out a unique realm called society that can and must be distinguished from technical artifacts or a separate realm of nature. The digital transformation has brought the imperative character of communication to the fore. Communication is no longer limited by either oneto-one or one-to-many forms of organization. The model of someone saying something to someone, or someone saying something to everyone is displaced by the model of everyone and everything saying everything to everyone and everything. From the systems point of view, this looks a lot like chaos or the equal probability of all events. Systems deal with this situation by means of reducing complexity. Networks, as we shall discuss below, deal with chaos in an entirely different way, namely, by means of governance. In the sense of a network norm, communication refers to the specific many-to-many interaction that characterizes networks after the digital revolution. The network norm of communication prescribes a form of many-to-many interaction that creates the specific condition of publicy and the global socio-sphere. This implies that building social order in all its forms will only be successful when communication is done in certain ways. Within the sociotechnical ensemble of today’s world, it has become increasingly risky and almost certainly counterproductive to 65 | Westin’s influential definition of privacy as the right to not communicate runs into conceptual difficulties the moment it becomes clear that one cannot not communicate.

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maintain forms of communication suited to the pre-digital world. Instead of confirming the purely normative status of Weberian rational bureaucracy, the phenomenon of “decoupling” described by neoinstitutionalism points much rather to a social reality that has moved beyond hierarchical forms of organization and fruitless antagonisms between agency and structure. What we are witnessing everywhere today is not decoupling, but the transformation of hierarchically ordered closed systems to connected, flowing, communicative networks. Participation This leads to the next network norm, participation. Systemic operations, as we saw, are as much about inclusion as exclusion. A system that does not direct its operations toward itself cannot ensure that its operations, its “autopoiesis” will continue. Autopoiesis requires not only operational but also informational closure. This means that there is no communication between system and environment. Events taking place in the environment are not information for the system, but merely perturbations or disturbances which, if they are to be relevant for the system at all, must be transformed into information according to the organization of the system. This phenomenon is widely known as “selective perception” and serves as the foundation for epistemological constructivism.66 Information is constructed within the system and does not flow between system and environment. If both operational and informational closure cannot be established and maintained, the system disintegrates into the environment. Systems are constituted by closure. This is not at all the case for networks. Networks, as opposed to systems, do not necessarily and constitutively exclude anyone or anything. A system must achieve operational and informational closure, whereas a network is based on operational and informational openness. A network is not in danger of disintegration. It reconfigures, expands, shrinks, branches out, and folds into other networks, shifts hubs, gains and loses nodes, increases or decreases links. Networks do not need to establish and maintain operational or informational boundaries. Networks, therefore, are oriented towards participation. In the digital age, connectivity comes to the fore as a prime example of this fundamentally participative dynamic of networks. Connectivity fosters flow and flow increases options, possibilities, alternatives, and unexpected connections. On the basis of connectivity and flow, communication appears as information in action, the dynamic of networking. The network norm of participation means that networks are not only open to the addition of more nodes and links, but they 66 | See the works of Ernst von Glasersfeld, Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Siegfried J. Schmidt, Jakob von Uexküll and many others who propose a “radical constructivism.”

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actively do not exclude anything or anyone from becoming a part of the network. The question of how an entity could fit with another entity or how someone could associate with someone else replaces the question of what is excluded or included. Whereas systems are concerned with reducing environmental complexity by increasing internal complexity, networks are constantly on the lookout for possible nodes, heretofore unheard voices, that is, those knocking on the door and trying to get involved. Systems come into being only when the question of membership has been clearly answered by assigning functional roles to a selection of elements that is always less than what is available in the environment. This is not participation, but the construction of systemspecific elements. Systems are inherently non-participative. Bringing new elements and operations into a system often means reorganizing the system completely. When this happens, it is usually described as “adaptation” or even “evolution.” Networks neither adapt to a particular environment nor do they evolve into new species. For networks, participation does not necessarily imply reorganization. What it does imply, is continuous negotiations, adjustments, and reconfigurations. This characteristic of networks has become prominent in the socio-technical ensembles of today. The affordances of digital technologies have created a “participatory culture” that lowers the barriers to the creation, use, and distribution of information. The once clear differences between media producers and media consumers, for example, becomes blurred. Today, a successful media organization depends on flows of information from many sources beyond its own production teams and studios. This is true for many different kinds of organizations, whether in the private or the public sectors. Digital connectivity, uncontrolled flows of information, and network communication make participation an imperative guiding the construction of social order today.67 Transparency and Authenticity Together with connectivity, flow, communication, and participation, further network norms are transparency and authenticity. It has become increasingly difficult and expensive to keep secrets or to attempt to manipulate opinion in a world characterized by connectivity, unpredictable flows, and network communication open to many different forms of participation. One of the 67 | Participation has long been a focus of discussion in political theory, for the most part in debates about participatory versus representative democracy and the proper constitution of the public sphere. Our claim is that the foundations for these debates, communitarian vs. liberal theories as well as the limitations of communication to either face-to-face or one-to-many, have been washed away by the digital transformation and must be rebuilt upon the network norm of participation and many-to-many communication.

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major characteristics of publicy can be seen in phenomena such as rating platforms, whistleblowers, leaks, scandals, freedom of information laws, open access movements, and demands for transparency in all areas. Tapscott (1997; 2009) has shown that so-called “Net-Gens” value transparency with regard to who stands behind information, where it comes from, and for what use it is intended. Networks tend automatically toward developing mechanisms enabling universal participation in the quality control of information. Wikipedia is a case in point. In addition to this, there are many rating platforms for products and services of all kinds. What is becoming apparent is the increasing need to base social action and social order on information. There are practically no decisions that cannot, and should not, be supported by information. There is practically no area of life that cannot and should not be “data-driven,” whether this be business, education, law enforcement, public and private healthcare, transportation, energy, and of course public services administration and even politics. Data-driven decision processes need not only connectivity and the free flow of information, but also transparency with regard to the sources of information and the quality of information. When privacy laws are everywhere attempting to disguise data sources and make it difficult to assess data quality, or even promoting obfuscation and distortion of information, the imperatives of the socio-technical ensemble today are exactly the opposite. Demands for answers to the questions, where does information come from and what is it worth are based on the norms of transparency and authenticity. Transparency is the imperative of revealing the sources of data and its quality. Authenticity is the imperative of taking responsibility for creation and uses of information. Weinberger (2012) interprets these network norms in terms of five recommendations. First, open access to information is necessary, but it is not sufficient. There must also be access to many different kinds of filters that allow information to be sifted, selected, bundled, and presented in different ways for different purposes. Not only information but filters and search engines should be public domain or at least be held accountable to public scrutiny. Secondly, finding information is not enough, information needs to be evaluated, rated, curated, and classified in order to determine its quality. Wikipedia has demonstrated that community quality control can work. Even if forms of governance are needed, this does not necessarily imply a return to hierarchies. Third, transparency about the sources of information and processes of reaching conclusions via hyperlinking can expose intentions behind the presentation and use of information. The Internet makes it possible to trace back all statements via links to their sources. This potential must not be neglected. It is necessary to make use of hyperlinks for the sake of transparency. Fourth, not only information but also institutions and organizations should be linked together to form networks. Networked organizations favor distributed decision-

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making, trust, negotiation, and innovation.68 They are managed by lateral forms of governance instead of vertical, top-down government. When government agencies are linked together with private actors, communities, non-profits, and civil society beyond local and national borders, it becomes more difficult for any single actor to give commands and force policy. Fifth, Net literacy must be taught and learned. How to use filters, how to evaluate informational quality, and how to participate in distributed decision-making are competencies that must be acquired, fostered, and protected. No governmental agency or factchecking organization can relieve all participants of the responsibility to evaluate information. Of course, it can help if governments and other organizations offer fact-checking services. But in the end, everyone is responsible for what they consider to be reliable information. These five measures express what the network norms of transparency and authenticity can mean. Championing privacy, advocating secrecy, assuming that knowledge is power, and claiming that withholding information is necessary to ensure equality and justice have become dysfunctional. The digital transformation means that one cannot successfully bring people together and create value by preventing connectivity, blocking flows of information, and setting up barriers to communication, participation, transparency, and authenticity. These network norms influence the construction of social order in specific ways. One important influence can be termed flexibility. Flexibility can be considered a network norm that challenges traditional notions of power, stability, and order. Participatory culture, as Balkin argues, encourages and even prescribes that social actors get involved. Connectivity provides the means to do so by creating free flows of information and many-to-many communication. Participation and communication mean many heterogeneous actors get involved in networks. This is true not only for individuals but also for organizations, artifacts, and entire technologies. Actors are “mediators,” that is, they not only receive information and pass it on, but they modify, enrich, redirect, and reconfigure it. Actors have a “voice” of their own. They make choices about information, about what it is, where it goes, and for what purposes it is used. For this reason, flows of information are unpredictable and difficult to control. This implies that the network is constantly changing, reconfiguring itself, adding new links, generating new content, forming new clusters, dropping others, and branching out in unforeseeable directions. It is important to note that this is not merely a description of how global network society actually works, it is also a value, or as we prefer to say, a network norm. This network norm can be termed flexibility.

68 | For a discussion of networked organizations see Belliger/Krieger (2016).

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Flexibility The counterpart to the norm of flexibility in networks is the idea of “adaptation” in the systems model. From the point of view of systems theory, a system can maintain its operations in the face of changes by means of building up sufficient internal complexity that it can react to many possible different events in the environment. When a system is able to continue its autopoiesis in the face of environmental changes this is called an “adaptation” to the environment. Systems that cannot adapt cannot continue their operations and are no longer “viable” in a specific environment. According to this Darwinist view, they simply disappear. From the network perspective, this process looks very different. Networks, unlike systems, do not have environments. Instead of a threatening environment, networks have stronger or weaker ties. Networks do not adapt, they reconfigure, expand or shrink, displace focus, etc. This makes networks inherently innovative because they can accommodate unforeseen events without radical structural changes. Network reconfigurations cannot be conceptualized as an adaptation to a potentially hostile environment, but much rather as flexibility.69 Networks do not evolve. They are constantly changing and display an inherent structural flexibility that systems do not have. For networks relations are never purely functional and therefore even if structures and processes change, relations always remain. Flexibility has become an explicit generator of value in the network society under the name of innovation. There is practically no organization today, regardless of sector, goals, size, etc. that does not place innovation at the top of its wish-list. In the industrial age, stability was important. Today, change and innovation are major values. In the global network society, flexibility is the norm. The network norms of connectivity, flow, communication, participation, transparency, authenticity, and flexibility condition the ways in which social order is constructed in the global network society. They influence how information, including the informational self, is constituted, how criteria of meaning, value, and truth are contractually established within the networks that make up society. The socio-sphere is an open horizon of flexible, multicultural, heterogeneous, scalable, and innovative networks that cut across traditional boundaries between private and public, individual and society, and society and nature. The informational self participates in these networks in different ways, but always on the basis of the network norms briefly described above. We propose conceptualizing network participation as publicy. In opposition to privacy, publicy is not primarily concerned with boundary management, anonymity, 69 | The network model allows for interesting comparisons to Stuart Kaufmann’s (2008) influential notion of “adjacent possibility” which intends to conceptualize how innovation arises in evolution. For a discussion see https://www.edge.org/ conversation/the-adjacent-possible.

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and hindering flows of information. It is not even primarily concerned with individual persons since both humans and nonhumans participate in actornetworks and can be considered social actors. Finally, publicy is not merely a defining characteristic of individuals who, after the digital transformation, find themselves transformed into “inforgs” faced with the task of managing their personal information in different ways. Publicy is the defining characteristic of all participants in the socio-sphere, regardless of whether these be human or nonhuman, individuals or organizations. This implies that traditional forms of regulation and government need to be reconceptualized along lines compatible with the norms that are actually guiding the socio-sphere. This is what governance is about. Governance replaces both privacy regulations and bureaucratic government. On the basis of the default condition of publicy, we propose a theory of network publicy governance.

4. Governance

Major characteristics of the new forms of communication, association, and organization in the global network society are decentralization and deregulation, the participation of many different actors from both private and public sectors in common tasks, and network forms of organization in place of markets or hierarchies.1 These characteristics are typical of what since the 1990’s has come to be termed “governance.”2 Traditionally, all forms of regulation were subsumed under the general title of “government.” Government is a term that well describes how cooperative action is hierarchically organized. Government solves the problems of cooperative action by means of establishing clear functional roles, well-defined processes, and command and control communication, or as Merriam-Webster defines the term, “authoritative direction or control.” It would not be an exaggeration to claim that in one form or another government has been the dominant form of social order, at least for large populations, for the greater part of human history. The digital transformation has changed this situation. The global network society displays in many areas a different form of regulation. We will follow a growing body of literature that uses the term “governance” in order to describe networked forms of regulation that are increasingly displacing traditional forms of government.3 Bamberger and Mulligan speaking from the perspective of corporate governance summarize this trend as follows: Over the past decade, legal scholars have devoted considerable focus to the shift from traditional forms of static, rule-bound, top-down, ‘command-and-control’ regulation, to new forms of governance that promote regulatory ambiguity, diversity, and revisability; 1 | See the discussion of this transformation in Belliger/Krieger (2016). 2 | See Rhodes (1997) and Stoker (1998) for an overview of governance theories. 3 | See Ansell/Gash (2007) for a systematic as well as programmatic survey of 137 studies on governance as well as Chhotray/Stoker (2009) for a cross-disciplinary review of governance theories. See Willke (2007) for a discussion of “smart governance” for the knowledge society.

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Network Publicy Governance that involve policy dynamism informed by experience and experimentation; that rely on transparency to create legal and market pressures for compliance; and that enlist Stakeholders – including advocates, professionals, and regulated firms themselves – in achieving policy solutions. (Bamberger/Mulligan, 2011: 477-8).

Although there are many different definitions of governance and varied theoretical approaches, we propose to define governance as the way in which networks regulate publicy under the normative influence of connectivity, flow, communication, participation, transparency, authenticity, and flexibility. This definition admittedly differs from traditional approaches, but it nonetheless aims at retaining many of the central insights of governance theory. What is new is that we will attempt to describe governance from the point of view of actornetwork theory and the affordances of digital information and communication technologies. The goal is to outline a theory of governance that is helpful for answering the question of how order in the socio-sphere is constructed and how networks regulate themselves when they can rely on neither rational individuals nor sovereign states.

4.1 Sources of Governance Theor y Contemporary theories of governance have various sources and many different purposes. One important source of governance theory is the attempt to describe, as well as normatively guide, programs of deregulation and privatization in which the neoliberal “minimal” state attempts to deal with complexity and efficiency deficits by reducing its governing role and by sharing decision-making with non-state actors. These distributed forms of public administration are often discussed under the rubric of “policy networks.”4 Another important strand of governance theory is represented by theories of “corporate governance” aimed at increasing the legitimacy, social accountability, as well as the efficiency of large organizations within the private sector. Influences from corporate governance are often found in theories of “new public management” which attempt to apply management practices that have proven effective in the private sector to the public sphere. Another source of governance theory is known under the title of “good governance.” Good governance describes the reaction of international institutions such the World Bank and other development organizations to problems of lack of the rule of law, corruption, the absence of accountability, and lack of transparency in third world recipients of development funding. Good governance attempts to set up guidelines for legitimacy, accountability, and efficiency. A further important source of governance theory is globalization 4 | See Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_network_analysis as well as Chhotray/Stoker (2009) and Bingham/O’Leary (2008).

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theory and international relations which speak of “global governance.”5 In the absence of any centralized authority, as is typical of the international arena, governance lends itself for theorizing forms of regulation that cannot be steered top-down or enforced by any one source of authority or power. When international development institutions such as the World Bank link governance to rule of law, observers from sociological, ethnological, and sociallegal studies join institutional economics in pointing out that formal laws make up only a small part of the various formal and informal regulatory measures, instruments, norms, and customs that govern social order. Governance is a matter of complex overlappings of rules of many different kinds based on many different sources and not merely formal laws instituted and enforced by centralized state governments. In this view, individuals and non-state actors cannot be seen as merely passive objects of an overpowering legal apparatus. Nor can they be understood as rational egoists as is typical of traditional economics. Instead, non-state actors play constructive roles in shaping regulatory measures outside of and beyond formal, state-sanctioned laws. The importance of “self-organizing resource governance regimes” (Ostrom (1990; 2010) has been demonstrated above all in areas where neither markets nor hierarchies are successful and where resources cannot be clearly categorized as either private or public. What all these approaches to governance theory have in common is that they model multi-stakeholder involvement in collaborative, consensus-oriented forms of collective decision making and regulating. As Chhotray and Stoker (2009: 3) put it: Governance is about the rules of collective decision-making in settings where there are a plurality of actors or organisations and where no formal control system can dictate the terms of the relationship between these actors and organisations.

As noted above, typical concrete settings for turning to theories of governance have been public policy management, international relations, corporate responsibility, environmental resource and common-pool resource management.6 In these areas, however, governance studies do not attempt to understand governance from the perspective of the emergence of a global network society based on digital information and communication technologies.7 This is not to say that networks are not a topic in traditional 5 | There is a vast literature on the topic of “global governance.” For a good summary see Willke (2006; 2007). 6 | See Ansell/Gash (2007); Chhotray/Stoker (2009) and Bingham/O’Leary (2008) for overviews. 7 | Castells (1996; 2010) is an exception to this rule.

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governance theories. Governance discourse usually speaks of networks as alternative forms of organizing apart from the usual models of either markets or bureaucracies.8 The importance of networks is explained on the basis of advantages arising from knowledge sharing, efficient learning, enhanced legitimacy and reputation, improved performance and adaptability, as well as better management of resource dependencies. It was not until the digital media revolution, however, that network forms of organization ceased being a more or less interesting sideshow to markets and hierarchies. This implies that it is not primarily globalization and democratization that have made networks and also governance so important today, but the digital transformation. The affordances of digital technologies have brought an end to the industrial era, dismantled hierarchies, delegitimized command and control communication, and, as we have argued above, they have opened up the socio-sphere as the space of publicy. There seems to be little doubt that we are entering the era of the global network society. As Castells (2005) points out, it is not that networks are new in human history, but “What is new is the microelectronics-based, networking technologies that provide new capabilities to an old form of social organization” (4). The digital transformation makes global networked organizations possible. Following the slogan, “governance without government,”9 new decentralized, non-hierarchical, collaborative, and distributed forms of regulation typical of networks have become central topics in almost all areas of today’s world. Of course, even in a network society, people must accomplish certain tasks and solve certain problems if there is to be cooperative action at all. Goals must be set, stakeholders must be identified, roles and responsibilities must be assigned, processes must be designed, and compliance and controlling must be defined and implemented.10 Governance does not change these basic problems, but it attempts to solve them on a different basis and in a different way. The affordances of digital information and communication technologies place governance in the limelight. Organizations in all areas of society are changing. Castells (2005: 8) locates three processes characteristic of this new network society, 1) the “generation and diffusion of new microelectronics/digital technologies of information and communication;” 2) the “transformation of labor that is able to innovate and adapt;” and 3) the “diffusion of a new form of organization around networking.” We might add a fourth important characteristic, namely, the omnipresent significance of information as a central 8 | See for example Powel (1990). 9 | See Rosenau/Czempiel (1992) and Rhodes (1996). 10 | Alderwereld et al. (2016) have examined the many different models for social coordination in “socio-cognitive technical systems” and identified a “unified metamodel” of social organization that confirms the universal relevance of these basic tasks.

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resource in all areas of society. A global network society based on ICTs is an information society and a data-driven society. Governance of connectivity, flows of information, communication, participation, and other affordances of ICTs has become as important today as once was the management of hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations in the industrial era. The digital transformation calls for reconceptualizing governance theory in terms of publicy, the socio-sphere, and the network norms arising from the affordances of ICT’s. As Castells claims with regard to the role of the state and traditional forms of government: All these transformations require the diffusion of interactive, multilayered networking as the organization form of the public sector. This is tantamount to the reform of the state. Indeed, the rational bureaucratic model of the state of the industrial era is in complete contradiction to the demands and processes of the network society. (Castells 2006: 16).

Transitioning to organizational forms based on networks is not only necessary for public policy management, but as the many contributions to governance theory demonstrate, new thinking is needed in all areas of society, whether it be public administration, business, education, healthcare, research, politics, social movements, and so on.11

4.2 Resource Governance It is interesting and suggestive that one of the major fields in which governance has become an important issue is natural resource or common-pool resource management.12 Against this background, it could be claimed that the digital transformation has called attention to the nature of information as a kind of natural resource or at least a good that is neither exclusively private nor exclusively public. Information is potentially available in abundance. It has shown itself to be excludable only with great difficulty. Furthermore, it is non-rivalrous, since the use of information by one party does not imply nonuse by other parties. The Internet, big data, open data, data philanthropy, the sharing economy, and in general the growing demand for a data-driven society imply that in many cases information should be considered as a kind of public domain resource. Information resembles in many respects a raw material that

11 | For a discussion of the rise of networks in many different areas of public policy administration see Goldsmith/Kettl (2009), and for other areas of society see the discussion of networked organizations in Belliger/Krieger (2016). 12 | See the many important contributions of Elinor Ostrom.

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can contribute in various ways to multiple value chains.13 Echoing Norbert Wiener’s famous words that information is information and neither matter nor energy, perhaps we can say that information is information and neither public nor private. It may be that we are dealing with a unique kind of resource that simply does not fit into the traditional categories of economics, a resource that demands a new form of economy and new forms or regulation. Instead of attempting to throttle information gathering and flows of information, which is the tendency of privacy regulations and intellectual property laws, we are confronted with the challenge to use information of all kinds in constructive ways.14 Not less information is required, but more information used in the right ways. From the point of view of a theory of the informational self, of publicy, and a network theory of social order, governance is a form of regulation not primarily resulting from neo-liberal programs of de-regulation or from globalization, but instead, governance should be based on norms arising from the affordances of ICT’s. We have briefly discussed these norms in Part 3 above. These norms describe a society that is no longer based on the scarcity of information and knowledge. Let us recall again Weinberger’s (2012) proposal of replacing the traditional metaphor of hierarchical order, the pyramid, with a new symbol, the cloud. In the cloud, knowledge is non-hierarchical, unlimited, connected, inclusive, complex, and public. This means that in contrast to government, governance is not based on hierarchical communication, privacy, secrecy, exclusion, and the scarcity of information. Privacy discourse has arisen within a view of society as primarily consisting of more or less Machiavellian hierarchies on the one side, while on the other side powerless individuals attempt to protect themselves by hiding from the panoptic view. It may well be that within the parameters of industrial society freedom, autonomy, and human dignity were in fact supported by disguise and secrecy. In the global network society, however, privacy must be replaced by publicy and top-down government regulation by decentralized and collaborative governance.

13 | Rose (1998) for example argues that information does not fall neatly into traditional categories of property as either private or public. It is something in between. 14 | This is the challenge that Balkin’s (see Part 3 above) understanding of a democratic and participatory culture based on fundamental rights to free speech takes up. It is also the concern of large international policy programs such as the Digital Single Market initiative in Europe as well as bottom-up data sharing initiatives such as the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. Connectivity and flow of information is the basis of the sharing economy and the collaborative commons which some, for example Benkler (2006) and Rifkin (2014), have seen as one of the most important factors for future economic and social development.

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Publicy and the networked character of the informational self require that governance discourse be extended beyond the dichotomy of individual versus society such that information management is regulated across multiple domains, platforms, sectors, and dimensions of social reality. Indeed, the digital transformation has had the effect of merging the private and the public spheres into one global social space that we have termed the socio-sphere. Instead of dealing separately with personal information in terms of “personal information management,” “personal network management,” and “communication privacy management,” today’s default condition of publicy demands a new approach.15 We propose reinterpreting governance theory as a general theory of publicy regulation. Publicy is the default condition of the informational self in which the individual is no longer defined in opposition to society and the private no longer in opposition to the public. The informational self does not own nor is it constituted by something that can be called “personal information.” Information as such, as we argued in Part 1 above, is not personal but belongs to an actor-network. This understanding of what information is and what human existence as an informational being means places traditional distinctions between individual and society, as well as agency and structure in question. The “self” of the informational self is not the autonomous, rational subject of modernity. It is not the genetically and psychologically bounded “individual,” or even the sociologically constructed “person.” The informational self exists in and as a plurality of actor-networks. The actor is the network, and the network is a heterogeneous and hybrid association of humans and nonhumans.16 The “collective,” Latour’s term for what we call the socio-sphere, is made up neither of micro individuals nor macro social structures in the form of systems, organizations, or institutions. Neither is it made up of society on the one side and nature “out there,” beyond the human and social realm on the other side. Instead, the collective is made up of heterogeneous, hybrid actor-networks that are either small or large, local or global.17 Scalability is everything, from the stone ax to a space station. Size matters, but not because it changes the ontological status of whatever we are talking about. Networks are all made up 15 | See Petronio (2002; 2008) on “communication privacy management theory” for a social-psychological approach and for a knowledge management approach see Reinmann/Eppler (2008). 16 | This marks important differences between ANT and Stiegler’s (1998) view of human-technics co-evolution. It also marks the difference between ANT and traditional social constructivism as well as Luhmann’s notion of the person as a construction of communication. 17 | Latour (2004: 83) speaks of the “articulation” of “propositions.” We prefer to speak of “participants” which is closer to the network norms arising from the affordances of ICTs in present day actor-networks.

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of the same information producing activities of translation and enrollment. Network publicy governance is, therefore, a matter of articulating shorter or longer networks constituted by more or less information. It is important to emphasize and always to keep in mind that what we call organizations are not macro social structures that somehow integrate or “socialize” individuals into wholes that are always greater than the sum of the parts. Instead, following ANT, we propose that organizations of all kinds can be understood as greater or smaller networks. In terms of information management, this means that a theory of organizing and regulating networks is the key to understanding how issues of privacy as well as of governance in the digital age should be approached. In the following we will attempt to reconstruct governance theory from the point of view of publicy defined as the normative form of social order in a global network society, that is, as conditioned by the affordances of ICTs and network norms. Admittedly, much of contemporary governance theory already relies on network models, even if this is not always made explicit. But the network models in question are neither necessarily the same, nor are they based on actornetwork theory or a theory of the informational self and publicy. Our central question will, therefore, be: What does a general theory of governance look like when it is explicitly based upon actor-network theory, the informational self, publicy, and the network norms arising from the affordances of digital technologies?

4.3 Reconstructing Governance Theor y Under the rubric of “new governance” public administration has long pointed to the growing importance of collaborative, multi-stakeholder models in which the “normative ideals” of “inclusiveness, representativeness, impartiality, transparency, deliberativeness, lawfulness, and empowerment” (Bingham/ O’Leary 2008: 10) guide the design of governance in networks. Concretely, this means that a governance regime must explicitly establish “network decision rules,” “behavioral norms,” “systems for resolving conflict within the network,” “mechanisms for accountability,” and “means for transparency” as well as for “incorporation of the public’s voice” (ibid.). Neoinstitutionalist economics has contributed to this understanding of what regulating networks means by describing “self-organized resource governance regimes” (Ostrom 2000: 138). From this perspective, social actors cannot be reduced to the simple model of rational egoists upon which traditional economic theory is based, and governments cannot be reduced to the role of guaranteeing fair access to public goods. This is because the resources themselves, and this is especially the case for informational resources, often cannot be clearly classified as exclusively either public or private property.

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Common-pool resources such as pasture land, forests, fishing grounds, water reservoirs, irrigation systems, etc. are interesting from the point of view of publicy and the informational self, because information has much in common with such resources. Information, as we have argued, belongs to the network and not to any one actor within a network. The implication of claiming that publicy is the default condition of the informational self is that information is neither an exclusively private good, nor a purely public good, but something that must be understood on the basis of the network model of social order. Information, as we noted above with reference to Wiener’s famous definition, is information and neither exclusively public nor exclusively private. The distinction between public and private appears in many instances of common-pool resource governance to be no longer helpful. This makes governance regimes that regulate resources that cannot be easily classified in these ways interesting for a theory of publicy regulation. On the basis of many empirical studies of concrete cases of common-pool resource governance, Ostrom and her colleagues have discovered “core design principles” of successful self-organizing governance regimes. These principles are clearly defined boundaries, fair distribution of benefits and costs, collaborative decision-making, effective monitoring and conflict resolution, recognition of rights to organize, and coordination with encompassing social structures.18 We propose a reinterpretation of the principles that characterize collaborative public administration and common-pool resource governance upon the basis of ANT and specifically with regard to the nature of the informational self and problems of regulating publicy. Our guiding questions will be: How do networks, in general, regulate themselves? Specifically, what does network publicy governance look like? After clarifying the general principles of network regulation, we will turn to how network governance looks under the conditions of publicy and the informational self. In order to answer the general question of how networks regulate themselves we turn again to actor-network theory. Although much governance discourse speaks of networks, governance theory to date has not usually understood itself to be a theory of networks and has made use of the term on an ad hoc basis without critical foundation. We propose, therefore, to reconstruct governance theory upon the basis of a theory of networks. From the point of view of actornetwork theory, networks can be said to be regulated not by fixed structures, but by dynamic processes. Partly, but not exclusively, following Latour’s terminology,19 we can list the regulating processes typical of actor-networks as follows: 18 | See Wilson/Ostrom/Cox (2013: 22). 19 | This list is based on the Latour’s theory of political ecology presented in The Politics of Nature (2004). Since Latour does not directly address the question of

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1. taking account of 2. producing of stakeholders 3. prioritizing 4. instituting and excluding 5. localizing and globalizing 6. separating powers20 In order to clarify what these network governance processes mean, a comparison with systems theory is helpful. As opposed to systems, networks are relatively open and not clearly bounded patterns of associating. This typical characteristic of networks can be traced back to the processes of translation and enrollment by means of which networks as informational entities come into being, maintain, and transform themselves. Each actor is constantly contributing something to the network and is constantly being challenged by the contributions of the other actors involved. Using explicitly linguistic metaphors, Latour (2004: 83) calls these contributions “propositions.” We have suggested above that one could as well speak of information. The associations that the various propositions enter into can be thought of as a process of “articulation.” In the example of the stone ax discussed in Part 1 above, the stone, the hand, and the wood all are propositions that become articulated in a particular way when the stone ax is used by a hunter or a builder or a farmer. This terminology is useful because it allows conceiving of the contributions of actors – both human and nonhuman – as “voices” in a “collective.” Each actor, whether human or nonhuman, is “speaking” in its own way, while at the same time building a collective acting cooperatively. By entering into the network, the actor is transformed, but does not cease to have its own voice. The hand, for example, is no longer merely a hand, but the hand of a hunter. This means that the actor is never reduced to a mere functional element as is the case when defining elements and operations within a system. The elements of a system are purely functional. The heart, for example, is a pump and therefore, when the organic pump no longer works, it can be replaced by anything that fulfills this function. Contrary to systems, the actor in an actor-network can always surprise the network with new and unexpected network governance, we have adapted his political theory to address this issue. Within the development of Latour’s work, The Politics of Nature should be understood as a transition work towards a more differentiated theory in An Enquiry into Modes of Existence (2013). Since our concern is not Latour exegesis, but a theory of network governance for the digital age, we focus on his earlier, explicitly political, work. 20 | In order to signal that we are using these terms in the technical sense of network governance processes and not their usual meanings, we will write them in italics whenever so intended.

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propositions. A stone might not cut in the way expected, or it might show that it can be used for something entirely other than originally intended. For example, it seems that stone axes were often used as status symbols and not as tools.21 In addition to this, new associations can always be integrated into the network. The regulatory process of taking account of is in a continuous process of discovery of new voices attempting to participate in the network. Networks regulate themselves by means of creating porous and flexible boundaries or, in other words, by allowing for contingency and the unexpected. It is because of taking account of that stone axes could become not only status symbols, but also metal axes or chainsaws or even modern industrial sawmills. Taking account of brings more and more associations and more and more information into a network. Although actors in networks do play roles – the hand has a role to play as well as the stone – they do not have fixed identities and can modify, interpret, challenge, and disrupt established links and associations. Networks have to take account of this. Taking account of is the basis of the expansive dynamic and unpredictability of networks. Taking account of is only one of the dynamic processes that regulate networks. While taking account of makes networks open to contingency, the unexpected, and unforeseen with regard to what associations are continuously being made, the second regulatory process is concerned to produce stakeholders. In the case of the stone ax, only certain stones, hands, and wood, animals, etc. become stakeholders who contributed decisive “voices” and are able to articulate an actor-network that fulfills a certain purpose. Stakeholders, for example, could be builders, hunters, warriors, farmers, stone shapers, certain animals, enemies, certain places, types of stones, etc. As opposed to taking account of, producing stakeholders is not addressing the question of who is knocking on the door or clamoring to be let in but which voices are playing decisive roles in the network, what actors are emerging from the associations that are being made, and what programs of action are being followed. With the advent of motorized chainsaws, some stakeholders remained, such as hands, tools, and trees, but others who were new became involved, for example, metal producers of motors, designers of machines, engineers and their accompanying sciences, tools, organizations, markets, investors, legal experts, etc. Industrial sawmills have multiplied stakeholders enormously including not only large machines, energy producers and distributors, management professionals, financial experts, political regulations and much more. The network has become larger, but it is still an actor-network constantly on the lookout for new voices and constantly producing stakeholders. Third, not all stakeholders are equally important. Not all nodes in a network are the same with regard to weight, the number of associations, etc. Some nodes 21 | See Kohn/Mathen (1999).

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may become “hubs” on account of their influence in the network. Determining the relative importance of stakeholders is an ongoing task that is solved by the third regulatory process, prioritizing. Setting priorities is not merely a matter of “deciding” which actors are important, but also which roles actors play in relation to others. A social actor, whether human or nonhuman, is not an isolated individual, but a task, a practice in relation to others. Prioritizing is not a matter of top-down decision-making or of command and control communication. It is a matter of “negotiation” among all stakeholders. It is a temporary and never uncontested result of trials and challenges in which stakeholders “voice” who they are (propositions) and what program of action (articulation) they pursue. Over millennia of trial and error negotiations between hands, stones, wood, animals, etc. prioritized certain ways of wielding certain kinds of stones for certain purposes. With the advent of metallurgy, new actors appeared with new priorities. By means of prioritizing networks arrive at a relatively stable coordination and cooperation among actors, or as Latour puts it, a certain “articulation” of the collective along a certain trajectory or program of action. Once roles have been prioritized, they tend to become relatively stable and durable. This can be termed institutionalizing. It must be emphasized that institutionalizing is a process and not a structure. Institutions are not macro social structures, but relatively successful efforts to maintain certain roles and programs of action. In the example of the stone ax, we can suppose that over many thousands of years of experimentation, of trying different stones, handling them in different ways, for different purposes, etc., this led to a typical and relatively stable “stone ax” with its specific constitution, form, and purposes. A hand wielding a stone ax was not – without great effort – free to do just anything. Networks are not chaos. Not everything and anything is equally probable. There are typical, repeatable, and thus institutionalized use cases. Institutionalizing can be measured by the effort it takes to translate and enroll actors into other networks or other roles. If one fashioned a particular stone in a certain way and wielded it in one way instead of another you became a hunter, or a builder, or a warrior, etc. and it was no longer an open question who you were and what you were doing. In order to do something different, much effort was required. Institutionalized actors are tightly held to their roles because they have entered into so many associations that if one tries to change any single link, one has to change them all. It’s a question of quantity and not quality. It is not that some links or associations are more equal than others. They are all information. What makes some links strong is that they are not alone. They are highly associated and have entered into many dependencies. In a certain sense, one could say that they have more “meaning” or more information. These relatively fixed patterns of associations take on a normative character. They are the source of what is often seen as tradition, custom, norms, and expectations. This is what sociological and economic institutionalism appeals

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to when it emphasizes the importance of informal rules and norms in society and organizations. The institutionalizing dynamic of networks is the basis for what is often called “structure,” that is, repeatable, relatively fixed identities and processes. It is important to emphasize, however, that institutionalizing reduces, but does not eliminate, the flexibility of networks and thus can also be seen as a process of excluding. Institutionalizing sets boundaries. Institutionalizing and excluding go hand in hand. Unlike systems, the boundaries of networks are not constitutive, but merely regulative. Networks exclude actors, roles, processes, and associations not in order to become networks, but in order to practically deal with a particular problem or pursue a specific goal. Institutionalizing and excluding allow networks to have a program of action, that is, to pursue certain goals at certain times and places and thereby to marginalize much that is not relevant to the purpose at hand. Although in principle networks, as opposed to systems, can do anything and everything, they must nonetheless reduce the paralyzing complexity of attempting to do everything at once. Networks reduce the complexity of many different and diverging possible activities by what can be called localizing, that is, by focusing on a particular problem or goal in a particular local situation. Localizing creates a limited and goal-directed program of action, for example, chopping wood instead of hunting or fighting. Of course, one could switch relatively quickly from one activity to the other if needed. But this only illustrates how networks cannot be adequately theorized as bounded systems. The well-known description of society as consisting of different domains, for example, business, politics, science, education, etc. and different levels such as the micro, meso, and macro levels can be seen from the network perspective as the results of localizing. Localizing produces specific programs of action. In terms of interaction sociology, it can be said to construct “frames” and “contexts” in which only certain activities are undertaken and others excluded. A program of action can also be described as the trajectory of a network. It answers the question: What are we doing? Where are we going? What is our purpose? As a governance process, localizing can be seen in attempts to explicitly formulate and institutionalize programs of action. In terms of privacy theory, Nissenbaum’s (2004) well-known notion of “contextual integrity” makes privacy expectations dependent social contexts. Social contexts, or frames of social interaction, however, are not merely given. Often, we are not sure what game we are playing or ought to be playing. In times of rapid social change, this is all the more the case. Context definitions and frames can neither be derived from fundamental rights nor dictated by governments. They must be constructed and are consequently constantly changing. If we start from the informational self whose default mode is publicy, then publicy means that it is the localizing process of network governance that defines the

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context of information use. Publicy, as opposed to privacy, is always a question of governance, that is, negotiation, collaboration, and consensus.22 The fundamental openness and flexibility of networks which is based on the process of taking account of prevents the local from becoming a closed system and links networks to each other thus integrating them globally. The global integration of networks is usually called “world.”23 Even social systems theory had to admit that communication takes place against and with reference to a world horizon of possible meaning. Despite the necessary closure of systems against one another and the constitutive exclusion of the environment, the theory of social systems was forced to acknowledge the fundamentally associative character of communication by postulating a single, all-encompassing “world society.”24 No matter how autonomous, self-referential, and operationally as well as informationally closed social systems might become, they nonetheless must communicate beyond their borders. Even if the symbolically generalized medium and the binary exclusion code of one system is different from another, such as politics is different from business, or education from both, there would be no political regulation of markets or no public school system without exchange of information between these systems. Localizing must, therefore, be understood in relation to globalizing, that is, the potential, indeed, the imperative, of linking up everything to everything. The governance process of globalizing insures the ability to make associations and links that do not serve any singe immediate purpose other than to open up possibilities of associations to other networks that are involved in other programs of action. As a governance process, this requires that local programs of action be designed in such a way as to not preclude unforeseen innovation. The localizing/globalizing dynamic of network governance can be seen as a wholistic imperative or ethical foundation which distinguishes network governance from purely systemic imperatives of functionality and efficiency.25 Finally, it is a basic function of network regulation to balance the processes of taking account of on the one side and institutionalizing and excluding on the other so that the local cannot mistake itself for the global and the global cannot dictate conditions to the local. The critique of colonialism in all its forms has made it clear that the global reach of any centralized authority amounts 22 | For a revealing discussion of what happens when contextual integrity is not constructed by an adequate governance regime see Vezyridis and Timmons (2017) study of the rise and fall of the NHS’s care.data program. 23 | See Heidegger’s notion of human existence as “being-in-the-world.” 24 | See Luhmann (1982). 25 | Latour (2004) speaks of “political ecology” or a “parliament of things,” but also of “design,” when referring to the ethical dimension of the global/local processes of network governance. We will return to this below.

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to misuse of power. As neoinstitutionalism grudgingly admits, the global, despite whatever hegemony it may claim for itself, is always adapting to local opportunities, problems, tasks, and purposes. This balancing of the opposed or even antagonistic functions of openness and closure is what Latour, with a regard to modern democratic constitutions, calls separating powers. Just as the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of government are distinguished from one another, so in network governance are the processes of taking account of and institutionalizing/excluding and the processes of globalizing and localizing balanced against one another. In summary, we can say first of that network governance, as described by ANT, is distinguished by its process character and defies description in terms of hierarchical structures. Secondly, instead of being derived from central authorities, fixed in laws and regulations, and sanctioned by courts and the police, network regulation takes place as multidimensional processes that construct a specific kind of order in the chaos of everyone talking to everyone. The task of reconstructing governance theory on the basis of ANT is not finished until the contributions of our most significant non-human others are taken into account. The above listed general processes of network governance are only interesting for a theory of network publicy governance when the unique characteristics of networks in the digital age are described. Before attempting to outline a general framework for network publicy governance, we must, therefore, take a necessary detour through digital information technologies. There is no network in today’s world that is not in some way affected by the affordances of digital technologies. Digital devices of all kinds, software, algorithms, and network infrastructure are important “voices” and “stakeholders” in almost all the networks we participate in today, and this will certainly be more so in the future. It is on account of these digital actors in our collectives that publicy has become our default condition and we have become informational selves whose mode of existence is neither private nor public. It could be argued that it is precisely because the bounded subject of Western modernity no longer serves as a reliable model of human existence that privacy has come to the forefront of discussions about subjectivity in the digital age. If the self has become a networked-self constituted by information that is neither private nor public, it would seem that we must discover a new and different way of understanding human existence as well as society. Where, if not to networks, do we look for an answer to this question after it has become apparent that we are no longer at home in markets and hierarchies? Homo oeconomicus and homo politicus seem to have disappeared as did God before them and left the world-stage empty and without an actor. Although it is indisputable that the religious and humanist narratives are still with us – as privacy discourse demonstrates – the need for a new narrative that can carry us into the digital future is equally undeniable. Our question becomes: What do the affordances

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of information and communication technologies mean for understanding the regulation of networks in today’s world? In order to answer this question, we return to what we have described as network norms. These norms are specific to the ways in which order is constructed in the digital age. They are connectivity, flow, communication, participation, transparency, authenticity, and flexibility. To complete our proposed reconstruction of governance theory, we will interpret the dynamic processes of network governance described by ANT from the point of view of these network norms. When digital technologies become our most significant nonhuman others in the construction of social order, then the network governance process of taking account of manifests itself as connectivity and flow. Every device added to the network brings new information, new “voices” into the collective. Every device, be it ever so inconspicuous and of apparently only local importance clamors to gain access to global networks and participate in global flows of information. Smartphones, smart homes, smart cities, smart automobiles, smart energy, smart communication and transportation networks, smart logistics, industry 4.0, and much more all testify to the connective imperative that seems to be driving innovation in all sectors. What makes these connections “smart” is, of course, the flows of information enabling software and algorithms to create value. Connectivity and flow are ways in which taking account of is expressed in the digital age. This is so not only for devices but also for people. The Internet of Things is actually an Internet of Everything and Everybody. The well-known dystopian narrative in which super-intelligent AI’s (artificial intelligences) kick humans out of the loop and take over the world runs up against this fundamental network norm. Even after the “singularity,” in which AI’s become at least as “intelligent” as humans, they remain accountable to the norms of the networks that enable them. These norms imply that any actor is always part of a much larger network and that no one actor or type of actor controls or determines any network.26 Furthermore, network norms are based on the nature of information itself, which, as we argued at length in Part 1, is constructed by the contributions of all participants to the network. To speak of “super-intelligence” does not change the nature of intelligence itself, which is distributed, extended, and enacted in heterogeneous, hybrid networks. You don’t get smarter by kicking anyone out of the loop. What taking account of as a principle of network publicy governance implies is that all the voices, both human and nonhuman, matter. In the digital age, connectivity and flow are imperatives for all networks governed by processes of taking account of. Network governance processes make sure that no matter how influential any actors, including AIs, may become, they would run counter to network 26 | For a discussion of these rather dystopian visions of the future from the perspective of world history see as one among many Harari (2016).

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norms if they begin to practice wide-scale exclusion and create closed loops. Connectivity and flow enable all stakeholders to emerge as nodes that not only transfer, but also translate information. This is expressed in the norms of communication and participation. Communication and participation are what stakeholders do. In terms of governance processes, the affordances of ICTs have made the production of stakeholders in network governance regimes much more distributed and complex than in hierarchical government. The effect of digital affordances has been to create many more stakeholders in all kinds of networks than were possible under the conditions of informational scarcity and one-tomany communication. As we noted in the discussion of publicy above, the wide distribution of stakeholders in the digital age has been termed “participatory culture.” The digital transformation has placed the means of the production of information into everyone’s hands. It has empowered consumers to become prosumers not only in business, but also in education, healthcare, and social service administration. What is true for the production of goods and services of all kinds is also true for the production of social and political order. With regard to politics, as Balkin noted in his defense of democratic culture, political discourse is no longer restricted to a limited number of experts, gatekeepers, representative instances, or parties, but open to all as never before. Publicy has given rise to a global socio-sphere regulated by governance processes that produce stakeholders empowered by the norms of communication and participation. The multiplication of stakeholders in networks influenced by the affordances of ICTs requires that prioritizing, institutionalizing and excluding be done in new ways. In today’s global network society, bottom-up, collaborative, and self-organizing practices of prioritizing stakeholders, institutionalizing roles, identities, and processes, as well the setting of boundaries have proven more effective than bureaucratic management or the invisible hand of a supposedly free market. What governance research has almost unanimously affirmed is that network forms of organization are more efficient than bureaucracies. They are also more equitable than traditional markets that under the conditions of an economy of scarcity quickly become tilted in favor of those who own the means of production. The advent of many-to-many communication in the digital age has brought this potential of networks to the fore. It has also shown that networks set priorities and institutionalize certain roles, identities, and processes on the basis of the norms of transparency and authenticity. If publicy and not privacy is the default condition, it becomes increasingly costly to attempt to set agendas and maintain political or commercial advantages by means of secrecy. In the digital age, knowledge is only then power, when it is shared

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and used collectively.27 This, in turn, requires that the sources, the quality, and the intended purposes of information are transparent and that actors do not misrepresent themselves. Networks operate on the basis of trust, which itself is based on transparency and authenticity. Privacy, on the contrary, is based on mistrust and obfuscation. Not knowing who one is dealing with, not knowing what information is valid, and not knowing what information is intended to be used for all make organizations today inefficient, costly, and bound to fail. When the norms of transparency and authenticity are not followed, the wrong stakeholders are prioritized and others who should not are excluded. Inadequate structures become institutionalized and are no longer questioned or revised. The norms of transparency and authenticity that influence digital networks support network publicy governance in overcoming these typical problems of government. Finally, the norm of flexibility takes network governance a step further and influences how processes of localizing/globalizing and the separation of powers are implemented. Large or even global networks must encourage the autonomy and self-organizing capabilities of local networks to adapt to unforeseen problems and take advantage of unique and unexpected opportunities.28 This is a problem that systems theory clearly recognized but could not solve. Systems find themselves in the paradoxical situation of being able to reduce environmental complexity only by increasing internal complexity, which creates ever greater strains on system organization.29 There is an inherent tension in the primary purpose of systems to reduce complexity on the one hand and on the other hand the necessity of having to constantly increase internal complexity to maintain viability in the face of an ever more complex environment. Network governance deals with complexity in an entirely different way. When networks influenced by the affordances of ICTs localize programs of action against a global horizon of possible network extensions they realize a flexibility or adaptability for which cut-throat evolutionist theories had to pay much too high a price. In the systems model, organizations were faced with the Darwinian choice to either adapt or die, while adaptation often meant such a drastic organizational restructuring that this resulted in the appearance of an entirely new organization in place of the old. This was called, somewhat euphemistically, evolution. Networks, unlike systems, do not adapt to an environment. Properly speaking, neither do they evolve. If networks neither adapt nor evolve, what do they do? Networks 27 | This is the central insight behind all the tools, techniques, and organizational changes that are subsumed under the title of “knowledge management.” 28 | For a discussion of research on networked organizations see Belliger/Krieger (2016: 173-239). 29 | See Ashby’s famous “law of requisite variety” (Ashby 1956), as well as the vast literature on systemic management which attempts to deal with this problem.

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are the entire ecosystem in which many different programs of action influence each other continually in ever-changing processes of localizing and globalizing, institutionalizing and taking account of. Before the digital transformation, this was a difficult, if not impossible task that forced networks into hierarchical or market forms of order. The emergence of the socio-sphere has created a kind of ecosystem that does not evolve, at least not in the Darwinian sense. One should probably drop the term “system” altogether when speaking of ecology and found the idea of ecology on network theory instead of system models. Indeed, it may well be that the “logos,” the principle of order, in such domains as psychology, sociology, and ecology is not systemic at all, but much rather a matter of network governance.30 Network governance follows the norm of flexibility by means of channeling the opposing forces of localizing and globalizing and taking account of and institutionalizing/excluding into the normative affordances of connectivity, flow, participation, communication, transparency, and authenticity. Latour speaks of this process as separation of powers, which he explicitly derives from democratic political theory. Despite being derived from political theory, Latour’s notion of separation of powers is an “ecological” concept, that is, a concept of “political ecology.” If we take the metaphor seriously, politics becomes networked the moment communication, participation, authenticity, and transparency enable negotiation among all who have been taken account of. The imperative that publicy networks must be flexible ensures that separating powers does not fall back into a rigid legal structure typical of traditional government and some global governance theories. Instead of “separation” of powers, network publicy governance prefers the term “distribution” of powers. More important than the mere distinction of functions is the distribution of functions among stakeholders such that hierarchical power structures are flattened out and command and control communication yields to negotiation and collaboration. This leads to what many have termed adaptability. More appropriate to network publicy governance, we prefer to speak of flexibility. At this point, we are in a position to link our discussion of network publicy governance back up to what was said earlier about common-pool resource governance and thus to governance theory in general. On the basis of many empirical studies of concrete cases of common-pool resource governance, Ostrom and her colleagues have discovered “core design principles” of successful self-organizing governance regimes. These are:

30 | See Krieger/Belliger (2014) for a comparison of the system model and the network model of order with regard to defining ecology. For a differentiated theory of governance from the systems theory perspective see the works of Helmut Willke (2006; 2007; 2014; 2016).

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Network Publicy Governance Clearly defined boundaries. The identity of the group and the boundaries of the shared resource are clearly delineated. Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs. Members of the group must negotiate a system that rewards members for their contributions. Collective-choice arrangements. Group members must be able to create at least some of their own rules and make their own decisions by consensus. Monitoring. Graduated sanctions. Conflict resolution mechanisms. Minimal recognition of rights to organize. Groups must have the authority to conduct their own affairs. Externally imposed rules are unlikely to be adapted to local circumstances and violate principles. For groups that are part of larger social systems, there must be appropriate coordination among relevant groups. (Wilson/Ostrom/Cox 2013: 22)

Ostrom did not interpret these characteristics of successful governance regimes on the basis of a network model. This is apparent in the importance that she assigns to clearly defined boundaries and group identity, which play a greater role in systems models than in network theory.31 Of course, the network publicy governance model also acknowledges the need for closure, identity, and exclusion, but not as primary and constitutive measures. For networks, openness and flexibility are at least as important as closure. Further, Ostrom finds that successful governance regimes negotiate a fair distribution of benefits and costs. What is important in this principle is the way in which benefits and costs are distributed, namely, by means of negotiation and collaboration. Negotiation and collaboration also play major roles in the principle of the right to self-organize without interference from centralized authorities. This fits very well with what has been said above about network governance processes of producing stakeholders and prioritizing of roles and responsibilities, as well as with the process of institutionalizing. The point is that roles and processes are neither given, nor dictated by a central authority, but are defined by means of collaborative decision-making. Research into common-pool resource governance as well as collaborative public administration has in addition to this shown that successful governance regimes depend upon monitoring of compliance and effective sanctions. What is important for the comparison between self-organizing governance regimes and the network publicy governance is that both networks and common-pool resource management emphasize the distribution of powers to regulate and sanction. A peer-based

31 | See Ostrom (2000).

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stakeholder monitoring, quality control, and compliance take the place of topdown regulation and sanctioning. The entire problematic of compliance, monitoring, and conflict resolution is handled in networks by means of exclusion and also by ensuring the separation of powers. Networks use boundaries as a means of maintaining a certain trajectory and not as a constitutive requirement as is the case for systems. The question of compliance is always an issue of stakeholder identities and network trajectory and not an issue of system integrity. This makes networks flexible since stakeholders all have voices and programs of their own and refuse being functionalized. Compared to bureaucratic hierarchies, networks can easily change trajectories, follow different and sometimes divergent goals, and include new links and associations. The mobility platform Uber, for example, can smoothly become a medical service provider or food delivery company. Amazon, which originally was a virtual bookstore, is on the way to becoming the world’s largest retailer and supplier of all kinds of goods and services including food-markets, cloud services for scientific research, and AI assistants. Network publicy governance creates a situation in which identities, roles, and processes can more easily become multifunctional and diverse. Actors in networks are hybrid mediators constantly making their own translations and enrollments and not functional cogs in a machine whose identities and roles have been fixed once and for all top-down. One need not cite only large, if not monopolistic, corporations such as Uber and Amazon, but many examples of cooperative platforms illustrate a sharing economy that challenges traditional capitalistic business models. This is the promise of participatory culture, and also, if we take the discussion of publicy seriously, it is what the fundamental rights to free speech and free association are meant to protect. Finally, what Ostrom describes as coordination among groups, or integration of governance regimes in larger social systems is described by ANT in terms of localizing and globalizing. Small, local networks are always in a variety of ways linked up to larger networks, and larger networks can only be successful if they adapt to local conditions. If one follows the links and associations in either direction, one arrives at either very small local networks right down to networked individuals or in the other direction very large global networks such as international corporations or governments. It is obvious but often not reflected upon that in some way or another everything is connected to everything and whatever happens at one time and place can and does affect what is happening in other times and places. The digital transformation has made this platitude into a real experience for many people working in business, policy administration, scientific research, and other areas directly affected by globalization. The global network society is constituted precisely by the possibility and necessity of adjusting activities in real time to both

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global and local levels. Localizing is therefore always done with regard to global connections, effects, and repercussions.32

4.4 Governance by Design Throughout the discussions of information, privacy, and publicy above, the concept of “design” cropped up again and again. Privacy advocates plead for “privacy by design.” Since digital technologies pose a threat to privacy, the best solution would be to design those technologies from the start so that potential threats to privacy are mitigated. Privacy becomes a part of the process by which data is gathered and used and not a matter of external compliance to a rule that must be enforced from outside the data process itself. This argument repeats itself on the level of publicy, albeit in the diametrically opposed direction. Instead of privacy by design, it is said that there should be “trust by design.” Socio-technical networks in which publicy has come to the fore as the default condition of the informational self should be designed to ensure communication, participation, transparency, and authenticity. Here again, regulation, whether for protecting privacy or promoting free speech and a democratic culture, is not an external rule but part of the information process itself.33 In both cases, what previously was an external rule that depended on external authorities or institutions to evaluate, monitor, and enforce compliance has become by means of “design” a part of the information process itself. Regulation becomes the outcome of a certain design strategy and not something imposed on outcomes from outside. Generally, it could be claimed that the more we enter into symbiotic relationships with technologies, the more the affordances of these technologies tend to subsume regulation to the design process. Where before there was governmental regulation of information networks, there is now governance by design. Traditionally, it was assumed that the nature of rules and laws is inherently external to that which they regulate. This made it necessary to formulate notions of freedom in terms of “self-rule.” The humanist ideal of self-ruled (auto-nomos) subjectivity – whether individual or collective, whether based on reason or freedom – finds in the digital age that it must yield to an informational self that is “self-designed.” It is by design and not by declarations 32 | For a detailed discussion of localizing and globalizing for both theoretically understanding and practically managing networked organizations see Belliger/Krieger (2016). 33 | In a similar vein with regard to AI and complex automated systems there have been calls for “ethics by design.” See, for example, the IEEE “Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems” (https://standards. ieee.org/develop/indconn/ec/autonomous_systems.html) and the ITI Policy Principles (https://www.itic.org/resources/AI-Policy-Principles-FullReport2.pdf).

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of fundamental rights, laws, and courts that freedom, self-determination, and human dignity are best to be realized. Reconstructing governance theory from the perspective of ANT and the network norms arising from the affordances of digital technologies could be understood as leading to a concept of governance not as regulation but as process. This is not an entirely new idea. The emergence of order out of the complex interactions of heterogeneous elements has, of course, been long modeled by the theory of complex adaptive systems and autopoietic systems. In terms of “order from noise,” “self-organization,” and “emergence” systems theory in its own way describes how the organization or structure internal to a system steers and regulates system operations. Steering the operations of a system is the central topic of cybernetics.34 Once a system has attained a certain complexity and self-organizing dynamic, it is no longer possible to steer its behavior by means of applying external rules. This model has become dominant in biology. Organisms are the typical examples of self-organizing, complex systems who steer their own growth, activities, and development. The theory of living organisms as autopoietic, self-organizing, self-referential, and informationally as well as operationally closed systems has become an influential model in all areas today.35 Selection of elements, setting these elements into certain relations to one another, and steering the operations of a system are the functions of internal rules or principles of order, that is, emergent order. To speak of governance as a process goes beyond understanding order in terms of the emerging structures of autopoietic systems. The organization of a system is a set of rules that, even though they emerge within the system, are not system operations themselves but the structures or instructions steering system operations. They steer the operations of the system to establish and maintain system identity and integrity in the face of disturbances coming from the environment. In general, it can be said that a complex adaptive system operates in order to continue its specific operations. This is what “adaptive” means. When the system is disturbed by an event in the environment, it turns this disturbance into “information” according to its own organizing rules or structures and uses this information to react in such a way that it can 34 | “The word cybernetics comes from Greek … cybernētic ḗ, meaning ‘governance’, i.e., all that are pertinent to … cybernáō, the latter meaning ‘to steer, navigate or govern’, hence … cybérnēsis, meaning ‘government’, is the government while cybern ḗ tēs is the governor or ‘helmperson’ of the ‘ship’ (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Cybernetics). See Malapi-Nelson (2017) for a recent historical and systematic discussion of cybernetics. 35 | See Maturana/Varella (1973; 1987) as well as Luhmann’s (1995) theory of Social Systems as examples of this view.

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continue its operations. If the operations, for whatever reasons, are unable to maintain the organization of the system, the system is no longer “viable” and disintegrates. This cybernetic model of order can be generalized to apply to machines as well as to organisms and also to cognition and social phenomena.36 Cybernetic machines are built on the principles of circular causality, negative feedback, information, teleology, self-regulation, and complexity. The regulating principles of the system, as Turing discovered, could be understood as an “algorithm.” From this point of view, both life and cybernetic machines are algorithmic forms of order, where the algorithm is the set of rules or instructions determining the states of the system. Since this is a general model of order in all areas of reality, it is to be expected that social order as well could be modeled as algorithmic. What this model suggests is that there are rules on the one side and that which is regulated on the other. There is software, and there is hardware. Algorithms are the software independent of any particular context or any specific contents, substrate, materials, and elements. Algorithms are internal sets of instructions for executing decisions and regulating processes, regardless of whether these processes be organic, mechanical, psychological, or social. This model of order is omnipresent today, and its influence can hardly be overstated. Nonetheless, we are suggesting that this is perhaps not the best way to think about governance. Reconstructing governance theory as a theory of networks and not as a theory of complex adaptive systems opens up the possibility of conceptualizing rules as processes and not as algorithms, as operations of a specific kind, and therefore as dynamic, changing, flexible, always distributed, and always a matter of negotiation.37 Not by algorithmic instruction, but by communication and participation is how network publicy governance operates. We admit that not only theories of government but also governance theory in its traditional forms is by and large a theory of algorithmic regulation, that is, it is based upon the distinction between rules that regulate and things, people, technologies, processes, and organizations that are regulated. This is to be expected and, considering the nearness of governance to government, is probably unavoidable. After all, what is governance all about if not regulation, and what is to be regulated if not things and people and what they do? 36 | This was the vision of Wiener, von Neumann, Turing, Ashby and others who founded the cybernetic movement. See Malapi-Nelson (2017) for a historical and critical discussion of cybernetics. Harari (2016) has popularized the notion that organisms are algorithms. See Walker/Davies (2013) for the scientific basis. 37 | If we assume that information is the construction of meaning and not negative entropy, and if we furthermore assume an ontological distinction between information and life, then modelling the order of meaning as an autopoietic system amounts to what Heidegger calls forgetfulness of Being.

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Indeed, what sense does the idea of governance make if not as a description of those rules that govern the operations of an organization? This question is legitimate and deserves a clear answer. We propose, therefore, to define network publicy governance not as a theory of regulation, no matter how self-organizing, bottom-up, collaborative, decentralized, etc. it might be, but as a theory of design. In order to emphasize the difference between network publicy governance and the traditional understanding of how society is regulated, we propose reconceptualizing governance, insofar as it is the way in which the informational self participates in bringing order into the socio-sphere, as design. Terms such as “privacy by design” or “trust by design” already suggest that regulatory problems can be solved by design. Does this mean that we are proposing a technocracy that will replace democratically elected officials, laws, judicial processes, and political institutions with engineers and turn the destiny of society over to software developers and user experience specialists?38 Let us recall that Plato wanted philosophers to rule. Both ancient and modern societies, however, choose a more practical solution and opted for power over wisdom. Perhaps the digital transformation offers the opportunity to choose an even more practical approach to social and political order. If neither wisdom nor power have proven very successful in solving the problems of society, perhaps it is time to try design. This radical displacement of governance theory into an area and a discipline in which it has heretofore had no natural home, if it is to be taken seriously at all, demands to be justified by clarifying what is meant by the term “design. Design has at least two different meanings. It can refer to the plan, blueprint, concept, etc. of some object that is to be created. This is often said to be the “design” of a particular object. According to this sense of the term, the design of an automobile, a building, a pair of shoes, or an information system are rather more like things than processes. Even if they exist only as ideas and are in nature immaterial, they can be temporally and spatially located and fixed on a piece of paper, a model, a hard drive, etc. Design, however, can also refer to the process of creating something. The design process can, of course, also be described in detail in a handbook, but this is a handbook and not the actual process of designing something. The design process, even if it follows a method and uses checklists is always a process of making, a continuous trial 38 | It could be argued that already Plato’s philosopher kings were technocrats because they ruled on the basis of expert knowledge. What is decisive for the technocratic vision is that problem solvers take precedence over those who primarily interested maintaining established structures. For a contemporary version of “direct technocracy” see Khana (2017) and for a critique from the European perspective see Habermas (2015). For constructive proposals from Europe see Helmut Willke (2007; 2014; 2016) who speaks of “smart governance.” Instead of speaking of technocracy we follow Latour’s notion of “political ecology” in Latour (2004).

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and error, fixing and experimenting, testing and innovating. In distinction to a merely technocratic understanding of governance, design is principally open to all who are concerned with a particular problem, experts and non-experts, and therefore distributed and decentralized. This is the meaning of the term that we wish to emphasize when speaking of governance by design. To focus on design as a process raises the question of the designer, that is, the one who is doing the designing. Science has established that complex forms of order can emerge without the aid of an external creator. The world does not need a creator God; it can do quite well on its own. The so-called argument from design was supposed to prove the existence of God, if not His omnipotence and good intentions. After God’s demise and the delegitimization of His representatives on Earth, humanism has left us with only ourselves to turn to when it comes to locating the sources of order in the world. That there is a certain uneasiness with this solution is reflected not only in the endless debate about how exactly the social contract is to be implemented but also in the many discussions of technology and society that are inspired by the Greek myth of Prometheus. It is well known that Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans thereby bringing upon himself – as well as humanity – the wrath of the gods. This narrative has served to explain how human arrogance and the usurpation of super-human powers through technology has led to the unprecedented destructiveness and injustice of modern civilization. It could be claimed, however, that the Prometheus story expresses only the bad conscience of humanism for not being able to fulfill the promises that technology offers. Perhaps it is time to look around for a new narrative, a narrative for a posthumanist world in which technology is no longer a neutral tool to be used for good or ill, but raises its own voice, and demands to tell its own story, or at least have a say in the story we are all telling. What would this narrative be? Instead of the clever thief Prometheus, Latour has suggested retelling the story of the clever engineer Daedalus. Daedalus is said to have designed the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete in order to contain the Minotaur. He also devised tools that helped Theseus kill the Minotaur and himself to escape the Labyrinth and leave Crete with Ariadne, the daughter of Minos. After being imprisoned by Minos, Daedalus designed wings for himself and his son Icarus in order to escape Crete, upon which occasion Icarus flew too new the sun and fell into the sea. For the Greeks, Daedalus was the archetypical craftsman and engineer. To him were attributed the construction of imposing buildings and of statues that could move on their own. As opposed to Prometheus, who simply and directly took what he wanted, Daedalus is characterized by taking complicated detours and devising clever artifacts and contraptions in order reach his goals not directly but by devious means.

4. Governance In the myth of Daedalus, all things deviate from the straight line. […] No unmediated action is possible once we enter the realm of engineers and craftsmen. A daedalion in Greek is something curved, veering from the straight line, artful but fake, beautiful and contrived. […] Daedalus is our best eponym for technique – and the concept of daedalion our best tool to penetrate the evolution of civilization. (Latour 1994: 29-30).

To illustrate what is meant by daedalion, that is, by taking technical detours to achieve goals, let us look once again at the primitive stone ax. The (pre)human wants to kill an animal but is too weak to accomplish this goal with its bare hands, so it takes a detour by wielding a certain kind of stone in a certain way. This detour we have described at length in Part 1 above as a process of making links and associations which Latour calls “technical mediation.” The stone stands between the hand and the animal. It “mediates” what the hand is and can do. It does this by allowing the hand to link up to it in certain ways. We go a step further than Latour in proposing that these links, the path of the detour, the daedalion, be understood as information and that following such deviating paths translates or transforms both hominin and stone into something neither were before. Hand and stone and animals and wood and other things are associated into actor-networks by detours of this kind. The (pre)human becomes a “hunter” or a “builder, ” and the stone becomes an “ax.” Daedalus is not a thief as is Prometheus, but a “networker.” His achievements are not based on daring and force, but on translating and enrolling other actors into a network. Furthermore, networking may anger kings and other authorities, but it is not arrogance that must be punished by the gods. It acknowledges that others have something to say about what is possible and how to achieve goals and not merely human will, as the unfortunate Icarus learned at the cost of his life. Daedalus respects the voices, the affordances of many things around him. He links up to them and follows the strange and deviating paths that they suggest to solve problems. This is design. Design, as we know it today, is technical in the sense of problem-solving in areas such as product development, marketing, business process planning, modeling, management, etc. The list is long since there is practically nothing that could not in some way be associated with design. Herbert Simon developed a concept of design that can be traced from Greek techné and understood in the light of the story of Daedalus. Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training [...]. Schools of engineering, as well as schools of

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Latour points out that the concept of design today “has been extended from the details of daily objects to cities, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, and … to nature itself…” (Latour 2008: 2). Even “humans have to be artificially made and remade” (ibid: 10). Once design has become the way in which all problems are to be understood and solved, even the problem that humans are to themselves, the concept of design takes on a much broader meaning. Latour goes so far as to claim that the concept of design becomes “a clear substitute for revolution and modernization” (5). Where modernity and humanism loudly called for revolution or at least for modernization to solve the problems of society and human existence, today we turn to design. The “fourth industrial revolution” is above all a revolution in design.39 For example, Schwab speaks of how environmental and resource problems can be solved by design: …there is great potential to restore and regenerate our natural environment through the use of technologies and intelligent systems design…. […] At the heart of this promise is the opportunity to shift businesses and consumers away from the linear take-makedispose model of resource use, which relies on large quantities of easily accessible resources, and towards a new industrial model where effective flows of materials, energy, labour and now information interact with each other and promote by design a restorative, regenerative and more productive economic system. (Schwab 2016: 64)

The significance of design comes to the fore especially with regard to problems such as climate change which is so inextricably tangled up with technology and science that exclusively social or political approaches cannot hope to achieve adequate solutions. For Latour “the decisive advantage of the concept of design is that it necessarily involves an ethical dimension which is tied into the obvious question of good versus bad design” (5). To speak of ethics as part of design implies that not only considerations of values and norms which go beyond mere functionalism play an integral part in the design process. It implies that these norms are themselves processual. When network governance is viewed as design, that which makes design ethically good is the process of taking account of many different aspects of what something is and can become. It is the process of respecting as many voices as possible, that is, the many claims that can be made on someone or something, and of ensuring that nothing important is overlooked. A computer network, an operating system, a platform, a smart factory, a city, etc. is not “good” from the perspective of design merely because it functions well, but 39 | See Schwab (2016).

4. Governance

because it operates by means of network governance processes such as taking account of, production and prioritizing of stakeholders, localizing and globalizing and maintains these processes as regulating activities. From the perspective of network publicy governance, this means that these regulating processes follow the norms of connectivity and flow, communication, participation, transparency, authenticity, and flexibility. To design something well, including oneself as an informational self in publicy networks, means continually optimizing connectivity and flow, enabling communication and participation, creating transparency, demanding authenticity, and incorporating flexibility. This is diametrically opposed to privacy by design and goes well beyond trust by design. It is governance by design. Design becomes a “means for drawing things together – gods, non-humans, and mortals included” (Latour 2008: 13) and as such it is ethical and carries with it a holistic and perhaps what could be called an “ecological” understanding of the good. Drawing things together from the perspective of network publicy governance understood as governance by design also brings together previously distinct political, social, technical, and economic approaches and competencies. Design is not merely coding or engineering. It is not limited to product usability, functionality, aesthetic criteria, and efficient service delivery. Neither can it be dictated by governments or agencies, or imperatives of profit maximization. In the sense in which network publicy governance becomes a design process, design is multidimensional and involves many different perspectives and their accompanying disciplines and methods. Network publicy governance is concerned with taking account of all voices, producing stakeholders, prioritizing and institutionalizing roles and processes and linking local networks to global concerns. This means that norms of communication, participation, transparency, and authenticity are to be followed such that neither political strategy, nor economic gain, nor technical functionality, nor social issues one-sidedly influence which stakeholders are prioritized and which roles and processes become institutionalized. Many different voices must be heard and integrated into the network. This takes place on both local and global levels. Localizing and globalizing become design factors when flexibility, innovation, and change are built into the network. Local solutions are linked up to global networks and global resources can be brought to bear for meeting local needs. Admittedly, much design work is concerned with what motivates, enables, and binds people to a particular constellation of products, services, roles, and identities. Design is eminently practical. It starts with people and their needs. Design begins with real problems and offers practical solutions. As opposed to lofty theories, design is above all a practical knowledge, much like Heidegger’s circumspection, but reflective in its own unique way. This is why design has become so important today and why Daedalus is perhaps a more useful and inspiring role model than Prometheus. Developers and designers are

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usually much more responsive to users’ needs and interests than established institutions and authorities. They have learned that it is often much better to take practical detours than trying to go directly toward some distant and uncertain goal. The significance of detours becomes apparent the moment we consider that information gathered, aggregated, shared, and evaluated in large quantities yields new and unforeseen products and services in all areas, whether it be business, healthcare, education, or policy administration. Governance by design implies that the meaning of business success, of health, learning, and social services is not fixed and clearly defined but emerges from communication, participation, transparency, authenticity, and flexibility, that is, from governance processes influenced by network norms. This applies not only to society but personal life as well. It is in networks that the informational self finds freedom and dignity and not in secrecy, withdrawal from society, and silence. Publicy, as we have argued, not privacy is the default condition of the informational self. Information is neither exclusively private nor exclusively public. Publicy can be effectively regulated by neither hierarchical government nor by a “free” market. Governance can perhaps best be understood by a theory of design instead of a theory of regulation. Such a radical repositioning of governance theory needs a new narrative of how social order comes to be. A new narrative that can lead us into the digital future may well tell the story of a humble Daedalus who, together with many artifacts and things, collaboratively designs a world in which connectivity and flow, communication and participation, transparency, authenticity, and flexibility normatively influence what counts as good, beautiful, and true in the many networks in which we live.

Conclusion

Network publicy governance regimes of all kinds are sprouting up in all sectors of society and are experimenting with new and disruptive forms of organization, regulation, and information usage. If we assume that the digital transformation has fundamentally changed, or is in the process of changing the ways in which work, science, business, politics, healthcare, organizations, production, transportation, logistic, forms of communication and association, and uses of information in all areas of society are being done, then this probably affects how people understand themselves as informational beings and how they manage personal information as well. The challenge facing us today is to find out what privacy means when society is not based on the scarcity of knowledge and hierarchical, one-to-many communication and when information is understood to be neither an exclusively private nor exclusively public good. The typical responses to this situation have been either simply proclaiming that privacy is dead and resigning oneself either hopefully or pessimistically to the default condition of publicy, or lamenting this deplorable situation and attempting to enact and enforce ever more strict data protection laws. We have argued that these responses are equally unsatisfying and do not lead into the digital future. We have proposed a way beyond these impasses. We propose network publicy governance. We have attempted to answer the following questions: What does personal existence mean if social order is constituted by heterogeneous, scalable sociotechnical networks constructed to maximize connectivity and the free flow of information? What becomes of the individual if not only cognition but also agency and even identity are distributed throughout networks and are no longer limited to individuals? What do freedom and human dignity mean if there is no such thing as the bounded individual and information is an abundant resource that cannot be subsumed under an economy of scarcity or a regime of secrecy? What is the human condition when connectivity, flow, communication, participation, transparency, and flexibility are the norm, and not the exception? We have attempted to answer these questions by offering a new understanding of information. Information belongs to the network and not to any individual

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actor in the network. This explains why publicy and not privacy has become the default condition of the informational self in the digital age. The “infosphere” is a “socio-sphere” constituted by network norms. These norms are the new “institutions” of the global network society. They influence how networks are best regulated and what regulation and governance of networks mean. Within traditional Western ontology of substance, beings were what they were precisely because they could exist without relations, and without internal divisions. This is what the concept of the “individual” means. It designates that which cannot be divided or decomposed into relations. The concept of the individual and our normal self-understanding as persons are deeply influenced by the philosophical idea of “substance” (Greek ousia, Latin substantia). Substance signifies that which is the foundation or the final irresolvable element of being, that upon which all else is erected, the last unit of analysis. The Judeo-Christian tradition added to this Greek notion the idea of the historically, bodily, and spiritually unique person who is free and selfdetermining. All of these ideas flow in various, often obscure, ways into today’s notions of the person, the human individual, of freedom, and even dignity. We may call the worldview that is based on the bounded individual humanism. Humanism is the religion and philosophy of Western modernity. The shadow of humanism in the digital age is the so-called “data subject” who is the subject of privacy theory and privacy legislation. The data subject is usually defined as a locus of sovereign decisions about the disclosure of information or as uniquely constituted by certain “personal” information. The philosophical, political, social, and legal convictions, institutions, and regulations that attempt to protect and sustain this form of individuality are becoming increasingly dysfunctional. The theory of network publicy governance encourages us to attempt to think outside this long, honorable, and omnipresent tradition. Thinking beyond modernity and humanism need not automatically imply a transhumanistic or even posthumanistic interpretation of the informational self. If not only cognition but also agency is distributed in networks, this implies that identity is also a network effect. Once information emerges as the fabric of the world, identities, actors, and networks appear. Although there may be such a thing as “personal information,” this information does not exclusively belong to a bounded and private individual. Informational “self-determination” becomes a question of governance and not government. Being a network is not the same as being an individual, even if certain typically modern networks did all they could to make it appear so. In distinction to traditional notions of subjectivity, the informational self is not a constructed unity. It is not a system of parts integrated somehow into a whole. On the contrary, the informational self is a network of associations. Once subjectivity is understood on the basis of information, there is no need to impose unity upon diversity in order to create subjectivity, personhood, and individuality.

Conclusion

Instead, it is necessary to take account of as many diverse voices as possible through ongoing negotiations that never achieve clear boundaries. The informational self is based on the fact that the links that construct networks can be understood as the product of such negotiations. This is information. A network does not need privacy, even if it pretends to and is convinced that it does. Nor does it need private property or exclusive possession of information. A network does not need government in order to protect privacy. What it needs is publicy. And it needs governance in order to get the most out of publicy. The upshot of all this is that subjectivity can be theoretically understood as mediation instead of immediate self-transparency, regardless of whether this interiority be considered “rational” or “existential.” Socially, it means that there simply is no bounded individual, despite all appearances that such features as free will, cognition, or emotion constitute such boundaries. The network is the actor. Cognition, agency, and identity are distributed throughout heterogeneous and hybrid actor-networks. Politically and legally, it means that there is no longer any reason for privacy as it was conceived, legitimated, and legally regulated in the modern age. Paradoxically, privacy seems to have become a hindrance to economic, political, and social development, and it tends to support and further what it is supposed to prevent and mitigate against. The fact that at the end of the modern age and the beginning of the digital age privacy becomes paradoxical does not mean that human dignity, autonomy, and freedom no longer matter. Building our institutions and organizations, as well as our personal lives on the basis of publicy, does not mean that information of all kinds cannot be misused and that effective sanctions against misuse of information are unnecessary. On the contrary, issues of information misuse take precedence over issues of access when it comes to security, combatting crime, and ensuring order in the digital age. Network publicy governance steps in where hierarchies and markets no longer work well. It allows all stakeholders to have a voice in how information is used. At the beginning of the digital age, the question is not how best to protect privacy, but how best to make sense of and to protect what is most valuable to us in a world of information and a global network society. We have argued that at least one possible answer to this question can be found in the network norms of connectivity, flow, communication, participation, transparency, authenticity, and flexibility insofar as these norms are understood to be network governance processes. Shifting the locus of order away from centers of power towards activities of networking implies seeing ourselves not as sovereign kings and rulers but as cleaver designers constantly making detours to take account of many voices as possible when gathering all things together into a livable world.

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167

Social Sciences and Cultural Studies Carlo Bordoni

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Alexander Schellinger, Philipp Steinberg (eds.)

The Future of the Eurozone How to Keep Europe Together: A Progressive Perspective from Germany October 2017, 202 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4081-6 E-Book PDF: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4081-0 EPUB: 26,99€ (DE), ISBN 978-3-7328-4081-6

European Alternatives, Daphne Büllesbach, Marta Cillero, Lukas Stolz (eds.)

Shifting Baselines of Europe New Perspectives beyond Neoliberalism and Nationalism May 2017, 212 p., pb. 19,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3954-4 E-Book: available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3954-8

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All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!