Digifesto

Suppose we put aside any apocalyptic fears of instrumentality run amok, make peace between The Two Cultures of science and the humanities, and suffer gracefully the provocations of the critical without it getting us down.

We are left with some bare facts:

• The size and therefore the complexity of society is increasing all the time.
• Managing that complexity requires information technology, and specifically technology for computation and its various interfaces.
• The information processing already being performed by computers in the regulation and control of society dwarfs anything any individual can accomplish.
• While we maintain the myth of human expertise and human leadership, these are competitive only when assisted to a great degree by a thinking machine.
• Political decisions, in particular, either are already or should be made with the assistance of data processing tools commensurate with the scale of the decisions being made.

This is a description of the present. To extrapolate into the future, there is only a thin consensus of anthropocentrism between us and the conclusion that we do not so much govern machines as much as they govern us.

This should not shock us. The infrastructure that provides us so much guidance and potential in our daily lives–railroads, electrical wires, wifi hotspots, satellites–is all of human design and made in service of human interests. While these design processes were never entirely democratic, we have made it thus far with whatever injustices have occurred.

We no longer have the pretense that making governing decisions is the special domain of the human mind. Concerns about the possibly discriminatory power of algorithms concede this point. So public concern now scrutinizes the private companies whose software systems make so many decisions for us in ways that are obscure or unpredictable. The profit motive, it is suspected, will not serve customers of these services well in the long run.

So far policy-makers have taken a passive stance towards the problem of algorithmic control by reacting to violations of human dignity with a call for human regulation.

What is needed is a more active stance.

Suppose we were to start again in founding a new city. Or a new nation. Unlike the founders of every city ever founded, we have the option to write its founding Constitution in source code. It would be logically precise and executable without expensive bureaucratic apparatus. It would be scalable in ways that can be mathematically confirmed. It could be forked, experimented with, by diverse societies across the globe. Its procedure for amendment would be written into itself, securing democracy by protocol design.