Data Populism

Discussion

Why we need a progressive data populist movement

Evgeny Morozov:

""A much better agenda for left-leaning populists would be to insist that data is an essential, infrastructural good that should belong to all of us; it should not be claimed, owned, or managed by corporations. Enterprises should, of course, be allowed to build their services around it but only once they pay their dues. The ownership of this data – and the advanced AI built on it – should always remain with the public. This way, citizens and popular institutions can ensure that companies do not hold us hostage, imposing fees for using services that we ourselves have helped to produce. Instead of us paying Amazon a fee to use its AI capabilities – built with our data – Amazon should be required to pay that fee to us.

This points to a broader deficiency with most populist projects of the left: all they can promise is just more of the same but done better, utopia be damned. So, antitrust regulations will get tougher; jobs will magically come back; the welfare state will once again be as generous as it was in the 1960s.

However, the jobs won’t come back because they never really left: they were simply automated out of existence. Making big data firms smaller is not a programme that will excite anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of what makes these firms so effective and their products so affordable. Waxing nostalgic about the highly intrusive welfare state – while Silicon Valley elites cheerlead for the creative flexibility of basic income – also seems suicidal.

The left’s inability to master this new populist language is all the more puzzling, given that technology is one issue where rightwing populists such as Trump and Ukip have little to offer. It’s even hard to imagine what the rightwing version of data populism would be like, other than to say that we have been living and breathing such populism, albeit in a polished, neoliberal version of Barack Obama or David Cameron, for the last decade.

Data populism, in other words, is one issue on which the populist left does have a genuine advantage." (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/04/data-populists-must-seize-information-for-benefit-of-all-evgeny-morozov)