Keynote address to the 2019 CC Summit
More on the Shared Digital Europe initiative @ https://shared-digital.eu/
Everything is digital by now, our society is digital. And our society is more – should be more – than a market. We are not all just consumers or entrepreneurs, we are citizens, people, which is something much richer.
This is only my second time at the CC Summit. I was fortunate to come to Toronto in 2017. For me it was a heartening and empowering experience, mainly I think to be among so many people with similar work and politics who understood what I do in my work every day. I am very happy to be back and grateful to have this opportunity to share our work with all of you.
I am based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and run a small mainly European group, Commons Network. We work with activists, thinkers, pioneers and policy makers to tell stories, build networks and proposes policy to support the commons.
We bring the idea of the commons, the value of community, the equitable sharing and stewardship of resources and how this contributes to a social ecological transition, to the political agenda. We do this by means of publications, organising, but also concrete proposals for policy, many issues, also city level, especially in the domain of knowledge and the digital commons. As such we work in European policy, on regulatory processes like intellectual property reform, research policy, medicines, trade. Yet often, whether working on issues like copyright reform, or support for open science, we lose.
Maybe because we are terrible advocates, we use weak arguments, have illegitimate goals, or we don’t know how to organise. Perhaps. Of course we have modest resources compared the power of the corporate lobbies and private interests.
But there is more. It is the narrative, the framing within which we work and try to achieve our goals. It is skewed in its logic towards opposing objectives
The current framing for Digital Policy Making in the EU is that of the Digital Single Market. The DSM conceptualises everything in the digital realm to be geared towards market goals, growth, competition. This makes it hard to work towards strong public institutions, knowledge commons, as these serve different objectives… We can’t always resort to the ‘market failure’ argument. Some things are necessary to organise different then a market, even though there might not be market failure. Maybe we want to carve out domains for commons, public space. So the way things are framed in the mainstream put the odds against us from the start.
So together with Alek from Centrum Cyfrowe and Paul from then still Kennisland, we started a project, on a new frame for digital policy making. To work with broad coalition. For Commons Network this worked really with our ongoing campaign for the commons in the light of the European elections, such a frame would be relevant for the new policy cycle coming after the elections, and could influence the approaches of our peers.
So we started writing, discussing, what is it that we had in mind? What would such a frame look like, what did it need to include. What is a frame to start with actually? This was think-tank work. We are mainly advocates, organisers, manifesto writers, so it was a bit out of our comfort zone. And we did not have clear what was necessary, what to do first? We wanted to come up with something that appealed to a very broad range of people. This new frame should appeal to the greens, and the left, but also to the liberals, the Christian democrats, and perhaps to the conservatives. To the European Commission, the media, national policy makers, and of course to our base and peers.
After many essays, workshops with activists, hackers, academics, policy people, heated conversations, frustrating jitsi experiences and working with strategic communications agency, we initially came up with four principles:
Decentralisation, Self Determination, The Commons and Public Institutions. This was a consensus process, and an outcome of co-creation with peers. And we think these are comprehensive and important principles, which also point at concrete policy solutions. We realised however, that these are more implementation principles, high level policy directions, not the actually frame we needed to sell these directions!
So we kept going and putting everything together we eventually landed:
A Shared Digital Europe is our vision of a digital space that facilitates diversity, empowers communities and favours an overall people-centric and public-interest approach to technology development and innovation.
Let me take you through the reasoning:
Today, market orthodoxy limits our ability to deal with the domination by corporate monopolies that constrain both individual freedom online – and the emergence of a truly European civic space.
Hence, a policy approach to digital needs to be broader than a market approach. Seeing the digital space as a market place only does not do it justice. It is in effect our society – a society that is experiencing a digital transformation. Therefore, the digital space cannot be a place where only market dynamics rule. There has to be an approach that is society-centric at its heart.
A frame needs to build and embrace core European values that distinguish Europe, from the US/China models. Values such as strong public institution, democratic governance and control to protect individual freedoms & community, sovereignty, cultural diversity, space for creativity, human rights & social justice.
Shared Digital Europe should be our source of strength, by supporting social and economic innovation, as well as a new, regenerative economy.
Other frames are more focused on the individual and the market, or the public good. We hear the term human centric internet quite a bit. We prefer society centric. We feel tempting to achieve social justice based solely on human rights is not enough in to achieve the fundamental change needed. There is need for a systemic approach that emphases the importance of the collective, of communities and societies as a whole.
So how can this shared digital Europe be achieved? By enabling self-determination, cultivating the commons, decentralising infrastructure and empowering public institutions. These four principles complement and reinforce each other.
Enables self-determination: because must be possible to fully participate in social life without having to give up your personal data to commercial entities. This includes the right to privacy and the need for more democratic models of data governance and algorithmic transparency.
Cultivates the Commons: allowing for collaborative practices and knowledge sharing, this creating substantial economic value. But also, huge social value.
Decentralising our technological infrastructure will increase Europe’s technological sovereignty by reducing dependency on non-European technology providers. It is also a way to strengthen our democratic traditions and diversity. Will allow people online to engage in more democratic platforms, more localised and community based.
Empowering public institutions will help us to provide meaningful online spaces that are protected from the surveillance practices of commercial platforms. Public libraries, educational and cultural resources.
Combine these four elements with a truly European set of values and a new strategy presents itself. A strategy to counter the deteriorating online debate, the monopolisation of the digital sphere, the enclosure of knowledge and the violation of human rights in the digital space.
Our Vision for a Shared Digital Europe provides policy makers with an opportunity to work towards digital society that responds to current challenges and embrace a hybrid digital space: of public, market and commons ,where people can engage in different ways. We believe that it is in the capacity of Europe to shape such a digital society.
Now, we have to sell the idea, share it and link it to clear policies to adopt. We hope to do this in a broad coalition.
One question is of course, very obvious in this setting of a global summit: does this idea translate to the other places beyond Europe? And how? And this one of the questions we would like to tackle in our session on Saturday.
Thank you very much.
