P2P Politics

Brexit was a triumph for a new form of politics. This mutant offspring of a love affair between Neo-feudalism and data science points towards a politics where representation is replaced by information and analysis. This bizarre child, bleating jingoism as it stomps all over the British economy, is an unfortunate advertisement for the new politics but there can be little doubt that it represents the future. And that could be a good thing, if we are smart.

Brexit was delivered by data science. Over 50 million Facebook profiles were filleted for data-points that could be mapped to political views allowing propaganda uniquely tailored towards exploiting individuals fears to blitz the accounts of voters on the final day of the Referendum. For data science and propaganda the Referendum result was a triumph. The problem with Brexit was the objective. I don’t mean leaving the E.U., I mean the use of social media and big data techniques to impose the private goals of a few onto the population by manipulating their anxieties. This is a perversion of what could and should happen when big data meets politics.

Facebook, Google, Amazon, all know more about you than you do yourself.. And the social media giants have the ability to redefine this raw data into propositions and then market this data to companies that want to sell you products. As Brexit proved, the product could be political. So it is entirely within the ability of big data to flip this method on its head and provide politics as a service to you and to everyone within a sovereignty, however that may be defined.

Instead of identifying your beliefs for exploitation, the same system has the ability to collect your beliefs and needs and wishes to provide profiles that describe how the world looks to you today, and how you want the world to look tomorrow. Repeat this 47 million times and you have the political data set for an entire nation. You can mine this dataset to identify today’s urgent needs and tomorrows goals. You can group needs and beliefs and measure their significance and urgency directly. You no longer need manifestos to propose solutions for the population to vote on, you know precisely what needs to be done and how urgently it needs acting on. You no longer need representatives to interpret constituents wishes and form a rough consensus of what a community wants, you know with precision what those wants are and the relative priorities  the community gives to them.

There are many dangers in big data politics. How can we be certain the profiles of community members reflect the economic, legal, and practical realities that might limit solutions ? What happens if the consensus that forms includes irresolvable and convicting claims on resources or capabilities? How will these conflicts be resolved? There are many objections to big data politics but most are spurious. The conflicts or ‘unreasonable’ demands that might emerge from such a fine grained understanding of what individuals and communities really want and need already exist. All big data politics is doing is surfacing them in as detailed and transparent a way as possible. As the referendum proved, powerful undercurrents are hidden by current democratic methods, and this allows them to be misdirected and exploited by ruthless minorities. 

Speaking of ruthless minorities, the real danger from big data lies in the impact that big data politics might have on the political class and their practices. It is just conceivable that the current ideological views and manifestos are a perfect representation of a communities true needs and beliefs, but I think it unlikely. I think it more likely that ideologies represent a very different group of people. To bastardise Tomas Piketty’s key revelation in Capital and Ideology, ideologies compete for the creation and maintenance of inequality for an elite.  I think it unlikely that the general population would support manifesto’s that create inequalities at their expense.

To go further, it is time to acknowledge that all the hopes and dreams and wants and needs of a population of 47 million intelligent, inventive and rational souls can never be represented by a binary choice of  left or right. We are each, as individuals, made up of character and experiences  that are as unique as our fingerprints. And at the same time  we are each capable of reaching agreements, or cooperating on a day to day level, on the give and take that living together in the modern world demands. If this were not so there would be no cooperation, no economy, no society, no civilisation. 

The old forms of building consensus are perverse clumsy things, the best we could do when communication was difficult and memory was limited. That isn’t the world we live in today. Today there are companies that understand more about us than we understand about ourselves. It is time we took back control of our data, owned our own profiles, and shared those profiles to provide the sort of big data politics that will help us resolve our differences, not exploit them.

“ Every epoch therefore develops a range of contradictory discourses and ideologies for the purpose of legitimising the inequality that already exists or that people believe should exist”

Tomas Piketty – Capital and Ideology 2020