You Will Be Digitally Included

The Global Digital Compact as Anti-Politics

We commit to connect all people to the Internet.

-Global Digital Compact: zero draft

Take a look around. I think you’ll agree that what we really need is ‘a high-level event, bringing world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future.’ It sounds like just the ticket, doesn’t it?

This is in any case the billing that is being given to the 2024 Summit of the Future, a UN shindig taking place in September this year under the ‘co-facilitatorship’ of Namibia and Germany. This ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity’, we are told in the bumf, ‘serves as a moment to mend eroded trust and demonstrate that international cooperation can effectively tackle current challenges as well as those that have emerged in recent years or may yet be over the horizon.’ The aim is for all of these world leaders to get together and come up with something that will be called the ‘Pact for the Future’, a ‘concise, action-oriented outcome document’ that will better prepare ‘the world’ to ‘manage the challenges we face now and in the future, for the sake of all humanity and for future generations.’ Input from electorates will be, needless to say, thin on the ground.

There is an awful lot to say about the Summit of the Future. It is sometimes genuinely hard to tell if there is no element of conscious self-parody involved (is there a single person alive who is convinced that the way to ‘mend eroded trust’ is for world leaders to get together extra-constitutionally and undemocratically for a two day meeting in order to hash out a ‘new international consensus’?). And one could have a field day critiquing the entire concept (what could possibly go wrong when ‘world leaders’ get together to decide on the outline of a ‘global financial system that works for all’, how to ‘shar[e] the benefits of space’, what ‘a new agenda for peace’ should look like, how to ‘transform education’, and how to achieve ‘integrity in information’ - all in the course of two days?) But here I want to draw particular attention to something called the Global Digital Compact, which is also going to be negotiated at the Summit, and for which a ‘zero draft’ has already been circulated (on 1st April no less - did I say something about self-parody?).

The Compact describes itself as a set of objectives around which the aforementioned ‘international consensus’ among ‘world leaders’ can be expected to cohere with respect to the digital sphere. These are:

(1) Clos[ing] the digital divides and accelerat[ing] progress across the Sustainable Development Goals;

(2) Expand[ing] opportunities for inclusion in the digital economy;

(3) Foster[ing] an inclusive, open, safe, and secure digital space;

(4) Advanc[ing] equitable international data governance;

(5) Govern[ing] emerging technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, for humanity

The idea is then that an array of ‘stakeholders, including governments, the private sector, civil society, international organisations and the technical and academic communities’ will ‘work in collaboration and partnership’ to achieve this ‘inclusive, open, safe and secure digital future’. (The phrase ‘inclusive, open, safe and secure’ appears eight times in the 13-page document and is clearly intended to be used mimetically and repetitively by world leaders until we all get it into our thick skulls, as in ‘Build Back Better’ or ‘jabs in arms’). Legislatures and parliaments, of course, insofar as they represent mere voters, do not get a look in.

This in itself tells you an awful lot about the future which is being laid out for us: a kind of anti-politics, in which the response to the massive transformations which digital technology is exerting on societies is presented as being something around which ‘consensus’ can be easily built, and hence as basically just a matter of technical implementation that need not involve the messy business of elections and legislative deliberation or compromise at all. We merely need to facilitate ‘collaboration and partnership’ among ‘all stakeholders, including governments, the private sector, civil society, international organisations and the technical and academic communities’ and Bob will be your uncle. ‘Consensus’ will emerge - and we actually already apparently know pretty much what that will look like: ‘closing digital divides’; ‘accelerat[ing] progress’; ‘advanc[ing] equitable international data governance’; and above all inclusion, inclusion, inclusion. All we need to worry about is how we do it.

The idea that some of the stakeholders mentioned - governments and international organisations, say, or the private sector and civil society - might have orthogonal or even oppositional interests, and that this might need to be resolved politically - is not entertained. And nor is the idea that there might even be a political response to, and rejection of, the very idea that what we all desire is to be ‘included’ in the wonderful technocracy that is emerging online. The future is laid out: whether anybody actually wants it is not really imagined to be up for debate. And that is leaving alone the question of whether ‘consensus’ can be reached within all of the competing interests and incentives that will inevitably tug in different directions, or directly clash, when a subject as big as ‘the digital future’ is on the table.

The most obvious and salient illustration of a flashpoint around which consensus may be difficult to establish is that of freedom of expression, of course, which on the one hand is recognised in the Global Digital Compact as a fundamental right, and hence an ‘enabler of sustainable development and closing digital divides’, but which is also identified implicitly as a threat to the ‘inclusive, open, safe and secure digital future’ we are all looking forward to. ‘Hate speech’, we are told, as well as ‘information manipulation and disinformation’, will in this future be ‘eliminated’ - the circle here being squared by the elimination being done ‘in a manner consistent with human rights and freedom of expression’. The anti-politics is here at its zenith: freedom of expression will be eliminated in a manner consistent with freedom of expression - good luck making sense of that as anything other than the purest of wishful thinking or the most purblind hubris.

But in this article I would like to draw attention to what I think is an even deeper, and more fundamental, problem of anti-politics at the heart of the Global Digital Compact - and it concerns the idea of ‘inclusion’ itself.

The authors of the Global Digital Compact are clearly of the view that, in essence, more internet is better. (They even, tellingly, reify the technology itself with a capital letter throughout, as in ‘the Internet’.) This is naked; they make no bones about it; at times the message is almost messianic in nature. ‘Digital accessibility’, they tell us, ‘as well as equitable and affordable access to data and digital technologies’ are ‘critical catalysts for development [emphasis added].’ This means that we ‘must ensure that people can meaningfully use the Internet and safely navigate the digital space [emphasis added]’. This will require ‘national digital skills strategies’; it will require ‘increas[ing] the availability of digital technology platforms’; it will mean extending network coverage to ‘rural, remote and “hard-to-reach” areas’; it will mean ‘connecting the remaining 2.6 billion people to the Internet’ and ‘address[ing] structural and systematic barriers to meaningful and affordable digital connectivity for all women and girls’. It will also mean increasing ‘capacity-building for women and girls, children and youth, as well as older, disabled and persons belonging to marginalized groups’ (the rules of syntax will apparently be thrown out of the window in the digital future, along with middle-aged men). It will mean, in short, that our ‘world leaders’ will ‘connect all people to the Internet’. And in a way, needless to say, which they deem to be ‘inclusive, open, safe and secure’.

The lack of self-awareness in the way this is framed is truly alarming - we should all I think be concerned that it does not seem to have occurred to anybody involved in the drafting of the Global Digital Compact that its contents might sound remotely sinister, or that nobody would sense anything dystopian at all about the idea of ‘world leaders’ getting together to agree ‘common targets, indicators and metrics for universal and meaningful connectivity’, to commit to ‘develop[ing] and undertak[ing] national digital inclusion surveys’, and to create ‘enabling environments for digital transformation’. (Or indeed to ‘map and connect all schools to the Internet’ and ‘includ[e] children and youth in the design and delivery of digital technologies’.) This does not suggest that the people in charge of the project have thought very deeply about what it really entails and how it will be recieved (and whether indeed it will ‘mend eroded trust’).

More importantly, though, it ignores a point which I think should be clear to anybody who is keeping an eye on things in the culture, which is that at some point - I don’t think we have quite got there yet, but I don’t think it is all that far away - there is going to be a serious push-back against ‘the digital’, and it is going to have deep political ramifications. And this is going to centre precisely around the subject of ‘inclusion’, because it strikes at the central faultline that runs through the very heart of our internet use.

If you are my age or older, you will likely remember a time when the internet was presented as being a technology of transformative liberation. It was going to allow us to communicate, create, and even imagine in ways that we had never been able to before. And there is no doubt that to a certain extent it has fulfilled that promise - not always, it must be said, in particularly positive ways (does anybody, even the enthusiast, really benefit from being liberated to watch ‘clop’ porn or to find like-minded souls in order to enjoy severing each other’s appendages?).

But it is now becoming increasingly apparent that the internet is just as if nor more capable of being deployed as a technology of transformative compulsion or even enslavement. This is partly happening through the capacity for network technology to render communications taking place through the network recordable, traceable and legible. And it is partly happening through the sheer addictiveness of the technology itself, whether by accident or design. Hence, on the one hand, we have the creation of ‘hate speech’ and anti-disinformation laws, digital currencies, remotely controllable ‘energy smart devices’ and the like which point towards a micromanagement of daily life that will be truly all-pervading. And on the other we have the ‘promise’, if that is the right word, of our consciousnesses being permanently saturated by a digital equivalent of soma - the prospect of entertaining ourselves to a state of half-death like rats in a gargantuan dream-world Skinner box, never hammering away at the dopamine-pellet-dispenser with quite enough obsessiveness to forget to eat or drink, but always more than enough obsessiveness to forget to think.

These two influences cohere of course, around an image of perfect government as I have elsewhere described it. If modernity is characterised by a gradually strengthening relationship of complete vulnerability and reliance on the part of the governed and complete knowledge and control on the part of the governor, then the unfolding of the digital future would appear to be the pinnacle of that process. For the governed, the promise of being ‘included’ in a perfectly safe, perfectly secure, perfectly equal fantasia; for the governor, the promise of being able to see and know the governed with perfect accuracy - every communication, every act, every thought, every emotion - and hence to subject society to absolute and total control accordingly.

The idea that there will be no pushback against this vision - the idea that people will not increasingly opt-out of ‘inclusion’ in the digital future being laid out for us - is scarcely credible. This pushback will not, obviously, always be conscious. But it is I think inevitable as the experience of using the Internet becomes increasingly ‘enshittified’, manipulative and bossy.

This pushback will take place along a number of different axis. In the first place, physical media and physical interactions will take on a samizdat-like function: in a world in which every time one listens to a piece of music it is logged and registered and one’s musical options are increasingly dictated by algorithm, the act of listening to a vinyl record in the privacy of one’s attic will come to feel almost rebellious. In a world in which e-books can be edited remotely for ‘sensitivity’ at the click of a few mouse buttons (or by an AI), the act of reading physical books will become a matter of low-level sedition. In a world in which every word one types in an email or social media post, or speaks in a Zoom meeting, is carefully combed through for microaggressions and hate speech, offline face-to-face conversations of even the most banal kind will become imbued with significance and excitement. This will not happen because people will do these things in self-consciously counter-cultural ways (for the most part); it will happen because the physical world will sooner or later be re-invigorated with a sense of ‘cool’, and being ‘extremely online’ will become seen as low status. This is in fact beginning to happen already.

In the second place, people in the long-term don’t like the feeling of being addicted to anything, and nor do they like the feeling of being manipulated and controlled. Over time, there will develop different methods for subjecting internet (sorry, ‘Internet’) use to much more careful control than that to which it is currently subjected - from the religious (think of the Jewish sabbath, or the practices of the Amish) to the secular (whether in law, regulation or custom), and with a great deal of pragmatic experimentation in between. It seems highly likely to me, for instance, that Cal Newport’s message about the destructiveness of unrestricted email use in terms of office productivity will eventually filter into the mainstream. It also seems quite likely that the banning of smartphones for children will become a political issue in the very near future.

And in the third place, we will in the long-term no doubt witness a kind of slow-burning revolution as the birth-rate declines. The ‘extremely online’ phenotype does not appear to be one which propagates itself. It will, as sure as eggs are eggs, therefore die out. And this may happen sooner than we think as economic conditions rapidly worsen; there may be a time coming at which the luxury of being able to sit around gazing at TikTok all day simply no longer becomes affordable, and the physical reasserts itself in a much more direct way than we would really like it to do.

We are in short heading for a collision between the ‘inclusive’ digital future which our ‘world leaders’ are imagining, and a number of different countervailing forces whose strength and timing are difficult to predict, but whose trajectories are roughly foreseeable. This suggests that much more is up for grabs than the authors of the Global Digital Compact realise. And it also suggests that the idea of ‘digital inclusion’, around which those authors naively think that consensus will centre, will be a major site of conflict in the coming decade.

Big questions will be at stake in that conflict: among them being how much digitisation human beings desire or can tolerate; how much state control is possible or desirable; and whether we will be the masters of digital technology or its slaves. This all suggests that our future is going to be anything but driven by consensus, or defined by being ‘open, safe and secure’. And it also suggests that ‘world leaders’ and other ‘stakeholders’ may wish to think twice before setting out their stall for total connectivity of everyone, everywhere, as they may find the ground on which they think themselves to be standing rapidly starting to shift.