E-Book, Englisch, 392 Seiten
Hengstschläger / Rat für Forschung und Technologieentwicklung Digital Transformation and Ethics
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-7110-5298-8
Verlag: ecoWing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 392 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-7110-5298-8
Verlag: ecoWing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
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Challenges to
Democracy in
the Age of the
Digital Transformation
Stefan Strauß & Alexander Bogner 1. Introduction
Not very long ago digitalization was seen almost exclusively as a great blessing for democracy. The Arab Spring was celebrated as a “Smartphone Revolution”, with the internet looking to be something like a digital echo chamber reflecting the democratic transition. In the 2012 US presidential election campaign the technology-friendly incumbent Barack Obama kept his Republican challenger at a healthy distance in the race for the White House. “Big Data Will Save Politics”, proclaimed the cover of the MIT Technology Review in early 2013. Only five years later, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal cast a long shadow over the fall of 2018, with fake news and unabashed hate communication everywhere in the net, the cover of the same journal asked almost with a sense of futility: “Technology is threatening our democracy. How do we save it?” Today the fact that massive “ethical challenges” are arising in the course of the Digital Transformation as the publication’s headline suggests is beyond questions. The challenges for the economy and society associated with the Digital Age are just as clearly evident. Some cite the development of new monopoly structures resulting from the immense market power of the “Big Five” US technology companies (Staab, 2019). Others point to the threatening power of the algorithms that so opaquely control and influence our perception of the world and our political points of view (Pasquale, 2015). Another frequent topic is the threat to civil liberties resulting from the perfection of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2018) and the threat to personal autonomy posed by digital identification technologies (Strauß, 2019). The latter threat highlights the tense relationship that has in the meantime developed between digitalization and democracy: If privacy is one of the cornerstones of democracy, democracy is in danger when privacy is threatened. In the present article we take a closer look at those challenges democratic politics face as they arise in the Digital Transformation. We pay particular attention to the significance of platform audiences and social media for the intermediation, representation and staging of politics. We use several familiar examples to illustrate the extent to which digitalization of political activities supports anti-democratic or populist tendencies. Our central thesis is that two fundamental principles of liberal democracy in particular are under attack in the course of digitalization today: The institutional principle of intermediation as well as the ideological principle of a reflective relativism. The next section will illustrate what each of these two principles stands for. 2. Cornerstones of Democratic Politics
In order to identify the potential threats to democratic politics resulting from digitalization, a more precise definition of the central cornerstones of liberal democracy is necessary. Immediate possibilities would be: Separation of powers, general suffrage, and civil liberties. These are fundamentally correct ideas, but for the present context, reference to the central technologies of formation of political will in democracy is decisive. This is necessary because the formation of will is not a direct act by the people, but rather is intermediated through certain entities, primarily through political parties and parliament and of course through the media. This means that modern democracy cannot technically be realized as direct democracy, but rather only as representative democracy, i.e. in the form or parliamentarianism (also when parliamentarian democracy can be supplemented with direct democratic elements). But more than technical reasons favor a parliamentary or party-based political system. The Founding Fathers of the USA already feared the direct formation of will based on unfiltered emotions and as a result decided in favor of independent parliamentarians and not judges that would be elected directly by the people. Thus the purpose of the intermediate institutions in democracy (parties, diversity of parties, parliament, media) is to establish a distance between direct will, eruptive movements, and political decision-making. This is achieved by opening up spaces that allow free exchange of opinions and points of view in order to enable something like a deceleration of political decision-making while rendering the debate more rational. John Stuart Mill, in his famous treatment of freedom, argued that only the open reception of freely expressed opposition legitimizes the claim to superior knowledge (Mill, 1974, 29). Those who blithely brush alternative opinions from the table gain lose the opportunity to better justify their own positions in open and unprejudiced encounters with the opposing side. At the same time, Mill of course knows that not every type of dissent is always also productive. In liberal democracies institutional provisions intended to make a proliferating diversity of opinions truly positive are therefore required to make their own opinions relevant through the indirect path of the party organizations, or in the definition of electoral thresholds for the election of the national parliament. This way every political initiative passes through a multi-stage intermediation process. The intermediary entities essential to liberal democracy ultimately symbolize the fundamental “educational claim” of every functioning democracy: Public formation of opinion and political decision-making involve advocating one’s own convictions without regarding the political opponent as an enemy; they involves grasping one’s own position as thoroughly superior, however without casting doubt on the principal legitimacy of the opposing position. In other words: The actual values of liberal democracy are not particular political objectives (e.g. “justice” in the Socialist model) but rather the norms of discourse, which are not explicitly defined anywhere. The erosion of such norms is a difficult problem, as has been evident for quite some time in the USA, where the extreme political polarization has in the meantime thwarted almost any attempt at reaching reasonable compromises. Accordingly, “Partyism” (Sunstein, 2015) – the hatred of persons solely based on their membership in a given party, with no other preconditions – is an ideology which is almost as destructive as racism or sexism. In other words: The prerequisite for a functioning democracy is the ability to relativize one’s own position. Those who assume that they possess a privileged view of matters, without requiring open debate, in reality foster dogmatism, authoritarianism and intolerance. Here the will to engage in dialog arises exclusively on the basis of the capability to self-reflect, calling one’s own position into question and thus self-relativizing. The essential elements of democracy – changing majorities and protected minorities – can only be established under the prerequisite of this fundamental openness. The Austrian constitutional jurist and sociologist Hans Kelsen treated this close connection between liberal democracy and the worldview of relativism as early as the 1920s: “Those who consider absolute truth and absolute values of human knowledge to be closed must also not only hold their own opinion to be tenable, but must also see alien, opposing opinions as at least possible. This is why the worldview of relativism is a prerequisite to the idea of democracy.” (Kelsen, 2018, 132) If there was such a thing as the absolutely superior opinion (“Truth”) or, to put it differently, if a generally shared belief in the unrivalled superiority of a certain political measure existed, then all political debate would become obsolete. The intermediary institutions fundamental to liberal democracy would then be nothing more but superfluous ornamentation, at best suitable for impeding the work of the executive. The principle of intermediation and the ideology of relativism are thus central prerequisites for liberal democracy. Both principles ultimately serve the purpose of facilitating “reasonable” politics by opening discourse. The following section will now look at how these fundamentals are currently under attack today in the course of digitalization. 3. Political Implications of the Digital Transformation
As early as the 1990s, the early days of the internet and WWW, there was a generally euphoric atmosphere about a wave of democratization through the new media. McLuhan’s “Global Village” metaphor finally seemed to have become a reality. Indeed, society has since then changed drastically in political and social terms due to new forms of interaction and unmediated communication. In the initial phase this still took place by and large bottom-up through so-called grassroots organizations and individual communities of interest in specific niche areas. The establishment of what is referred to as “Web 2.0” began in the 2000s and social media (initially Facebook and later Twitter) become global mass phenomena which the political mainstream could no longer afford to ignore. This resulted in a renewed structural transformation of the public in which the new media played a central role...
