or a country that promises freedom framed by endless texts, rules and norms, to the point of stifling the spirit of initiative and clogging up the administrations and courts?
The texts that regulate our lives are full of loopholes: they are sometimes written following an unfortunate event or sometimes to please a political group. They are imagined out of nothing. But each situation is unique and everything is constantly changing, at least much faster than the regulatory system can handle it. In short, they are always open to discussion and are therefore never satisfactory.
For example, the IT system of every bank in Europe is constantly evolving in order to keep up with the continuous flow of reforms, rules, recommendations and other laws to which they are subject. A bank’s IT system must be flawless. But an IT system that is constantly changing is becoming increasingly fragile. The agility of our banks is being lost in this never-ending battle.
What is happening to our banks is not a special case: all professions are affected. But this pushes us to consider another idea of the notion of bank and money and, more broadly, another idea of the tools of governance by making clever use of the potential of digital technology.
Thus, from now on, the reality to be taken into account is known, but rejected: code is law!
1.3.4.2. Code is law and “digital trust”
Digital technology, particularly Big Data, has the capacity to monitor the evolution of situations that arise for institutions and thus alert legislators and regulatory bodies. It has the capacity to enforce existing rules in a user-friendly way through applications designed to serve citizens and their social and economic agents. Finally, it allows everyone to find out about their rights and duties according to their situation and their project.
For example, pay slips have long been produced using software that is scrupulously updated each time a rule, law or rate is changed. This tends to become the case for the establishment of invoices or rents receipt. This way of doing things contributes to the gradual establishment of a rhizome of information, willingly accepted for the feeling of secure simplification, but repelled by the feeling of universal surveillance. Finding the right balance will require some maturation.
To make the most of this development, our (European) states need to develop an effective digital architecture based on trust.
This is far from the case. We have an administrative digital system made up of bits and pieces, built over time with a nascent computer system and working methods that consisted of freezing in computer programs the operating methods of our institutions of the 20th century and earlier.
What is infuriating is that Europe has financed a system of this type in Estonia (X-Road), which is highly satisfactory in terms of efficiency, safety and userfriendliness. This system has the advantage of being extremely modular and therefore easy to implement progressively, starting with local projects that are gradually aggregated to the European level. Being based on relatively light and above all modular technologies, it is economically accessible to all geographical areas of the territory.
It may seem strange to begin this plea on emergencies by talking about the digital world. The reason is simple: the development of money has allowed the development of trade, which in turn has allowed the development of the production of goods and services, in other words the economy as we know it today. The continuation of this development is blocked by organizational and environmental limits. To go further, we are using Big Data. Digital technology is becoming the second vector of human development after money.
Digital technology will enable us to develop the new model of society to which we aspire, based on the development of the common good. It is digital technology that will make it possible to “create society”, provided that it is also a vector of confidence, such as that which we have in our common currency, the euro.
For example, GAFAM10 offer us valuable and free online services, but every time we use them, they capture data about us in order to refine our behavioral profile ever more precisely.
This profiling is then marketed and used to influence us. Being profiled without our knowledge is the price we pay for using their free services.
We can ask ourselves why we are being subjected to this and what the consequences are. GAFAM have achieved this performance by offering us useful and very easy-to-use services. They have not considered us as subjects, as administrations do. They have set themselves the goal of making themselves indispensable so that we will faithfully adopt them.
Another way is possible: Estonian citizens use their digital technology with confidence because it has been designed to be useful to them. For example, they vote from home. No one questions the count of the vote, which is invisible, because in their daily lives, this system is reliable.
Digital technology in any geographical area will gradually become central to its operation and thus to the management of the common good.
Hence, our first priority is to move away from the digital 0.0 imposed on us by GAFAM and their Chinese replica BATX, towards a European digital 1.0, based on trust and democratic control (see section 11.4).
1.3.4.3. More human if more digital
Contrary to what we would like to believe, more digital technology, in order to manage living things, requires more relationships between people. Machines are not able to perceive the unexpected signals of society and the environment. They can nevertheless signal particular cases. It is up to man, and man alone, to treat particular cases with humanism and in a democratic spirit. This implies trusting a priori the men and women involved in “everyday life”, as well as having a great deal of confidence in the computer scientists who design and operate the software and databases.
If financiers were the operators of the development of the industrial era, computer scientists will be the actors of the coming era. But if this is the case, they must be sworn in, as are, in principle, the actors of finance. It is therefore urgent to create a council of the order of computer scientists.
This idea has been around since the 1970s, but has never been implemented. In particular, the digital branch of SYNTEC is not involved. This institution is traditionally chaired by the head of a large French IT services company, but the majority of its board members are representatives of the American digital industry.
Successive governments have never spoken out on this subject, nor has parliament, which does not seem to see the issues at stake.
Thus, to answer Solzhenitsyn, it is possible and even indispensable: we cannot get bogged down among humans.
It is no longer possible to be told, “I understand you, but I’m going to tell you why I can’t do anything for you and that the steps you need to take are going to be long, expensive and uncertain.”
Banning this kind of talk is the electoral program that European citizens want to hear. We can do this with a lot of technological sovereignty. In this way, we will develop a “responsible democracy”.
By responsible democracy, we mean a network of locally committed citizens who, according to their commitment, intervene at more global levels and whose mandates do not last forever.
1.4. Better than a revolution
For the moment, the word “revolution” is growing in the word clouds
