Читать книгу Productive Economy, Contributory Economy - Genevieve Bouche - Страница 24

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).