Future Politics by Jamie Susskind, OUP, 544pp, £20
One of the most infuriating things I hear when speaking about the internet is a knowing retort, which goes something like: “People complained about the printing press and the radio and the television too. There’s nothing new here.”
Next time I hear this nonsense – which won’t be long – I’ll bash the speaker over the head with Jamie Susskind’s brilliant new book. In addition to being rather weighty and therefore capable of inflicting minor injury, it explains in detail why, where, and how politics will change due to the exigencies of modern technology. “New technologies make it possible to do things that previously couldn’t be done,” he writes with typical clarity, “and they make it easier to do some things that we could already do.”
This simple idea has profound consequences for the entire political system. As Neil Postman memorably wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death, would a society in which smoke signals were the primary form of long-distance communications have been able to run complex, large-scale bureaucracies?
Obviously not. And our systems of arranging the world may one day appear equally ill-suited to a universe of smart machines, big data and the rest. Assumptions that have served us well – about fundamental political ideas of power, property, freedom, equality and the law – are up for grabs again. “We’ll need a radical upgrade of our political ideas,” says Susskind.
This is far more profound than the daily tattle of nasty tweets, or Russian bots, or online homophobia. Take the most interesting section of the book, which is about new forms of power. Drawing on the work of the US scholar Laurence Lessig, Susskind looks at how computer code will become a new system of power. For example, imagine a smart car that won’t let you break the speed limit or park anywhere you shouldn’t. Or a digital currency system that automatically and immediately taxes the self-employed as they go. This is a computer code that ensures legal compliance, which will become important when it comes to blockchain technology.
This, as Susskind notes, is radically different from a legal system where you break the law and are punished afterwards. It has consequences for the nature of government power, but also for whether citizens are able to develop moral character. A world in which you can never do anything bad is also a world in which you can never chose to do anything good.
Future Politics is satisfyingly full of important questions like this, which most politicians and lawmakers blissfully ignore. How does freedom of speech look when tech companies decide the limits? How do we hold algorithms to account when they’re so complex? Will governments find new ways to control us and how can we still scrutinise them? What will property mean in an age of machines? How would it feel to be treated disrespectfully by a smart machine? Susskind takes them on with detailed research, colourful examples and a pacy, upbeat style.
You might have noticed that we are currently indulging in a phase of tech-bashing. In the bookshops now are several books, including one of my own, explaining why big tech is disrupting democracy. I daresay the market has become saturated. Susskind’s is an example of the next wave – Andrew Keen’s How to Fix the Future being another – which will focus on where we go next. An excellent set of chapters considers, for example, new forms of democracy that might be more suited to the digital age.
It’s customary to add a few notes of criticism in these reviews; this is especially true when the author covers similar ground to you. Unfortunately, I’m struggling. True, Future Politics just about falls on the highbrow side of the academic/general reader divide. But that’s not really a criticism, since it’s extremely easy to read and understand. And Susskind’s heavy use of philosophers – Mill, Kant, Marx, Arendt, Wittgenstein – adds weight without drag. There is, like most tech books these days, the occasional retelling of by now quite familiar stories about auto-completes on Google, or police allocation numbers. But this really is the smallest of minor quibbles.
The recent grilling of Facebook emperor Mark Zuckerberg by the US Senate revealed a lot about where we are. It demonstrated that politicians who’d bothered to mug up on tech were far more effective interrogators than those who hadn’t.
It also revealed how badly designed our democratic institutions are when dealing with new problems: each senator had four minutes to question Zuckerberg, which rendered the whole exercise unnecessary and stupid. Historians of the future will analyse this exchange as symbolising a clash between old politics and new technology, and will rightly conclude it was a rout. It’s a shame this book wasn’t published before Zuckerberg took the stand.
Fortunately, Future Politics will remain relevant for several years. All elected officials should read it as a matter of urgency, because something tells me Facebook won’t be the last technology put in the dock.
Jamie Bartlett is author of The People vs Tech: How the Internet is Killing Democracy (and how we save it)
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