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  • Richard Hill – Review of Bauer and Latzer, Handbook on the Economics of the Internet

    Richard Hill – Review of Bauer and Latzer, Handbook on the Economics of the Internet

    a review of Johannes M. Bauer and Michal Latzer, eds., Handbook on the Economics of the Internet (Edward Elgar, 2016)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    The editors of this book must be commended for having undertaken the task of producing it: it must surely have taken tremendous persistence and patience to assemble the broad range of chapters.  The result is a valuable book is valuable, even if at some parts are disappointing.  As is often the case for a compilation of articles written by different authors, the quality of the individual contributions is uneven: some are excellent, others not.  The book is valuable because it identifies many of the key issues regarding the economics of the Internet, but it is somewhat disappointing because some of the topics are not covered in sufficient depth and because some key topics are not covered at all.  For example, the digital divide is mentioned cursorily on pp. 6-7 of the hardback edition and there is no discussion of its historical origins, economic causes, future evolution, etc.

    Yet there is extensive literature on the digital divide, such as easily available overall ITU reports from 2016 and 2017, or more detailed ITU regional studies regarding international Internet interconnectivity for Africa and Latin America.  The historical impact of the abolition of the traditional telephony account settlement scheme is covered summarily in Chapter 2 of my book The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (2013).  One might have expected that a book dedicated to the economics of the Internet would have started from that event and explained its consequences, and analyse proposals regarding how to address the digital divide, for example the proposals made during the World Summit on the Information Society to create some kind of fund to bridge the gap (those proposals were not accepted).  I would have expected such a book to discuss the possibilities and the ramifications of an international version of the universal service funds that are used in many countries to minimize national digital divides between low-density rural areas and high-density cities.  But there is no discussion at all of these topics in the book.

    And there is little discussion of Artificial Intelligence (some of which is enabled by data obtained through the Internet) or of the disruption of labour markets that some believe is or will be caused by the Internet.  For a summary treatment of these topics, with extensive references, see sections 1 and 8 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    The Introduction of the book correctly notes that “Scale economies, interdependencies, and abundance are pervasive [in the Internet] and call for analytical concepts that augment the traditional approaches” (p. 3).  Yet, the book fails, on the whole, to deliver sufficient detail regarding such analytical concepts, an exception being the excellent discussion on pp. 297-308 of the Internet’s economic environment for innovation, in particular pp. 301-303.

    Of the 569 pages of text (in the hardcover edition), only 22 or so contain quantitative charts or tables (eight are in one chapter), and of those only 12 or so are original research.  Only one page has equations.  Of course the paucity of data in the book is due to the fact that data regarding the Internet is hard to obtain: in today’s privatized environment, companies strive to collect data, but not to publish it.  But economics is supposed to be a quantitative discipline, at least in part, so it would have been valuable if the book had included a chapter on the reasons for the relative paucity of reliable data (both micro and macro) concerning the Internet and the myriad of transactions that take place on the Internet.

    In a nutshell, the book gives good overall, comprehensive, and legible, descriptions of many trees, but in some cases without sufficient quantitative detail, whereas it mostly fails to provide an analysis of the forest comprised by the trees (except for the brilliant chapter by Eli Noam titled “From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment”).

    The book will be very valuable for people who know little or nothing about the Internet and its economics.  Those who know something will benefit from the extensive references given at the end of each chapter.  Those who know specific topics well will not learn much from this book.  A more appropriate title for the book would have been “A Comprehensive Introduction to the Economics of the Internet”.

    The rest of this review consists of brief reviews of each of the chapters of the book.  We start with the strongest chapter, followed by the weakest chapter, then review the other chapters in the order in which they appear in the book.

    1. From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment

    This chapter is truly excellent, as one would expect, given that it is written by Eli Noam.  It captures succinctly the key policy questions regarding the economics of the Internet.  We cite p. 564:

    • How to assure the financial viability of infrastructure?
    • Market power in the entertainment Internet?
    • Does vertical integration impede competition?
    • How to protect children, old people, and traditional morality?
    • How to protect privacy and security?
    • What is the impact on trade? What is the impact of globalization?
    • How to assure the interoperability of clouds?

    It is a pity that the book did not use those questions as key themes to be addressed in each chapter.  And it is a pity that the book did not address the industrial economics issues so well put forward.  We cite p. 565:

    Another economic research question is how to assure the financial viability of the infrastructure.  The financial balance between infrastructure, services, and users is a critical issue.  The infrastructure is expensive and wants to be paid.  Some of the media services are young and want to be left to grow.  Users want to be served generously with free content and low-priced, flat-rate data service.  Fundamental economics of competition push towards price deflation, but market power, and maybe regulation, pull in another direction.  Developing countries want to see money from communications as they did in the days of traditional telecom.

    Surely the other chapters of the book could have addressed these issues, which are being discussed publicly, see for example section 4 of the Summary of the 2017 ITU Open Consultation on so-called Over-the-Top (OTT) services.

    Noam’s discussion of the forces that are leading to fragmentation (pp. 558-560) is excellent.  He does not cite Mueller’s recent book on the topic, no doubt because this chapter of the book was written before Mueller’s book was published.  Muller’s book focuses on state actions, whereas Noam gives a convincing account of the economic drivers of fragmentation, and how such increased diversity may not actually be a negative development.

    Some minor quibbles: Noam does not discuss the economic impact of adult entertainment, yet it is no doubt significant.  The off-hand remark at the bottom of p. 557 to the effect that unleashing demand for entertainment might solve the digital divide is likely not well taken, and in any case would have to be justified by much more data.

    1. The Economics of Internet Standards

    I found this to be the weakest chapter in the book.  To begin with, it is mostly descriptive and contains hardly any real economic analysis.  The account of the Cisco/Huawei battle over MPLS-TP standards (pp. 219-222) is accurate, but it would have been nice to know what the economic drivers were of that battle, e.g. size of the market, respective market shares, values of the respective products based on the respective standards, who stood to gain/lose what (and not just the manufacturers, but also the network operators), etc.

    But the descriptive part is also weak.  For example, the Introduction gives the misleading impression that IETF standards are the dominant element in the growth of the Internet, whereas it was the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) HTML and successor standards that enabled the web and most of what we consider to be the Internet today.  The history on p. 213 omits contributions from other projects such as Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) and CYCLADES.

    Since the book is about economics, surely it should have mentioned on pp. 214 and 217 how the IETF has become increasingly influenced by dominant manufacturers, see pp. 148-152 of Powers, Shawn M., and Jablonski, Michael (2015) The Real Cyberwar: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom; as Noam puts the matter on p. 559 of the book: “The [Internet] technical specifications are set by the Steering Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a small group of 15 engineers, almost all employees of big companies around the world.”

    And surely it should have discussed in section 10.4 (p. 214) the economic reasons that lead to greater adoption of TCP/IP over the competing OSI protocol, such as the lower implementation costs due to the lack of security of TCP/IP, the lack of non-ASCII support in the early IETF protocols, and the heavy subsidies provided by the US Defence Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which are well known facts recounted on pp. 533-541 of the book.  In addition to not dealing with economic issues, section 10.4 is an overly simplified account of what really happened.

    Section 10.7 (p. 222) is again, surprisingly devoid of any semblance of economic analysis.  Further, it perpetuates a self-serving, one-sided account of the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), without once citing scholarly writings on the issue, such as my book The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (2013).  The authors go so far as to cite the absurd US House proposition to the effect that the Internet should be “free of government control” without noting that what the US politicians meant is that it should be “free of foreign government control”, because of course the US has never had any intent of not subjecting the Internet to US laws and regulations.

    Indeed, at present, hardly anybody seriously questions the principle that offline law applies equally online.  One would expect a scholarly work to do better than to cite inane political slogans meant for domestic political purposes.  In particular when the citations are not used to underpin any semblance of economic analysis.

    1. The Economics of the Internet: An Overview

    This chapter provides a solid and thorough introduction to the basics of the economics of the Internet.

    1. The Industrial Organization of the Internet

    This chapter well presents the industrial organization of the Internet, that is, how the industry is structured economically, how its components interact economically, and how that is different from other economic sectors.  As the authors correctly state (p. 24): “ … the tight combination of high fixed and low incremental cost, the pervasive presence of increasing returns, the rapidity and frequency of entry and exit, high rates of innovation, and economies of scale in consumption (positive network externalities) have created unique economic conditions …”.  The chapter explains well key features such as multi-sided markets (p. 31).  And it correctly points out (p. 25) that “while there is considerable evidence that technologically dynamic industries flourish in the absence of government intervention, there is also evidence of the complementarity of public policy and the performance of high-tech markets.”  That is explored in pp. 45 ff. and in subsequent chapters, albeit not always in great detail.

    1. The Internet as a Complex Layered System

    This is an excellent chapter, one of the best in the book.  It explains how, because of the layered nature of the Internet, simple economic theories fail to capture its complexities.  As the chapter says (p. 68), the Internet is best viewed as a general purpose infrastructure.

    1. A Network Science Approach to the Internet

    This chapter provides a sound and comprehensive description of the Internet as a network, but it does not go beyond the description to provide analyses, for example regarding regulatory issues.  However, the numerous citations in the chapter do provide such analyses.

    1. Peer Production and Cooperation

    This chapter is also one of the best chapters in the book.  It provides an excellent description of how value is produced on the Internet, through decentralization, diverse motivations, and separation of governance and management.  It covers, and explains the differences between, peer production, crowd-sourcing, collaborative innovation, etc.  On p. 87 it provides an excellent quantitative description and analysis of specific key industry segments.  The key governance patterns in peer production are very well summarized on pp. 108-109 and 112-113.

    1. The Internet and Productivity

    This chapter actually contains a significant amount of quantitative data (which is not the case for most of the other chapters) and provides what I would consider to be an economic analysis of the issue, namely whether, and if so how, the Internet has contributed to productivity.  As the chapter points out, we lack sufficient data to analyse fully the impacts of the development of information and communication technologies since 2000, but this chapter does make an excellent contribution to that analysis.

    1. Cultural Economics and the Internet

    This is a good introduction to supply, demand, and markets for creative goods and services produced and/or distributed via the Internet.  The discussion of two-sided markets on p. 155 is excellent.  Unfortunately, however, the chapter is mostly a theoretical description: it does not refer to any actual data or provide any quantitative analysis of what is actually happening.

    1. A Political Economy Approach to the Internet

    This is another excellent chapters, one of the best in the book.  I noted one missing citation to a previous analysis of key issues from the political economics point of view: Powers, Shawn M., and Jablonski, Michael (2015) The Real Cyberwar: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom.  But the key issues are well discussed in the chapter:

    • The general trend towards monopolies and oligopolies of corporate ownership and control affecting the full range of Internet use and development (p. 164).
    • The specific role of Western countries and their militaries in supporting and directing specific trajectories (p. 165).
    • How the general trend towards privatization made it difficult to develop the Internet as a public information utility (p. 169).
    • The impact on labour, in particular shifting work to users (p. 170).
    • The rise and dominance of the surveillance economy (where users become the product because their data is valuable) (p. 175).
    1. Competition and Anti-Trust in Internet Markets

    This chapter provides a very good overview of the competition and anti-trust issues related to the Internet, but it would have been improved if it had referred to the excellent discussion in Noam’s chapter “From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment.”  It would have been improved by referring to recent academic literature on the topic.  Nevertheless, the description of key online market characteristics, including that they are often two-sided, (p. 184) is excellent.  The description of the actual situation (including litigation) regarding search engines on p. 189 ff. is masterful: a superb example of the sort of real economic analysis that I would have liked to see in other chapters.

    The good discussion of network neutrality (p. 201) could have been improved by taking the next step and analysing the economic implications of considering whether the Internet infrastructure should be regulated as a public infrastructure and/or, for example, be subject to functional separation.

    1. The Economics of Copyright and the Internet

    This is an excellent introduction to the issues relating to copyright in the digital age.  It provides little data but that is because, as noted on pp. 238-241, there is a paucity of data for copyright, whereas there is more for patents.

    1. The Economics of Privacy, Data Protection and Surveillance

    As one would expect from its author, Ian Brown, this is an excellent discussion of the issues and, again, one of the best chapters in the book.  In particular, the chapter explains well and clearly (pp. 250 ff.) why market failures (e.g externalities, information asymmetries and anti-competitive market structures) might justify regulation (such as the European data privacy rules).

    1. Economics of Cybersecurity

    This chapter provides a very good overview of the economic issues related to cybersecurity, but, like most of the other chapters, it provides very little data and thus no detailed economic analysis.  It would have benefited from referring to the Internet Society’s 2016 Global Internet Report, which does provide data, and stresses the key market failures that result in the current lack of security of the Internet: information asymmetries (section 13.7.2 of the book) and externalities (section 13.7.3).

    However, the section on externalities fails to mention certain possible solutions, such as minimum security standards.  Minimum safety standards are imposed on many products, such as electrical appliances, automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, etc.  Thus it would have been appropriate for the book to discuss the economic implications of minimum security standards.  And also the economic implications of Microsoft’s recent call for a so-called Geneva Digital Convention.

    1. Internet Architecture and Innovation in Applications

    This chapter provides a very good description, but it suffers from considering the Internet in isolation, without comparing it to other networks, in particular the fixed and mobile telephone networks.  It would have been good to see a discussion and comparison of the economic drivers of innovation or lack of innovation in the two networks.  And also a discussion of the economic role of the telephony signalling network, Signalling System Seven (SS7) which enabled implementation of the widely used, and economically important, Short Messaging Service (SMS).

    In that context, it is important to note that SS7 is, as is the Internet, a connectionless packet-switched system.  So what distinguishes the two networks is more than technology: indeed, economic factors (such as how services are priced for end-users, interconnection regimes, etc.) surely play a role, and it would have been good if those had been explored.  In this context, see my paper “The Internet, its governance, and the multi-Stakeholder model”, Info, vol. 16. no. 2, March 2014.

    1. Organizational Innovations, ICTs and Knowledge Governance: The Case of Platforms

    As this excellent chapter, one of the best in the books, correctly notes, “platforms constitute a major organizational innovation” which has been “made possible by technological innovation”.

    As explained on pp. 338-339, platforms are one of the key components of the Internet economy, and this has recently been recognized by governments.  For example, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament adopted an Opinion in May 2017 that, among other provisions:

    Calls for an appropriate and proportionate regulatory framework that would guarantee responsibility, fairness, trust and transparency in platforms’ processes in order to avoid discrimination and arbitrariness towards business partners, consumers, users and workers in relation to, inter alia, access to the service, appropriate and fair referencing, search results, or the functioning of relevant application programming interfaces, on the basis of interoperability and compliance principles applicable to platforms.

    The topic is covered to some extent a European Parliament Committee Report on online platforms and the digital single market, (2016/2276(INI).  And by some provisions in French law.  Detailed references to the cited documents, and to other material relevant to platforms, are found in section 9 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    1. Interconnection in the Internet: Peering, Interoperability and Content Delivery

    This chapter provides a very good description of Internet interconnection, including a good discussion of the basic economic issues.  As do the other chapters, it suffers from a paucity of data, and does not discuss whether the current interconnection regime is working well, or whether it is facing economic issues.  The chapter does point out (p. 357) that “information about actual interconnection agreements … may help to understand how interconnection markets are changing …”, but fails to discuss how the unique barter structure of Internet interconnections, most of which are informal, zero-cost traffic sharing agreements, impedes the collection and publication of such information.

    The discussion on p. 346 would have benefited from an economic analysis of the advantages/disadvantages of considering the basic Internet infrastructure to be a basic public infrastructure (such as roads, water and electrical power distribution systems, etc.) and the economic tradeoffs of regulating its interconnection.

    Section 16.5.1 would have benefited from a discussion of the economic drivers behind the discussions in ITU that lead to the adoption of ITU-T Recommendation D.50 and its Supplements, and the economic issues arguing for and against implementation of the provisions of that Recommendation.

    1. Internet Business Strategies

    As this very good chapter explains, the Internet has had a dramatic impact on all types of businesses, and has given rise to “platformization”, that is the use of platforms (see chapter 15 above) to conduct business.  Platforms benefit from network externalities and enable two-sided markets.  The chapter includes a detailed analysis (pp. 370-372) of the strategic properties of the Internet that can be used to facilitate and transform business, such as scalability, ubiquity, externalities, etc.  It also notes that the Internet has changed the role of customers and both reduced and increased information asymmetries.  The chapter provides a very good taxonomy of Internet business models (pp. 372 ff.).

    1. The Economics of Internet Search

    The chapter contains a good history of search engines, and an excellent analysis of advertising linked to searches.  It provides theoretical models and explains the important of two-sided markets in this context.  As the chapter correctly notes, additional research will require access to more data than are currently available.

    1. The Economics of Algorithmic Selection on the Internet

    As this chapter correctly notes (p. 395), “algorithms have come to shape our daily lives and realities.”  They have significant economic implication and raise “significant social risks such as manipulation and data bias, threats to privacy and violations of intellectual property rights”.  A good description of different types of algorithms and how they are used is given on p. 399.  Scale effects and concentration are discussed (p. 408) and the social risks are explained in detail on pp. 411 ff.:

    • Threats to basic rights and liberties.
    • Impacts on the mediation of reality.
    • Challenges to the future development of the human species.

    More specifically:

    • Manipulation
    • Diminishing variety
    • Constraints on freedom of expression
    • Threats to data protection and privacy
    • Social discrimination
    • Violation of intellectual property rights
    • Possible adaptations of the human brain
    • Uncertain effects on humans

    In this context, see also the numerous references in section 1 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    The chapter includes a good discussion of different governance models and their advantages/disadvantages, namely:

    • Laissez-fair markets
    • Self-organization by business
    • Self-regulation by industry
    • State regulation
    1. Online Advertising Economics

    This chapter provides a good history of what some have referred to as the Internet’s original sin, namely the advent of online advertising as the main revenue source for many Internet businesses.  It explains how the Internet can, and does, improve the efficiency of advertising by targeting (pp. 430 ff.) and it includes a detailed analysis of advertising in relation to search engines (pp. 435 ff.).

    1. Online News

    As the chapter correctly notes, this is an evolving area, so the chapter mostly consists of a narrative history.  The chapter’s conclusion starts by saying that “the Internet has brought growth and dynamism to the news industry”, but goes on to note, correctly, that “the financial outlook for news providers, old or new, is bleak” and that, thus far, nobody has found a viable business model to fund the online news business.  It is a pity that this chapter does not cite McChesney’s detailed analysis of this issue and discuss his suggestions for addressing it.

    1. The Economics of Online Video Entertainment

    This chapter provides the history of that segment of the Internet industry and includes a valuable comparison and analysis of the differences between online and offline entertainment media (pp. 462-464).

    1. Business Strategies and Revenue Models for Converged Video Services

    This chapter provides a clear and comprehensive description of how an effect of convergence “is the blurring of lines between formerly separated media platforms such as over-the-air broadcasting, cable TV, and streamed media.”  The chapter describes ten strategies and six revenue models that have been used to cope with these changes.

    1. The Economics of Virtual Worlds

    This chapter provides a good historical account of the evolution of the internal reward system of games, which went from virtual objects that players could obtain by solving puzzles (or whatever) to virtual money that could be acquired only within the game, to virtual money that could be acquired with real-world money, to large professional factories that produce and sell objects to World of Wonders players in exchange for real-world money.  The chapter explores the legal and economic issues arising out of these situations (pp. 503-504) and gives a good overview of the research in virtual economies.

    1. Economics of Big Data

    This chapter correctly notes (p. 512) that big data is “a field with more questions than answers”.  Thus, logically, the chapter is mostly descriptive.  It includes a good account of two-sided markets (p. 519), and correctly notes (p. 521) that “data governance should not be construed merely as an economic matter but that it should also encompass a social perspective”, a position with which I wholeheartedly agree.  As the chapter says (p. 522), “there are some areas affected by big data where public policies and regulations do exist”, in particular regarding:

    • Privacy
    • Data ownership
    • Open data

    As the chapter says (p. 522), most evidence available today suggests that markets are not “responding rapidly to concerns of users about the (mis)use of their personal information”.  For additional discussion, with extensive references, see section 1 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    1. The Evolution of the Internet: A Socioeconomic Account

    This is a very weak chapter.  Its opening paragraph fails to consider the historical context of the development of the Internet, or its consequences.  Its second paragraph fails to consider the overt influence of the US government on the evolution of the Internet.  Section 26.3 fails to cite one of the most comprehensive works on the topic (the relation between AT&T and the development of the internet), namely Schiller, Dan (2014) Digital Depression: Information Technology and Information Crisis, University of Illinois Press.  The discussion on p. 536 fails to even mention the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) initiative, yet that initiative undoubtedly affected the development of the Internet, not just by providing a model for how not to do things (too complex, too slow), but also by providing some basic technology that is still used to this day, such as X.509 certificates.

    Section 26.6, on how market forces affect the Internet, seems oblivious to the rising evidence that dominant market power, not competition, is shaping the future of the Internet, which appears surprising in light of the good chapter in the book on that very topic: “Competition and anti-trust in Internet markets.”  Page 547 appears to ignore the rising vertical integration of many Internet services, even though that trend is well discussed in Noam’s excellent chapter “From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment.”

    The discussion of the role of government on p. 548 is surprisingly lacunary, given the rich literature on the topic in general, and specific government actions or proposed actions regarding topics such as freedom of speech, privacy, data protection, encryption, security, etc. (see for example my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation).

    This chapter should have started with the observation that the Internet was not conceived as a public network (p. 558) and build on that observation, explaining the socioeconomic factors that shaped its transformation from a closed military/academic network into a public network and into a basic infrastructure that now underpins most economic activities.

    _____

    Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2o Review Digital Studies magazine.

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  • The Human Condition and The Black Box Society

    The Human Condition and The Black Box Society

    Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015)a review of Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015)
    by Nicole Dewandre
    ~

    1. Introduction

    This review is informed by its author’s specific standpoint: first, a lifelong experience in a policy-making environment, i.e. the European Commission; and, second, a passion for the work of Hannah Arendt and the conviction that she has a great deal to offer to politics and policy-making in this emerging hyperconnected era. As advisor for societal issues at DG Connect, the department of the European Commission in charge of ICT policy at EU level, I have had the privilege of convening the Onlife Initiative, which explored the consequences of the changes brought about by the deployment of ICTs on the public space and on the expectations toward policy-making. This collective thought exercise, which took place in 2012-2013, was strongly inspired by Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition.

    This is the background against which I read the The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms Behind Money and Information by Frank Pasquale (references to which are indicated here parenthetically by page number). Two of the meanings of “black box“—a device that keeps track of everything during a flight, on the one hand, and the node of a system that prevents an observer from identifying the link(s) between input and output, on the other hand—serve as apt metaphors for today’s emerging Big Data environment.

    Pasquale digs deep into three sectors that are at the root of what he calls the black box society: reputation (how we are rated and ranked), search (how we use ratings and rankings to organize the world), and finance (money and its derivatives, whose flows depend crucially on forms of reputation and search). Algorithms and Big Data have permeated these three activities to a point where disconnection with human judgment or control can transmogrify them into blind zombies, opening new risks, affordances and opportunities. We are far from the ideal representation of algorithms as support for decision-making. In these three areas, decision-making has been taken over by algorithms, and there is no “invisible hand” ensuring that profit-driven corporate strategies will deliver fairness or improve the quality of life.

    The EU and the US contexts are both distinct and similar. In this review, I shall not comment on Pasquale’s specific policy recommendations in detail, even if as European, I appreciate the numerous references to European law and policy that Pasquale commends as good practices (ranging from digital competition law, to welfare state provision, to privacy policies). I shall instead comment from a meta-perspective, that of challenging the worldview that implicitly undergirds policy-making on both sides of the Atlantic.

    2. A Meta-perspective on The Black Box Society

    The meta-perspective as I see it is itself twofold: (i) we are stuck with Modern referential frameworks, which hinder our ability to attend to changing human needs, desires and expectations in this emerging hyperconnected era, and (ii) the personification of corporations in policymaking reveals shortcomings in the current representation of agents as interest-led beings.

    a) Game over for Modernity!

    As stated by the Onlife Initiative in its “Onlife Manifesto,” through its expression “Game over for Modernity?“, it is time for politics and policy-making to leave Modernity behind. That does not mean going back to the Middle Ages, as feared by some, but instead stepping firmly into this new era that is coming to us. I believe with Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish that it is more effective to consider that we are now entering into the ubiquitous computing era instead of looking at it as if it was approaching fast.[1] With the miniaturisation of devices and sensors, with mobile access to broadband internet and with the generalized connectivity of objects as well as of people, not only do we witness an increase of the online world, but, more fundamentally, a collapse of the distinction between the online and the offline worlds, and therefore a radically new socio-technico-natural compound. We live in an environment which is increasingly reactive and talkative as a result of the intricate mix between off-line and online universes. Human interactions are also deeply affected by this new socio-technico-natural compound, as they are or will soon be “sticky”, i.e. leave a material trace by default and this for the first time in history. These new affordances and constraints destabilize profoundly our Modern conceptual frameworks, which rely on distinctions that are blurring, such as the one between the real and the virtual or the ones between humans, artefacts and nature, understood with mental categories dating back from the Enlightenment and before. The very expression “post-Modern” is not accurate anymore or is too shy, as it continues to position Modernity as its reference point. It is time to give a proper name to this new era we are stepping into, and hyperconnectivity may be such a name.

    Policy-making however continues to rely heavily on Modern conceptual frameworks, and this not only from the policy-makers’ point of view but more widely from all those engaging in the public debate. There are many structuring features of the Modern conceptual frameworks and it goes certainly beyond this review to address them thoroughly. However, when it comes to addressing the challenges described by The Black Box Society, it is important to mention the epistemological stance that has been spelled out brilliantly by Susan H. Williams in her Truth, Autonomy, and Speech: Feminist Theory and the First Amendment: “the connection forged in Cartesianism between knowledge and power”[2]. Before encountering Susan Williams’s work, I came to refer to this stance less elegantly with the expression “omniscience-omnipotence utopia”[3]. Williams writes that “this epistemological stance has come to be so widely accepted and so much a part of many of our social institutions that it is almost invisible to us” and that “as a result, lawyers and judges operate largely unself-consciously with this epistemology”[4]. To Williams’s “lawyers and judges”, we should add policy-makers and stakeholders.  This Cartesian epistemological stance grounds the conviction that the world can be elucidated in causal terms, that knowledge is about prediction and control, and that there is no limit to what men can achieve provided they have the will and the knowledge. In this Modern worldview, men are considered as rational subjects and their freedom is synonymous with control and autonomy. The fact that we have a limited lifetime and attention span is out of the picture as is the human’s inherent relationality. Issues are framed as if transparency and control is all that men need to make their own way.

    1) One-Way Mirror or Social Hypergravity?

    Frank Pasquale is well aware of and has contributed to the emerging critique of transparency and he states clearly that “transparency is not just an end in itself” (8). However, there are traces of the Modern reliance on transparency as regulative ideal in the Black Box Society. One of them is when he mobilizes the one-way mirror metaphor. He writes:

    We do not live in a peaceable kingdom of private walled gardens; the contemporary world more closely resembles a one-way mirror. Important corporate actors have unprecedented knowledge of the minutiae of our daily lives, while we know little to nothing about how they use this knowledge to influence the important decisions that we—and they—make. (9)

    I refrain from considering the Big Data environment as an environment that “makes sense” on its own, provided someone has access to as much data as possible. In other words, the algorithms crawling the data can hardly be compared to a “super-spy” providing the data controller with an absolute knowledge.

    Another shortcoming of the one-way mirror metaphor is that the implicit corrective is a transparent pane of glass, so the watched can watch the watchers. This reliance on transparency is misleading. I prefer another metaphor that fits better, in my view: to characterise the Big Data environment in a hyperconnected conceptual framework. As alluded to earlier, in contradistinction to the previous centuries and even millennia, human interactions will, by default, be “sticky”, i.e. leave a trace. Evanescence of interactions, which used to be the default for millennia, will instead require active measures to be ensured. So, my metaphor for capturing the radicality and the scope of this change is a change of “social atmosphere” or “social gravity”, as it were. For centuries, we have slowly developed social skills, behaviors and regulations, i.e. a whole ecosystem, to strike a balance between accountability and freedom, in a world where “verba volant and scripta manent[5], i.e. where human interactions took place in an “atmosphere” with a 1g “social gravity”, where they were evanescent by default and where action had to be taken to register them. Now, with all interactions leaving a trace by default, and each of us going around with his, her or its digital shadow, we are drifting fast towards an era where the “social atmosphere” will be of heavier gravity, say “10g”. The challenge is huge and will require a lot of collective learning and adaptation to develop the literacy and regulatory frameworks that will recreate and sustain the balance between accountability and freedom for all agents, human and corporations.

    The heaviness of this new data density stands in-between or is orthogonal to the two phantasms of bright emancipatory promises of Big Data, on the one hand, or frightening fears of Big Brother, on the other hand. Because of this social hypergravity, we, individually and collectively, have indeed to be cautious about the use of Big Data, as we have to be cautious when handling dangerous or unknown substances. This heavier atmosphere, as it were, opens to increased possibilities of hurting others, notably through harassment, bullying and false rumors. The advent of Big Data does not, by itself, provide a “license to fool” nor does it free agents from the need to behave and avoid harming others. Exploiting asymmetries and new affordances to fool or to hurt others is no more acceptable behavior as it was before the advent of Big Data. Hence, although from a different metaphorical standpoint, I support Pasquale’s recommendations to pay increased attention to the new ways the current and emergent practices relying on algorithms in reputation, search and finance may be harmful or misleading and deceptive.

    2) The Politics of Transparency or the Exhaustive Labor of Watchdogging?

    Another “leftover” of the Modern conceptual framework that surfaces in The Black Box Society is the reliance on watchdogging for ensuring proper behavior by corporate agents. Relying on watchdogging for ensuring proper behavior nurtures the idea that it is all right to behave badly, as long as one is not seen doing do. This reinforces the idea that the qualification of an act depends from it being unveiled or not, as if as long as it goes unnoticed, it is all right. This puts the entire burden on the watchers and no burden whatsoever on the doers. It positions a sort of symbolic face-to-face between supposed mindless firms, who are enabled to pursue their careless strategies as long as they are not put under the light and people who are expected to spend all their time, attention and energy raising indignation against wrong behaviors. Far from empowering the watchers, this framing enslaves them to waste time monitoring actors who should be acting in much better ways already. Indeed, if unacceptable behavior is unveiled, it raises outrage, but outrage is far from bringing a solution per se. If, instead, proper behaviors are witnessed, then the watchers are bound to praise the doers. In both cases, watchers are stuck in a passive, reactive and specular posture, while all the glory or the shame is on the side of the doers. I don’t deny the need to have watchers, but I warn against the temptation of relying excessively on the divide between doers and watchers to police behaviors, without engaging collectively in the formulation of what proper and inappropriate behaviors are. And there is no ready-made consensus about this, so that it requires informed exchange of views and hard collective work. As Pasquale explains in an interview where he defends interpretative approaches to social sciences against quantitative ones:

    Interpretive social scientists try to explain events as a text to be clarified, debated, argued about. They do not aspire to model our understanding of people on our understanding of atoms or molecules. The human sciences are not natural sciences. Critical moral questions can’t be settled via quantification, however refined “cost benefit analysis” and other political calculi become. Sometimes the best interpretive social science leads not to consensus, but to ever sharper disagreement about the nature of the phenomena it describes and evaluates. That’s a feature, not a bug, of the method: rather than trying to bury normative differences in jargon, it surfaces them.

    The excessive reliance on watchdogging enslaves the citizenry to serve as mere “watchdogs” of corporations and government, and prevents any constructive cooperation with corporations and governments. It drains citizens’ energy for pursuing their own goals and making their own positive contributions to the world, notably by engaging in the collective work required to outline, nurture and maintain the shaping of what accounts for appropriate behaviours.

    As a matter of fact, watchdogging would be nothing more than an exhausting laboring activity.

    b) The Personification of Corporations

    One of the red threads unifying The Black Box Society’s treatment of numerous technical subjects is unveiling the oddness of the comparative postures and status of corporations, on the one hand, and people, on the other hand. As nicely put by Pasquale, “corporate secrecy expands as the privacy of human beings contracts” (26), and, in the meantime, the divide between government and business is narrowing (206). Pasquale points also to the fact that at least since 2001, people have been routinely scrutinized by public agencies to deter the threatening ones from hurting others, while the threats caused by corporate wrongdoings in 2008 gave rise to much less attention and effort to hold corporations to account. He also notes that “at present, corporations and government have united to focus on the citizenry. But why not set government (and its contractors) to work on corporate wrongdoings?” (183) It is my view that these oddnesses go along with what I would call a “sensitive inversion”. Corporations, which are functional beings, are granted sensitivity as if they were human beings, in policy-making imaginaries and narratives, while men and women, who are sensitive beings, are approached in policy-making as if they were functional beings, i.e. consumers, job-holders, investors, bearer of fundamental rights, but never personae per se. The granting of sensitivity to corporations goes beyond the legal aspect of their personhood. It entails that corporations are the one whose so-called needs are taken care of by policy makers, and those who are really addressed to, qua persona. Policies are designed with business needs in mind, to foster their competitiveness or their “fitness”. People are only indirect or secondary beneficiaries of these policies.

    The inversion of sensitivity might not be a problem per se, if it opened pragmatically to an effective way to design and implement policies which bear indeed positive effects for men and women in the end. But Pasquale provides ample evidence showing that this is not the case, at least in the three sectors he has looked at more closely, and certainly not in finance.

    Pasquale’s critique of the hypostatization of corporations and reduction of humans has many theoretical antecedents. Looking at it from the perspective of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition illuminates the shortcomings and risks associated with considering corporations as agents in the public space and understanding the consequences of granting them sensitivity, or as it were, human rights. Action is the activity that flows from the fact that men and women are plural and interact with each other: “the human condition of action is plurality”.[6] Plurality is itself a ternary concept made of equality, uniqueness and relationality. First, equality as what we grant to each other when entering into a political relationship. Second, uniqueness refers to the fact that what makes each human a human qua human is precisely that who s/he is is unique. If we treat other humans as interchangeable entities or as characterised by their attributes or qualities, i.e., as a what, we do not treat them as human qua human, but as objects. Last and by no means least, the third component of plurality is the relational and dynamic nature of identity. For Arendt, the disclosure of the who “can almost never be achieved as a wilful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this ‘who’ in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities”[7]. The who appears unmistakably to others, but remains somewhat hidden from the self. It is this relational and revelatory character of identity that confers to speech and action such a critical role and that articulates action with identity and freedom. Indeed, for entities for which the who is partly out of reach and matters, appearance in front of others, notably with speech and action, is a necessary condition of revealing that identity:

    Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: who are you? In acting and speaking, men show who they are, they appear. Revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for, nor against them, that is in sheer togetherness.[8]

    So, in this sense, the public space is the arena where whos appear to other whos, personae to other personae.

    For Arendt, the essence of politics is freedom and is grounded in action, not in labour and work. The public space is where agents coexist and experience their plurality, i.e. the fact that they are equal, unique and relational. So, it is much more than the usual American pluralist (i.e., early Dahl-ian) conception of a space where agents worry for exclusively for their own needs by bargaining aggressively. In Arendt’s perspective, the public space is where agents, self-aware of their plural characteristic, interact with each other once their basic needs have been taken care of in the private sphere. As highlighted by Seyla Benhabib in The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, “we not only owe to Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy the recovery of the public as a central category for all democratic-liberal politics; we are also indebted to her for the insight that the public and the private are interdependent”.[9] One could not appear in public if s/he or it did not have also a private place, notably to attend to his, her or its basic needs for existence. In Arendtian terms, interactions in the public space take place between agents who are beyond their satiety threshold. Acknowledging satiety is a precondition for engaging with others in a way that is not driven by one’s own interest, but rather by their desire to act together with others—”in sheer togetherness”—and be acknowledged as who they are. If an agent perceives him-, her- or itself and behave only as a profit-maximiser or as an interest-led being, i.e. if s/he or it has no sense of satiety and no self-awareness of the relational and revelatory character of his, her or its identity, then s/he or it cannot be a “who” or an agent in political terms, and therefore, respond of him-, her- or itself. It does simply not deserve -and therefore should not be granted- the status of a persona in the public space.

    It is easy to imagine that there can indeed be no freedom below satiety, and that “sheer togetherness” would just be impossible among agents below their satiety level or deprived from having one. This is however the situation we are in, symbolically, when we grant corporations the status of persona while considering efficient and appropriate that they care only for profit-maximisation. For a business, making profit is a condition to stay alive, as for humans, eating is a condition to stay alive. However, in the name of the need to compete on global markets, to foster growth and to provide jobs, policy-makers embrace and legitimize an approach to businesses as profit-maximisers, despite the fact this is a reductionist caricature of what is allowed by the legal framework on company law[10]. So, the condition for businesses to deserve the status of persona in the public space is, no less than for men and women, to attend their whoness and honour their identity, by staying away from behaving according to their narrowly defined interests. It means also to care for the world as much, if not more, as for themselves.

    This resonates meaningfully with the quotation from Heraclitus that serves as the epigraph for The Black Box Society: “There is one world in common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep each turns away into a world of his own”. Reading Arendt with Heraclitus’s categories of sleep and wakefulness, one might consider that totalitarianism arises—or is not far away—when human beings are awake in private, but asleep in public, in the sense that they silence their humanness or that their humanness is silenced by others when appearing in public. In this perspective, the merging of markets and politics—as highlighted by Pasquale—could be seen as a generalized sleep in the public space of human beings and corporations, qua personae, while all awakened activities are taking place in the private, exclusively driven by their needs and interests.

    In other words—some might find a book like The Black Box Society, which offers a bold reform agenda for numerous agencies, to be too idealistic. But in my view, it falls short of being idealistic enough: there is a missing normative core to the proposals in the book, which can be corrected by democratic, political, and particularly Arendtian theory. If a populace has no acceptance of a certain level of goods and services prevailing as satiating its needs, and if it distorts the revelatory character of identity into an endless pursuit of a limitless growth, it cannot have the proper lens and approach to formulate what it takes to enable the fairness and fair play described in The Black Box Society.

    3. Stepping into Hyperconnectivity

    1) Agents as Relational Selves

    A central feature of the Modern conceptual framework underlying policymaking is the figure of the rational subject as political proxy of humanness. I claim that this is not effective anymore in ensuring a fair and flourishing life for men and women in this emerging hyperconnected era and that we should adopt instead the figure of a “relational self” as it emerges from the Arendtian concept of plurality.

    The concept of the rational subject was forged to erect Man over nature. Nowadays, the problem is not so much to distinguish men from nature, but rather to distinguish men—and women—from artefacts. Robots come close to humans and even outperform them, if we continue to define humans as rational subjects. The figure of the rational subject is torn apart between “truncated gods”—when Reason is considered as what brings eventually an overall lucidity—on the one hand, and “smart artefacts”—when reason is nothing more than logical steps or algorithms—on the other hand. Men and women are neither “Deep Blue” nor mere automatons. In between these two phantasms, the humanness of men and women is smashed. This is indeed what happens in the Kafkaesque and ridiculous situations where a thoughtless and mindless approach to Big Data is implemented, and this from both stance, as workers and as consumers. As far as the working environment is concerned, “call centers are the ultimate embodiment of the panoptic workspace. There, workers are monitored all the time” (35). Indeed, this type of overtly monitored working environment is nothing else that a materialisation of the panopticon. As consumers, we all see what Pasquale means when he writes that “far more [of us] don’t even try to engage, given the demoralizing experience of interacting with cyborgish amalgams of drop- down menus, phone trees, and call center staff”. In fact, this mindless use of automation is only the last version of the way we have been thinking for the last decades, i.e. that progress means rationalisation and de-humanisation across the board. The real culprit is not algorithms themselves, but the careless and automaton-like human implementers and managers who act along a conceptual framework according to which rationalisation and control is all that matters. More than the technologies, it is the belief that management is about control and monitoring that makes these environments properly in-human. So, staying stuck with the rational subject as a proxy for humanness, either ends up in smashing our humanness as workers and consumers and, at best, leads to absurd situations where to be free would mean spending all our time controlling we are not controlled.

    As a result, keeping the rational subject as the central representation of humanness will increasingly be misleading politically speaking. It fails to provide a compass for treating each other fairly and making appropriate decisions and judgments, in order to impacting positively and meaningfully on human lives.

    With her concept of plurality, Arendt offers an alternative to the rational subject for defining humanness: that of the relational self. The relational self, as it emerges from the Arendtian’s concept of plurality[11], is the man, woman or agent self-aware of his, her or its plurality, i.e. the facts that (i) he, she or it is equal to his, her or its fellows; (ii) she, he or it is unique as all other fellows are unique; and (iii) his, her or its identity as a revelatory character requiring to appear among others in order to reveal itself through speech and action. This figure of the relational self accounts for what is essential to protect politically in our humanness in a hyperconnected era, i.e. that we are truly interdependent from the mutual recognition that we grant to each other and that our humanity is precisely grounded in that mutual recognition, much more than in any “objective” difference or criteria that would allow an expert system to sort out human from non-human entities.

    The relational self, as arising from Arendt’s plurality, combines relationality and freedom. It resonates deeply with the vision proposed by Susan H. Williams, i.e. the relational model of truth and the narrative model to autonomy, in order to overcome the shortcomings of the Cartesian and liberal approaches to truth and autonomy without throwing the baby, i.e. the notion of agency and responsibility, out with the bathwater, as the social constructionist and feminist critique of the conceptions of truth and autonomy may be understood of doing.[12]

    Adopting the relational self as the canonical figure of humanness instead of the rational subject‘s one puts under the light the direct relationship between the quality of interactions, on the one hand, and the quality of life, on the other hand. In contradistinction with transparency and control, which are meant to empower non-relational individuals, relational selves are self-aware that they are in need of respect and fair treatment from others, instead. It also makes room for vulnerability, notably the vulnerability of our attentional spheres, and saturation, i.e. the fact that we have a limited attention span, and are far from making a “free choice” when clicking on “I have read and accept the Terms & Conditions”. Instead of transparency and control as policy ends in themselves, the quality of life of relational selves and the robustness of the world they construct together and that lies between them depend critically on being treated fairly and not being fooled.

    It is interesting to note that the word “trust” blooms in policy documents, showing that the consciousness of the fact that we rely from each other is building up. Referring to trust as if it needed to be built is however a signature of the fact that we are in transition from Modernity to hyperconnectivity, and not yet fully arrived. By approaching trust as something that can be materialized we look at it with Modern eyes. As “consent is the universal solvent” (35) of control, transparency-and-control is the universal solvent of trust. Indeed, we know that transparency and control nurture suspicion and distrust. And that is precisely why they have been adopted as Modern regulatory ideals. Arendt writes: “After this deception [that we were fooled by our senses], suspicions began to haunt Modern man from all sides”[13]. So, indeed, Modern conceptual frameworks rely heavily on suspicion, as a sort of transposition in the realm of human affairs of the systematic doubt approach to scientific enquiries. Frank Pasquale quotes moral philosopher Iris Murdoch for having said: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture” (89). If she is right—and I am afraid she is—it is of utmost importance to shift away from picturing ourselves as rational subjects and embrace instead the figure of relational selves, if only to save the fact that trust can remain a general baseline in human affairs. Indeed, if it came true that trust can only be the outcome of a generalized suspicion, then indeed we would be lost.

    Besides grounding the notion of relational self, the Arendtian concept of plurality allows accounting for interactions among humans and among other plural agents, which are beyond fulfilling their basic needs (necessity) or achieving goals (instrumentality), and leads to the revelation of their identities while giving rise to unpredictable outcomes. As such, plurality enriches the basket of representations for interactions in policy making. It brings, as it were, a post-Modern –or should I dare saying a hyperconnected- view to interactions. The Modern conceptual basket for representations of interactions includes, as its central piece, causality. In Modern terms, the notion of equilibrium is approached through a mutual neutralization of forces, either with the invisible hand metaphor, or with Montesquieu’s division of powers. The Modern approach to interactions is either anchored into the representation of one pole being active or dominating (the subject) and the other pole being inert or dominated (nature, object, servant) or, else, anchored in the notion of conflicting interests or dilemmas. In this framework, the notion of equality is straightjacketed and cannot be embodied. As we have seen, this Modern straitjacket leads to approaching freedom with control and autonomy, constrained by the fact that Man is, unfortunately, not alone. Hence, in the Modern approach to humanness and freedom, plurality is a constraint, not a condition, while for relational selves, freedom is grounded in plurality.

    2) From Watchdogging to Accountability and Intelligibility

    If the quest for transparency and control is as illusory and worthless for relational selves, as it was instrumental for rational subjects, this does not mean that anything goes. Interactions among plural agents can only take place satisfactorily if basic and important conditions are met.  Relational selves are in high need of fairness towards themselves and accountability of others. Deception and humiliation[14] should certainly be avoided as basic conditions enabling decency in the public space.

    Once equipped with this concept of the relational self as the canonical figure of what can account for political agents, be they men, women, corporations and even States. In a hyperconnected era, one can indeed see clearly why the recommendations Pasquale offers in his final two chapters “Watching (and Improving) the Watchers” and “Towards an Intelligible Society,” are so important. Indeed, if watchdogging the watchers has been criticized earlier in this review as an exhausting laboring activity that does not deliver on accountability, improving the watchers goes beyond watchdogging and strives for a greater accountability. With regard to intelligibility, I think that it is indeed much more meaningful and relevant than transparency.

    Pasquale invites us to think carefully about regimes of disclosure, along three dimensions:  depth, scope and timing. He calls for fair data practices that could be enhanced by establishing forms of supervision, of the kind that have been established for checking on research practices involving human subjects. Pasquale suggests that each person is entitled to an explanation of the rationale for the decision concerning them and that they should have the ability to challenge that decision. He recommends immutable audit logs for holding spying activities to account. He calls also for regulatory measures compensating for the market failures arising from the fact that dominant platforms are natural monopolies. Given the importance of reputation and ranking and the dominance of Google, he argues that the First Amendment cannot be mobilized as a wild card absolving internet giants from accountability. He calls for a “CIA for finance” and a “Corporate NSA,” believing governments should devote more effort to chasing wrongdoings from corporate actors. He argues that the approach taken in the area of Health Fraud Enforcement could bear fruit in finance, search and reputation.

    What I appreciate in Pasquale’s call for intelligibility is that it does indeed calibrate the needs of relational selves to interact with each other, to make sound decisions and to orient themselves in the world. Intelligibility is different from omniscience-omnipotence. It is about making sense of the world, while keeping in mind that there are different ways to do so. Intelligibility connects relational selves to the world surrounding them and allows them to act with other and move around. In the last chapter, Pasquale mentions the importance of restoring trust and the need to nurture a public space in the hyperconnected era. He calls for an end game to the Black Box. I agree with him that conscious deception inherently dissolves plurality and the common world, and needs to be strongly combatted, but I think that a lot of what takes place today goes beyond that and is really new and unchartered territories and horizons for humankind. With plurality, we can also embrace contingency in a less dramatic way that we used to in the Modern era. Contingency is a positive approach to un-certainty. It accounts for the openness of the future. The very word un-certainty is built in such a manner that certainty is considered the ideal outcome.

    4. WWW, or Welcome to the World of Women or a World Welcoming Women[15]

    To some extent, the fears of men in a hyperconnected era reflect all-too-familiar experiences of women. Being objects of surveillance and control, exhausting laboring without rewards and being lost through the holes of the meritocracy net, being constrained in a specular posture of other’s deeds: all these stances have been the fate of women’s lives for centuries, if not millennia. What men fear from the State or from “Big (br)Other”, they have experienced with men. So, welcome to world of women….

    But this situation may be looked at more optimistically as an opportunity for women’s voices and thoughts to go mainstream and be listened to. Now that equality between women and men is enshrined in the political and legal systems of the EU and the US, concretely, women have been admitted to the status of “rational subject”, but that does not dissolve its masculine origin, and the oddness or uneasiness for women to embrace this figure. Indeed, it was forged by men with men in mind, women, for those men, being indexed on nature. Mainstreaming the figure of the relational self, born in the mind of Arendt, will be much more inspiring and empowering for women, than was the rational subject. In fact, this enhances their agency and the performativity of their thoughts and theories. So, are we heading towards a world welcoming women?

    In conclusion, the advent of Big Data can be looked at in two ways. The first one is to look at it as the endpoint of the materialisation of all the promises and fears of Modern times. The second one is to look at it as a wake-up call for a new beginning; indeed, by making obvious the absurdity or the price of going all the way down to the consequences of the Modern conceptual frameworks, it calls on thinking on new grounds about how to make sense of the human condition and make it thrive. The former makes humans redundant, is self-fulfilling and does not deserve human attention and energy. Without any hesitation, I opt for the latter, i.e. the wake-up call and the new beginning.

    Let’s engage in this hyperconnected era bearing in mind Virginia Woolf’s “Think we must”[16] and, thereby, shape and honour the human condition in the 21st century.
    _____

    Nicole Dewandre has academic degrees in engineering, economics and philosophy. She is a civil servant in the European Commission, since 1983. She was advisor to the President of the Commission, Jacques Delors, between 1986 and 1993. She then worked in the EU research policy, promoting gender equality, partnership with civil society and sustainability issues. Since 2011, she has worked on the societal issues related to the deployment of ICT technologies. She has published widely on organizational and political issues relating to ICTs.

    The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and in no way represent the view of the European Commission and its services.

    Back to the essay
    _____

    Acknowledgments: This review has been made possible by the Faculty of Law of the University of Maryland in Baltimore, who hosted me as a visiting fellow for the month of September 2015. I am most grateful to Frank Pasquale, first for having written this book, but also for engaging with me so patiently over the month of September and paying so much attention to my arguments, even suggesting in some instances the best way for making my points, when I was diverging from his views. I would also like to thank Jérôme Kohn, director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School for Social Research, for his encouragements in pursuing the mobilisation of Hannah Arendt’s legacy in my professional environment. I am also indebted, and notably for the conclusion, to the inspiring conversations I have had with Shauna Dillavou, excecutive director of CommunityRED, and Soraya Chemaly, Washington-based feminist writer, critic and activist. Last, and surely not least, I would like to thank David Golumbia for welcoming this piece in his journal and for the care he has put in editing this text written by a non-English native speaker.

    [1] This change of perspective, in itself, has the interesting side effect to take the carpet under the feet of those “addicted to speed”, as Pasquale is right when he points to this addiction (195) as being one of the reasons “why so little is being done” to address the challenges arising from the hyperconnected era.

    [2] Williams, Truth, Autonomy, and Speech, New York: New York University Press, 2004 (35).

    [3] See, e.g., Nicole Dewandre, ‘Rethinking the Human Condition in a Hyperconnected Era: Why Freedom Is Not About Sovereignty But About Beginnings’, in The Onlife Manifesto, ed. Luciano Floridi, Springer International Publishing, 2015 (195–215).

    [4]Williams, Truth, Autonomy, and Speech (32).

    [5] Literally: “spoken words fly; written ones remain”

    [6] Apart from action, Arendt distinguishes two other fundamental human activities that together with action account for the vita activa. These two other activities are labour and work. Labour is the activity that men and women engage in to stay alive, as organic beings: “the human condition of labour is life itself”. Labour is totally pervaded by necessity and processes. Work is the type of activity men and women engage with to produce objects and inhabit the world: “the human condition of work is worldliness”. Work is pervaded by a means-to-end logic or an instrumental rationale.

    [7] Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958; reissued, University of Chicago Press, 1998 (159).

    [8] Arendt, The Human Condition (160).

    [9] Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Revised edition, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003, (211).

    [10] See notably the work of Lynn Stout and the Frank Bold Foundation’s project on the purpose of corporations.

    [11] This expression has been introduced in the Onlife Initiative by Charles Ess, but in a different perspective. The Ess’ relational self is grounded in pre-Modern and Eastern/oriental societies. He writes: “In “Western” societies, the affordances of what McLuhan and others call “electric media,” including contemporary ICTs, appear to foster a shift from the Modern Western emphases on the self as primarily rational, individual, and thereby an ethically autonomous moral agent towards greater (and classically “Eastern” and pre-Modern) emphases on the self as primarily emotive, and relational—i.e., as constituted exclusively in terms of one’s multiple relationships, beginning with the family and extending through the larger society and (super)natural orders”. Ess, in Floridi, ed.,  The Onlife Manifesto (98).

    [12] Williams, Truth, Autonomy, and Speech.

    [13] Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn, Between Past and Future, Revised edition, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006 (55).

    [14] See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

    [15] I thank Shauna Dillavou for suggesting these alternate meanings for “WWW.”

    [16] Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, New York: Harvest, 1966.