#364 / The Digital Republic

An article by Nathan Heller, in the December 18 & 25, 2017, edition of The New Yorker, identifies Estonia as a "digital republic." 

In other words, the article is not talking about some "abstraction," but is claiming that an actual country, a nation, is now qualitatively different from the kind of political republics that exist in what most of us still consider to be the "real" world, a world that is definitely more "analog" than "digital."

Heller's article is worth reading, perhaps particularly if you teach a course in "Privacy, Technology, And Freedom," as I do. Here's a sample of what Heller has to say:

I booked a meeting with Marten Kaevats, Estonia’s national digital adviser. We arranged to meet at a café near the water, but it was closed for a private event. Kaevats looked unperturbed. “Let’s go somewhere beautiful!” he said. He led me to an enormous terraced concrete platform blotched with graffiti and weeds.

Seagulls riding the surf breeze screeched. I asked Kaevats what he saw when he looked at the U.S. Two things, he said. First, a technical mess. Data architecture was too centralized. Citizens didn’t control their own data; it was sold, instead, by brokers. Basic security was lax. “For example, I can tell you my I.D. number—I don’t fucking care,” he said. “You have a Social Security number, which is, like, a big secret.” He laughed. “This does not work!” The U.S. had backward notions of protection, he said, and the result was a bigger problem: a systemic loss of community and trust. “Snowden things and whatnot have done a lot of damage. But they have also proved that these fears are justified.

“To regain this trust takes quite a lot of time,” he went on. “There also needs to be a vision from the political side. It needs to be there always—a policy, not politics. But the politicians need to live it, because, in today’s world, everything will be public at some point.”

What Kaevats says about the United States is accurate. I know that because of the readings I have done for my course. Citizens in the United States most emphatically do not control their own data, and this makes the possibility of totalitarian political control a continuing and looming threat. This is what the documents revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 conclusively demonstrated. And the reaction of government officials in the United States has been anything but positive, if you think the politicians should be trying to "regain trust."

Even more important to me than Kaevats' criticisms, as outlined above, was the way he described why he got involved in an effort to establish a "digital republic."

Kaevats admitted that he didn’t start out as a techie for the state. He used to be a protester, advocating cycling rights. It had been dispiriting work. “I felt as if I was constantly beating my head against a big concrete wall,” he said. After eight years, he began to resent the person he’d become: angry, distrustful, and negative, with few victories to show.

“My friends and I made a conscious decision then to say ‘Yes’ and not ‘No’—to be proactive rather than destructive,” he explained. He started community organizing (“analog, not digital”) and went to school for architecture, with an eye to structural change through urban planning. “I did that for ten years,” Kaevats said. Then he found architecture, too, frustrating and slow. The more he learned of Estonia’s digital endeavors, the more excited he became. And so he did what seemed the only thing to do: he joined his old foe, the government of Estonia.

To transform our world, we must be "for" something, and must say, "Yes," not "No," if we are to create a future that will respond to our deepest aspirations. New digital technologies are the latest way that human beings are projecting human agency into the world, to control it and make it theirs. Republics are, at least as Americans understand them, "democratic" in both their origins and intentions. This is, of course, the story of our American Revolution. 

A new revolution is needed, now, and it cannot be a revolution premised on violence and destruction, if democracy and the nation are to survive. Maybe, just maybe, the "digital republic" of Estonia has some lessons we should learn.

Image Credit:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic