Harnessing private to public. Not too partisan
The answer is quite a lot, providing the symptoms are correctly recognised and treated with the right curatives in enough time, just as a good and fully qualified doctor would do.
• We have already looked at the starting point of any return to an age of reason and commonsense in place of chatbots, But the list goes on a long way beyond that. For instance, without revision of the World Health Organization the muscle needed to control the next pandemic through full and honest international cooperation will be absent.
• Without a respected and strong authority to police all moves affecting both the living and growing environmentally, consent to and faith in climate change measures will dissolve.
• Without a powerful agency - to update the refugee and migrant legislation (the 1951 UN Refugees Convention, and its protocols), the dam will burst, and violence will replace legal and illegal people movement on an unmanageable scale.
• Without agencies underpinning the Law of the Sea, the laws of Inner space and the laws of outer space, the sub-standards of the Wild West will prevail.
Populism and multipolarity (extreme assertion of opposites from multiple conflicting power sources)), are both the outcomes of the digital age and its reinforcement. Anyone who thinks we can put it all back in the bottle is living with their head well and truly buried in the sand. There can be no future in trying to meet volatile populism with mountains of paperwork and propagandist literature, because there is nothing solid and fixed to meet.
Populism grows out of myriads of mobiles, avalanches of poorly edited (in fact barely edited at all) news and coverage which their holders can now advance with the touch of button and at near zero cost. No need to make it up or imagine it. The flow is already there, served up warm and plentiful – and far from always responsible. In the hyper-digital age, anything goes. In the graphic words of a former British Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan －one of the 20th century’s－ best ‘ a lie can be half way round the whole world before the truth can get its boots on’! And that was before anyone had conceived of the power for falsification of AI, if mischievously used.
The most effective limiting forces on the power of the on-line media, and the giant platforms who operate it, are chronic over-supply of untrustworthy information, contradiction, low quality, short life, corrupt use of present power, and total unreliability -all mixed with disinformation, malformation and transience. This is the mixture which will in the end devalue itself to nothing.
In the meantime, this is also the nexus within which we all live, and which shapes all our thoughts, ideas, and analysis of what is really happening. This is where two-sided impact of technology on lives and relationships and world order reveals itself most clearly.
This, too, is where the combination of responsible nations with liberal values must again be allowed to work, where common sense must be listened to over on-line hype and where democracy can still be saved and strengthened, with the right analysis and the right responses, and widely shared capitalism of many kinds popularised and spread. And this is where our priorities should unquestionably be and where the great web of modern existence allows us to survive, and even prosper, in the global network.
Collapse in the architecture of world order is not just dangerous: it is fatal, especially for Britain which has long aspired to be open, as far as practical.
In an already transformed world we need to bring forward, with our island ingenuity, a new British resource and contribution: the combination of the absolute unfaltering rule of law and the contribution of rebuilding class institutions of world order. We must place these real priorities together again where they must stand, deliver and safeguard each one of us, on common ground in a network world.
