EASST/4S 2020 Conference: Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and Agency of STS in Emerging Worlds

20 August 2020

Our "Ethics in IT" research group is taking part in the virtual EASST/4S 2020 conference. On Thursday, 20 August, 12:00-13:30, Gernot Rieder and Catharina Rudschies will give their talk "Notes on the Political Economy of Welfare AI". On Friday, 21 August, 3:00-4:40, Laura Fichtner will hold a presentation on "Platform Regulation and Liberal Democracy".

Title: Notes on the Political Economy of Welfare AI
Authors: Gernot Rieder and Catharina Rudschies
 
In late 2019, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, published a much-discussed report on the worldwide emergence of digital welfare states where "digital data and technologies are used to automate, predict, identify, surveil, detect, target and punish" (UN OHCHR, 2019). Outlining a number of related societal risks – from privacy violations to the reinforcement or exacerbation of existing inequalities – the report warns of the dangers of "stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia", a human-rights free zone that is "especially problematic when the private sector is taking a leading role in designing, constructing, and even operating significant parts of the digital welfare state" (ibid.). Against this background, and given that the political push for "automating society" (AlgorithmWatch, 2019) is clearly gaining momentum, this paper takes a closer look at the political economy of welfare AI, with particular attention to the expanding role of the private sector in either supporting or delivering public services. More specifically, we wish to shed some light on the business behind welfare tech, the types of corporations involved, and the nature of the emerging public-private partnerships in some of the most sensitive areas of government operation. Drawing on examples from EU member states, the paper thus seeks to contribute to current discussions around the datafication and industrialization of the public sector (see, e.g., Dencik et al., 2019) and the changing power relations these processes initiate, raising questions of ownership, control, accountability, and democratic legitimacy.
 

Title: Platform Regulation and Liberal Democracy
Author: Laura Fichtner
 
The presentation builds on my analysis of the media discourse that surrounded the introduction of the Network Enforcement Act, short NetzDG, in Germany. This law regulates how social media platforms perform content moderation and which content they take down. I explore how the political dispute over NetzDG can be read as a dispute over the future of online discourse and liberal democracy on the internet. I trace how, within this dispute, readings of what the internet is and does are co-produced with citizen subjectivities, state agencies, foreign relations and normative notions of freedom of speech and democracy. Thus, a discussion over the rules and practices for speech on social media platforms ends up as a discussion over how to imagine – and implement – platform democracy and as an exercise of state-making. Social media platforms function as the site for collective imaginaries of democracy; more than a material basis, they represent shared visions of an ideal marketplace of ideas that brings citizens together for engaging with each other and bringing about democracy. But they also function as a pivotal point for disagreement over what constitutes the very “liberal democratic order” accounts refer to which are tied up with ideas about how democracy ought to work online and particularly about state involvement, citizen-state relationships and the role of the state within a global internet. Such disagreements are not articulated explicitly but manifest themselves as disagreements over the “natural state” of social media platforms – whether they gravitate towards lawlessness and unruliness or towards democracy.

Conference website: https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/