Evgeny Morozov - Digital socialism: Reimagining social democracy for the 21st century

The great social democratic achievements of the twentieth century were in institutional innovation. By engaging with the risks posed to democracy by Big Tech, social democracy can both revive this tradition and reimagine its role. But that means leaving the comfort zone of regulation and campaigning for radically different technological infrastructures.
First, the bad news. When it comes to Big Tech, we have lost the plot. By we, I refer to those of us who, in one way or another, feel a relationship with social democracy or socialism. And by the plot, I don’t mean just our understanding of the dynamics of the digital economy and digital capitalism, but also of capitalism as such and the role that social democracy and socialism should be playing in either countering or counterbalancing it.
These days, it is all too easy for social democrats and socialists to get a false sense of priorities, and no more so than when it comes to Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Although it is true that social democrats and socialists have traditionally worried about questions of power, rule of law and legality, these things have never been at the top of the social democratic or socialist agenda. The values that have actually driven the social democratic and socialist project have always been egalitarianism, social justice and, I would argue, institutional innovation.
Institutional innovation is not fully understood even by those inside the social democratic and socialist project. But it was precisely by inventing new institutions and new practices that social democracy managed to achieve so much. They include the welfare state and workers’ co-determination, as well as institutions that exist somewhere between capitalism and the public sector.

Take the library system. It’s an institution that works on an ethos and rationale different from those of the market. We do not try to encourage competition between fifty different libraries in order to produce the best results. We recognize that libraries are a public good that require an infrastructure and adequate funding. And we use that public good in order to promote a set of values, some of which have to do with solidarity, cooperation and egalitarianism.... read more:
https://www.eurozine.com/digital-socialism/


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