From 60s counterculture to the end of privacy in the noughties: what direction will digitisation take in the age of sustainability?

In this blog post, we introduce our new paper ‘Deep transitions and the evolution of the digital meta-regime’ (by Phil Johnstone, Laur Kanger and Johan Schot) and trace the story of the digital age before thinking about the future of digitalisation. We first go back to the 1950s where it all began and then move forward to consider how digitisation could become a positive element of a true sustainable transition.

This paper conducts a historical analysis using the Deep Transitions Framework (DT) of how our digital meta-regime came to dominate society-wide developments in multiple sociotechnical systems of communications, mobility, food, entertainment and more, identifying the underlying rules or institutions across science, business, policy, markets and cultural dimensions of digitalisation.

The digital meta-regime: the configuration of rules thatspans multiple socio-technical systems and aligns them in the same direction over long historical periods.

Rules: a constraint that structures regulations, behaviours, practices in society. E.g. ‘maximise revenues by trading user data on behavioural prediction and control markets’ (see the paper for a full list of digitalisation rules).  

We offer a novel vantage point on the prospects of digitalisation to contribute towards sustainability goals.

1.       We find that the dominant direction of the digital meta-regime has little to do with sustainability and, in fact, exacerbates certain sustainability challenges.

2.      We produce a novel historical analysis of how this meta-regime – centred around data monitoring, surveillance and extraction – came to be.

Combined, this allows us to look forward and ask how we can stimulate radical transformation and re-direct digitalisation towards sustainability.

Digitisation exacerbates many substantiality challenges

Contrary to the optimism of twin transitions discourse, our current digital meta-regime is not sustainable. The signs of this now manifest in a range of concerning environmental outcomes, from the increasing levels of energy required to power data centres, the leading role digital technologies play in creating large volumes of waste, and the increased mining required for an expanding range of critical and rare earth minerals.  Moreover, a range of social and economic unsustainable developments have been accelerated, such as inequality, democratic polarisation, insecure work, negative health effects, heightened consumption, an unstable and oversized finance system, and new unsustainable weapons systems (to name a few). After the optimism surrounding new user-centred media enabled by digitalisation in the 2000s, these features are now a source of growing societal unrest. Yet, it did not have to be this way.

How did we get here? From counterculture to the end of privacy

We trace how the wild ideas in the 1950s of networking computers and digitalising all communications evolved to be the advertising-saturated, consumption-accelerating and data-thirsty phenomenon that we know today.

In the early 70s, computing innovation moved out of the secretive world of Cold War research establishments to a wider public where decentralised and networked computing were shaped by theLSD-tinged, liberatory waves of the counterculture. Here, computers were viewed as machines of liberation and transformation. Yet as time went on, others sought propriety models and commercialising digital data. In the waves of euphoria of the 90s, after the fall of the Berlin wall and the unleashing of the internet, investment poured into dot com companies in a frenzy to commercialise internet activity. But there was one problem: the countercultural roots prevailed and many early users loathed advertising and corporate control. How could the internet be commercialised when the users believed information should be free?

In the ‘dot com’ crisis of 2000 and its aftermath, which we identify as the turning point, a solution was discovered by Google in the form of using the ‘digital exhaust’ of internet users for targeted advertising. Another business model that survived was the matchmaking ‘platform’ model originally developed at Ebay and turbo-charged by Amazon. Rather than using online activity to sell physical products, the name of the game was now about creating profit directly from online interactions themselves. Under these imperatives, a trend of amassing ever-increasing amounts of data through surveillance and extraction accelerated. Yet, this business model resolved the conflict between countercultures of free use and desires for commercialisation because in order to get as much user data as possible, new platforms were offered for free. This was further stabilised by policy decisions focused on global property rights and self-regulation, leading to optimism of new forms of democratic engagement, entertainment and the power of users to shape media. Yet the price that was paid, as CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg admitted in 2010, was the end of privacy as a societal norm and the range of problems that have emerged surrounding this.

Hopes of a sustainability transformation

These rules related to data extraction and surveillance are the new paradigm that constitute part of a new selection environment shaping multiple sociotechnical systems yet have little to do with sustainability despite shared roots in the counterculture. When considering the current twin transition interventions – do current rules fundamentally challenge or simply make the digital meta-regime more efficient? If we are to meet ambitious Sustainable Development and climate goals, optimisation will not be enough, we need a more fundamental change.

We are not without hope. There is an incredible potential of digital technologies to contribute to sustainability if shaped in a new direction. Historical analysis reminds us of the early dreams of networked and decentralised computing unleashing new ways of living that can bring us closer together and in balance with the environment. Dreams worth remembering in today’s world of polarisation, echo chambers, and advertising overload. Moreover, digital technologies seem especially important for unlocking multi-system cascades to shape an ecology of renewables based on flexible flows of distributed energy replacing old world fixed finite stocks of fossil fuels. Prospects for AI include many developments that are geared towards helping marginalised communities and addressing societal challenges.

Here, the priority is not about racing to deploy AI as fast as possible across every societal activity but starting from the question of how AI can help us realise sustainable ways of being. We may find – if such reflection is enabled – that there are activities that we actually do not want AI to do for us. Whereas in other areas it may be a highly useful tool (new health discoveries are a case in point). These should be prioritised by investors and others. In challenging the dominant rules, these practices could contribute to the unleashing of a sustainable future. The imprints of the countercultural dreams that echo through the long history of digitalisation may yet be realised.

Read the paper here.

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By Phil Johnstone

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