The umbrella concept was social justice, as that term has come to be understood. Like human rights in its own day, the term is elastic and dependent on application in space, time, and place. Yet it is the essential ideological frame in this new era of popular management because it can be molded to suit the space and objectives for which it is to be deployed--strategically.
What are the strategies of social justice in this G20 with respect to the digital space. One key element stressed development: "Improve access to digital services and digital public infrastructure, and leverage digital transformation opportunities to boost sustainable and inclusive growth" (
G20 Statement §5i). This certainly aligns with the driving priority of Marxist Leninist and post colonial developing states within the older architecture of human rights and sustainability.
Another key element was the care and feeding of labor markets and labor collectives for the benefit of those collectives in a position to create and manage value. Positive noises were made in the direction of managing collective labor forces for effective insertion in digital work spaces ("Welcome the comprehensive toolkit with adaptable frameworks for designing and introducing digital upskilling and reskilling programmes" G20 Statement §20iv).
Related to the role of digital technologies in the context of labor is its role in promoting small capital enterprises, and the managed access for private capital based economic collectives.
We welcome the 2023 Update to Leaders on Progress towards the G20 Remittance Target and endorse the Regulatory Toolkit for Enhanced Digital Financial Inclusion of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). We endorse the voluntary and non-binding G20 Policy Recommendations for Advancing Financial Inclusion and Productivity Gains through Digital Public Infrastructure. We take note of the significant role of digital public infrastructure in helping to advance financial inclusion in support of inclusive growth and sustainable development. . . We endorse the G20 2023 Financial ¡Inclusion Action Plan (FIAP), which provides an action oriented and forward-looking roadmap for rapidly accelerating the financial inclusion of individuals and MSMEs, particularly vulnerable and underserved groups in the G20 countries and beyond. (G20 Statement §21).
The social justice foundations of these policies is clear, and clearly trumpeted through this leadership signalling text. Less apparent is the way in which this also aligns with the core policies of Marxist Leninist and post-colonial developing states. In this context, the focus on MSME aligns with a view that markets and private orderings of economic activity must be understood as a complement to and a tool of public management of economic production, specifically, and management, generally. It aligns with the current ideological position, fashionable even in the core regions of the capitalist metropolis, that capitalism and more generally markets, are something that is in need of a redo--fundamental. And that technology can be a nice tool to achieve it. More fundamentally it does underscore a shift from markets primacy in global economics to state capitalist models with a smaller and managed space left fr the "non-state economy."
Digital technology is also apparently understood as some sort of virtual mule that can be used to pull the cart of sustainable development. (
G20 Statement §24i). To that end G20 states "Recognise the role of digital transformation, AI, data advances, and the need to address digital divides. We endorse the G20 Principles on Harnessing Data for Development (D4D) and welcome the decision to launch Data for Development Capacity Building Initiative, and other existing initiatives." (Ibid.). The idea of the digital as a mule, or an ox, or centuries earlier, a slave, is appealing in the way that exploitation always is when it iss undertaken in the spirit of free riding. In this case, of course, the free riding is the underlying conviction that the digital is neither an object of social justice. And, indeed, that is a very difficult presumption to overcome, even as non-carbon intelligence acquires a life of its own.
That virtual mule, of course, ought to be available to all. The G20' reiterated its "commitment to harness digital technologies to overcome the digital divides for all learners" (
G20 Statement §30ii). Included as well were (1) a commitment to extend "support to educational institutions and teachers to enable them to keep pace with emerging trends and technological advances including AI;" (2) an emphasis on "expanding access to high-quality Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET);" and (3) a reaffirmation of the "commitment to promote open, equitable and secure scientific collaboration and encourage mobility of students, scholars, researchers, and scientists across research and higher education institutions." (Ibid., ¶30 iii - v). These deepen and operationalize the conception of digital technologies to enhance labor effectiveness, and the contribution of the non-state sector in well organized and targeted private markets. It is also a means of advancing social justice goals by shifting its management and control from social forces and culture, to the public apparatus of the state and its technocracies. This is tied as well to the gender equality objectives of the G20, especially in the context of data technologies ((
G20 Statement §65).
All of these normative presumptions are then underscored in Section E of the G20 Statement; "Technological Transformation and Digital Public Infrastructure" (
G20 Statement ¶¶ 55-61). The text of this section is worth considering in detail and follows below. The fundamental premise was addressed in the section on Artificial Intelligence (A.I:):
It is our endeavour to leverage AI for the public good by solving challenges in a responsible, inclusive and human-centric manner, while protecting people’s rights and safety. To ensure responsible AI development, deployment and use, the protection of human rights, transparency and explainability, fairness, accountability, regulation, safety, appropriate human oversight, ethics, biases, privacy, and data protection must be addressed. (G20 Statement §61).
Human-centric is the key. But it is a brittle key
and unlikely to be either effective or enduring (deeper dive
here). It is not clear whether human-cerntricity is baselined at the level of collective humanity or at the operative level of
autonomous individuals with agency. Indeed, the great irony here is that while the G20 and its widely varied state apparatus is keen to bend data tech to human desire, it appears that this bending actually produces a parallel of efficient use. Here data tech is at its most useful when it can be deployed to make its human subjects more efficient. The exploiter, in this case, of both human and digital intelligence, remains the state. Perhaps individuals do like being managed; and the imperceptible and real time management through data tech makes it possible to manage populations without the need for performative politics (legislation,. debates, etc.). That may perfectly align with the ideological foundations for the political-economic system of a state, but its debasement into a form of generic feel good language meant to appeal to the propaganda departments of these political apparatus advancing rhetoric of social justice provides much in the way of discursive power and perhaps less ion the way of substance. Here, indeed, the value of the digital is in the enhancement of the ability of the state (and its dependent collectives, public or private) to increase the value of human exploitation. But all in a good cause (e.g.,
here).
Either way, however, to those ends it is necessary to convince the masses. And that is the function of G20 2023 ¶¶ 55-61. All of this will fall on deaf ears, of course--human privileging virtue signalling in the shadow of (human) social justice serves as the orthodox sloganeering and a screen behind which those who have now been vested with social justice (collective) power can manage things in ways that are assessed by their value as performance. And yet, the self absorption of the technocracies aligned with political vanguards and their state apparatus (in either Marxist-Leninist, post-colonial, or liberal democratic architectures), suggests a plural subjectivity in the realm of data tech. First the group of people who resist or ignore the architectures of state (or market vanguard) control will continue to develop and deploy data tech as they like. Calling the names will not change the fact that data tech will continue to evolve as it wills in relation to a class of coders and users intent on having their way. That is less difficult, for example, than mounting analog versions of rebellion. Second, data tech has a life of its own; one that is developing autonomously from the human along its interface with coders and users. Generative tech and descriptive/predictive models are not vacuum cleaners that are the amoeba of non-carbon life forms. It works and processes even when its user interface with carbon based life is not engaging with it. The nature of its inductive iterative forms of sentience can be coded, but once released into its environment (either internal within silicon based machinery) or external (operating in the circulatory system of interactive data analytics. None of that matters in a human-centric governance framework--what matters is the appearance of control. The rest can be fudged. And the irony--in order to rationalize the complicated system of regulatory pathways identified and assess meeting objectives--these grand normative architectures
will be dependent on all of the tools that they purport to control. The human-centric regulation of data tech will be impossible without the power of data tech to make it so. One can only wonder about the realities of lines of control.
Still it is worth considering the architecture of this policy-regulatory framework as a refinement of what is emerging as the public orthodox view aligning tech and social justice. It s built on a number of key focus areas: (1) public infrastructure; (2) digital economy; (3) digital finance; (4) digital currency; (5) digital ecosystems; and (6) artificial intelligence stripped of autonomy.
The first speaks to concepts like "smart cities" and seamless communications aiding the functioning of the state. And in a sense, to the extent that the state oversees the development of such infrastructures it retains the position of hub along which well monitored spokes may be allowed to be built, assessed, and deployed. The extent to which non-state based "smartness" may be developed without permission will likely shrink. Transparency, however is not aligned with this project. The second speaks to the transposition of infrastructure framing into the roadways and byways of commerce. The same rules will apply. And in the end it is the hub that acquires a greater regulatory control--to the extent it is actually able to control the use, content, and deployment of commerce aiding data tech. That is a tall order. But the "Global Digital Public Infrastructure Repository (GDPIR), a virtual repository of DPI, voluntarily shared by G20 members and beyond" (¶56ii) and the "G20 High-level Principles to Support Businesses in Building Safety, Security, Resilience, and Trust in the Digital Economy" (¶57i)) suggests the direction in both objectives. .And then there is control of the education for the kidddies--an essential element in the smooth transition to data tech based seamless management under the watchful eye of non-carbon intelligence ostensibly controlled and operated by carbon life forms. Digital finance measures also speak to efficiency and control. These are old friends of social relations, made better now that they can be deployed through technologies. But the space for resistance is equally large, and the temptation to use the objectives of social justice (reduce digital divides) to ensure control by managing those divides strategically is quite irresistible. Digital ecosystems is a polite way developing mechanisms that define the borderlands and patrol the internal behaviors of those engaged in the business of interfacing with tech, and of devising new forms of such interfacing ("fostering safe and resilient digital ecosystems, and ensuring that every citizen on our planet is financially included" (¶60)). There is irony here in three respects: (1) data tech control of the management of human culture; (2) data tech objectives of a totalizing inclusion (one can't manage who one can't embed); (3) the deployment of ecologies of tech against ecologies of nature (viruses, etc.). The last suggests the Nicene creed of data tech regulation. But like the
Nicene creed (an orthodox confession of faith) it papers over the quite real divide between this orthodoxy and those now necessarily recast as heresy. These sorts of divides do not portend well for stability, order or prosperity.
