We
live in a representative democratic society that evolved from the rise
of constitutional republics like France and America in the late 18th
Century. This resulted in the emergence of modern constitutions
governing the legal behaviour of political leaders, supported by
accounting frameworks for citizenship. Governments now manage taxation,
legal process and border controls by issuing identity documentation, but
as we spend more time online our real world identity overlaps our
emerging digital identity and vice versa leading to governments becoming
“digital by default” as citizen identity documentation is transformed
into data. This process is useful for navigating the digital realm but
it lacks democratic accountability, creating a shift in representation
from government to private enterprise where information is easily shared
without consent, enabling misrepresentation and fraud.
In
response to these challenges the UK government attempted the
digitisation of state processes with a National Identity Register,
holding fifty categories of information on every British citizen, but
this was scrapped in 2010 over human rights and security concerns. More
recently at the 2011 e-G8 summit, President Sarkozy of France and Eric
Schmidt of Google argued ‘who could best build the networked society’:
big government or the corporations? Ben Hammersley, in his British
Council lecture then argued ‘that we are moving to networked societies,
but we do not yet know how to build them’. Meanwhile global online
communities continue to evolve regardless, with over 900 million users
signed up to Facebook actively transacting personal data from identity
accounts designed to optimise corporate advertising revenues.
Citizens,
who nominally hand over their collective power to the state at election
time, now need more control of how their identity is represented as
both governments and corporations make decisions on our behalf; data
protection law needs to be extended to the intellectual property rights
of the digital self. Governments could begin translating passports,
driving licenses and birth certificates into online citizen accounts
that embrace human rights, by granting appropriate charters for
citizens’ to represent themselves digitally. ‘True Identity’ accounts, a
form of digital passport, could then provide a unique master key for
authenticating digital transactions with utilities, banks and social
networks, without handing over data to second or third party providers.
Online
citizen accounts, chartered by government for identity creates
opportunities for an alternative peer2peer economy network to emerge for
transacting money, including layers of banking, savings and loans. A
financial network without the expensive costs imposed by service
providers, only using money issued by government, guaranteed by users
through identity accounts. This would enable all currency to be invested
back into the social environmental economy to create a robust utility
focused solely on the needs of the community that it served. From these
citizen-centric themes trust could evolve to transform
hierarchical representative democracy into a participatory network
society.
Written and Published by Oliver Ashton and Fred Garnett
@oliverashton – @fredgarnett