This spring has been a busy one. After having real difficulties tracking down courses to fill my elective credits, this spring I took courses at 3 different European universities on Digital Citizenship, Digital Sovereignty and Digital Resilience. This was extremely demanding but a very successful learning period, particularly for how it links into my ‘hobby’ of tending to Icelandic national resilience and crisis communication.
This fall I’m teaching a 3 day seminar on resilience at the Open University with an old peer of mine Páll Ásgeir Davíðsson, it’s called Öryggi og úrræði í breyttum heimi (Resilience and resources in a changed world) where we discuss changing legal and practical demands and help prep for the worst.
Now I’m back in Iceland and finally have time to start applying Warren’s model, to test my methodology and write out Democratic Theory. I’m tracing norms onto Warren’s framework and believe I have identified (as Warren himself predicted) an addition to the framework in the form of an 8th practice of adjudication.
Warren identifies seven generic political practices that serve as ways to solve the three democratic functions of inclusion, will-formation and execution; recognizing, resisting, deliberating, representing, voting, joining, and exiting. As it pertains to modern tech governance, many rights cannot be governed or enforced without a judiciary mechanism for appeal, reasoned justifications and evidence for the public record.
This gives a structured way to examine how well different practices are functioning in a democracy, bringing forth issues of enforcement and corporate governance. From what I’ve examined so far there are glaring issues all over the place, such as platforms self-legislating Terms of Service and enforcing it as contract through forced privatized arbitration forums.
Reviewing the law and the reports, it looks like academia and research agencies are being tasked with enforcing transparency without adequate tools to do the job. I dug into the reports generated through the Digital Services Act, legislating social media as Very Large Online Platforms.
Very iiiiinteresting how limited the Ernst & Young audit was and how careful they were in their wording. And even with careful wording they still didn’t sign off on the law being properly implemented or enforced. I only know the Icelandic situation well and that’s a resounding “we’re not ready”.
An educated opinion:
To make a long story short, using Warren’s framework to look at how different democratic functions and rights are governed in cyberspace, it is glaringly obvious that democratic principles are underserved and underrepresented within post-neoliberal tech-communication operations.
Above is a screenshot from a mock-up app I made of Warren’s framework, designed and vibecoded, to help me map out norms and how well they’re served and enforced in relation to social media governance.
I presume it is also a great way to confirm or supplement EU’s FRIAS, Fundamental Rights Impact Asessments for legislation, per the EU AI Act. One might say Warren’s framework is a different method to do the same thing – to evaluate the impact of technology. While the FRIAS is thorough, Warren’s framework has dimensions that FRIAS doesn’t consider and facilitates big-picture analysis rather than focusing on an exact practice.
The more I play around theoretically and apply the framework to an analysis of what’s wrong with cyber-governance, the more apparent it is that we’ve been subjected to a privatized takeover of public functions that still largely operate outside of legal enforcability.
I’m not sure most countries have the experts or institutional capacity to govern social media, to understand the reports, conduct independent research and ensure that meaningful information is being disclosed.
EU tech law needs to be adopted into the EEA agreement before it is actionable locally, with Iceland on the far end of the implementation curve. Current law doesn’t cover social media governance or accountability against societal harms, e.g. when Instagram or FB fail to remove false information or hate speech. But within a couple of years we’ll have these tools legally, so then the next step becomes enforcement – what are we doing to ensure that we have those capabilities, institutions, research and whatnot?
IMO it should be a top priority to build capacity NOW to take on these tasks when the legislation is implemented. From what I gather it would make sense for Iceland to follow the Norwegian approach and place cyber-issues at a unified ministry instead of being spread across 6 different Icelandic ministries. Institutionally everyone seems to be experimenting, considering that governing the DSA belongs to a different ministry in every single Nordic country. We can fix this and coordination of communication-defenses needs to be one of them.
My order of action for Iceland right now: Pass the legislation, build an academic knowledge center, ensure the development and preservation of the Icelandic language model for future research. Top three items that underpin the next step that begins once we have the law.
I still have high hopes of making Iceland be for data into what Svalbard is for seeds. If anyone can do datacenters efficiently with minimal ecological impact it is going to be us with our hydropower and natural cooling conditions. Make it disappear into a mountainside or a mound and minimize the impact globally. Competitive advantage.
