I asked the AI how it sees our reactions to the US election and the German traffic light crash. The AI sent me the picture above in response.
The many smiling people may have confused 5/11 and 6/11 with 11/11/2024 (the start of carnival).
It gives hope that everything will be fine if everyone looks ahead.
However, I strongly advise the Liberals and especially the FDP at the upcoming programme convention to take a look around!
It is a horror scenario that every entrepreneur has to imagine. And citizens have not been spared from it either. Germany digital is like the first floor of a high-end shopping mall that nobody visits. The offerings are of the highest quality, made in Germany, and yet all the customers are on the ground floor because everyone else is downstairs.
A handful of gatekeepers own the ground floor and decide who does business there and with how much turnover.
It is truly astonishing that such an unconstitutional situation could happen when the shopping centre is under German jurisdiction. Germany could simply change the building regulations and lead the entrances to the first floor via a ramp. Then the poor gatekeepers would have nothing to laugh about. But would that be liberal? Does Germany really need something like that?
In fact, I proposed something much better than a ramp to the FDP for their programme convention. My overall concept, on the other hand, offers numerous advantages for all citizens and numerous reasons why everyone will spend more and more time on the alternative German civil rights infrastructure. This will digitally move the first floor to the ground floor, but with even more offerings that every citizen can expand until the advantage of diversity surpasses any scalable business model. You can find details on this in my books.
The crucial question is to what extent we are prepared to move digitally on a par with the USA. Only if we have the courage to go our own way can we strengthen our digital sovereignty. German politicians are faced with the challenge of giving citizens the same power of disposal over their digital property as they are used to with their analogue property. This should actually be a matter of course.
The automobile has been transporting people and goods from A to B since 1863. Its use has not changed in more than 160 years. For less than 40 years, we have been talking about digitalisation and developing a growing fear that AI will change us in our humanity, if not eat us up.
The reason for this is the ingenious idea of some marketing people to characterise digital development as disruptive. The complete disintegration of our society, or at least its replacement by something new, was anchored in people’s minds. As a result of this marketing, there was indeed a disruptive development on the part of the gatekeepers through scalable business models. If the distribution of value creation is in the hands of a few, if the concept ensures that wealth and political influence flow unchecked to these few, then this also has disruptive effects on society.
The car has significantly improved the social situation. Digitalisation can do the same if it is no longer seen as a disruption, but as a tool for the development of society.
The traffic light government is about to be voted out of office because it is not giving citizens a comprehensible answer as to how digitalisation will improve their situation and how disruption can be turned back into sustainable prosperity.
The fact that democracies are threatened by unrest and even wars after long periods of peace is directly linked to the lack of a democratic digital society.
The digitalisation of recent years has also shifted security from the citizen to the state. It is only with great difficulty that even democratic states can be prevented from practising total surveillance for their security. In https://finders.de/liberalism-is-a-law-of-human-nature-but-is-it-defensible/, I explained why a society that trusts its citizens need not fear autocracies – and I include gatekeepers in this. However, I also admitted that I was unable to push through concepts because there was no real protection for citizens. This is precisely what digitalisation can do, because digitalisation can just as easily create a participatory environment for every citizen that offers every citizen the same opportunities for advancement and protection for society, while at the same time dissolving autocracies from within in the long term through social competition.
KEY FIGURES FOR SOCIAL STRUCTURAL RELEVANCE
As an immediate measure, I call for the introduction of indicators for social structural relevance that can be used for political control, see https://gisad.eu/social-structure-relevance/ . Relevance must be scientifically underpinned and supported by a democratic basis.
The FDP has drawn up questions and answers for the FDP programme convention. I am going to add two values to these questions and answers. These values, which are based on a gut feeling, make it clear why such a system is so important for policy-making. Later, scientifically based key figures will have to be developed from them.
The first value stands for social relevance, i.e. how important an issue is in order to successfully maintain the pre-digital society. The second value relates to the relevance of the question, i.e. whether the question is only being asked against the background of an already misguided digital development and whether this misguided development may even be counterproductively reinforced.
Before Christian Lindner invited me to join the FDP in 2017, politics for me was primarily something you had to endure in order to find your way.
I have since realised that I have always held liberal positions. In the following, I will prove that liberalism is a law of human nature. Liberalism always starts from the individual. It finds its justification in the centuries-long success of democracies. Once a democratic system was established, it was very difficult to replace it with another by peaceful means – at least in pre-digital times. The key to the success of a democracy is the active participation of almost all citizens in shaping society. This is precisely what digitalisation would be ideally suited to. But the potential remains untapped.
A key stability factor for democracies is a sustainably prosperous economy. Autocratic economic systems such as China are increasingly threatening our economy as they successfully use digitalisation to strengthen their social system.
Democracies, on the other hand, are dependent on gatekeepers who also work with autocratic methods, but only to scale business models in the interests of the few. Since democracies such as Germany, unlike China, have not managed their social digitalisation, our economy is ultimately weakened by the gatekeepers in the long term. The gatekeepers have an interest in keeping us in a state of sensory overload and permanent excitement for as long as possible, see https://www.uni-bonn.de/de/universitaet/presse-kommunikation/presseservice/archiv-pressemitteilungen/2015/195-2015. I myself only have a high creative output because I check my digital news three times a day at fixed times and therefore allow myself to be distracted very little.
What evidence do I have for liberalism as a law of human nature?
In the 1980s, while studying at VHS Düsseldorf, I helped set up a programme for illiterate adults. We had great success in encouraging each adult to read individually, uncovering letters, letter sequences or words with a card and realised that everyone learns completely differently, see https://books.google.de/books/about/Theorie_und_Praxis_der_Alphabetisierung.html?id=ekevPgAACAAJ. The analytical-synthetic reading learning method is the most comparable method today. However, learning methods are still made for teachers and not for pupils. Because teachers need control. How are they supposed to award grades if there is no comparable learning framework in which everyone is doing the same thing? I am convinced that even today many people still fall through the cracks or fail to realise their potential because schools violate the natural law of liberalism. States also believe that they have to control everything and have transferred an expectation to their citizens that they are infallible. Ultimately, however, they lose control precisely because they do not utilise the digital possibilities to involve citizens in democratic processes with real power of disposition. Failure on a small scale must be accepted as part of social change!
I am delighted about the Nobel Prize in Economics for the three researchers Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson. They have scientifically proven that societies in which there are incentive systems for everyone are also the most economically successful.
In the 1990s, alongside my entrepreneurial activities, I was involved in setting up GraTeach Forschungs- und Qualifizierungskonzepte für neue Medien GmbH. At that time, there was a high level of graduate unemployment. The fact that the participants were involved in real projects from day one and were able to contribute their individual skills in teams meant that a placement rate of 100 per cent was achieved. GraTeach was driven into insolvency by a remote-controlled state of NRW. There were certainly envious parties among other competitors subsidised with Objective 2 funds. But the extensive manipulations of the state and the NRW judiciary suggest that it was more a case of me having implemented my search engine patent without any further capital requirements that could have been used to put me under pressure, which could produce the diversity with at least 1,000 specialised search engines behind a joint entry to this day. A market analysis based on a first customer at that time would still be able to generate billions of euros in sales today if there were independent decisions from the gatekeepers. The state of NRW has acted in the interests of the gatekeepers and against the liberal nature of the people.
In the 2000s, I developed the social media concept getmysense on the basis of the search engine patent, which is not about artificial excitement, but about being the best in the smallest meaningful unit (moneme). The plan was to realise it in 2,500 languages. Like-minded people from different languages could find each other by connecting the monemes without having to speak the same language. Today, such a system could be mapped using an AI. In 2014, getmysense actually managed to be online for 2 days before the server was taken down by countless cyberattacks. There was no state I could have asked for help. Today, cyber incidents have to be reported, but if the state doesn’t even care who is working for digital democracy, how is it supposed to offer protection?
In fact, there were subsequently various attempts to support getTIME.net GmbH with EU funds or, during the FDP era, even with a state guarantee. But the public sector simply didn’t understand that without special protection, any support in this risky environment would have led to my personal ruin.
I am currently disappointed by the NRW Minister of Economic Affairs and the NRW Minister of Justice, who are simply ducking away instead of accepting my offer to create the legal conditions for renewed cooperation. I have only ever seen this kind of behaviour from various NRW Minister Presidents. I found it difficult to accommodate the state to such an extent from my point of view.
Yes, it shakes the belief in the infallibility of the state of NRW if it cannot at least rule out being directly responsible for undesirable democratic developments. But it is precisely this reappraisal that citizens expect. This is the only way to regain lost trust in democracy.
In recent years, I have registered many liberal patents that take individual people into account because they are decentralised. After all, a personalised digital system could have significantly strengthened democracies and even prevented the war in Ukraine. A resolution against the war in Ukraine was passed unanimously by the FDP EU delegates and the grassroots. However, I was no longer able to take care of this because all my weak points were sounded out in order to damage me. I have defined the new offence of ‘gang-like appearance’ for this purpose.
Indications of a gang-like appearance:
After all, the Federal Constitutional Court has allowed four complaints to be decided:
-1BvR 227/23 – on: ‘the emergence of a digital society in which no power emanates from the people’, ‘leaving the transfer of the constitutional order of a digital society to the forces of the free market’.
-1 BvR 1640/24-, -1 BvR 1641/24-, -2 BvR 907/24 – on: ‘a legal system that places those who advocate the preservation of fundamental rights in the digital society in a worse position than others who do not’, ‘a state that fails to take appropriate measures to protect the Basic Law in the digital society’.
Let’s assume that there will soon be an AI whose intelligence is comparable to that of humans. Humans are defined by their genetic make-up and imprinting. Let’s assume that the ‘genetic make-up’ of an AI can be regulated by law. What is certain is that AI can only make decisions based on the data available to it. Most of the data we have today was collected via humans and not consciously generated by humans. Imagine what conclusions a human child would draw in an environment where there are no limits. The economic goals of analysing today’s data are limited to highly scalable business models that accept the lasting damage to society. If we do not create data structures that reflect liberal and democratic ways of thinking in the shortest possible time, democracies will disappear. All the social upheavals that we are experiencing today, including many wars, can be seen as the result of socially unreflected digitalisation.
Personally, I am at a crossroads. At the moment, I can only ensure my retirement security with measures or products that are detrimental to democracy. On closer inspection, this only puts me in the ranks of the digitally successful.
Important topics are:
I have captured the state of our society in a few words in an AI image instruction. AI can draw in seconds what politics no longer wants to deal with today because it seems too complex. As a prompt, I entered: „A group of different people, expecting order, running around in a mess“.
As a negative prompt, i.e. what the image should not depict, I entered: „social order, peace, creative will“.
In a Tik-Tok world of emotionalised messages, how can we create an alert society that is capable of proactively dealing with the preservation of our pre-digital achievements in the digital world?
After more than 20 years of misguided uncontrolled digitalisation, it is no longer about progress, but at least for us Germans, it is first and foremost about preserving a society that became a global model for radical renewal after the Second World War. It was the many individuals who no longer wanted war and made Germany what it was before digitalisation.
But just like in the AI picture, there are many who simply carry on as if nothing has changed, while others are weighed down by a ball and chain that prevents them from moving forward. Others simply disappear into a hole without anyone noticing, or they bury their heads in the sand.
The Left and the SPD are increasingly losing the image of the capitalist as the enemy. This is because most medium-sized companies no longer serve as the enemy in the global world, which is shaped by the digital players. Data capitalists are out of reach for the trade unions. The work of many people and the added value of a few are becoming increasingly disconnected from each other.
The Greens are finally being taken seriously with their environmental issues. But they do not offer any convincing solutions. Many people want to preserve the environment, but do not feel involved when it comes to initiatives for heat pumps and wind turbines. What is missing is a decentralised approach that focuses on the energy autonomy of the individual and supports their sense of responsibility with incentives.
The FDP is still a beacon of hope at the moment. At least someone has to uphold civil rights. But here too, there is a lack of will to actively shape a digital society in the short time remaining. Social value creation can only be achieved decentrally by many. To do this, every citizen must have a real key and the power of disposal over his digital data as his property. I have proven in an overall concept that it would be easy to take everyone into a digital society. But without being able to protect someone like me when I want to implement such concepts, the preservation of pre-digital achievements such as diversity and civic engagement in the digital world will fail. The economy will not fix it alone.
The CDU has always attracted those who want to make money. Here you get help to continue on your way without falling into a hole. But you can only distance yourself further from actively shaping a digital society if you are openly pursuing a concept that is hostile to democracy.
The new parties must first prove whether they can implement well-thought-out concepts in a difficult social environment. Visions alone no longer move anything.
If more people in the East are turning their backs on the concept of democracy than in the West, it is simply because they have not experienced many good democratic years and were overtaken by a digital society at an early stage. Socialist systems were smashed and there was not enough time for many to find their own way.
Digitally unstructured democracies are no longer determined by social necessities, but by globally scalable business models in the interests of the few.
And yet it is precisely digitalisation that makes it possible to overcome spatial boundaries. With the right participation concepts, East Germans would not have a locational disadvantage.
In the same way, we could counter demographic change as an active immigration country by having digital probationers in their home country prepare for their participation in our society. Current social frictional losses due to migration could be avoided by social integration abroad.
A large proportion of the disinformation and cyber attacks would be avoided if all citizens had the opportunity to evaluate information that has been newly added to the Trusted WEB 4.0 in a democratic process. If every digital offender could be clearly identified, the cyber spook would quickly come to an end.
But to achieve this, a will to shape the future is needed to maintain democratic social order and peace in Germany. If politics only reacts to pressure, the democracies will have disintegrated from within as a result of further digitalisation before countermeasures are even taken.
As recently as August I wrote: Without a basis for popular decision-making, democracies will perish!
The war in Ukraine would not have been possible if democratic states had transferred their pre-digital achievements to digital democracy. The war in Israel could also have been prevented!
So far, the world’s intelligence services have agreed that only total digital surveillance can guarantee the security of society. But how do they explain that Israel, one of the world’s largest arms exporters and a leader in the surveillance industry, failed to notice Hamas‘ preparations for more than two years?
This attack is the bankruptcy of a centralised surveillance IT that thinks it can control everything. On the other hand, there are many lawless spaces, such as the dark web, that largely escape surveillance.
For years I have been calling for a Trusted WEB 4.0, in which no warrantless surveillance is possible on an infrastructure provided by the state for all citizens, but extensive forensic traces can be secured in individual cases and after a court order.
Israel ranks 29th on the 2022 Democracy Index, ahead of the United States. The future of democracies is being decided right now. This is not just about the privacy of citizens, but also about the systematic establishment of social controls and incentives for all citizens to contribute objectively and constructively to society and to prevent abuse. Such an understanding of democracy would destabilise autocracies from within. For the Internet knows no geographical boundaries. As surveillance states, however, democracies can only become second-best digital autocracies.
It’s quite simple: if in the pre-digital age we didn’t believe that strangers would intervene if we were attacked, then we would need a policeman on every street corner. But while policemen cost the state a lot of money, total digital surveillance is not only almost free, but a few monopolists like Google, Facebook and X are making a lot of money worldwide with today’s advertising and excitement driven ’social‘ media systems in a virtual boxing ring. Everyone is pitted against everyone else. All objectivity falls by the wayside. Students today are no longer able to learn due to constant sensory overload. Populism is increasingly replacing factual debate in politics.
Governments are withdrawing from a meaningful democratic infrastructure for all. Yes, the press even avoids reporting on technologies that preserve democracy. I have just submitted a request to the EU Commission to introduce an obligation for the media to report on democracy-enhancing technologies! If my manuscript, which was not published by SWR, had been filmed in 2014, citizens would have been able to lobby for appropriate measures. The war in Ukraine is not being fought here with democracy-preserving digital technology! But no publisher is likely to be found for fear of the gatekeepers.
Historically speaking, the constitutional order is disintegrating in our decade because politicians are actionistically sticking plasters on more and more crises instead of proactively taking care of a functioning concept of digital democracy.
I offered the following guest article to 70 newspapers in 35 countries. The deciding factor was the Democracy Index (The Economist), in which Germany ranks 14th in 2022. Even countries with a high index score are afraid to publish concrete recommendations for preserving democracy in the digital transformation. Angry gatekeepers could affect the reach of newspapers. Even the public broadcasters in Germany fear for their reach and do not publish.
It is an indictment when democracies can only counter the Russian aggressor in Ukraine with the same means of warlike confrontation. Prigozhin’s current coup attempt shows how easy it would be to weaken Russia from within if there were an incentive system that every Russian citizen could understand as an alternative to autocracy. A defensible digital democracy would scare Putin and he would not have started the war. Because a digital social system does not stop at geographical borders!
If you look at the growth figures, there is no denying China’s economic success. A major factor is the successful digital transformation of the autocratic social system through the social credit system. As a former KGB officer, Putin uses this knowledge to manipulate his people, but also to destabilise democratic states.
In my life I have had the good fortune to be an entrepreneur, a humanities scholar, a technology developer with my own patent applications and, increasingly in recent years, a policy designer. Since 1999, the overall concept of Trusted WEB 4.0 has been developed and is now recognised by the EU Commission. My goal is to replace the autocracies of this world with a democratic digital concept in the medium term.
Today, citizens have to collect their data keys from platform operators and trust them not to search their digital homes and steal anything. Alternatively, only the citizen digitally owns his keys and thus the real power of disposal over his data.
Through globally standardised categories, the citizen is given the opportunity to specialise in a (new) field without hurdles and to be professionally successful. Through integrated translation with AI, he can find like-minded people in all languages without having to learn the language. This makes them available to a global, democratic labour market.
By integrating each individual into the digital society concept, the state gains a high level of resilience against social disruption and increases overall social productivity. In this way, government expenditure can be significantly reduced in the long term and government revenues increased.
To this end, every citizen must be provided with a one-off technical infrastructure for digital services of general interest. In addition, it makes sense to create an incentive for everyone to actively participate in improving data quality through a conditional digital citizen’s income.
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By removing trade barriers and developing democratic digital standards, a global association of states can emerge in the form of a Democratic Digital Union. By making citizens unrecognisable as targets for attackers and enabling crime by quickly identifying a perpetrator, pre-digital security will be significantly surpassed and billions in cyber damage avoided.
A global democratic ecosystem approach encourages healthy competition. Products can be quickly scaled globally.
Unfortunately, the prognosis is not for a quick end to the war. A proxy war between autocracies and democracies is raging in Ukraine. In the long run, Ukraine will only win if it can point to a better democratic digital approach.
The most beautiful view has been promised to us for years by the digital transformation. Working in a home office would be unthinkable without digitalisation. However, the open door and the missing roof of our digital dwelling threaten to outweigh the advantages.
According to Article 13 (1) of the German Basic Law, the home is inviolable. It is precisely regulated that a search may only take place in individual cases and after a court order. We keep our data in our digital home. But in very few cases do we have a key to our own home. We have to get a password from a third party so that we can enter our home, which is in someone else’s possession. Where we might think we have a door, it is not there for others, when in 2022 more than 5.4 million records stolen from Twitter were for sale and a record of more than 530 million Facebook users could be found on the internet. The helplessness of the legislation is shown by the fact that, for example, adolescents who pubescently try out and exchange nude photos via social media now have to expect criminal charges for child pornography. Even if chat programmes want to guarantee encrypted communication, the user is never safe from the state, manufacturer or a hacker ignoring the secure door and simply opening the roof to secretly look in from above.
It is astonishing that citizens from all social classes do not see this digital legal ruin as a bad thing.
After all, in the pre-digital world, self-designed privacy is considered a measure of prosperity. It starts in the room for subletting, the flat that one then wants to own oneself because one cannot afford a house of one’s own. But homeowners also differ, with terraced houses, detached houses and even villas with a park.
So far, users lack the digital understanding that their social position will be differentiated in the future by how well they guard their privacy and how well they can individually benefit from freely available data.
So are Google, Facebook and Co. secretly communists who want to make everyone the same?
Well, with their products they are probably aiming at certain behavioural patterns that can be found in all social strata and are happy that everyone freely lets them evaluate the valuable data.
Even if it is only a few trendsetters who push this development, a silent majority must suffer from it and is even forced to go along with it.
Today’s emails are not encrypted and can be intercepted at any time. Nevertheless, they have replaced letters even in confidential communication with authorities.
The state must finally ensure that the pre-digital achievements in the digital society are preserved for those who are not used to fighting back. To this end, I call for the introduction of WAN anonymity. Similar to a car registration number, the data owner must be identified in the event of misuse. Otherwise, anonymity can only be lifted in individual cases to be regulated by the legislator. It is also possible to communicate, shop and pay anonymously via WAN. For this to work, the state must provide every smartphone owner with a PDS (Personal Digital System) USB stick. The citizen pays for web space in the cloud in addition to his internet flat rate. Each record is encrypted and decrypted via the PDS on the smartphone. Only the citizen has access to the keys. He can enjoy his data with the door locked and the roof intact, without having to reckon with unauthorised access.
You can find statements on my more than 100 EU initiatives.
It costs the state a lot of money to be able to guarantee a roof over everyone’s head in the pre-digital world. If the state wants to transfer this security to a functioning digital society, it can only do so with a digital, WAN-anonymous communication infrastructure that is free of charge for everyone. For this, the state spends a fraction of today’s costs arising from cyber attacks.
States are increasingly competing for skilled workers. Most people will prefer a digitally secure society to a nice view without a roof and door. Digital security for everyone determines success or decline!
Families stick together. A “We feeling” unites us. If things go particularly well, this will result in family businesses that expand over many generations. Families sometimes argue, but ultimately they support each other when it comes to threats from the outside. We transfer the feeling in the small to the society on the big. Here, too, we act, shaped by our ancestors and with the desire to leave something to our descendants.
It was probably also the family ties of descent, which after the Second World War led to the fact that the mostly European-rooted American did not want to suppress their relatives, but in a Marshall plan made a decisive contribution to post-war construction.
In recent years, the children of Europe have increasingly embarked on a disruptive path. They have not only destroyed companies in the scope of digitalisation, but have increasingly divided their families, divided them into political camps to the point that they could no longer talk to each other. This divide Biden will not be able to lift without the help of Europe.
It is not least thanks to the great success of the Marshall Plan that we Europeans do not question the American path but continue to seek orientation in the USA until today. This became very vivid in the “Deutsches Wirtschaftsforum digital” on three days in the first week of November. Outstanding contributions analysed the actual differences between the US and Europe: “Half of Americans want to carry weapons and feel health insurance is a restriction of freedom. The individual is more important than the family. The high inheritance tax is not geared to the preservation of family businesses.”
The theme of the event was: “Democracy and the digital economy – the European path.” I found it incomprehensible why there were invited a majority of non-European speakers to the topic of AI. For example, the Radboud University Nijmegen has been teaching AI for 30 years. All Global Player contributions were out of place. Regardless of whether it was a Chinese, American or European international technology company, the answers were similar: “You make the rules and we build them in”. Such a result is then a little authoritarian Chinese, disruptively American and contains only the absolute necessary European guidelines. The Economic Forum has correctly presented the problems, but has not been able to show the prospect of its own European path.
To make rules for all those involved in the digital economy is to make the third step before the first step. In the beginning it is necessary to define how pre-digital democratic achievements can be transferred to a digital society for an own European infrastructure in solid craftsmanship and not destructively. For this I wrote a draft for a Marshall Plan and focused on three goals:
In a second step, these goals must be adapted to the current challenges of the Western world. The Marshall Plan has to answer three questions:
At present, the security debate is mainly about the expansion of classic weapon systems. For someone like me who has been fighting unfair measures by the data-users for 20 years, it is very unlikely that we will go to a conventional war again. Who would do that and what advantage would it have? It is much easier and, above all, undetectable to attack people, groups or even industries by a virus. We can stand up for Europe’s security by introducing an infrastructure in which every citizen can protect himself and his or her data. I have proposed such an infrastructure in the form of an EU-D-S (European digital system) of the European Commission. Since primarily defined open standards and some technical procedures are introduced, the EU-D-S would be transferable to the US. This own contribution to security would not cost Europe a cent if we were to bring back the digital value ceation, in particular from American companies. I have given detailed statements on the further synergy effects at http: //gisad.eu/statements/.
Europe has just agreed on a procedure for respecting the rule of law. It can speak with one voice. Now Europe must respond quickly to the challenge of the Corona crisis. Even if a quick vaccination succeeds, we will not be able to return to our old habits before Christmas 2021. Many new habits and changes will remain. The next year will suffice to divide Europe too, unless there is a new perspective for all Europeans quickly. The social fabric is changing. While so far a relatively steadily growing prosperity offered the social cement, Corona reshuffled the cards. On the one hand, there are winners who can sit out the crisis in the home office and others who are now forced daily to expose themselves to the risk of contagion. There are entire industries receiving artificial respiration by state support, but with a longer-lasting pandemic, they have no chance of recovery. A state can compensate for losses resulting from the pandemic, but not for social distortions caused by people losing their social frame of reference through the pandemic. Short-time worker money works for a few weeks. However, where work cannot be outsourced to the home office, the daily routine disappears. There is a lack of the task by which one has defined oneself. Frustration and fear of an indefinite future are increasing.
The pandemic intensifies digital misdevelopments. Social media programs have not been developed to increase democratic, social cohesion. The content generated by the users has the only purpose to serve as a carrier for advertising. Thus, phenomena such as fake news were not taken into account in business models. They do not attach importance to self-determined users. These false digitalisation concepts support the natural laziness of people. (I found no equivalent for the German word “Bequemlichkeit”. “comfort”, “amenity”, “ease”, “accommodativeness” and “convenience” are too positively occupied, “laziness” too negative. So I will use laziness.)
What happens when only the third step of regulation has been made without making the first two steps, a 80-year-old relative has once again impressively demonstrated to me at the weekend. For several years she has been reading her e-mails on her tablet. Now it was about a PDF attachment for which the corresponding PDF reader was missing. Supervised by me via phone, multiple attempts to get an app ended on pressing advertising instead of the installation process. There are also problems with the feed reader I had installed just before. For most posts, you first have to accept cookies in popups. Advertisements are positioned in such a way that you accidentally click on them. That’s a total overload for someone who’s been reading from top to bottom all his life. The GDPR has only contributed to the user’s data protection to the extent that my relative has now completely renounced digital newspaper reading and has subscribed to a print newspaper again. Integration of old people looks different.
The digital echo chambers aim at the convenience of people. Those who were never expected to participate in decisions do not see any sense in the critical reflection of information. They are looking for like-minded people on social media that they are perceived by. For example, continued support for Republicans depends substantially on socially forgotten groups, which Trump has given the feeling of representing their interests.
An EU-D-S must not only provide security to people, but must integrate them into a permanent democratic process. This integration must be so simple and self-evident that everyone can participate in it. My relative lives alone. Together with others, she could make valuable contributions to the digital society if she could contribute according to her capability. That would help her, too. Everyone wants to be a valuable part of society. If we have an EU-D-S with such an integration possibility, we will achieve such a high proportion of society, which can be built on this basis of numerous new value creation concepts. Then the users will also pay monthly contributions for information. However, I think individual newspaper subscriptions are outdated. If you have learned to evaluate different media via a feed reader, you won’t pay to restrict yourself to only one medium. Alternatively, an EU-D-S would allow an author levy per read article, which could be paid by the user over a staggered monthly price. Anyone who has exceeded a certain monthly reading quantity, adds further contributions, advertising-free of course. Advertising should work in the pull principle. In a global category standard, each user could determine to which categories he wants to receive advertising. It is important that advertising becomes a user-controlled process. Our goal must be to take everyone into the digitalisation process. If everyone were to participate in the EU-D-S, there would also be solutions for financing artistic digital offerings. The current social media structures are directed against diversity. Sick information is suitable for a Shitstorm or for getting acquainted with only some influencers. This is due to processes that lead all users to the first result of a page and thus prefer those who made it to the first page. If all content is randomly presented and condensed digitally to a group of evaluators, all content has the same chance of being perceived. If every European city can recommend a regionally based and successful startup bottom-up to other cities, startups in Europe also have a real chance. Startups don’t need money in the first place, they need perception. It is difficult to achieve this at a time when the focus is exclusively on the US and China. How are new concepts to prevail if information structures of competition need to be used for dissemination? For a successful Europe, the basic structure for disseminating information must be general good.
The EU-D-S must provide an overall societal approach in which critical citizen participation in the evaluation of content is an integral part of a lifelong integration strategy for all EU citizens.
Even if this civil rights infrastructure is provided free of charge to every EU citizen, it will only be successful if there are incentive systems to leave the path of habit. There must be a social promise of integration for all those who participate. Society should expect a (small) digital return for any crisis support from the state.
An EU-D-S cannot be introduced overnight. Today it is about a realistic vision of the future against pandemic depression, which offers a perspective for those who are particularly affected by Corona. Tremendous forces can be released if all EU citizens move in the same direction!
At the press conference, Angela Merkel once again demonstrated why she is Chancellor in TV „Tagesthemen“ of 22.45 a.m. on 15 October 2020. A pile of paper lay in front of her and was intended to help explain the new rules drawn up jointly at the Corona Summit. Merkel began to read from the notes. However, after a few notes, she confused the papers or found no relevant information in it. In real multitasking, one did notice in the lecture not for a second that at the same time she flipped through her papers in search of something relevant to find. Rather, she spoke without a point or comma, stylistically impeccable. No one was stigmatized. Everyone was integrated and exhorted. Content that could not be agreed on at this time – probably most of them – were avoided.
Like Mrs Merkel, one must act as a majority-capable politician. But increasingly missing those who identify unambiguous truths. When someone has found truth, he should not deviate a millimetre from the demands resulting from these truths. I see myself in such a position with regard to the demands for a digital society. I’ve been searching for truths for 25 years. As a politician, I’m completely unsuitable. I can get irritate myself in a short lecture when I realise that I thought one or the other not to an end. That’s why I prefer to post in writing or in videos that I can edit at will, until there are no questions left unanswered. For that, when I have thought something to the end, I am only very seldom mistaken.
The German government can score points in the pandemic because every citizen can directly notice the personal consequences of a measure and can be traced in the hospitals of Europe, what it means when the virus escalates. Above all, every citizen can participate in a common goal.
But it is precisely the strength of a Merkel-styled Germany with influencing the EU, which finds a compromise for everything and everyone, why i fear, will lead to Europe’s dissolution in the next ten years. Germany is doing well within Europe because we Germans are particularly good at sticking to rules. But if we compare Europe with Asia, we suddenly realise that even democratic countries such as South Korea survive with much fewer deaths and much less consequences for the Corona economy. In this way, they will become stronger in competition with Europe.
In Europe, it is argued that our freedom rights are a very high asset for us and that such a hard lockdown, as usual in Asia, is therefore out of the question. We also reject a complete tracking of infected people. The truth is, it has been so good for us for many years with a diplomacy of mediating that we have been able to afford freedom rights without having to do much for it. Politics has failed to take citizens along in a change that has now taken place without and against the citizens.
Not only is the Corona pandemic growing exponentially, but also global digitalisation is rapidly changing the world accordingly. Digitalisation relentlessly exposes the weaknesses of our policies. Today, the reference to our freedoms rights is often hypocritical because we have let decades pass unused without worrying about a digital strategy that preserves freedom.
As a downside of eternal mediation, Europe’s strategic vacuum has emerged in terms of preserving pre-digital democratic achievements. Diversity must not become the opposite of a social concept. But this is exactly what happens when, for example, a Belgian initiative against terrorism no longer dynamically wants to associate IP addresses but with groups of up to 16, then identifiable users, or Germany is constantly thinking about retention of personalised data and on the other hand, laws such as the GDPR or e-Privacy arise.
We can learn from Corona and dictatorships that a piece of dictatorship can be necessary in democracy. It is the dictatorship of truth. Ultimately, all Europeans have subjected themselves to the predictions of virologists in the pandemic. These predictions are nothing more than a scientific knowledge condensed to the truth. If, after many hundred years of social development, we in Europe have at least a majority understanding of the rule of law, civil rights and diversity, then these are truths that must be enforced without ifs and but also in digitalisation.
We can and must use Corona together with digitalisation to be better positioned in future pandemics than authoritarian states can do in their system limitations. We must take advantage of the opportunity to take every citizen on the digital journey. Together we are much stronger than a single dictator.
Unfortunately, the challengesare much higher and more complex than the Corona pandemic. Because digitisation doesn’t come suddenly. In a creeping process, over the past two decades, citizens have learned that they have to exchange their personal data and have to give up many civil rights if they want to participate in the digital society. Companies and states have understood too late what fundamental dependencies they have gone into. In order to understand the complexity of created dependencies, I recommend a podcast from the FAZ: “Why modern wars are waged with semiconductors”, see a href=“https://m.faz.net/podcasts/f-a-z-digitec-podcast/warum-moderne-kriege-mit-halbleitern-gefuehrt-werden-16993545.html“
So many steps have been taken without the citizens in the wrong direction, so that only with democratic processes the missed can no longer be made up.
One can certainly speak of the fact that digital Europe is an occupied zone that needs a Marshall Plan to get back on its own feet at all. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called for such a Marshall Plan. I wrote a draft for a Marshall Plan and made it available to the European Commission. I have also participated in various consultations, see http://gisad.eu/statements/ .
As a prerequisite, I have assumed several truths which, in my view, have been scientifically proven to be acceptable without further democratic discussions:
There are three objectives for the Marshall Plan, to which all other EU measures on digitisation have to be subordinated:
Against the background of the above-mentioned truths, European countries are currently making the following mistakes:
In the first quarter of 2021, the Commission will deal with all the submissions. It remains to be hoped that in the EU institutions the decision-makers will have the power to adopt against a policy of compromises shaped by Germany in favour of a European overall strategy of a Marshall Plan, which ultimately makes sense for all EU citizens. Through a smart digital citizen participation must be ensured that such a long lasting avoid development of the citizen rights can never be repeated.
Olaf Berberich
