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 Even the public broadcasters in Germany fear for their reach and do not publish.
Here is the article:
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.
This is what the concept looks like:
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.
Each citizen is given 1,000 IP addresses to use at random. He receives the keys decentrally and offline from a lawyer.
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.
Using a search engine that analyses the input, the matching categories for the search results are displayed and a special AI is linked. Since the AI only learns within a category, it does not pose an omnipotent threat.
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.
All new data put on the Internet will be evaluated in a democratic process
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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.
The lawyer who allocates the keys negotiates with a judge in each case which keys he will make available for a digital house search. When the smartphone was loaded, automatic backups of the keys were stored decentrally in the home.
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.