The issues of state-as-controller-of-data that made Corbyn’s proposal interesting has sent me down a rabbit hole. Meant as an escape from the US wild west approach to a digital economy and fueled by the simple anarchist thought that the state, while better than the market, might also not be trusted with the welfare of platform workers, the focus on 'digital democracy' has proved confusing. Does 'digital' refer to social media, online voting, or service platforms? Does 'democracy' guarantee citizen privacy and preventions of worker abuse? Or access to government participation? And, in the end, do either affect what I am really interested in: the conditions affecting the production of architecture and the urban environment? Still, the faith that state governance is materially relevant to platform work led me on.

As the one socialist manifesto in the west to address platformism and a digital economy, Corbyn’s 'Digital Democracy' manifesto stands out less for what it does or doesn’t include than for its authorial positioning. Every point tells us what the government will give its citizens. One can find problems with the manifesto’s claims – can they really do that? Are these promises the essential ones and is there even internal consistency in them? Many critics point to its general naivete. But the one-way-street, state-to-citizen ideology is notable for the assumption that the state not only knows what the masses need but what the masses are: unified, monolithic, homogenous.

In contrast to this are the liberal European countries that NESTA has cited for 'digital democracy'.[1] The subtext for NESTA’s 2016–17 examination was two-fold: the necessity to move beyond abstract concepts like 'the public sphere' that dominate platform discourse, and to highlight the exceptions to pervasive governmental resistance to 'the transformative effects of digital technology.' The countries that embrace technology to create viable political parties or legislative mechanisms, they point out, construct a 'political class' that does not yet exist. The assumption in these liberal democracies is that the 'masses' have yet to coalesce or identify as a collection of citizens, and, for me, thereby contrast with the assumptions in Corbyn’s manifesto.

Just to go through the NESTA list: Digital democracy has propelled new parties in Iceland’s (the Pirate Party, the second largest in the country, using X.piratar.is as the platform letting citizens advocate for the right to privacy, transparency and responsibility, freedom of information and expression, direct democracy and self-determination); in Spain (the Podemos Party using the digital platform 'Plaza Polemas' to allow 'Citizen Proposals' to put forward and subsequently vote (via NVotes) on various proposals); and, most famously, in Italy (the Five Star Movement, using 'Rousseau' as a site for collective, direct decision making by registered citizens on policy options, candidacy selection, and member expulsion and also ruling that all M5S politicians drafting bills must share the text and relevant videos for a two-month debate by its members.)[2]

The examples of digital democracy directly entering local or national governments are Brazil (the e-Democracia portal set up in 2009 to provide a new channel for individual citizens to interact with representatives and Deputies); Taiwan (where vTaiwan developed gOv as a consultation platform bringing together a wide range of stakeholders to achieve consensus on complex and controversial topics); Finland (the Citizens Initiative Act gives the right of citizens to submit proposals for new and amended legislation and dictates that when an initiative reaches 50,000 signatures, it must be reviewed by parliament); France (the website Parliament & Citoyens brings together citizens and representatives to jointly discuss policy issues and draft legislation).

And then there is Estonia, in a league of its own.[3] It is not only a real example of a digital statism that Corbyn’s proposal only simulates but also a unique mix of socialist top-down and liberal bottom-up governance; it has, in other words, an already-identified class (the post-Soviet masses) while mobilising a newly minted neoliberal individual. Estonia is e-everything, it is 'the platformisation of government services'. It packs shopping, working, travelling, healing, paying parking tickets, paying taxes, banking, teaching… everything into each person’s mandatory e-Residency and their eID Card. There are only three exceptions to the e-rule: getting married, getting divorced, or selling real estate, and these by political choice, not technical incapacity. Every quotidian administrative act – from signing administrative paperwork to paying for the parking lot to getting access to your child’s school grades to finding your pet’s vet diagnosis to voting at elections (Estonia is the only democracy in the world to allow such a system for official elections) – can be done on a laptop or a smartphone, at home or away. The system is motivated by an 'only once' policy that takes advantage of the state-verified totality of personal data; citizens never have to fill out forms in advance of access to goods, information, or events. Robots are pervasive and they have representative rights through an algorithm that lets them buy and sell services on your behalf.

The new flagship of citizen participation is Rahvaalgatus ('citizen initiative'), a platform designed to implement a right to collectively address Parliament. Relying on the national digital infrastructure that authenticates every signature, any proposal that gathers the support of 1000 citizens has to be taken up by the legislators. Data is locally, not centrally held. The government 'merely' coordinates the data of the various servers via its platform X-Road, which cannot read the data, only coordinate it. If everything is digital and location-independent, the state can run a borderless community. Thus there is a digital residency program which allows logged-in foreigners to partake in some Estonian services while living in another country. Banking is open and liberal business regulations encourage international start-ups to put down virtual roots in Estonia. By 2016, 28,000 had applied for eResidency. As the government sees it, people are going to come to the country that performs best in this environment.

Each individual owns all information recorded about him or her and peering in on someone else’s secure data is a criminal offence. Every citizen can, by logging into their account, determine who accessed their personal data, and when. But more important than privacy and security, they say, is data integrity; the accuracy of the data they collect matters more to Estonians than privacy, probably a reaction to the behaviour of their neighbor and previous coloniser, Russia. Data integrity relies on transparency, which in turn relies on trust, which in turn relies on the growing use of KSI, a blockchain technology which ensures the tracability of data. But trust is also due to what a number of articles have described as an unusual faith Estonians have in their institutions, which are more positively perceived than representatives and political parties.

In comparison to the US, especially in the context of our current experience in the presidential election and its aftermath, Estonia sounds like a utopia. Conditions from the most mundane (not filling out three forms every time you go to a doctor) to the most political (one can be a cross-border resident) only add to its otherworldliness. And yet, as critiques of Estonia’s system indicate, the 'invisible state' and the 'dematerilalisation of public services' relies on its extreme efficiency…. which perhaps becomes an end in itself. As one of the government/tech innovators in Estonia said, regrading digital democracy, the former (digital) was a trend that wouldn’t last, while the latter (democracy) was largely useless.

In this, the Estonian citizen is primarily rendered as a consumer of services, a subject produced by the techno-legal apparatus of e-Residency and defined by his or her economic exchanges with Estonian corporations and actors. In other words, this system doesn’t address the citizen as worker; she is defined as a consumer and not as a producer. If Estonia is the alleged model of a state that has managed to invent a new social contract with its citizens, it leaves out discourse about both the worker and the nature of work. In this hybrid bottom-up, top-down system, where work is both gig-ish and state-ish and where many local start-ups as well as international firms seek an Estonian foothold, no one seems concerned about the efficacy or conditions of that work. The president of Estonia said at an EU conference that the open residency would 'rethink the entire labour market;' not much has been heard of since.

Likewise, critical discourse based on identities other than efficient consumption go missing. Because the government is the most innovative of all, many choose to work for the government. One influential government official was a former critic of the Estonian government and, hoping to direct his denunciations in a positive direction, went to architecture school to study urban planning. Finding architecture too frustrating and slow, he joined his old foe, the government. The government’s 'enthusiasm and optimism around technology is like a value of its own.' This is not in and of itself bad; it just leaves a hole that used to be filled by non-governmental workers who question what state 'democracy' means. With this observation, I can return to the initial impetus to critically examine statism – to see how it matches up to an anarchist support of cooperatives and worker-owned governance. Worker-owned coops and their ability to rethink governance in relation to platform capitalism will be the topic of my next blog.