IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 8

Editorial
should therefore be mutual, reciprocal, voluntary,
and cooperative, not metricated, commodified
and transactional.
4. Polycentricity and subsidiarity. Polycentricity
[22] acknowledges the multiplicity of decision-making
authorities, and other stakeholders,
and their involvement (e.g., through consultation)
in self-governance processes. Subsidiarity
is the principle of ensuring that decision making
is delegated to the closest point at which it will
have an effect. Linked to the third principle, just
as individual actions depend on have an impact
on others, the collective actions of collectivities
have impact on other collectivities: this is a system
of systems (i.e., an ecosystem). Structures
federated through polycentricity and subsidiarity
and are less prone to monopolisation, centralization
(through preferential attachment at the
application layer) or colonization (with subsequent
wealth extraction), because principles of
self-determination are stronger and more robust
in such structures. Moreover, both polycentricity
and subsidiarity contribute to ensuring that a collective
expression of values, priorities, and preferences
is not a timeless, unquestionable and
infallible product of some mechanism of social
choice (i.e., a vote), but can be revisited and
revised through timely and reflective processes.
5. Legitimacy. As previously specified, legitimate
self-governance is only enacted with the
informed, meaningful, and revocable consent of
the governed, whatever form of -archy or -cracy
is consented to. Legitimate democratic self-governance
can be implemented by the practice
of democracy-by-design [23]. Democracy-bydesign
is another instantiation of the valuesensitive
design methodology (and values-based
engineering is now an IEEE standard [24]) taking
the same approach as other instantiations such
as privacy-by-design [25]. In this methodology,
a qualitative human value (e.g., privacy, democracy)
is identified as a " supra-functional " design
requirement and used as the focus of public
interest design, not a bonus grafted onto a functional
system as an afterthought. Design decisions
should be made manifest in the interface or other
signals, for example, by design contractualism or
costly signaling. Progressive reform and systemic
improvement of the ecosystem should similarly be
based on reflection and meta-deliberation about
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socially constructed relations such as responsibility,
accountability, and transparency.
6. Public property and the common good. In socialist
and mutualist thought, private property (as
distinct from personal property) is generally only
rejected if that property is considered to be essential
to the well-being or effective functioning of
the collective; see, for example, the typology of
common-pool resources defined by [26]. Applying
this to the Digital Society, it can be argued
that the private ownership of the means of social
coordination and collective action can diminish
effective functioning. For example, systems for
meeting organisation, conference organisation,
or charitable donation, etc., could be made
available as non-profit-making public services
held and operated in trust, without the need for
collecting data, digital advertising (which wastes
energy) or excessive executive salaries. The U.K.
lottery uses the slogan " your numbers make
amazing happen, " to which a reasonable rejoinder
could be " so do taxes " ; it is just that taxes
can be more progressive and more honest about
their use in wealth redistribution and pro-social
benefits in promoting the common good rather
than wealth extraction. (Although the fiction that
taxes " pay " for public services is a gross misrepresentation
of the way macroeconomics actually
works and should be thoroughly debunked in
every classroom.)
7. The underlying economic system. The effective
functioning of society and self-governance is
inextricably linked with the nature of the underlying
economic system. As Foucault makes clear
[8], historically the economic system underlying
liberal democracy was capitalism and the
accumulation of capital; subsequently, this process
was co-extensive with the accumulation of
men. Increasingly, this is now co-extensive with
the accumulation of attention. Foucault writes,
in 1975, of " anonymous instruments of power,
coextensive with the multiplicity that they regiment,
such as hierarchical surveillance, continuous
registration, perpetual assessment and
classification " [8, p.220], thereby anticipating
(respectively) surveillance capitalism, social
media logins, social media rating and review,
and machine learning by some 50 years. The
Digital Society needs an alternative underlying
economic system different to one based on
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