Productive Economy, Contributory Economy. Genevieve Bouche

a nascent computer system and working methods that consisted of freezing in computer programs the operating methods of our institutions of the 20th century and earlier.

      What is infuriating is that Europe has financed a system of this type in Estonia (X-Road), which is highly satisfactory in terms of efficiency, safety and userfriendliness. This system has the advantage of being extremely modular and therefore easy to implement progressively, starting with local projects that are gradually aggregated to the European level. Being based on relatively light and above all modular technologies, it is economically accessible to all geographical areas of the territory.

      It may seem strange to begin this plea on emergencies by talking about the digital world. The reason is simple: the development of money has allowed the development of trade, which in turn has allowed the development of the production of goods and services, in other words the economy as we know it today. The continuation of this development is blocked by organizational and environmental limits. To go further, we are using Big Data. Digital technology is becoming the second vector of human development after money.

      Digital technology will enable us to develop the new model of society to which we aspire, based on the development of the common good. It is digital technology that will make it possible to “create society”, provided that it is also a vector of confidence, such as that which we have in our common currency, the euro.

      For example, GAFAM¹⁰ offer us valuable and free online services, but every time we use them, they capture data about us in order to refine our behavioral profile ever more precisely.

      This profiling is then marketed and used to influence us. Being profiled without our knowledge is the price we pay for using their free services.

We can ask ourselves why we are being subjected to this and what the consequences are. GAFAM have achieved this performance by offering us useful and very easy-to-use services. They have not considered us as subjects, as administrations do. They have set themselves the goal of making themselves indispensable so that we will faithfully adopt them.

      Another way is possible: Estonian citizens use their digital technology with confidence because it has been designed to be useful to them. For example, they vote from home. No one questions the count of the vote, which is invisible, because in their daily lives, this system is reliable.

      Digital technology in any geographical area will gradually become central to its operation and thus to the management of the common good.

      Hence, our first priority is to move away from the digital 0.0 imposed on us by GAFAM and their Chinese replica BATX, towards a European digital 1.0, based on trust and democratic control (see section 11.4).

      1.3.4.3. More human if more digital

      Contrary to what we would like to believe, more digital technology, in order to manage living things, requires more relationships between people. Machines are not able to perceive the unexpected signals of society and the environment. They can nevertheless signal particular cases. It is up to man, and man alone, to treat particular cases with humanism and in a democratic spirit. This implies trusting a priori the men and women involved in “everyday life”, as well as having a great deal of confidence in the computer scientists who design and operate the software and databases.

      If financiers were the operators of the development of the industrial era, computer scientists will be the actors of the coming era. But if this is the case, they must be sworn in, as are, in principle, the actors of finance. It is therefore urgent to create a council of the order of computer scientists.

      This idea has been around since the 1970s, but has never been implemented. In particular, the digital branch of SYNTEC is not involved. This institution is traditionally chaired by the head of a large French IT services company, but the majority of its board members are representatives of the American digital industry.

      Successive governments have never spoken out on this subject, nor has parliament, which does not seem to see the issues at stake.

      Thus, to answer Solzhenitsyn, it is possible and even indispensable: we cannot get bogged down among humans.

It is no longer possible to be told, “I understand you, but I’m going to tell you why I can’t do anything for you and that the steps you need to take are going to be long, expensive and uncertain.”

      Banning this kind of talk is the electoral program that European citizens want to hear. We can do this with a lot of technological sovereignty. In this way, we will develop a “responsible democracy”.

      By responsible democracy, we mean a network of locally committed citizens who, according to their commitment, intervene at more global levels and whose mandates do not last forever.

1.4. Better than a revolution

      For the moment, the word “revolution” is growing in the word clouds resulting from semantic analyses of what is being said in the think tank environment.

      “Revolution”! This approach should be avoided. France allowed itself to do so in 1789 in a context that aimed to redistribute power between the landed nobility and the pre-industrial bourgeoisie and thus launch the industrial era.

      The current situation is quite different. The promoters of revolution are supported by external actors who offer them financial and digital means to weaken European democracies: their weapons are the tools of influence and no longer pitchforks and bayonets. Nevertheless, it is preferable that we do not go through the “revolution” box. The memories of this pathetic episode are still too vivid in our minds for the French to do it again.

      It is only through the redesign of our institutions that we can achieve this. This overhaul cannot come from the institutions themselves. They must therefore be the result of collective reflection leading to a consensus. The movement is underway. Initiatives are flourishing. Popular consultations are finding a response. Of course, the responses are chaotic because we are not prepared for this approach. The systemic reality of the suggestions made by some and others is difficult to grasp, which leads to endless and therefore discouraging controversy.

In these debates, there are the hardcore activists, the skeptics, the ambitious, the idealists, the hardworking, etc. Those who only listen and those who only talk. But most of them share the same objective: to make Europe the renewed democracy that enters the 21st century with the will to seize the opportunities of the societal shift that is upon us: to bring about a new source of prosperity which, this time, will be centered on the development of the common good, contrary to the previous phase, which was essentially centered on the satisfaction of the primary needs of individuals.

      Our children will say of us, as the saying goes, “They did it because they didn’t know it was impossible”.

      In reality, this is possible via the communication tools that are now in the hands of the public. However, the public must be warned that the current social networks they use are not at their service, on the contrary, they are tools of “massive influence” and therefore capable of turning against their purpose through, in particular, their ability to spread fake news.

      In Europe, the right to speak is respected, even if it is “contained”. We can rejoice in having a press that works.

      However, before embarking on such an exciting but complicated exercise of “redesigning” our model of society, it is important to understand why our institutions are now suffering.

      1 1 Editorial note: Unlike in North America, in Europe and Latin America the word liberalism means a moderate form of classical liberalism and includes both center-right conservative liberalism (right-liberalism) and center-left social liberalism (left-liberalism). In North America the word liberalism almost exclusively refers to social liberalism (left-liberalism). This book uses liberalism in the European sense.

      2 2 Simple vocabulary