The Digital Domain and the New Social Contract Research Program
A new collaboration with the Center for the Governance of Change analyzes the digital domain and the fracture of our social contract to advance realistic solutions for future agreements.
October 2020
Image: Center for the Governance of Change
In the last two years, humans generated more data than in the past twenty thousand. Today there are over 8 Billion connected devices but that figure will jump to 40 Billion by 2025 with the coming of age of the Internet of Things. This systemic shift in how we operate, communicate, register and process data will change our economy, politics and social interactions. The implications of digital transformation are manifold and range from a changing landscape of economic power, to the redefinition of privacy, to the geopolitical implications of the emergence of data.
This process, however, also brings with it numerous challenges linked to the generation and distribution of income. The Social Contract—that in the US was centered around social mobility and in Europe around economic security—looks increasingly broken and the gap between the highly skilled and everyone else is growing. These technological and economic transformations have reshaped the relationships between education, work, opportunities and welfare, rendering our previous social contract outdated, and making it necessary to establish a new one that benefits everyone.
The understanding and governance of systemic shifts of this nature requires a new set of policies and regulations to foster innovation around data and its governance while improving social inclusion. This research program tries to support this process by analysing the transformation of the digital domain and the fracture of our social contract from a multidisciplinary perspective, and advancing new and realistic solutions for future agreements.
Read what team members Oscar Jonsson, Academic Director for the Center for the Governance of Change and Taylor Owen, Director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy have to say about the three imperatives governments have in mitigating the digital economy’s negative effects here.
