What will the Pax Technica Mean for Civil Society?

February 11, 2014
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Information technology and the ways in which it is being used both by state and by civil society actors has ushered in a new age in history.

Phil Howard calls this new age the Pax Technica, likening it to previous historical ages during which industry and the practices and policies of governments have closely aligned to bring about an era of relative social stability such as the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannia.

Howard, who is Professor of Media and Communication Policy and Governance at SPP, and Director of the Center for Media and Communication Studies (CMCS), was presenting the core ideas from his upcoming book which will be entitled Pax Technica at a February 6 sitting of the CMCS Media and Change Lunch Series.

In his forthcoming book, Howard argues that we are currently living through a moment in history when governments regularly invest significant money in rolling out new technologies to democracy advocates around the world and it's a moment when civil society actors are becoming increasingly aware that having a good web presence and organizing themselves online is one of the key ways to get significant buy-in from other actors, raise money and generate interest.

"The Pax Technica is the theory that technology diffusion and the collaboration between industry and governments has brought about a peculiar form of political stability," Howard explained. "We are entering a period of stability not so much marked by the absence of war but by the presence of regular learning patterns between authoritarian rulers and civil society leaders. A stability that comes from knowing that technology control and access is one of the most consistent predictors of a political win whether that be in an election or international crises that involve military combatants.

"In the last ten years technology control and information access has become a key factor in explaining political outcomes. These are rare moments in history when technologies provide such levels of strategic advantage and we have a name for these moments – we call these Pax." Howard went on to explain however, that while previous Pax were the domain solely of state actors, the Pax Technica is one to which all of global society has access. While technology has empowered some states to have healthy conversations about public policy options, and empowered others to closely monitor internet traffic, states no longer monopolize information infrastructure the way they did before.

This new freedom to take advantage of online technologies has been matched by an increased technical literacy on the part of civil society actors. Howard points to several examples of civil society using technology to make up for shortcomings of government in failed states - such as the Mapping Kibera project in which mobile phones were used to map previously ignored slum areas of Nairobi and to plan, on a local level, for the funding and maintenance of essential services. The most obvious result of this effect so far has obviously been the Arab Spring during when important role of technology in the Arab Spring was in allowing people in different countries realize that they had shared grievances and that there was something they could do about those grievances. A digital cascade of images from Tahrir Square, and from Tunisia set the wheels in motion for similar uprisings across the authoritarian states of the arab world. On the flip side though, it is not only civil society which has learned to use technology, as by the time the protests of the Arab Spring had reached the likes of Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, the governments there had learned that they would need to make certain concessions in order to stop things spiraling out of their control.

Howard's new book will lay out five propositions for the coming years of the Pax Technica. They are:

  1. We'll see more examples of how connected actions solve collective problems. Many social problems are caused by the breakdown of social networks. Bringing these networks online helps to keep them functioning.
  2. Big data provides more collective security than insecurity, for example in the pursuit of criminals and terrorist networks. However, this will usually means violating our privacy norms so it must be responsible use of big data.
  3. The internet is increasingly weaponized both for civil society actors and for national security agencies.
  4. Technology increasingly creates the opportunity for new governance forms when states fail.
  5. Technology marginalizes radical ideologies. Best examples of this in Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey etc. where radical Islam has had to moderate its message or lose support.