[1] Article XVI of the Augsburg Confession affirms the responsibility of Christians to engage in civil affairs. However, engaging well and faithfully requires Christians to understand the civil and political contexts in which they are embedded. Many recent works in political theory have described various contemporary political crises and challenges: social fragmentation at global, national, and local levels; the decline of mediating institutions in civil society; the increasing atomization of the citizen and the growth in power and reach of the centralized, bureaucratic state; the rise of the ethics of authenticity and the politics of recognition; the fusion of the social-cultural liberalism of the left since the 1960s and the economic-political liberalism of the right since the 1980s; and the increased use of populist sentiments and responses since 2016. In addition to these important issues, there is another significant political and cultural transformation that will revolutionize politics as it is understood and practiced today: the creation, integration, and increasing reliance on digital technology and powerful digital systems.
[2] In his recent work, Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, author and barrister Jamie Susskind provides a timely and insightful work of political theory to help readers imagine how the relentless advances in technology will transform the way we gather and share information, communicate, and live together, with consequences for politics that are profound and frightening in equal measure. Susskind’s work invites readers to consider the paradigm-shifting impact of new technologies on our understanding and practice of politics.
[3] In the twentieth century, the dominant political question was: “How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?” Today, a new dominant question has emerged: “To what extent should our lives be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems – and on what terms?” (2). Susskind rightly contends that almost all of us are unprepared morally, philosophically, linguistically, politically, and, I would say, theologically for the technologization of politics. As a result, Susskind hopes that Future Politics can provide an intellectual framework to help us understand and influence our shared political future (25, 366).
[4] Susskind organizes his book into six parts—Part I sketches a vision of the future, which he calls the digital lifeworld. The digital lifeworld will be a “dense and teeming system that links human beings, powerful machines, and abundant data in a web of great complexity and delicacy,” consisting of three defining features: 1) increasingly capable systems and machines that are equal or superior to humans in a range of tasks and activities; 2) increasingly integrated technologies that surround us and are embedded in our physical environment; and 3) an increasingly quantified society where more and more human activity will be captured, recorded, and then processed and sold by digital systems (22).
[5] Part II examines how digital technology and systems will transform how power is exerted and controlled. Susskind focuses explicitly on three forms of power: force, scrutiny, and perception control. Two groups who stand to benefit the most from harnessing these forms of power in the digital lifeworld are political authorities and big tech firms, which must be recognized as economic entities that are politically powerful (156-160).
[6] Part III explores how this change in power will affect every aspect of political life, especially the nature of liberty. Susskind contends that these new forms of technology will enable new sorts of self-expression, self-fulfillment, and personal and social affordances. Yet new forms of technology will also possess remarkable predictive ability regarding human thought, emotion, and behavior, which could be harnessed for totalitarian and authoritarian purposes by the “supercharged state” (177-179). While digital technologies can supercharge the state, they will be increasingly concentrated in the hands of tech firms that control the technologies of power, especially code. The code and algorithms established by big tech firms will mediate, moderate, filter, and set the rules of what constitutes a central aspect of liberty in a free society: free speech (189-191). This raises questions about critical differences between the power wielded by states and that wielded by tech firms (192-194).
[7] Part IV explores how democracy will be revolutionized in the new digital lifeworld and asks how people can control these digital systems in ways that benefit all, not just the elites. He argues that there are five contemporary systems of democracy jockeying for recognition: Deliberative Democracy, Direct Democracy, Wiki Democracy, Data Democracy, and AI Democracy. Susskind wonders how a combination of some of these democratic systems, while not perfect, might enable new and better ways to organize our collective life while holding power to account (212-254, 348).
[8] Part V addresses social justice in the digital lifeworld. In the first section of this part of the work, Susskind focuses on algorithmic injustice, that is, how algorithms contained in code will increasingly settle questions related to the distribution of social goods, like jobs, loans, housing, and insurance (257-270), and social recognition through ranking, rating, scoring, and sorting persons into social hierarchies of status and esteem (271-278). This raises important questions about the role of software engineers, who will inevitably be the social engineers of the new digital lifeworld as they gather data, build systems, and apply rules through code and algorithms (294). The second section of this part of the work focuses on the idea of technological unemployment, the idea that technological systems in the digital lifeworld, like various forms of AI, will radically reshape the nature, purpose, and necessity of human work and labor. He also explores how these features will likely necessitate reimagining the relationship between capital, wealth, property, and ownership in the digital lifeworld (295-341).
[9] Part VI explores various principles and forms of regulation, especially regulation to ensure transparency and regulation to break up massive concentrations of power (354), to reign in and control the power of the supercharged state and tech firms so that people remain free. His argument in this last part draws on two critical themes touched on earlier in the work: Digital Confederalism and Digital Republicanism.
[10] Digital Confederalism refers to the idea that the best way to preserve liberty is to ensure people can move between systems according to their preferred code. That is, there must be a plurality of available digital systems to interact with and use (205-206). Digital republicanism refers to the idea that no one should be subject to the arbitrary power of those who control digital technologies. Ensuring this freedom necessitates understanding how the technologies work, the values they encode, who designed and created them, and what purpose they serve. It also requires not just understanding the digital systems that exert power over us but playing an active role in shaping them (206-207). Both of these themes are necessary to maintain our humanity as we stand on the precipice of a technologically saturated, integrated, perhaps even post-political, digital lifeworld (360-366).
[11] Throughout the work, Susskind shines as a writer. While the book is lengthy, he writes in such a way that the reader can understand not only his argument but also the categories, terminology, and theory he employs. He also skillfully employs multiple illustrative examples to help readers imagine more concretely the technologies, how they work, and how they will come to shape the world around us and our experience. All the while, he employs a refreshing mix of humor and wit.
[12] The digital lifeworld Susskind describes is alarming and poses several significant challenges and problems, but he deliberately avoids a pessimistic and deterministic view that contends we are doomed to an AI-dominated dystopian future. Nevertheless, he makes it clear that we cannot ignore or be indifferent to these technological changes at a political and cultural level but must play an active role in understanding and shaping them (366).
[13] While questions of religion and theology never really appear in the work, Christian theology brings a unique perspective to these debates, such as its affirmation of the value of life, the divine mandate to care for the creation, and the importance of human work and vocations as the “masks of God,” human callings in which God is hidden to preserve and bless creation by working through human creatures. What exactly politics will look like in the future is unknown. Future Politics, though, provides an erudite and groundbreaking resource to help readers begin to understand the technologization of politics so that we might better take up our responsibility to engage well and faithfully in civil affairs.
William G. Fredstrom is a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, MO, and an Associate Pastor at Immanuel Lutheran Church, School, and Childcare in Seymour, IN (LCMS).