Pharmakon. It’s not exactly a commonly used word in most circles. I’d never come across it before reading Alessandro Sbordin’s wide-ranging interview with Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink that, among other things, invites readers to think about what the next phase of the internet might look like. Then again, and no judgment, I don’t usually hang out with the Jacques Derrida set (he originated the concept according to Wikipedia – like I said, this isn’t my usual side of the street). But after reading Sbordin and Lovink on “the internet as a pharmakon: at the same time cure and poison,” it’s hard not to think that it’s the perfect word to describe the state of debates over the internet and digital technology in 2023.

This sense of the internet – and digital technologies – as both problem and cure doesn’t just mirror a famous Homer Simpson quote: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems!” (Homer Simpson: Heir to Derrida?) We can see this balancing of tech as both problem and solution (thought not solutionist) in many of the pieces featured in this newsletter. As Peter Drahos points out in his book Survival Governance, and as Maria J Sousa recognizes here, digital technologies are necessary to deal with the climate emergency, including supporting green cities. At the same time, Nora Young’s guests on Spark highlight the problems with one-size-fits-all solutions often pushed by Big Tech. Meanwhile, Ana Valdivia reminds us that the computing power underlying seemingly ephemeral technologies like artificial intelligence comes at a high environmental cost. Notes Valdivia, “it is estimated that training an algorithm to automatically produce text uses 190,000 kWh; that is, 120 times more than the average annual consumption of a household in Europe in 2020.” ChatGPT: bad for education, bad for the environment.

In their way, Eric Monteiro’s (open access) book, Digital Oil: Machineries of Knowing and Lighthouse Reports’ account of the disastrous outcome of machine-learning-driven welfare policy in the Netherlands offer good reasons why more of us should probably go down the poststructuralist rabbit hole. As these two works suggest, seeing the world as data affects how we act in the world, including what we consider to be solutions and how we interpret problems.

More prosaically, how to balance the problems and benefits of any issue is the heart of public policy and governance. This challenge is represented here by work addressing Canada’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act and a Lawfare Podcast discussing AI regulation in the US and the EU. 

Beyond specific policy issues, it’s always helpful to recall that these debates take place within contexts that privilege some actors, ideas, and outcomes over others. In an insightful article that focuses on South Africa, Antonio Andreoni and Simon Roberts consider how best smaller states – all too often overlooked in the EU-US-China-focused literature – can constrain and benefit from the large digital platforms. They make the case for an “entrepreneurial-regulatory state” that attempts to “strike the appropriate balance between the dynamic scale and scope economies of platforms, and the imperative of setting rules on platform power to ensure optimal competition for local value capture and capabilities formation.”

The Ada Lovelace Institute goes even bigger, proposing a series of reforms designed to overhaul a commercially dominated digital ecosystem that “privileges people over profit, communities over corporations, society over shareholders. And, most importantly, one where power is not held by a few large corporations, but is distributed among different and diverse models, alongside people who are represented in, and affected by the data used by those new models.” 

In a sense, their report reads like a response to Lovink’s challenge to imagine an internet and digital ecosystem beyond today’s “weird combination of platform dependency and state surveillance.” Which brings us full circle, from poststructuralist theory to public policy analysis. The next time someone wonders what philosophy is good for in the real world (such as it is), smile mysteriously, reply, “Pharmakon,” show them the Homer alcohol clip, and start talking digital policy.

- Blayne Haggart