LAUSR

In the 10 years since the Global Financial Crisis, technology has indeed changed our world, and not necessarily for the better. There is an unnerving similarity in the responses of a financially (if not morally chastened) global finance and a resurgent global tech to belatedly acknowledged transparency and accountability deficits. Both sectors have proved impervious to effective control. Expressing regret is not the same as accepting responsibility. Disruption, like innovation, is not a value-neutral noun or concept. Everything has a price. This includes the governance and operational practices of our leading technology corporations. Far removed from complying with generally accepted principles of best-practice corporate governance, these highly mobile, asset-light, corporations are adroit at maximising minimisation strategies that contribute to tax base erosion through profit shifting and sail uncomfortably close to tax evasion. Their competitive advantage enhanced by deft exploitation of gaps provided by the apparent – but not tested – non-applicability of traditional systems of oversight. These gaps are informed by the exercise of power without responsibility for the curation of hosted content, the ideational privileging of innovation and disruption over stability, security and sustainability on libertarian grounds, cavalier approaches to data protection, and technical gaming of regulatory rules designed for an economy destined to history. In seeking to restore warranted confidence in corporations and their governance, we need to keep in creative tension the twin societally beneficial goals of liberty and equality. Maintenance of social order and progress require active balancing. If equality of opportunity is compromised by a privileging of individual freedom, the social contract disintegrates, leading to a corresponding increase in resentment. The resulting distrust damages social cohesion in a downward spiral. The shrill nature of political debate, amplified and reinforced by automated algorithms, create echo chambers that calcify confirmatory bias. Ultimately, the “free service”, provided by the platforms is nothing of the sort. As Kris Kristofferson once sang, “freedom is just another word for nothing else to lose”. When judgment becomes automated and at one step removed, served up on a computer screen, there is no need to exercise one’s mind. The resulting passivity not only dulls the senses by pandering to bias, it is deeply corrosive of what remains of community values. If belonging is deemed a property right exercised more in empty sloganeering than opportunity, the stage is set for confrontation. This is what is happening across the liberal order. All, however, is not lost. Arresting this malaise does, however, require a fundamental change in thinking. In today’s globalised world no physical wall can provide a protective shield. The challenge is as much virtual as physical. As the dislocation caused by technological disruption extends and expands, middle class aspiration becomes unattainable to gain or indeed to hold. We are, in short, witnessing a systemic rise in precariousness. It is the defining dynamic of the age and extends far beyond the inner cities or the rust belt. Anaemic economic growth, the erosion of economic certainty and job security are advanced within and across the “gig” economy as a positive development. It is anything but. The author of the term precariat now sees it as an affliction increasingly impacting on the professions, including law. In a 2017 interview he argued, “the division of labour has changed. For example, the legal profession has silks at the top, then salariat lawyers and a huge growth of paralegals with basic training, but without a career path through the profession, because there are ceilings. It’s the same in the medical and teaching professions. The precariat is not just a reality, it’s grown extremely fast in recent years. Unless something is done to improve security and redress the class-based inequalities arising, you’re going to get a political monster”. The scale of the task ahead was brought home to me reading the “Life and Arts” section of the Financial Times on the last weekend in July 2018. The lead article explored the rise of the far-right in Germany, where in the last federal election no less than 12 per cent privileged a return to the politics of the strongman, not least because of an influx of refugees, many of which, understandably are not fleeing immediate personal persecution but no less catastrophic political and economic chaos. The return of the culture wars demonstrate an upending of past verities, once cherished by the left. Cultural relativism, used to justify opposition to the imposition of bourgeois values, has become the arena of choice for those of the right, who see multiculturalism as the triumph of a moral decay. The book pages were dominated by accounts of the illusory control associated with the populist turn. Take, for example, the Philippines. The blatant denigration of due process in one of the oldest democracies in Asia by a president masquerading on television as a vigilante follows a well-worn rhetorical path. Ayyip Erdoğan in Ankara, János Áder in Budapest and Andrzej Duda in Warsaw, along with Donald Trump in Washington, DC, have used similar tactics to secure the presidential keys of office. In each case, the malleable elasticity of truth has been critical to short-term success. Misrepresenting the size of campaign or inauguration crowds, erroneously claiming the out-going president was not born in the United States, making his very presidency illegitimate, casting doubt on the loyalty of the security services for following due process, these were not opinions. Rather, they were alternative facts. Not surprising the approach forms an increasingly central part of the electoral playbook. Law and Financial Markets Review, 2018 Vol. 12, No. 3, 105–110, https://doi.org/10.1080/17521440.2018.1524233