EU Commission DSM strategy will lead to economic & democratic collapse

Ideological blindness is a deterministic road to failure

In the 1960s, Chinas Mao pushed forward the "Great Leap" to industrialization. The rhetoric was grand and promises even bigger. Only problem was that means lacked linkage to claimed consequences leading to economics disaster, famine and millions of dead chineese while destroying enormous wealth and historic artifacts in a mad raze to industrialize through manufacturing steal.

EUs DG Connect and EU Commission claims of a "data-driven" economy is even worse. Systemic dis-empowerment of citizens with eIDAS and ICT standards with build-in lock-on/surveillance, free flow of unsecure data in both public and private sector as well as systemic profiling and abuse of personal data provide a straight route to market and democratic collapse. The strategy is fundamentally a plan for digital feudalization of Europe.

In this, it hardly makes much question if the source of failure originate in institutional defenselessness to bigtech lobbyism, in yet another European authoritarian ideology (a destructive feudalist combination of BigGov bureaucratcy and BigCorp markets controls), in paranoid fear of terrorism leading the system to self-destruct or in some fourth source of institutional failure.

What is important is the way unscrutinized claims and numbers fabricated in "consultancy reports" on BigData, Identification and OnceOnly gets transformed into "political truths" stripped of any linkage to reality and causality.

What is important is the near-total absence of consideration of alternatives or reflection of impact of means that systemically will dis-empower citizens both in terms of democratic rights and in terms of the consumer power to enforce choice on value chains.

Problem is not ends, but means

The claim here is not that we e.g. do not want knowledge from research, but that we want better knowledge in smarter ways, that do no a priori distort the market processes and reduce citizens to analyzed and managed objects.

The claim here is not that we do not want growth, but that growth is caused by SMARTER use of ressources to produce more individual value. The present means will do the opposite - sacrifice value for the illusion of growth as power gets concentrated and monopolly effects benefits the few at the expense of the many and society overall.

The claim here is not that we do not want protection against criminals and terrorist, but that trying to do so by surveillance of everybody always, only makes security worse by making targets defenseless and providing the means and vectors of scalable attacks, i.e. that "security" thinking in terms of identification is worsening - instead of improving - security.

So what is wrong?

Three Digital Agenda 2012 Linking Security with Economicscore aspects are wrong with DSM.

1) Digitalization is not designed for change and adaption to choice, but to create single-size-fits-all and centralize controls. Especially infrastructure is designed more to prevent competition and innovation than to facilitate it. Solution is to create standards to remain open for change in parallel, i.e. open interfaces for better solution to outperform lesser models and value chains.

2) Security is not design to isolate to prevent interdependence as well as targeted or scaling attacks.

3) ICT and processes are not designed for choice to work as the ONLY way to signal best value of alternative use of resources. Both OnceOnly, commercial profiling and infrastructure are designed to manage and control citizens instead of empowering them to enforce choices on processes.

But EU will reform Data protection regulation?

So what?

If the technology fundamentals are designed to reverse the value chains and reduced citizens to analyzed objects to be managed and traded, soft regulation might do a bit to reduce the damage, but cannot compensate of enable processes and markets to adapt and improve.

Data Protection regulation may REQUIRE good empowering security by design or it will inevitably fail reducing "consent" to a mere excuse for abuse without any real choice possible.

What will work is regulation that require the right to enter into digital transactions WITHOUT identification and enabling means to do so. What will work is regulation that actively reject secondary use of personal data and enable means for citizens themselves to respond to request by collecting data from non-linkable sources and anonymizing/contextually isolating the results for knwoedlge creating processes or services.

But EU Commission is enabling the Single Market?

Won't competition and innovation solve the problem?

It would if markets are allowed to work and citizens empowered to enforce choice.

But fact is that EU is NOT enabling market with present DSM strategy. Eu is through accepting and even investing in bad technology design preventing markets from working by systemically dis-empowering citizens and legitimizing reversal of value chains.

So, to summarize, claiming doing good is no good if means are counter-productive to intended goals.

DG Connect, EU Commission, Andrus Ansip and Günther Oettinger - you ae basically spreading misinformation and vasting taxpayers money on bad investments - you urgently need a change of perspective or be the instrument for European deroute for decades to come