Social, political, and ethical dimensions of digital transformation

aje on February 7, 2022

Course introduction

This course investigates how digital transformation relates to current issues relating to democracy and governance in an increasingly connected yet polarised world.

There are widespread concerns that social and political divisions are being exacerbated by information technology, and that this is having a profound impact on the capabilities and quality of both global and local institutions. In a similar way to how the advent of the printing press prompted the rise of democracy and the nation state, perhaps digital transformation is contributing to a similar disruption in governance.

Such trends are particularly relevant in regimes where statehood was not an internal process, and was adopted either through colonial or international activity. Rising populism and authoritarianism provides the social and political backdrop to our analysis of the broad impact of technology, and we will consider whether pluralist approaches may help to combat some of the emerging threats to liberal democracy.

Prerequisite

Students should have already taken my 6 hour component of the Business Frontier Technologies course. This includes the following content:

Mandatory pre-course readings

For a 40 point quiz to test your knowledge of the pre-readings see here.

Contents

Group workbooks [download here]

  1. Introduction [lecture handouts]
  2. Addiction [lecture handouts]
  3. Social media
  4. Conspiracy
  5. Democracy [lecture handouts]
  6. Ethics [lecture handouts]
  7. Governance [lecture handouts]
  8. Central banks and digital transformation [lecture handouts]
Optional background preparation

To understand some of the context for my construction of this course I recommend:

  • Four Hours at the Capitol, BBC (a documentary about the storming of the US Capitol building on January 6th 2021)
  • The Coming Storm, BBC Sounds (7 part podcast documentary on the rise of QAnon)
  • Death by Conspiracy, BBC Sounds (an 11 part podcast documentary on Gary Matthews, who died from covid in January 2021 having been drawn to social media claims that it was a hoax. I listened to this as a parallel to The Coming Storm but it strayed too far into covid, media ethics, and psychology for me to incorporate it more fully in this course, which attempts to avoid those areas. I didn’t learn much about conspiracy theories aside from episode 9 which provided a good attempt to understand why our common conception is often misplaced. Ultimately I just found this sad.)
  • Things Fell Apart, BBC Sounds (a documentary that looks at the different origins of the culture wars, which are defined as “the battle for dominance over conflicting values”, or the things we shout about on social media)
  • Command and Control, PBS (a documentary looking at how close we came to a major nuclear accident)
Recommended video

Famous documentaries about Facebook include:

Here is the Brexit movie mentioned in class:

Here is David Rand’s talk on misinformation:

Here is Patri Friedman arguing that we should be able to start new countries as easily as starting a new country:

Recommended audio
Recommended activity
Assessment
  • Group report [download here]
  • Individual One Pager
    • This should be based on an article that you think is relevant for this course and that I should add for next year
    • Here are instructions on How to Write a One Pager
  • Individual MCQ final exam
    • This relates to all lecture content and the readings from the content section
Student reflections

Priyanka Dalotra (LinkedIn)

On design
Resources for the public sector

If you wish to work in the public sector I recommend the following resources:

Recommended books

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series contains a number of titles that are relevant for this course. I particularly recommend:

Further recommendations

The Economist’s overview of effective altruism