America’s Challenges Take Center Stage in Greece

“We’re watching the forward march of authoritarianism under a different guise, but with a similar end, which is the oppression of minority rights and voices,” she said.

Ms. Abrams said 600 bills “to undermine voting rights” had been moved through 48 of the 50 states, and “phony audits of the vote” had been conducted by Republican leaders across the country. It was urgent for both houses to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, whereby “no matter where you live in our country, you will have the same fundamental, minimal standards of democracy,” she said. “That does not exist today.” (The act, introduced last month in the Senate, would set national standards to ensure Americans can vote in ways that suit them, regardless of their age, race, sex, language or ZIP code.)

The conference opened after a major Silicon Valley controversy. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Facebook was getting ready to introduce its Instagram Kids service for children aged 13 or younger, despite being aware of the harm that Instagram was doing to teenage girls’ mental well-being. (After the Journal report, Facebook announced that it was pausing the development of Instagram Kids.)

The controversy illustrated the power of the U.S. technology giants — a power that the author Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, denounced.

In a lively video address, Professor Zuboff warned of cataclysmic consequences for democracy and for humanity if tech companies were allowed to continue to harvest people’s data and to profit from it as part of what she labeled “surveillance capitalism.”

She said Western democracies had fallen asleep in the past two decades as the tech giants had engaged in the “wholesale destruction of privacy,” disinformation and “massive-scale” campaigns to modify human behavior. No laws had been introduced against these encroachments, she said. So everybody everywhere around the world was “naked and vulnerable,” left “without the rights, the laws and institutions purpose-built to govern us in our digital century in the name of democracy.”

Professor Zuboff cautioned that unless there was a “democratic counterrevolution” in the next decade against the technology companies, they were “on course to unravel the sociological and psychological substrates upon which the very premise of democracy rests.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/business/america-democracy-challenges.html