The Futures of Digital Democracy: Four Scenarios

This paper presents four scenarios for the future of digital politics and digital society. It asks: How could the future of society look like in the digital age? What could be the role of authoritarianism and democracy in scenarios of digital futures? What could be the role of participation and representation in such scenarios? This talk presents research results from INNOVADE: INNOvative DEmocracy through digitalisation, https://innovade-democacry.eu. INNOVADE is a three-year long interdisciplinary research project funded by Horizon Europe (grant agreement 101178306). The project’s overall aim is to better understand and improve digital democracy. Paderborn university’s research team is one 11 project partners. In INNVOADE, the Paderborn team focuses on critical social theory and critical social research aspects of digital democracy. This presentation outlines some of the team’s research results generated in INNOVADE. Methodologically we combined the Scenario Development Technique from the UN Strategic Foresight Guide with STEEP-Analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Political). We based our research on two distinct axes. One axis describes the mode of governance (participation and representation), the other one describes utopias and dystopias (democracy and authoritarianism). Combining these axes results in four scenarios, for which we described the five societal dimensions defined by STEEP analysis. We constructed four distinct scenarios: Representative Digital Authoritarianism, Participatory Digital Authoritarianism, Representative Digital Democracy and Participatory Digital Democracy. We have chosen fiction, or to be more precise, realist science fiction, as a method for writing about the future of digital society and digital democracy. We present four science fiction scenarios of how digital societies could look in 2050. The method we employ is storytelling, namely the construction of four realist science fiction scenarios that aim at providing food for thought about what a future digital society could look like and what digital futures are desirable and undesirable. The dystopian spectrum is represented by Representative Digital Authoritarianism and Participatory Digital Authoritarianism. The former depicts a totalitarian future of state monopoly digital capitalism, where the fusion of state and corporate power utilises biometric surveillance, genetic scoring, and AI-driven propaganda to enforce ideological conformity. Scenario 2 presents a more deceptive dystopia of nudging and gamification. While maintaining a veneer of participation, the ruling regime in this model utilises social scoring and corporate-state partnerships to manufacture consent, marginalise dissent, and cement inequality. The utopian possibilities are examined through Representative Digital Democracy and Participatory Digital Democracy. Scenario 3 presents a regulated digital capitalism where the state safeguards privacy, taxes wealth progressively, and utilizes technology for open governance and transparency. Scenario 4 describes a society where the ownership of digital goods is predominantly common and public. In this future, technology serves the public interest through open-source software, platform cooperatives, and public service Internet. Ultimately, the analysis demonstrates that the digital future is not technologically determined but politically constructed. The contrast between the dehumanising mechanics of the authoritarian scenarios and the human-centric, ecological, and deliberative frameworks of the democratic scenarios underscores the urgent necessity of active political intervention in the design and regulation of digital technologies.