How does technology impact society? That is begging the question. Phrasing the question like that already assumes techno-determinism: that technology happens and impacts society. Technology as a force unto itself, independent of human involvement. Therefore, it’s an impossible question. Technology comes from human effort. Necessity is the mother of invention. A solution to a problem, a means to an end. After, the invention can be put to use in other ways, but that is also a consequence of human design. Technology can be made in many different ways, it can be used for good and bad. Gunpowder can be used for bombs or fireworks, war or entertainment. Technology is never without ideology, but often a product of it. The space race was a product of the Cold War, the superpowers competing over whose ideology was superior. Netopia is in a way a project to uncover techno-determinism and argue against it.

Except Netopia is also a product of technological determinism. It’s called “Forum for the digital society”, after all. Its name assumes that technology impacts society. And of course technology does impact society. The telephone, electricity, flight, the combustion engine and numerous other inventions define our society, what we can and can’t do. It sets the limits and opportunities for what we can accomplish. Without technology, humans would struggle to survive. Technology is only deterministic in retrospect, we can see how one thing lead to another. Going forward, it can take many different directions, impossible to predict – whatever some pundits say about things like Moore’s Law and exponential growth.

Which is it? Does technology impact society? Or not? Can we imagine society without technology? (What is technology anyway – that definition is material for a different blog post). Seven years into Netopia, I am struggling with this question. Behind all the blogposts, newsletters, book reviews, thoughts, ideas and opinions, is this – more profound – question. It’s true and not true at the same time.

Now I have found a way forward. Professor Kentaro Toyama suggests what he calls the “law of amplification”. He makes the case in his book Geek Heresy ­– Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology (reviewed for Netopia by Waldemar Ingdahl when it was first released in 2015). Professor Toyama says technology can’t change society, but it can amplify the change that humans bring. Put laptops in a classroom and they’re great learning tools if there is a good teacher and motivated students, but without that all the laptops in the world won’t do much to help those students learn.

The law of amplification points to a way forward, out of the riddle of whether technology impacts society or the other way around. It’s simple and therefore beautiful. Now that you’ve read this post, please listen to my podcast interview with professor Toyama, where talk about the law of amplification and how it corresponds to the alt.right, the Arab Spring and Sesame Street.

The biggest hit by The Hives is Hate to Say I Told You So. Great song, I’ve seen them perform it live several times. The chorus comes to mind when I follow the debate on social media and democracy.

The Economist front page the other week was the F from the Facebook-logo as a smoking gun and the headline “Social media’s threat to democracy”. You may have seen the animated version on Facebook (yes, Facebook). If The Economist says something, that message is central to the direction the debate on a current topic is going.

This message is quite different from how social media and democracy was discussed yesterday. Remember the “social media revolution”? How Twitter and Facebook brought about the Arab Spring in 2011? How many seminars and op-eds have talked about how social media bring democracy to authoritarian states? Now, it appears social media rather brings authoritarianism to democratic states.

Hate to say I told you so, but I never bought the idea of a social media revolution. In 2012, I published a chapter in anthology by Egyptian democracy ­activist Mariam Kirollos: The Revolution Beyond 140 Characters. She said many of the people who risked their lives on Tahrir Square for bread, freedom and social justice were illiterate, most had no internet connection and had never heard of Facebook. The social media revolution existed only as hype in Western media. It only took six-seven years for the penny to drop.

Don’t take it from me, take it from The Hives.

Once upon a time there was a new political movement. It had a bold vision of a future where the old systems had no place. It had a new language and a confident attitude. It had activism. It had an idea of how a new form of democracy could be built.

Arguably the most obvious starting point was The Declaration of the Indepence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow in 1996 (written in Davos, prescient?). It was the articulation of internet exceptionalism, the idea that the Internet is different, and no rules should apply. It inspired Internet activists and pirates alike.

Internet exceptionalism was a perfect combination of an elitist message – “only we understand this new thing” – and the populist mantra – “no more paying for entertainment!”. The activism was both in piracy; through file-sharing technologies and later more commercialized illegal streaming sites, and in communication via mass e-mail campaigns to policy-makers making the few look like the many. It was not without good humor, for example when the Swedish Pirate Party youth section registered the “Kopimism” religion as an official church, with ceremonies, symbols and the lot.

The new movement had friends in high places, some of the biggest companies in the stock market gave support to its think-tanks and networks. It had telecom operators and business associations on its side. Policy-makers responded to the innovative ideas, some with liking, some with confusion. Journalists fell in love with the thought of free information. Academics in various disciplines developed theory. An endless string of writers, think-tanks, leadership consultants and sages came preaching the message of the new era: unstoppable growth, new opportunity, Moore’s law. You can’t stop modern technology, don’t even think about trying.

The enemy was the copyright industry. Its business models are outdated, the new movement said. Who cares about the old gate-keepers, now that everybody can express themselves, echoed the choir. Any attempt to uphold the exclusivity of copyright content will bring a “draconian” surveillance state. Out with the old, in with the new.

In 2017, everything changed. It turns out that the Internet was not that different after all. It did not bring democracy, but election manipulation. Not free speech, but fake news. Not pluralism, but monoculture. Not quality, but algorithmic idiocy. Not grassroots, but skyscrapers. The surveillance state did indeed come, but not from copyright but from the internet companies. The pirates bet on the wrong horse: it was not Hollywood that broke the Internet, it was Silicon Valley.

What we are witnessing is the aftermath. Some still sing to the tune of Internet exceptionalism. Some still claim that the Internet is best left in the hands of a few dominant players. But policy-makers are coming around, accepting the idea that democracy is necessary also online. And the people always knew. In the surveys, people requested a more responsible online space. It appears that the policy debate is fast catching up.

Technology is great. With Internet exceptionalism out of the way, we can finally talk about how we should apply to get the most of the good and the least of the bad. Who said something about the end of the beginning?

Netopia first started in Sweden in 2010, but in 2013 moved to Brussels and changed language to English. There were two reasons. First, the future of the digital society is a global conversation and it made little sense to participate in it in Swedish – a language that only 10 Million people speak. The other reason was that I thought the European institutions are the only ones who could balance the power of the internet platforms. The general understanding of how the Internet ought to work at the time was that regulation was the enemy of freedom. I found this weird, elsewhere we have a working system where individuals have rights, institutions protect those rights and those institutions are under democratic control. Why should the internet be different? Now it appears I was onto something. The other day, president Juncker and four other members of the European Commission proposed guidelines and principles for online platforms to tackle illegal content online. Progress!

The rules on immunity from prosecution for intermediaries online were conceived long before the breakthrough of social media and data monopolists. They were intended to protect private communication online, but have been thoroughly abused over the years to the extent that all traffic (even machine-to-machine-communication) is regarded as speech and that internet platforms can beat the competition, not with more innovative technology but with a legal trump card called safe harbor. This has created a centralized internet where the rich get richer and where private communication is monitored and sold to advertisers. The opposite of why the immunity rules were put in place to begin with! Oh, the irony.

This impossible situation has become more and more obvious, just as the denial on the part of the companies concerned. When first faced with the allegations of manipulation of the US presidential election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (himself a potential candidate for president!) dismissed it as speculation. Weeks later, he had to concede that not only had Facebook played a part but also sold adverts to foreign agents wanting to influence the election. (Twitter and maybe Google also played a part.) Something in line with what European Commission just proposed became inevitable.

The responses have been predictable: It will break the internet. It will stop innovation. It will inspire dictators. It will stop freedom of speech. I never thought I’d say this, but there sure is a lack of imagination in the pirates, net freedom activists and lobbyists who oppose all and any regulation online. They will have to come up with something better. The internet won’t be broken, the threat to freedom online is not democracy but monopoly. Innovation will be fine, except some of the would-be disruptors who look for legal advantages more than fresh technologies may have to think of something new. Dictators will go ahead and oppress anyway as they always have done, sometimes with the aid of Western technology companies. And freedom of speech is the right to express your own opinion without prior inspection by the authorities, so we don’t have to worry about that either.

Freedom of speech, competition, innovation, a de-centralised internet, privacy online… intermediary action is the key to all these things. Until now, the internet platforms have had to be loyal only to the owners and the bottom line (no, not the users, they are locked in in various ways). This leaves little room for the priorities that matter to society in general in the longer term. It is clear that internet platforms will only take responsibility when they are forced to do so. As The Guardian has revealed, Facebook only moderates holocaust denialists if it faces “risk of getting blocked in a country or a legal risk”.

With the proposal from European Commission, there is real pressure on the tech giants of Silicon Valley to take responsibility and do something. The question remains if this is enough. The track record is not impressive, rather the tech companies have done as little as possible as late as possible. Keep the pressure high, President Juncker.