The next decade of governance technology will either close the accountability gaps that institutional failure exploits or widen them. The choice is not made by the technology — it is made by the governance decisions about how the technology is deployed.
The Technology's Governance Potential
The governance technologies that are developing alongside the artificial intelligence, the distributed ledger, and the real-time data infrastructure of the current technological moment have the potential to significantly improve institutional accountability — to close the information asymmetries that allow institutional failure to persist undetected, to reduce the transaction costs that make accountability mechanisms too expensive to deploy at the scale that comprehensive accountability would require, and to create the transparency that allows the populations who depend on institutions to assess institutional performance with the information that informed assessment requires. These are genuine governance possibilities, and some of them are being realised in specific institutional contexts where governance technology has been deployed with genuine accountability objectives.
The same technologies also have the potential to widen the accountability gaps they could close — to create new surveillance capabilities that serve institutional power rather than institutional accountability, to generate the opacity of algorithmic decision-making that is harder to contest than the opacity of human decision-making, and to concentrate the information advantages that technology creates in the institutions with the most resources to deploy it rather than in the populations it is supposed to serve. Which of these potentials is realised depends on the governance choices about how the technology is deployed, who controls it, and what accountability framework governs its use — choices that are being made now, in the governance gap before adequate regulatory frameworks are in place.
Technology's governance potential is neither inherently liberating nor inherently oppressive — it is the potential that the governance choices about its deployment realise. The technology deployed with genuine accountability objectives will close accountability gaps. The technology deployed with power-concentrating objectives will widen them. The governance challenge is ensuring that the accountability objective governs the deployment rather than the power-concentrating one.
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