DIGITAL EQUITY & TRANSPARENCY: 21ST CENTURY MARKET ADMINISTRATION AND REGULATION DEMOCRATIZING WEALTH
Digital equity and transparency represent fresh goals and novel means innovating 21st century market administration and regulation to democratize wealth.
Digital equity enables individuals, enterprises, and institutions to own and monetize, and to securely buy, sell, and reciprocally compensate one another for permissioned data and meta data that all create with investments, transactions and daily Internet and broadband communications at no marginal cost.
Digital equity, as a universal wealth democratization goal, is agnostic to race, color, gender, national origin, and faith.
Digital equity makes it possible for search (Alphabet/Google), mobile communications and media (Apple), on-line retail (Amazon), social media (Meta/Facebook), cloud storage and computing (Amazon, Microsoft, and others) and entertainment (Netflix) to grow and prosper in, with, and through democratic markets in the 21st century; that is, to scale beyond relevance and to curtail security costs.
Transparency, the enabling means toward digital equity and wealth democratization, clarifies real time monetary and risk values of transactions, data and meta data instantaneously to ground market administration and regulation in secure 21st century markets.
Available information technologies now enable transparency to emerge as a network element and effect.
Because transparency affords vertical efficiencies without vertical hierarchies, practical applications include:
-powering instantaneous rational calculability in 21st century investment,
-creating competitive interactive computer services and access software provider markets,
-securing mobile banking,
-thriving retail data and meta data markets,
-reshoring American manufacturing,
-integrating contemporaneous logistics into real time asset management,
-animating social investment and economic activity in impoverished regions, neighborhoods, and communities,
-resolving interactive computer service incumbent freedom of speech challenges,
-reviving publishing revenues,
-creating Fourth Industrial Revolution industry peace (5G wireless, optical fiber, hybrid coaxial networks, Internet of Things),
-rationalizing bitcoin, block chain, and cryptocurrency adoption,
-driving decentralized finance across multichains,
-easing integration of contemporaneous technological capabilities into pension fund prudent diversification,
-operationalizing efficient, wholesale distributed renewable energy generation and trading markets,
-clarifying insurance and reinsurance risks, and
-enhancing cybersecurity by isolating and monitoring surreptitious infiltrators, among others.
Context
Neither current market administration nor regulation addresses competition, investment, and consumer protection efficiently and efficaciously. Each is premised on something that exists in diminished force: compensating industrial workers adequately to purchase manufacturers’ goods to sustain industrial capitalism.
Just over one hundred years ago, Louis D. Brandeis catapulted Woodrow Wilson to the presidency by advocating competition to address industrial capitalism, emerging middle and working classes of consumers populating cities and suburbs, and the closing of the frontier. Capital intense, infrastructure and mass production industries required investment. Consumers needed protection from monopolistic abuses of market power. Physical expansion had run its course. The advice worked. Administered markets and regulation promoting competition fit citizens’ expectations and convictions and elicited exactly enough support to enable a single term New Jersey governor to succeed to the presidency. Wilson scored an Electoral College majority (435) and popular vote plurality (41%) over former presidents William Howard Taft, who advocated leaving public policy to the courts, and Theodore Roosevelt, who proposed joint federal government-big business production planning, and Eugene V. Debs, who campaigned for socialism, by advocating market administration and regulation suited exactly to time and tide in 1912.
For all the stability, growth, and prosperity of New Freedom market administration and regulation and their New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society progeny, twentieth century market administration and regulation are now too costly, slow, limited, and partial. Rulemaking requires expert compensation. Administrative procedure protracts decision making and implementation. Regulated industry influence biases disposition.[i] Congressionally delegated authority defines scope and scale necessarily. Nonetheless, court decisions preferencing regulatory implementation over congressional intent often result in arduous regulatory costs unduly burdening local and regional enterprises.
Nor is Brandeis’ century old approach delivering on economic and income equality. One percent of wage earners commands approximately 33% of wealth while 50% contest 2.5% according to contemporaneous analyses in sharp contrast to Brandeis’ achievements early in the 20th century yielding higher real wages and greater disposable income for working people.
Efficient, effective legislation, suited to contemporaneous, dynamic, technologically-driven 21st century markets, mores, and manners is yet to be enacted and implemented.
Congress finds itself incapable of enacting legislation addressing oligopoly and concentrated market power with policies and solutions like digital equity democratizing wealth and transparency delivering real-time marketplace administration and regulation.
Legislators patronize constituencies with identity politics and show trials, or, when they can concur, fine tune partitions of regulatory supervision or enact unconstitutional legislation to palliate one or another interest group.
While Congress dithers, the executive branch and administrative state agencies extend authority, the judicial branch increasingly addresses and resolves public policy, and technological innovation and opportunistic actions (Archegos, Robinhood, ransomware) provoke turbulence and turmoil in monetary markets and policy and supply chains.
What remains to be addressed is that “surveillance capitalism” overwhelms anachronistic market administration and regulation architected and implemented for 20th century industrial capitalism.
Twenty-first century surveillance capitalism obliterates the reciprocal relations undergirding industrial capitalism. Unlike 20th century manufacturers vending to consumers who were also employees, surveillance capitalists flourish by selling the “behavioral surplus” of individual, enterprise and institution data and metadata “in new behavioral futures markets in which users are neither buyers nor sellers nor products. Instead, users are the human natural source of free raw material that feeds a new kind of manufacturing process designed to fabricate prediction products…. Unless this latency is evoked into new forms of collective action, the trajectory of the digital future will be left to the new hegemon: surveillance capitalism and its unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power,”[ii] a scholar cautions.
Digital equity and transparency, by contrast, democratize wealth enabling individuals, enterprises, and institutions to own and to securely buy and sell information indicating “what they will do now, soon, and later”[iii] through transparent market administration and regulation.
Endnotes
[i] “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of economic-elite domination and for theories of biased pluralism, but not for theories of majoritarian electoral democracy or majoritarian pluralism,” political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found in a 2014 study.
[ii] Soshana Zuboff, “Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action,” New Labor Forum, January, 2091. https://newlaborforum.cuny,edu/2019/01/22/surveillance capitalism
[iii] Ibid.