Tech Inequities Fuel Populist Power

Geopolitical crises, looming climate chaos and the relentless expansion of surveillance capitalism are driving the development of technology. Each new tool holds tremendous potential to improve lives and help solve the world’s biggest problems. But technological change always produces winners and losers by giving rise to new concentrations of power and novel forms of inequality.

In this op-ed, a version of which appeared in Newsweek, Kyle Hiebert writes that as the Fourth Industrial Revolution accelerates, a new form of populism rooted in tech-fuelled disparities may eventually consume democratic nations.

Blayne Haggart writes that platform is one of those words that tends to mean whatever the speaker wants it to. It has effectively become synonymous with social media, or, at a stretch, search engines. But the problems of a data- and intangibles-based economy are more pervasive than those posed by social media companies alone.

Better, Haggart argues, to focus on how companies that identify themselves as platforms actually operate — what business model they use, rather than the ideology and jargon they deploy — to clarify the exact policy challenges these companies pose.

The global rise of digital giants is spurring recognition that Canada’s competition laws are overdue for reforms. But, Keldon Bester writes, just as important as those laws is the structure of the institutions charged with administering and adjudicating them.

The institutions making up the foundation of Canada’s competition laws concentrate the future of the field in too few hands and appear to be straining to meet their mandates. If Canada is to truly make competition a pillar of its economic policy, these institutions will need to change to meet the needs of a more active and vibrant competition law ecosystem.

Nov. 14 – 7:00 p.m. EST (UTC–05:00) – Waterloo, Canada: The late Canadian diplomat and commentator John Wendell Holmes believed the best public policy emerged out of an appreciation of history and context. Taking this approach, the contributors to CIGI’s essay series Situating Canada in a Changing World, sponsored by the Holmes Trust, reflected on and offered practical solutions to contemporary security and public policy challenges.

Please join us on November 14 for a conversation with two of the series’ contributors, Timothy Andrews Sayle and Laurence Deschamps-Laporte. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session moderated by Aaron Shull and Adam Chapnick.

This hybrid event is free and open to the public. Find out more and register here.