The Six Horsemen of the Digital Apocalypse

"The Six Horsemen of the Digital Apocalypse"

Remarks by Dr Johnny Ryan FRHistS at the European Data Summit 2024, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Berlin, 17 April 2024 

(Text edited from video)

What are the big challenges for the next European Commission?

It is useful to have a visual aid. Let us take one from the German master Albrecht Dürer from 1498: "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".

But we will have six horsemen. Not four.

The first horseperson of the digital apocalypse is that the quality of information in our democracy is collapsing. This on its own is enough to threaten our European way of life and our values and the sustainability of our democracy.

This first challenge has at least two causes.

Let’s look at the first one: the broken ad system and market. I spoke about this one here on this stage with Pencho's very kind invitation, at the Konrad Adenauer Data Summit, in 2021.

I will summarise that hour-long presentation now: On almost every website and app when you visit, information about you is sent out by the "Real-Time Bidding" (RTB) system to many, many, many parties, so that an auction can be conducted. Potential advertisers have an opportunity to bid money for the chance to have their ad shown to you on that page.

One effect of that broadcast of data is that a publisher that spends an awful lot of money producing journalism has their audience sent out into the wilderness, literally. And that audience can then be monetised by the bottom of the web, by disinformation. That system also enables an absolutely enormous fraud, called “ad bot fraud”. I explained this here in 2021 and I will save you from it because we're at the end of a very long day.

The second of the two causes of the first horseman is that on almost every very successful digital platform there is a recommender algorithm that is based on a profile of you. The data contributing to that profile could be as simple as where you pause in a video. That will reveal your sexuality very often, depending on the video. Such data are used to figure out what makes you tick. The system then knows how to push your buttons: what content it should push at you in your feed to keep you on the system for the longest time, to make more money showing you more ads.

The second horse person of the apocalypse is immediately obvious if you grasp the first one: electoral interference. If we are broadcasting information about what every single voter is reading, watching, and listening to, all day long, and where they're moving in the real world, we are creating a risk that they can be profiled and manipulated by adversaries, by non-state actors - not necessarily by our own political parties - but by anyone who has an interest in interfering with the European election. And we have examples of this.

Now let's turn to the third horse person of the apocalypse: Broken markets. Back in 2021 I gave another detailed presentation here at the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, demonstrating how the cross use of data between, not only services, but also between "processing purposes" (a term of data protection law) allows a cascading monopoly across lines of business. And there are many other elements and causes of the broken digital market.

The fourth horseman is War. In November, we at ICCL Enforce released a study showing that broadcasting "RTB" data about everyone is exposing sensitive European personnel, military security industry leaders, our generals, our judges, our political leaders to compromise by potential foreign adversaries, the most intimate things about their lives, literally available for sale. We can say this with some certainty because we posed as a purchaser and acquired sample data from a data broker.

It is not only RTB and online advertising system that we ought to be worried about. In the hotel that I'm staying in, around the corner here in Berlin, there are "Hikvision" cameras installed in the hallway.

Hikvision is a Chinese brand of (state-subsidised) Internet-connected CCTV camera. They are very, very cheap. They are also installed all over Dublin, where I live. Even in military bases. They're internet connected, and a quick perusal of their specifications, which are public, shows that they have facial recognition on the device.

But it's not just the advertising system, nor just Hikvision cameras. We have taken a cavalier approach to digital security in many areas. In this area, as in so many, failure to enforce data protection has caused a crisis.

The fifth of our sixth horse persons is A.I. and labour. Not merely job displacement by A.I. It seems inevitable that an increasing share of our workforce will find itself working for an A.I. system, a master that it cannot understand, cannot negotiate with, and is not allowed to know. If this doesn't get people out on the street and ready to overthrow the system then one has to wonder what will.

The final horse person of the apocalypse is Carbon, created by all of the other horsemen together. Everything I have described involves getting very big computers to do processing that should not be occurring.

I am not anti-innovation. Nor am I against industry. In fact, I used to teach innovation, and I used to work in industry. But it can not be denied that there is a carbon cost created by the five horsemen.

So, let's look upon the Six Horsepersons of the Digital Apocalypse: Media, Elections, War, Markets, Labor, and Carbon. 

One thing I did not mention, but was in the slide, is that in that the first horseman (Media) includes acute harm to children. I'll give you an example of that. Yesterday night, I was in a documentary on Irish television in which the journalist had posed as a 13-year-old child, and set up a new account on TikTok. Posing as a 13-year-old Irish girl, she looked at the default feed. It shows you ten videos. She picked any that indicated an interest in sadness. Within about 15 minutes, she was being pushed self-harm videos by TikTok’s algorithm. (For the adults in the room, children on TikTok don't write "self-harm". They write “$h”). Within 27 minutes TikTok’s algorithm was pushing suicide videos glamorising suicide in to her feed. That is what we are up against with horseperson one.

How to we confront the Six Horsemen?

First, we need to guard against the word “incremental”. Though the previous panel at this Summit indicated a welcome degree of urgency from our colleagues at the European Commission, urgency is been strangely lacking from many other parts of the Commission. I have often heard the excuse: “we are taking an incremental approach”. But, incrementalism is not appropriate when you are facing a crisis. We need urgency.

Second, the incoming President of the next European Commission must harness all of the resources of the Commission and interact with the Member States to confront these problems.

Whoever the president is, whether it is Mrs von der Leyen or someone else, must take a “whole-of-Commission” approach. The President's cabinet should lead of a Taskforce for a Sustainable Digital Future.

That Taskforce must have a Commissioner who it works with. That Commissioner may be an existing position or a new one.

The Taskforce must set goals for Cross-Commission Teams on each of these challenges. We have an example of that with Digital Markets Act (DMA), where the Commission's Directorate Generals for Competition and for Connect have found ways to work together to implement this new law. We need to see more of that matrix structure, where responsibility is clearly held.

Third, all of this implies political will. The next President must have the political will to do these things that are necessary to protect our way of life, in a competitive way, in a sustainable way. Sometimes that means a little bit of confrontation with key Member States.

Who are those Member States? If the GDPR is as fundamental to these problems as I believe it is, then the next President must engage with Ireland and Luxembourg. There must be a discussion of the problem.

I am not one of those who advocates for a reopening and rewriting of the GDPR. I am suggesting that the next Commission do its job as the "guardian of the treaties" and ensure that European law is actually applied.

What is the law? We have powerful tools that have not been applied to these problems: tools in the GDPR, in competition law, including the DMA, the AVMSD, the DSA, and various others.

Let me leave you not with pessimism, but with optimism. It is clear that the next Commission will have to deal with the grand challenges of our era: climate, security, competitiveness, a reconsideration of the assumptions we've had in the economy over the last 15 years... and also digital.

We cannot continue to confront digital issues in silos. That is what has allowed them to grow.