Global Research

In two weeks, our government wants to agree to a global pact for digital coercion.

On September 22 and 23, a UN Future Summit prepared by the German and Namibian governments will take place in New York. A global digital pact is to be adopted, which has already been negotiated in almost complete secrecy and – as far as I know – in the absence of the public and parliaments. If you put aside the empty words in which the Global Digital Compact has been wrapped, you see an agreement to force everyone into a world controlled by digital corporations.

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When I write about exclusion of the public, I do not mean secrecy.

The negotiations at the summit are taking place behind closed doors. But the Global Digital Compact in the versions of the 2nd revision and the 3rd revision is published on the UN’s Summit of the Future website.

However, neither the UN nor the German government, which was heavily involved in the preparations for the summit, have made any serious efforts to inform the public about what is planned or even to have it discussed in parliaments and the media. It is also not public which corporations, foundations and hand-picked representatives of so-called civil society will be allowed to sit at the negotiating table. The World Economic Forum will almost certainly be there, as will the Club of Rome, according to reports.

The text of the agreement begins by stating that digital technologies “offer immense potential benefits for human welfare and the advancement of societies” and that we must therefore eliminate any digital divide between and within countries. The stated goal is “a digital future for all”.

What is important is what the contract does not say. The word voluntary only appears in connection with the signing of the contract. For citizens, however, there is no right to choose a future for themselves other than a completely digitalized future. After all, that would open up a digital divide that should no longer exist.

There is no provision for the right to manage many of one’s affairs in the traditional way by interacting with other people rather than with computers.

No one should be able to choose to have their children taught by teachers instead of computers, or to keep conversations with their doctor and treatments a secret instead of being stored on the servers of IT companies. Nothing in the contract indicates that such a right has even been considered.

Risks are acknowledged, but without the text being specific. They are to be “mitigated”. Human oversight of the new technologies should also be ensured. International cooperation must be agile and adapt to the rapidly changing technological landscape. Then there is a lot of blah-blah with nice adjectives such as sustainable, fair, open, responsible, etc. It sounds good, but it has big feet.

The development of the digital technology “landscape” is thus presented as coming from above, as something that citizens and even governments have to adapt to.

Yet landscape is just another word for the digital corporations and what they come up with. It recognizes a leadership role for corporations. This, as I have shown in a previous post, is a common thread of the UN Summit on the Future and the UN’s actions over the last two decades.

Risks of digitalization should not be avoided in any way, but only “mitigated”.

“Human oversight” of new technologies is something quite different from democratic control and decision-making autonomy for users. If Elon Musk of X, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of OpenAI and the bosses of Google have sovereignty over the new technologies, this requirement of the treaty is fulfilled, but the interests of citizens are anything but safeguarded. The whole treaty reads as if the IT corporations and their foundations had drafted it, and that is probably not far from the truth. After all, the UN relies on corporate money, and the world’s richest and most powerful corporations are IT companies.

Conclusion

When the UN, which is heavily influenced by the IT companies, is working at an international level, away from the public and parliaments, to promote digitalization and encourage everyone – whether they want to or not – to make extensive use of digital devices and programs, it is no longer surprising why our federal government is so committed to subjecting citizens to digital coercion. Be it by abolishing the option of paying in cash, be it via the state-owned railroad company or the semi-state-owned DHL, or by arbitrarily linking state benefits such as the Deutschlandticket, cultural vouchers for 18-year-olds and one-off energy payments for students to the use of a smartphone. This is how our government earns marks in the international evaluation of progress in digitalization.

The fact that this subjects citizens to ever more intensive digital surveillance of their every move and utterance is an added bonus for our surveillance-hungry rulers, one increasingly gets the impression.

Do not accept this in silence! Let them know that you expect them to defend citizens’ right to a self-determined life with protected privacy.

Ask them why the Digital Pact does not mention an individual right to opt out of digitalization and ask them what they think about it.

Ask them whether they follow the maxim that everything that is good for IT companies is also good for Germany. Check whether they want to vote for parties that put the interests of the IT industry above those of the citizens. According to my assessment, which I have repeatedly backed up with examples on this blog, the parties with a digital compulsion are first and foremost the FDP, closely followed by the Greens and, at a short distance, the CDU and SPD.

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This is translated from German via AI translation.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video