00:00:02 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Welcome everybody, it’s the 13^th of March 2025, but you are listening to this episode of Citizen D podcast on the 15th of March same year. We are again, you know, catching the deadline…

This time we are joined by Erik Tuchtfeld, co-chair of the D64 Center for Digital Progress, here to talk about the recent Chaos Computer Club post that calls for digital infrastructure resilient against fascism.

Hello Eric and thanks for dropping by.

00:00:36 Erik Tuchtfeld/ D64

Thanks a lot for the invitation, it’s a pleasure to be here.

00:00:39 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Let’s start with the obvious – what does fascism crave in relations with digital infrastructure?

00:00:47 Erik Tuchtfeld/ D64

So, what they’re craving for is on the one hand opposing any kind of resistance, any kind of opposition, so what they’re looking for is a totalitarian and absolutist form of government, basically, and at the same time, to reach this aim, they need to surveil and monitor society.

Both is necessary for them to achieve their aims and with the fascist movement movements we currently looking at a particular in the United States, but also in in in Europe, and in particular also in Germany, where the right-wing party, the AFD, is also rising.

We can see that right, populist, authoritarian movements are on the rise and that there is increasing connection between private surveillance, capitalist big tech companies and actual states, as actual state governments.

00:01:45 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Hmm, so how did we get here, how did we change enter this field, where we were often told that tech companies or technology in general is apolitical, it doesn’t have anything to do with parties or political movements, it’s there for all it serves the greater good of humanity to this really stark and harsh reality where we can see parties and autocratic government cooperating with big tech companies in order to, as you say, surveil and monitor the general population?

00:02:31 Erik Tuchtfeld/ D64

Yes. First of all, I don’t really think that technology was ever neutral, so that is maybe some kind of myth, a myth which is very popular also in the tech scene, the civil society engaged in questions of digitalization…. But technology is never neutral, technology can be used for certain purposes and the way technology is, normally foster certain goals and impedes others.

And that’s fine, I think, because there are certain things we do not want to have in the Internet, and this can also be something where like bipartisan issues and many people agree on, this could be something, for example, spam like people across the political spectrum agree that there should be less spam, or that the distribution of material of child sexual abuse should be impeded.

Where the discussion begins then, is how to do this and for what other purposes and purposes, which are more political, this technology can be used.

You asked… how did we get here? I think what the EU lacked in the past decades was a will to deal with the stark accumulation of power, the concentration of power in the hands of very few. Talking about big tech is not something we do for five years or so, but since 10 or 20 years more or less, there’s talk about the concentration of power, about surveillance capitalism, but the EU only reacted by reforming them, by trying to tell them that they need to deploy their power in a certain way, but it didn’t take the power as such, the concentration as such.

And I think that led to the situation we’re in right now, we have a concentration of power which has very little precedent in the history of basically humankind… that so few people can control the communication spaces of so many, of effectively billions of people.

Currently, I think we see that these people who are in power, who have so much power in their hands, fear somehow threatened, and they react to this threat by trying to exercise total control and trying to diminish any kind of protest and opposition they are observing on their on the platform.

00:05:20 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Hmm, first follow up question. Why was it so hard for the EU to react or act effectively in this field?

00:05:28 Erik Tuchtfeld/ D64

I mean, I think in the end it was a question of political will and the EU, I think, could have acted and we see that in, in certain areas they have also acted… I mean, they are sanctions against, for example Microsoft, also Facebook/Meta, which go into the billions.

But there was never this very strong assumption that the concentration of power as such might be a problem, it was always about the concrete way these powerful oligarchs or these powerful companies exercise their power.

Do you try to regulate the way they’re exercising their power first with the data protection regulation and also, with some antitrust competition measures they’ve taken against the platforms, but the general assumption was always “OK, the system as such is not the problem, but the way it currently works… if you reform the system to a certain extent, this will fix our problems.”

But there was not the recognition that the system as such is flawed and that additional public sphere, which is oriented toward profit, but is currently the case with private companies and not towards the common good… that this is such a problem and that it needs alternatives, that the concentration of power needs to be attacked, for example, with antitrust measures, that something which maybe could have happened more actively in the past, that also mergers…

I mean, we currently see these products which are used by millions of people, are not developed by the platforms or by the companies which own them at the moment, but were simply bought and these kinds of acquisitions, these kinds of mergers could have been controlled more sharply in the past.

The European Union could have also invested more in building alternatives, alternatives to the big tech companies, which are all based in the United States, which are all creatures of Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley’s ideology, apart from Tiktok, something which is also coming from China, but still mainly these companies are based in the US, and in particular, not in Europe, they’re not inventions inheriting European values.

00:07:52 Domen Savič / Citizen D

This is an often-repeated question or a comparison between the US and the EU in terms of innovating in the digital economy or the Information Society, right? We usually say or there’s the general perception that the US is the cradle of innovation while the EU is the cradle of regulation, right?

Would you say that is factual, that is true, or is there some other… are there some other powers in play that the enabled the US to be the cradle of innovation? If it is in fact, and on the on the other hand, that it tasks the EU with regulation?

00:08:48 Erik Tuchtfeld/ D64

I mean it is a very common, it is repeated by hundreds of scholars and politicians, it’s very popular and I guess there is some truth in it, but still, I don’t think that it is that easy.

First of all, I’m not really sure if the United States are so good at innovation, there’s a lot of innovation also going on in the European Union and we have a very active open source and civil society scene here in in Europe as well, maybe even more active in certain parts.

But what American companies are very good at is scaling, getting big really, really quick, and then also maybe not caring so much about the problems they’re causing for others in this process of scaling and this process of getting bigger and bigger.

I mean this is permanently coined by the term “move fast and break things” and maybe exactly that is something which is not possible in the European Union because there is more regulation and there is more supervision over rules than in the United States.

But that’s not, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature, right? We don’t want certain practices, we don’t want companies to break things and I mean break things somehow sounds harmless, but when we talk about Facebook, for example, there is this concrete evidence that the way Facebook moderated content