Enforced digitalization will deprive people of privacy and independence, but business profits and government control are more important.
Wissing says it openly for the first time: Everyone should be forced into the digital world and deprived of their privacy
. It is a measure of the deterioration of our society that a minister can openly say something that sounds so exaggerated and pointed without being swept away by a storm of indignation. According to a press release from his ministry, Wissing said on the occasion of the publication of the ” 2nd progress report on the federal government’s digital strategy ” on October 18th :
“Millions of citizens are using new digital services such as the Deutschlandticket, Bund-ID or e-prescription. It is time to turn the digital strategy into a ‘digital-only’ strategy. We must consistently dismantle analog parallel structures and rely on completely digital processes. This is not only more efficient and saves costs, but also improves data availability. Only if we become a fully digital country can we develop Germany into a leading AI location and strengthen our position in international competition.”
Accordingly, Wissing also praises the digital coercive measures of the government and especially his ministry as successes:
“Over 13 million people use the digital Deutschlandticket – conveniently on their smartphone or as a smart card.
Since June 9, 2024, the BahnCard will be offered exclusively digitally. This saves 30 tons of plastic per year.
Digital vehicle registration has broken the million mark. Drivers have saved time and money over 1.5 million times with i-Kfz. The fees for registration, change of ownership or deregistration are up to 70 percent lower online than at the counter.”
It could hardly be made much clearer that the government’s digitalization strategy is not about the needs of citizens, but about satisfying the data greed of corporations and the government. And if you are not willing (to go digital), I will use force, is the motto. Accordingly, privacy, voluntariness and data protection do not appear at all in the progress report and only in a few clichéd asides in the digital strategy . According to the digital strategy, the ” profitable use ” of data includes improving the availability of data and creating “new legal regulations for a modern and opportunity-focused data economy”. “Opportunity-focused” means concentrating on the possible advantages and accepting disadvantages such as the loss of privacy and control over one’s own data without complaint. Another way of putting this is that “data should be easier to combine and thus more usable for everyone” and that “isolated data islands” should be put to an end.
With almost unsurpassable stubbornness, the ministry writes : “We want to give everyone the same opportunities in the digital world” – and only in the digital world. Those who cannot or do not want to use the digital world will not be given the same opportunities and should not be given them. At best, they will be offered help with digital networking. Millions of citizens are forced to use the Deutschlandticket in the Deutsche Bahn’s data kraken app on a smartphone and to disclose their mobility data to Deutsche Bahn and the US digital corporations that use the data. Protests from many associations are simply ignored. Most users of student semester tickets , even ten-year-old schoolchildren and customers of railways and transport associations that offer no alternative to the digital ticket, are forced to use smartphones. Anyone who does not have a sufficiently modern smartphone is excluded from the offers.
Authorities use the pretext of service-oriented digitization to isolate themselves from citizens . Anyone who does not have a modern smartphone can often no longer receive their shipments sent by the partially state-owned DHL group. The postal law was specifically changed to address this, but DHL is allowed to ignore the regulations without penalty . Many trade fair companies are doing away with box offices and forcing visitors to strip off with their data .
The extreme energy consumption of AI applications is not mentioned anywhere. But a mere 30 tons less plastic per year is supposed to be a reason to force millions of BahnCard subscribers to use their smartphones and the DB Navigator app? For comparison: That’s roughly equivalent to the plastic packaging waste produced by 850 people in the EU per year. Wissing thinks we’re idiots.
The electronic patient file and the e-prescription are also based on forced happiness . The latter has become a must, the former is being introduced as an opt-out procedure, whereby everyone who does not expressly object on their own initiative receives the file. Otherwise, very few people would have ordered them. With the electronic ID function, the option to opt out has been completely abolished.
Everywhere, authorities and transport companies are eliminating the option of paying in cash and forcing citizens to hand over their data to financial and IT companies. Consistent dismantling of analogue parallel structures is what they call this “progress”. The progress report reveals the reason why so many transport companies are eliminating or reducing the option of paying in cash. Wissing’s ministry will provide funding if you do this:
“A new call for funding for the digitalization of municipal transport
systems has been launched. The aim is to improve existing transport
infrastructures through intelligent technologies and to promote
multimodal mobility solutions, e.g. through innovative information and
ticket services.”
Even the new funding guidelines of the “AI Lighthouses for Environment,
Climate, Nature and Resources”, which are hard to beat in terms of
non-intelligence (NI), and which I reported on when they were introduced
, are cited in the progress report as successes of the digital
strategy.
The geostrategic background
When a government so determinedly pursues an agenda that goes against the wishes of its own citizens, the profit interests of the corporations and, in particularly blatant cases, military and geostrategic goals are usually the decisive factors. Both are likely to be the case here. The interest of the big data octopuses such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Paypal and Visa in all of our data is obvious. It goes without saying that the federal government is not focusing on the advantages for foreign corporations, but rather on the advantages for German digital start-ups. But these are negligible compared to the former, especially since successful start-ups are bought up or pushed out by the large corporations anyway.
But it’s not just about the power and profits of the hugely
influential US corporations here. Since 2018, two commissions in the USA
led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have been investigating a
geostrategic question of the utmost importance for the USA : How can we
prevent China from overtaking the USA in digital technology and
artificial intelligence in the near future, thereby inevitably depriving
the USA of economic and military dominance in the world? The answer
from the National Security Commission on AI, or NSCAI for short, and the
Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) is: The reason China is
overtaking is that non-digital infrastructures are relatively poorly
developed in China, there is little data protection, and the close
cooperation between the government and corporations in the provision and
use of citizens’ and companies’ data.
The counter strategy is to learn from China. Between the lines, but
clearly, one could read in the reports that analogue alternatives must
be dismantled, data protection ignored and the government’s cooperation
with digital companies intensified. In order to coordinate activities in
this direction with the US allies, including our government, a Joint
Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) was created by the US military and
intelligence services.
What Wissing announced as a strategy when presenting the digitization progress report is fully in line with the strategy proclaimed by the aforementioned commissions to preserve US dominance in the world: less data protection, all data to the corporations and eliminating analogue alternatives for citizens. Anyone who knows even a little about the IT business has no doubt that this is primarily to satisfy the data hunger of US corporations. Processes such as those at Gaia-X, the European “ecosystem for business models and products based on data”, ensure that it stays that way.
Gaia X was originally intended to ensure greater European IT sovereignty. But then the large US IT companies were brought on board, or rather let on board, certainly under strong pressure from Washington. The German government refers to this very Gaia X in its digital strategy for networking data islands and creating open data availability. It is also symptomatic that the German government and Berlin are supporting a center for global government technology at the World Economic Forum in Berlin . The World Economic Forum is the lobby of the largest global corporations, the largest of which include the US IT companies.
This article first appeared at Norbert Häring .
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