Open Government Partnership IRM recommends US government revise approach

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There are reasons to be hopeful about open government as the United States as the new year begins, but also cause for grave concern. In December 2023, researchers at the Independent Review Mechanism (IRM) of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) confirmed what good governance advocates have said since 2017: the federal government is still not meeting the standards for open government domestically that the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) encourages other nations to adopt internationally.

Instead of standing with people demanding transparency from U.S. government, as President Biden encouraged other nations to do in December 2021, the White House refused to hold meetings in person in 2022 and 2023 and to incorporate the priorities of the (dwindling number of) good governance organizations and individuals willing to participate in voluntary multi-stakeholder processes after years of eroding trust and inaction.

Instead of seizing the moment and reviving the process with renewed leadership, the Biden administration starved OGP of attention, capacity, and relevance while creating a far weaker multi-stakeholder initiative, the Summit for Democracy.

The White House did not co-create a new “National Action Plan” for Open Government in 2022 with the American people and then announce it in a press conference, embrace accountability for the failures of the previous administration, and then use participation and collaboration to build back public trust.

Instead, the IRM found that the White House pre-drafted and then published a report full of vague, mostly pre-existing commitments – including many that were not relevant to government transparency and accountability – ignored expert feedback regarding opaque processes and flawed product, and then published yet another weak open government plan online over the holidays in December 2022.

This is unfortunately not novel. The OGP IRM has found the United States to have repeatedly acted contrary to process for years now. Nonetheless OGP restored the country to good standing after the Trump White House delivered a new plan in 2019 – despite ample cause for keeping a corrupt, secretive administration under review prior to a historic pandemic and attempted auto-coup.

After documenting the White House’s failures to engage the American public at scale, collaborate in choosing and drafting commitments on transparency and accountability, disclose comments, or provide a reasoned response for ignoring the consensus recommendations of good governance organizations, researchers at the Open Government Partnership Independent Review Mechanism recommended that the U.S. government collaborate with civil society to identify verifiable commitments with the most potential and refine them in 2024. 

In their report, the IRM identified six “promising commitments” in a policy area that important to stakeholders or the national context which are verifiable, have an open government lens, and modest or substantial potential for results: 

  • Commitment 1: Production, dissemination, and use of equitable data 
  • Commitment 4: Public access to federally funded research 
  • Commitment 8: Data for environmental justice Commitment 18: Government-wide anti-corruption strategy 
  • Commitment 27: Access to government information through FOIA 
  • Commitment 35: Effective and accountable policing and criminal justice

The good governance community also called on the US government to add new commitments to the 5th NAP in August, which the White House has so far declined to do — despite a mechanism that would allow it, as in the 3rd NAP. 

Letter to President Biden on Advancing Ambitious New Commitments on Open Government to Defend Democracy

Unfortunately, the White House has yet to acknowledge the (incredibly) constructive criticism from the researchers by revising selected commitments – much less added new ones, as the Obama White House did in 2016.

Instead, the administration invested a million dollars to fund an Open Government Secretariat within the General Services Administration to track progress on the commitments the White House chose and host a series of virtual seminars in 2023, complying with the bare minimum of the Open Government Partnership’s requirements for documenting implementation.

The Biden administration also has yet to respond formally to the “contrary to process” letter the Partnership sent in August or the letter a coalition of good governance groups sent to the President, bring senior officials to in-person roundtables in DC and around the nation, fix an opaque process, and heal badly broken relationships.

There continue to be good faith efforts across the agencies in the executive branch, from the National Archives to the General Services Administration, but strategic silence from the White House on open government has signaled to civil society and officials alike that this is not a priority.

If the President and his advisors see the value of investing political capitol, oversight capacity, and top-level leadership in open government across the federal government, change is possible. It’s crucial to provide dedicated civil servants with the air cover and capacity to do the work necessary to bring dormant or dissolved policies, programs, and partnerships back online to build resilience against headwinds for American democracy at home and abroad.

If the United States does not lead by the power of our example in 2024, our government will lose an opportunity to build trust in democratic governance through accountability and increase resilience against authoritarianism though transparency.

The Department of Justice’s “FOIA Wizard” isn’t a magical solution for White House strategic silence on open government

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In December 2021, President Biden urged “every nation in the Open Government Partnership to take up a call to action to fight the scourge of corruption, to “stand with those in civil society and courageous citizens around the world who are demanding transparency of their governments,” and to “all work together to hold governments accountable for the people they serve.”

Almost two years later, the United States is still not leading by the power of our example by including the priorities of US civil society organizations in additional commitments and engaging the American people and press using the bully pulpit of the White House, despite rejoining the Open Government Partnership’s Steering Committee.

What was missing from President Biden’s remarks at the Open Government Summit

That disconnect was evident at a public meeting with the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) on September 26, 2023. Members of the public and press who are interested in a first look at the Freedom of Information “Wizard” the OIP has been building with Forum One Communications can watch recorded video of the meeting on YouTube, along with DoJ’s work on common business standards and the “self-assessment toolkit” the agency updated. All three of these pre-existing initiatives were submitted as commitments on FOIA in the 5th U.S. National Action Plan for Open Government last December.

The General Services Administration’s new Open Government Secretariat will post a “meeting record” at open.usa.gov — their summary of what happened — though it’s not online yet. (Slides are online, along with agenda and screenshots.)

We posed a number of questions via chat that Lindsey Steel from OIP acknowledged, though not always directly answered — like the U.S. government not co-creating any of the FOIA commitments that were being discussed with civil society, in the Open Government Partnership model. (Unlike other previous public meetings in 2022 and 2023, members of civil society were given the opportunity to ask questions on video.)

While it’s both useful and laudable for OIP to take public questions on its work, the pre-baked commitments they presented on were not responsive to the significant needs of a historic moment in which administration of the Freedom of Information Act appears broken to many close observers, and follow an opaque, flawed consultation that was conducted neither in the spirit nor co-creation standards of the Open Government Partnership itself.

While the Open Government Partnership’s Independent Review Mechanism is far slower that press cycles in 2023, the independent researchers there have caught up with the USA’s poor performance since 2016. (Unfortunately, the OGP’s Independent Review Mechanism and Steering Committee’s governance processes both move too slowly to sanction governments during or after the co-creation process for failing to meet co-creation standards in a way that would have empowered US civil society in 2022.)

In a letter dated August 13, 2023, the Open Government Partnership formally informed the US government on August that it has acted contrary to process in its co-creation of.4th National Action Plan for Open Government and implementation of the plan.

The U.S. government’s response did not directly acknowledge any of the substantive criticism in the IRM or by good government watchdogs, much less announce a plan to address its failure to co-create a 5th National Action Plan last fall by coming back to the table.

Instead, the General Services Administration simply promised to do better in 2024 in a 6th plan and to keep updating the public on the work U.S. government was already doing.

The request of the coalition prior to the Open Government Partnership Summit was for the U.S. government to come back to the table and co-create new commitments that are representative of our priorities, not to continue hosting virtual webinars at which civil servants provide “updates” on pre-existing commitments in order to be in compliance with the bare minimum that OGP asks of participating nations.

With respect to FOIA, doing more than the minimum would look like the White House making new commitments to effective implementation of the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 and the Open Government Data Act through executive actions, including:

  • Building on U.S. Attorney General’s memorandum mandating the presumption of openness and ensure fair and effective FOIA administration.
  • Convening the U.S. Digital Service, 18F, and the nation’s civic tech community to work on improving FOIA.gov, using the same human-centric design principles for improved experience that are being applied to service delivery across U.S. government.
  • Making sure FOIA.gov users can search for records across reading rooms, Data.gov, USASpending.gov, and other federal data repositories.
  • Restoring a Cross-Agency Priority goal for FOIA.
  • Advising agencies to adopt the US FOIA Advisory Committee recommendations.
  • Tracking agency spending on FOIA and increase funding to meet the demand.
  • Directing the Department of Justice to roll out the “release-to-one, release-to-all” policy for FOIA piloted at the direction of President Obama, which the State Department has since adopted.
  • Collecting and publishing data on which records are being purchased under the FOIA by commercial enterprises for non-oversight purposes, and determine whether that data can or should be proactively disclosed.
  • Funding and building dedicated, secure online services for people to gain access to immigration records and veterans records — as the DHS Advisory Committee recommended — instead of forcing them to use the FOIA.
  • Commiting to extending the FOIA to algorithms and revive Code.gov as a repository for public sector code.”

We continue to hope that President Biden will take much more ambitious actions on government transparency, accountability, participation, and collaboration in order to restore broken public trust in our federal government, acting as a bulwark against domestic corruption and authoritarianism.

New US Chief FOIA Officer’s Council memo on the future of FOIA, online

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In August, the U.S. Chief Freedom of Information Act Officers Council issued a memorandum on the deadline for interoperability with FOIA.gov & sunset of FOIAOnline on September 30.

The U.S. FOIA Advisory Committee discussed the memo at our public meeting on September 7, 2023.

I’ve shared this memorandum and some analysis about what it means for the future of FOIA online over on the public US Open Government listserv that the USGSA maintains.

There’s a story here, for any journalists looking more than “Commander bites man.”

White House “virtual listening session” on new OIRA guidance on broadening public engagement in rulemaking

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This post contains an audio recording (above) of a public Zoom call held on July 20, 2023 to update Americans on select commitments in the 5th U.S. National Action Plan for Open Government, more than six months after the White House published the plan online at the end of December 2022.

Officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) presented on their work on commitments to make the voices of the public heard.

The first half of the forum discussed new guidance on broadening public engagement in the regulatory process issued on July 2019, followed by questions about developing a framework for engagement for use across the federal government. OMB requests feedback on the questions below to go to publicparticipation@omb.eop.gov.

  1. Should the Federal government adopt a common framework for participation and engagement? What might such a framework include?
  2. How would you design an ideal process to develop such a framework?
  3. What points in the process (e.g., outline, first draft, final draft) are most important for public engagement?
  4. What engagement formats or activities would be most effective for developing a Federal framework?
  5. What might the Federal government do to make it easier for people to participate?

Our view? OMB should go back to the future. Review the Public Participation Playbook the Obama White House developed with the public in 2015, as part of the US government’s efforts to open government. Then, working in collaboration with the Office of Public Engagement, host a series of open government roundtables with the nation’s leading authorities on civic engagement and public participation in 2023 and 2024 that inform guidance for the federal government.

Officials might review what approaches were effective in engaging Americans with public health information in the pandemic, voting information, and extreme weather — and which were not.

That work should be part of a new open government plans at OMB and OSTP that are hosted at whitehouse.gov/open, showing President Biden’s commitment to government transparency like whitehouse.gov/equity shows his administration’s commitment to equity.

Screenshots of the presentation follow. (Our apologies: we missed slide 3 and 9.)

Should this White House publish slides or notes from this public session on its work implementing open government commitments, we will update this post.

(Officials said that the session was not recorded, so we are providing the above resources for the Americans who were unable to attend or who did not hear about this opportunity to engage with OMB and OIRA about broadening public engagement because this administration did not engage the public. As you’ll hear in the recording, the public participants in this listening session offered praise for the guidance and suggestions for improvement tempered with critiques of the opaque process, poor communications about the forum, and dissatisfaction at the lack of a cohesive way to track and understand this administration’s work on government transparency and accountability.)

July 12, 2023 US open government “virtual engagement session”

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This post contains an audio recording (above) of the Zoom call held on July 12, 2023 to update the public on select commitments in the 5th U.S. National Action Plan for Open Government, more than six months after the White House published the plan online in December 2022.

The Office of Management and Budget presented on its work opening up the regulatory process, among other areas.

Should the General Services Administration publish video and transcript of this session, as the Open Government Secretariat indicated they would explore, we will add both.

Threats to transparency and election integrity in Mexico threaten democratic stability in the Americas

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Imagine if senators were refusing to vote on a deputy attorney’s nomination, blocking the administration of the Freedom of Information Act at the Justice Department. Imagine if President Biden then proposed defunding the Office of Information Policy. Now, imagine if OIP didn’t just offer guidance and generated reports on FOIA but combined the functions of the National Archives, Justice Department, Congress & judicial ethics offices into one transparency institution that oversees all three branches of a federal constitutional republic under a strong freedom of information law.

Bienvenidos a Mexico. This is exactly what’s happening in Mexico right now as the AP reported on April 30.

This threat to freedom of information and public knowledge is not happening in isolation, either.

In February, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador proposed budget and staff cuts at Mexico’s independent electoral agency.

Now, President Obrador is now calling for USAID to defund Article 19.

Access Now condemns AMLO’s call to cut funding for Article 19

Public accountability and privacy have been under threat in Mexico since 2021, but the growing risk has been under the radar in the USA. More recently, it has been obscured by rancor and fear regarding immigration at the southern border after Title 42 ended.

That’s a mistake: both Congress and news media should be focusing on what the changes to good governance in election systems, open government agencies, & chilling of NGOs would mean to Mexico, especially when combined with ongoing threats to journalists and activists from cartels, organized crime, & corrupted police.

The destabilization of Mexican democracy would represent a huge diplomatic, economic, and security challenge for the USA which must neither be ignored nor neglected.

What happens there will affect more than our politics, especially if conditions at the border deteriorate after a major natural disaster, from supply chains to labor supplies.

The looming challenges of migration from destabilized states should be driving comprehensive immigration reform, with investments in human capacity, courts, and services that would all increase resilience against the escalating stress that millions of people seeking asylum and economic opportunity in the USA will place on our own systems, as we are seeing today across the southern border of our union.

The renewed efforts to eliminate this transparency institution are a dagger of Damocles dangling over the heart of a still-young democracy whose stability and development are critical to American national security, public health, and public safety.

An assault on any one of institutions that provides checks and balances in a nation destabilizes the whole, from an independent judiciary to a free press to nonpartisan electoral administration.

An assault on all of them at once is a flashing WARNING sign that should be provoking an “all hands on deck response from the United States.

The long arc of our nation’s history with Mexico suggests to me that honesty, humility, and humanity from our nation’s leaders will be more effective here than bullying, bluster, or blunt demands or threats that would further fuel toxic headwinds.

In a different timeline, the President, Congress, and Supreme Court might be issuing a joint statement encouraging the Government of Mexico to invest in the laws, institutions, and people that are at the heart of a thriving democracy, reminding them that to allow any one party or politician to corrupt one organ risks killing the entire body politic.

In the world we have, such a public alignment between the leases of our own government seems inconceivable. It should be possible for the US government to speak as one to our neighbor in a new clear, stunning statement offering a hand in friendship to our neighbor partner to build more healthy democratic states together that center human rights, human dignity, and human potential.

Until that happens, it’s crucial for everyone else to call on Mexico’s leaders to uphold the public right to know and election integrity.

Every White House needs to inform and engage Americans “where we are,” online and offline

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The Obama White House joined Tumblr on this day, one decade ago.

In 2023, the White House is not on Tumblr or many of the other social networks it was updating in 2013.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, GitHub, & Flickr endure.

Digg, MySpace, Vine, Storify, GooglePlus, not so much.

It’s surprising that they’re not on LinkedIn.

Once a White House commits to reaching Americans “where we are”, then the offices of public engagement, press secretary, & communications need to apply online & offline strategies for public participation & public information, not just for politics.

Relevant vectors include:
📰 news
📻 radio
📺 TV
💬 texts
🤳social media
📧 email
🎙️town halls
📚libraries
🚉transit
🏫schools

Instead of banning TikTok, imagine if the White House tried to engage ~150 million Americans there, & then crossposted each video PSA across Instagram Snap Inc. & YouTube to ensure that info was available to all.

Start with vote.gov & serve.gov or. Build new .gov & services with us.

I know it looks dark online, but we should still be thinking bigger about how to do more than just get We the People Internet access, as foundational as that is: we need to make it matter, rebuilding trust through the delivery of trustworthy information over time on participatory platforms.

Better digital services won’t be enough: we need integrated offline and online strategies that find publics with information wherever we are.

We need a government communications revolution proportionate to the paired public health and civic crises we have collectively endured over the pandemic.

I still believe in the capacity of my fellow Americans to deliver on it, in no small part by learning about what the rest of the world is doing online and adapting, adopting, and improving civic technologies that meet our own needs.

Anti-democratic policy and chaotic leadership will force more institutions to reassess how they use Twitter

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As I told CNBC yesterday, Twitter’s ban on promotion of selected social media services and restriction of links was not a good policy. Suspensions of journalists reporting on moderation decisions was similarly horrific, chilling journalism on the platform and serving notice that new management was willing to change policy and ban journalists.

Successful companies should compete in the markets for attention, advertising, & information online by making & deploying robust, compelling products and services, not suddenly imposing draconian limits to freedom of expression and linking to other services online, which key anti-competitive behavior & anti-consumer behavior. 

After a massive backlash, Twitter owner Elon Musk apologized for sudden policy changes, Twitter deleted @TwitterSafety’s tweets and a webpage that outlined the regressive policy banned alternative social platforms, and Musk created a poll asking if he should step down. 

Got all that?

It’s been helluva 48 hours online, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time on social media over the past two decades.

This rollercoaster ride to and from Hades is far from over.

If explicitly anti-press, anti-government, & transphobic rhetoric, suspensions of the press, & extraordinary restrictions on both freedom of expression & freedom to link continue, more institutions will be forced off the sidelines this week to suspend participation, shift to listening mode, or leave outright Twitter.

As with every platform where we spent time, attention, or money, online or off, individuals, corporations, news media, & democratic governments all must reassess what corporate behavior, norms, & policies they are willing to endorse through continued participation, much less support through paid promotion or subscriptions. 

Since 2006, Twitter has acted as an information utility, along with a news browser, organizing tool, office watercooler, social network, & global platform for protests, campaigns, & lies that fueled an insurrection. 

It’s always been driven and shaped by the action of humans on it, not just the product and policy and feature decisions of its operators. The emergent behavior we see in reaction to the past week of changes will shape what Twitter will be in 2023, & to whom.

How governments should respond to changes at Twitter

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The impact of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the subsequent exodus of staff from layoffs and resignations continues to ripple outwards today. While the platform remains online today, every person or institution that uses it should be preparing for downtime and continuing changes to the policies on Twitter, along with the diminished capacity of its remaining staff to fix technical issues or mitigate the range of governance crises associated with running one of the world’s most prominent social media companies.

Government agencies have special considerations, however, and can’t afford to fiddle around while Twitter’s servers burn. Putting aside the prospect of regulatory action by the Federal Trade Commission or European data protection agencies, there’s some basic block and tackling that leaders need to moeg on, now. Lindsey Crudele reached out with questions about what that might look like this past week and published a useful article on what government agencies should do. I’ve published the answers I sent her in full, with an addendum to the last.

Why does Twitter matter to government agencies in 2022? Examples of usage you’d consider notable)?

This is such a huge question! It brought me back to 2011, when I was writing and thinking about how government should use social media all the time, as opposed to a lot of it. Just about all of this holds up, from use cases to why social media platforms and listening matters.

Social media has been where publics have been online in increasing majorities across nations since the dominant platforms of today launched in the 2000s: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – along with hundreds of social media startups that died, or faded, like Tumblr or Flickr or Delicious, though many still have millions of active users. MySpace still exists!

More seriously, while Twitter is much smaller than other global social platforms, in terms of daily active users and time spent, it has developed disproportionate influence and impact because of who those users are: world leaders, journalists, politicians, and thousands of institutions, from governments to universities to corporations.

Former President Trump’s use and abuse of Twitter made it even more of a central clearinghouse for US politics and US government policy. While banning him significantly reduced the amount of misinformation and lies on the platform, the Biden administration and other governments haven’t retreated from using Twitter to make announcements, break news, push back on misleading narratives, or engage publics.

If Twitter went away tomorrow, that broadcasting activity would likely be distributed across other services, from Facebook to Mastodon. What would be missing is the (mostly) open platform to listen in natural disasters or crises that Twitter provided and the default backchannel for many public conversations across industries and culture.

Given staffing cuts and leadership changes, what does platform and policy instability mean for government agencies on Twitter?

It means they should be making a plan for Twitter to go down, due to infrastructure issues, or for the integrity of the platform to decrease as content moderation capacity, support, and security are degraded, the level of misinformation and disinformation surges, and people leave the platform. (This is the same disaster recovery and business continuity plan that agencies should have had in case Twitter was taken offline by a hostile nation state around election day.) 

It’s critical for governments to go where people and press are online to listen and engage, but never to become dependent on any company. No one — government, politicians, media, academia, nonprofits, private corporations, activists, foundations, or scientists — should allow a third party company, much less one owned by a capricious billionaire who espouses anti-government and anti-democratic views, to own their relationships with communities, clients, or constituents. It’s crucial for the stewards of public institutions and the services and information they provide to avoid any single point of failure so as to avoid a singular crisis.

 What is your advice for agencies who use Twitter at this time in light of the changes?

As I said elsewhere, the first step is not to panic. Keep calm and tweet on. Let the constituents, residents, citizens, and communities who depend on you know that you will keep listening and link to your website and other channels to request help or get information

Second, turn on multi-factor authentication now. (Use an app, not SMS.) Disconnect third party apps.

The next step is to make sure agencies are ready for Twitter to go down, cease to be useful, or put their accounts behind a paywall, which may limit its utility as a public engagement channel – parallel to op-eds placed behind newspaper paywalls or interviews on subscription-based streaming services. If there’s a large enough engaged group of constituents and residents on a given platform, it makes sense for government agencies to at least be listening there.

The fourth step is to download agency social media archives, to ensure all public records are properly memorialized, and proactively disclose them on agency websites.

The fifth step is to secure all institutional social media accounts (not just Twitter) and connected email accounts – all of which should be connected to a .gov email! – with two-factor authentication.

The sixth step is to think bigger. Agency leadership should think about how all public communications and civic engagement efforts are working together in a holistic way, including email, texting, websites, social media, PR, direct mail, print/radio/digital ads, and press relations.

Finally, explore an institutional presence on Mastodon, in coordination with local, state, and federal leadership: it may make sense for one agency to create an instance to host accounts on, like the German government and MIT has stood up.

In the USA, President Biden should direct U.S. Digital Service and 18F to pilot a U.S. government instance on Mastodon, in collaboration with the Library of Congress and U.S. National Archives, and request Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young to issue guidance to all federal agencies on Twitter to download an archive of our public records from all official accounts. Imagine something like mastodon.usa.gov with agency accounts on it, for example, or mastodon.congress.gov with all official Congressional accounts.

(And as always, remember your towels.)

P.S. Over on Twitter, consultant and CTO Shannon Clarke suggested that “potentially specific agencies might want their own instance of Mastodon (or similar ActivityPub platform) so like email all users/accounts there would be clear which agency so perhaps name at agency.social dot is .gov or similar.”

That may make sense across local, state, and federal agencies – particularly for those with tens of thousands of staff. It might not be the right fit for tiny state or local agencies, though running a open, federal social system as a part of a polity’s websites may become table stakes for webmasters & IT staff. It’s certainly possible to imagine schools and libraries creating instances for students as alternatives to commercial social media, but that would be predicated on internal capacity, the ability to pay vendors, or the presence of state or local digital services that can delivery or maintain those systems.

I expect we’re going to see a riotous combination of approaches if there isn’t clear leadership. Clarke further posited that “there will be a reasonably good business (or service of an agency) in managing hosted instances of ActivityPub servers perhaps with government specific additional features (like formal, permanent archives; integration to identity management systems etc).”

I suspect he’s right and that will bear out over time in parallel ways to how Drupal and WordPress have been adopted and maintained by agencies – but

P.P.S. Also on Twitter, technologist Bob Wyman made an important point about how a “federal fediverse” should be configured: “If government uses Mastodon, or some other software, its public addresses or names should not include the software’s name. Government names should be generic. They should refer either to protocol (i.e. http://activitypub.gov), or to function (e.g. http://announce.gov).”

This makes sense to me, in terms of how domain names interact with the underlying technologies and protocols. Imagine social.usa.gov as a entry point for all executive branch .gov social media accounts or social.congress.gov.

The metaverse of 2040 must encode democratic values, or it will enable an authoritarian nightmare

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Image Credit: Online Abuse in the Metaverse Untangled, Web Foundation

In many ways, one future is already here: the metaverse Meta imagines is just not evenly distributed yet. But, as with the Internet that the nascent virtual worlds Facebook founder is building has in many senses been built upon, what the metaverse (or metaverses!) will be has yet to be written – much less the ways humanity will use it.

In 2022, the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center surveyed hundreds of technology experts about what the metaverse will look like in 2040.

Two key themes emerged from that non-scientific canvasing:

  1. A “notable share of these experts argued that the embrace of extended reality in people’s daily lives by 2040 will be centered around augmented-reality and mixed-reality tools, not in the more-fully-immersive virtual reality worlds many people define today as being ‘the metaverse.’”
  2. Experts “warned that these new worlds could dramatically magnify every human trait and tendency – both the bad and the good. They especially focused their concerns on the ability of those in control of these systems to redirect, restrain or thwart human agency and stifle people’s ability to self-actualize through exercise of free will, and they worried over the future freedom of humans to expand their native capacities.”

This following is our full answer to Pew’s questions, with two summaries distilled from the survey results. (You can read the rest in this PDF or Pew’s website.)

_______________________________________________________________

What we imagine about the future has always shaped by great authors and filmmakers whose vision inspires humans to invent the future. It can take decades or centuries or even millennia for many technology to catch up with someone’s imagination, though the future we experience may differ from the one we expected because of an accelerant like a global pandemic or a war. It may take years for the relevance or full impact of a new technology upon society to become apparent, like the Internet, smartphone, social media, bulk surveillance, drones, artificial intelligence, or mRNA vaccines.

The metaverse will be no different.

We may think of of it as conceived by Neal Stephenson in “Snow Crash,” the iconic cyberpunk novel from the 1990s that described a virtual world that could be accessed using personal terminals with goggles, public terminals and booths, or portable rigs operated by “gargoyles” who were always online. In many ways, such a space has existed and endures Second Life for the past two decades, but – unlike text and video-based social media platforms – never reached planetary scale. Around two hundred thousand people log onto Second Life daily in 2022, but the other 7 billion of us do not.

By 2040, we should expect the personal and public terminals that Stephenson once envisaged to exist in many forms around the globe, from public kiosks to university pods to private homes to library booths to commercial gear operated corporations to police and military interfaces. If the world is anything like today, each will have its own affordances, stigma, power, and privileges that will be reflected in capacity and appearance.

We should also expect that the smartglasses, VR goggles, and AR browsers in our smartphones today will be akin to the personal computers of the 1980s and cellphones of the 1990s in two decades time. The emerging panoply of computing devices that augment what we see and enable us to explore virtual worlds using avatars project images onto lenses or our eyeballs are still in their relative infancy today, as are the smartwatches, health bands, and fitness trackers of today.

In 2040, we should expect spoken and gestural interfaces like the ones we saw in “Minority Report” that enable us to interact in augmented reality layers in a given physical location, viewing the annotations and glyphs others have left, with background systems pulling up information about the people, places, and objects we observe. This will have some implications for how we live, work, play, govern, conduct business, pursue romance, as these new civic, corporate, and private spaces become commercialized or co-opted by the same societal forces and institutions that shaped the development and extension of Internet technologies in the 20th century.

When combined, all of these devices, our activity on them, the sensors in them, and the urban environments around us and above us will make up an “embodied Internet” on which we leave digital exhaust with each action or movement.

As with smartphones and the data collection practices of 2022, people won’t need to be wearing goggles, smartglasses or other wearable computers to be affected by adding more Internet-connected cameras, sensors, and autonomous devices to public and private spaces. This will put a premium on nations and states enacting data protection laws that protect children, consumers, citizens, and seniors as they move through these sensorized spaces.

While dystopian outcomes aren’t assured, there is gathering risk that failures in collective action will allow today’s ransomware and speak phishing to persist and become even more pernicious as more and more human activity is tracked as we navigate a planet overlaid with a metaverse. As with rapidly emerging systems that currently are being used in concentration camps by authoritarians in modern surveillance states, such a metaverse could empower authoritarians to track, control, and coerce billions of humans in silicon prisons ringed by invisible barbed wire, governed by opaque algorithmic regulation and vast artificial intelligences.

By 2040, we should expect to see positive applications of augmented reality in education, the sciences, entertainment, manufacturing, governance, and more, combined with virtual experiences that mix up holographic avatars with humans in ways that recall Star Trek’s holodeck.

In the most optimistic timeline, we will see the best of the generative aspects of today’s crude virtual worlds on Roblox or Minecraft evolve into global marketplaces in which people can buy synthetic goods and services with digital assets. If nation states can shape democratic norms into globally respected laws, billions of humans will be able to work, learn, play, and share in new civic spaces in which privacy and security by default protect human rights and civil liberties across platforms and media. Human nature itself will not change, but the nature of being human will be informed by this shift, as will our capacity to push for collective action to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

If nations do not enact data protection laws that center human rights online, however, and insist upon open standards and democratic norms for the emergent civic spaces of today, then the metaverses of 2040 will be pervasive closed platforms of coercion & control driven by surveillance capitalism, not open platforms for expression, connection, & generativity.