Author Yang Ming, Professor of Peking University Law School.
Lead: The operation of today's society is increasingly characterized by data-driven and algorithmic governance. The platformization of social governance improves the cheapness of people's behavior, but it also strengthens the restraint and control of behavior. Therefore, how to realize the effective exchange of "regulation" and "innovation" through the social governance of the platform is the basic value orientation of the legal system to deal with technological progress.
In 2008, the international financial crisis broke out, and the global economic operation suffered a huge destructive impact. Under the pressure of difficulties, major countries in the world began to actively seek new kinetic energy to lead economic development. After more than ten years of exploration and practice, digital economy has become the most important driving force to promote global economic development. Looking back now, I'm afraid most people didn't expect that human society had completed the digital transformation so soon.
Moreover, with the transformation of production and trading, the social governance structure and people's lifestyle are also quietly and deeply digitized, and the whole society is moving towards network integration at an extraordinary speed, and the concept of pluralistic co-governance is also developing vigorously. The fundamental reason for the rapid progress of digital transformation is the development of digital technology (physical layer), but we should look at the problem from the dimension of social structure change (application layer). In short, digital transformation is a summary of the decentralized development of social relations. More importantly, this transformation makes it possible for social governance with a flat structure, and correspondingly produces the internal demand for institutional allocation, thus matching the new governance structure.
The supply of public goods is the basic function of the government, including housing, transportation, education, medical care, communication, logistics, finance, commerce, energy and water supply, garbage and sewage treatment, public safety, fire control technology and so on. , more complex, involving a wide range. Traditionally, in order to perform so many public functions, the government has to build a huge system and design effective information mechanism, decision-making mechanism and execution mechanism to ensure the operation of the system, so as to realize the reasonable scheduling and adaptation of resources. Because the relationship between "government and market" and "government and civil society" has long been a vertical structure of centralization, in order to ensure the effective operation of complex systems, managers (governments) must carefully design their organizational structures so that all links or organizations in the system can operate in harmony with each other.
Therefore, the complexity of the social governance system is obvious, and correspondingly, the operating cost of the system is also very huge. With the expansion of population and the change of social structure, the government must constantly "repair" or "upgrade" the system to cope with the growth problem in the system, so the cost is also increasing. The so-called development of social governance is essentially to solve or control the growth problem within a limited system. Therefore, we can summarize the development process of human society as the cyclical process of the above-mentioned coping relationship. When growth control becomes more and more difficult, how to maintain the effective operation of centralized vertical structure has become a huge challenge that the government must deal with.
The traditional social governance system is based on "state power is the most effective tool to protect individual rights" and has the following characteristics: function orientation, high specialization, decentralized decision-making power, bureaucratic transmission and limited horizontal connection. The rapid development of information technology has had a great impact on this construction foundation. With the significant decrease of information cost, the connectivity between social units (whether people, fields or public affairs) has been continuously strengthened, which has led to a fundamental change in the relationship between public functions and market mechanisms. In short, the blurred boundary between the private sphere and the public sphere makes the bureaucratic and function-oriented governance structure lose its efficiency advantage more and more.
The redistribution of social resources caused by the innovation of digital technology is incomparable to the social changes produced by any industrial revolution in the past. Therefore, from the internal relationship between social structure changes and institutional system configuration, social governance in the digital age is bound to be very different from the governance mechanism based on traditional industrial civilization. The rapid progress of information collection, transmission, storage and processing technology, as well as the rapid popularization of information network infrastructure, have greatly improved the quantification, agility and accuracy of social affairs decision-making, and at the same time, have broken the subject limit or "threshold" of participating in decision-making. Large-scale data collection, processing and decision-making based on big data inevitably require effective means to eliminate information barriers, which is difficult to achieve under the vertical governance structure of traditional society. With the rapid development of digital tools, people can realize data-driven behavior choice and gradually evolve into a data-driven social order.
Digital transformation means that physical social infrastructure is connected with information infrastructure, which is conducive to the decentralized and flat development of social governance structure. The concentration of data enables many public affairs mentioned above to be integrated into one platform, allowing different stakeholders to participate in decision-making and jointly formulate solutions to problems. This is the so-called platformization of social governance. Affected by this, the boundary between the government and the market has changed, and the social contract between the state and citizens has been reshaped into an intelligent cooperative relationship on the Internet platform.
Platform-based social governance helps to solve the problem of information asymmetry, so it can promote creative cooperation. At the same time, this cooperation can further enhance the intelligence of the system, thus continuously improving the efficiency of social governance. It can be seen that the traditional governance structure takes the structure as the control means, and the platform replaces the structure with technology. With the continuous progress and wide application of technology, the data advantage platform will grow into a public organization with strong control. As a result, the network economic mechanism of "platform is market" has further evolved into the organizational mechanism of "platform is society". The socialization of the platform shows that the demands of different stakeholders for public functions can be realized through this organizational form, and the highly connected and collaborative society also shows a platform-based operation mode. In a word, platform socialization and social platformization.
In addition to economic opportunities and social forms, social governance under the background of digital transformation also involves several new dimensions, such as the impact of information infrastructure on the overall welfare of society and the interaction between social units (interconnection). Therefore, social governance through the platform includes not only the performance of public functions in the traditional sense (just using the platform as a medium and using big data for decision-making and execution), but also the governance of the platform itself. As far as the former is concerned, the economic impact of platformization and the resulting efficiency improvement are obvious. The application of digital technology has greatly optimized the transparency, predictability and quantification of social governance, and constantly spawned new public services (such as mobile payment, shared travel, traffic control and so on). ), finally, the behavior patterns and choices of social members (whether competitors in the market or citizens in daily life) have changed.
As a data gathering space, the platform can improve the ability of decision makers, whether through data integration view or historical big data regression model. A large number of studies describe the efficiency improvement brought by digital empowerment. However, while big data provides benefits for social governance, we should not ignore the deviation or alienation that data-driven and algorithmic governance may intentionally cover up, which mainly refers to ethics-related topics, such as informed consent, privacy, ownership, epistemology and big data gap. Because there is often an asymmetric relationship between the two creators of big data mining, analysis and utilization, in the process of dealing with public affairs, the value orientation related to the aforementioned ethical topics is often "swallowed up" by powerful data subjects in the name of innovation. The deviation or alienation of big data has been manifested in many forms, among which "innovation failure" and "dissatisfaction with digital disciplines" deserve our vigilance.
Social governance through platforms is complicated, because "the socialization of platforms and the platformization of society" make it difficult for people to have a clear and stable understanding of the decision-making process of big data. Although the innovation space brought by digital technology can be imagined infinitely, the positive and negative incentives of technology are accompanied, and the orderly development of society needs to strike a balance between encouraging innovation and restraining risks. Just as we once had a heated debate on "the incentive and harm of patent system to innovation", platformization is also faced with the exchange of interests between "supervision" and "innovation", and the risk of imbalance between them will only become more prominent. Ronald Burt, a sociologist, has put forward profound views on how social relations affect information dissemination, thus affecting the direction and speed of innovation. On the basis of his own research, the author thinks that the failure of innovation is related to the cognitive differences in social structure, and the legal system arrangement that promotes the free flow of information and tries to eliminate the structural overlap between social subsystems is the only way to realize the effective exchange of innovation and regulation and promote breakthrough innovation.
In the reconstruction of social order, the algorithm rules supporting platform governance are easily misunderstood, thinking that the resulting order is the natural result of technical rules. In fact, as Google's "Influenza Trend Prediction System (GFT)" has been criticized, the so-called prediction is intervention, and artificial guidance may be packaged into algorithm rules. Therefore, the so-called technical order of social governance is often a legal order or a regulatory order. Moreover, due to the huge gap in big data analysis capabilities, platform governance is more capable of disciplining and shaping governance objects than traditional social governance. In order to prevent and correct the unsatisfactory digital discipline, we should construct and constantly improve the regulatory rules of the digital ecosystem as soon as possible in view of its causes, such as public policy deviation, platform reverse incentive or moral hazard. Specific to the operational level, the data should be classified and standardized, and the possibility of judicial review should be expanded by using algorithm filing and algorithm audit mechanisms, so as to encourage positive guidance and restrain the internal motivation of negative punishment.
Conclusion:
As early as 20 15, Boyd Cohen described the three development stages of smart cities from "technology company-driven" to "municipal-driven" and then to "citizen-driven". It seems that social governance can also be described in the same logical context. Digital transformation makes the social structure very complicated. On the one hand, technological innovators have contributed more efficient governance methods, but at the same time, they have also brought more updated thorny issues as governance objects. Therefore, simple technical orders or regulatory orders are not enough. In order to promote the effective exchange of "regulation" and "innovation", the legal level should complete the construction of the corresponding rule system as soon as possible and reasonably divide the boundary between the government and the market. (Zhongxin Jingwei APP)
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