At the ‘Summit of the Future’ next week, the UN is aiming to have a global digital pact adopted. The pact aims to promote digitisation and extensively use digital devices and programs. However, there has been a lack of public and parliamentary involvement in the negotiations of this pact.  The text appears to be written by large IT corporations.

While it may suit IT corporations, there is no protection in this pact for citizens’ right to opt out of their digital solutions even though there is an obvious aim of increasing the digital surveillance of the public’s every move and comment made.

In Two Weeks, Our Government Wants To Agree To A Global Pact For Digital Coercion

By Norbert Häring, 7 September 2024

Note from The Exposé: So the article is more legible, we have edited the direct translation of Häring’s article from German into English with the help of a version of his article, which is also in German, HERE.

On the 22 and 23 September, the UN ‘Summit of the Future’ prepared by the German and Namibian governments will take place in New York. A global digital pact [called the ‘Global Digital Compact’] is to be adopted, which has already been negotiated with almost complete exclusion from the public and – as far as I know – of the parliaments. If you push aside the fluffy language with which the Global Digital Compact is packed, you can see an agreement to force all people into a world controlled by digital corporations.

When I write about public exclusion, I don’t mean secrecy. The negotiations at the summit take place behind closed doors. But the Global Digital Compact in the 2nd revision and the 3rd revision versions has been released on the UN’s Summit of the Future webpage. But neither the UN nor those within the German government involved in the preparation of the summit have made serious efforts to inform the public about the plan, or even to have it discussed in parliaments and the media. It has also not been made public which corporations, foundations and hand-picked representatives of so-called civil society can sit at the negotiating table. The World Economic Forum is pretty sure to be there, the Club of Rome, as reported, probably as well.

In the text of the treaty, we learn by way of the introduction, that digital technologies “offer immense potential benefits for human welfare and the progress of societies,“ and that we, therefore, have to eliminate any digital divide between countries and within countries. The declared goal is “a digital future for everyone.“

What is important is what is not in the contract.  The word voluntary only occurs in connection with the signing of the contract. However, there is no right for citizens to choose a future other than the fully digitised one for themselves. Because that would open up a digital divide that should no longer exist. There is no right to regulate many of his/her affairs in a traditional way in dealing with other people instead of computers. Nobody should be allowed to choose that their children are taught by teachers instead of computers, or that conversations with the doctor and treatments remain a secret instead of being packed on the servers of the IT groups. Nothing in the contract suggests that such a right has been considered at all.

Risks are acknowledged but without the text being specific. They are to be “mitigated.” Human supervision of new technologies is also to be ensured. International cooperation must be agile and adapt to the rapidly changing technology landscape. Then there is a lot of blah blah with nice adjectives like sustainable, fair, open, responsible, etc. That sounds good but it has thick horses’ feet.

The development of the digital technology “landscape” is thus presented as coming from above, as something to which citizens and even governments have to adapt. Landscape is just another word for the digital corporations and what they come up with. This recognises a leadership role for the corporations. As I have already shown in an earlier article, this is a common thread of the UN future summit and the actions of the UN in the past two decades.

Read more: The world domination of corporations is to be laid down at the UN Future Summit, Norbert Häring, 28 November 2023 (German to English translation using site’s translation tool)

Under no circumstances should digitalisation risks be avoided, but only “mitigated.” “Human supervision” of the new technologies is very different from democratic control and decision-making autonomy of the users. If Elon Musk from X, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, Sam Altman from OpenAI and the heads of Google have sovereignty over the new technologies, this requirement of the contract is fulfilled, but the interests of the citizens are anything but protected. The whole contract reads as if the IT groups and their foundations had formulated 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

If at the international level, under the leadership of a UN strongly influenced by the IT companies, away from the public and parliaments, there is haggling to promote digitization and to get all people – whether they like it or not – to extensively use digital devices and programs, it is no longer surprising why our federal government is so committed to putting citizens under digital compulsion. Be it by abolishing the possibility of paying in cash, be it through the state-owned company Deutsche Bahn or the semi-state DHL or the arbitrary linking of state benefits such as Deutschlandticket, cultural vouchers for 18-year-olds and energy payments for students using a smartphone. This is how our government gets hardworking cards in the international evaluation of progress in digitisation.

The fact that citizens are thus subjected to increasingly intensive digital surveillance of their every move and comment made is an additional bonus for our surveillance-hungry rulers, one increasingly has the impression.

Do not accept this in silence! Let your Members of the European Parliament (“MEPs”) know that you expect them to defend your citizens’ right to a self-determined life with protected privacy. Ask them why the Digital Pact does not mention an individual right to refrain from digitisation and ask them what they think of it. Ask if you are following the maxim that everything that is good for IT groups is also good for Germany. Check whether you want to choose parties that place the interests of the IT industry above those of the citizens. According to my assessment, which is repeatedly presented with examples on this [Häring’s] blog, the digital compulsory parties are first and foremost the FDP, closely followed by the Greens and with little distance the CDU and SPD.

Supplementary note (8.9): I have added the link to the 3rd revision of the draft pact of July 11 in the 1st paragraph after the opening credits, which was published in mid-August.

P.S. If you are looking for information about which German participants, or in general which participants are allowed to attend this non-democratic event, you will find that even the Bilderberg Group is a model of transparency towards this forum.

Further reading: The Club of Rome wants a UN world government that implements its goals by law,

About the Author

Norbert Häring is a German economist and business journalist. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Saarbrücken in Germany.  He has been working for the German Wirtschaftsblatt Handelsblatt since 2002 and reports on finance and the economy. Häring is also the founder and director of the World Economics Association and co-editor of the World Economic Review. Together with Olaf Storbeck, Häring is the author of the book ‘Economy 2.0’.