tl;dr: Social innovators are political entrepreneurs and the sustainability of the digital age requires a new political economy
Can digitalisation aid in achieving Sustainable Development? The answer is ”definitely maybe“. Digitalisation comes with great potentials of empowering active prosumerism and new forms of creative collaboration beyond the market, but also with great rucksacks of material and energy consumption. Digital Sustainability then demands fundamental economic change towards a circular economy, but also a transformation of social behaviours and structures. In order to unlock the Sustainability potential of digital technologies and applications, digitalisation has to be understood as a social phenomenon and driving social innovation. At the heart of social innovation are fundamentally changed social practices constituted by new technologies, new individual skills and new collective meaning constructions.
What has to be clear from the start: digitalisation surely is transformative but it is neither sustainable or contributing to the common good … per se. Like any other technology, it shapes and informs political, economic and societal perceptions but there is nothing inherently good in any of that. In order to address the benefits and opportunities for a more sustainable society through digitalisation we need to focus more closely on the social aspects. In fact, we need to understand digitalisation as a social phenomenon, not just a technological one. “Social”, however, does not mean “good” or “nice” or “altruistic” or anything like that; it points our attention to the in-between of our reality, to the very relations that constitute our society. That relational space is the home to communication, to interaction and exchange. Everything that affects that in-between changes society and how we relate to each other in a significant way. Digital technologies are probably the most severe communication innovation since the mechanical printing press and scholars like Dirk Baecker see a “Next Society” emerging because of them. That Next Society is signified by increasingly fluid barriers between business, politics, civil society, science and so on. Intersectorality would be another term to describe this phenomenon of blurring boundaries. When we focus on economic exchange, the notion of “prosumerism” coined by Alvin Toffler comes to mind: the collapse of production and consumption into one activity, a renewed empowerment of people to create what they need themselves without over-reliance on external market forces.
This perspective on a more social form of digitalisation then brings us to the notion of “social innovation”. We see a similar confusion here when it comes to definitions what exactly makes an innovation a social one. For me the concept of social practice can shed some light on that question. From social practice theory we know that a social practice can be understood as the fundamental building block of the relational space that creates our society. Within every social practice we can distinguish three elements that have to occur simultaneously to form that practice. These elements are: meaning, skills, and material. Meaning is a collectively shared understanding what a certain practice is good for, why it is good for, and why you should be doing it. It is both cognitive (what is it?) as well as normative (why is it?). The practice of cooking entails meanings of good health, of socialising, of being creative in your own kitchen. Skills are individual capabilities and craftsmanship to carry out a practice (how to do it?). If you want to cook, you need to know how to peel, cut, boil things, what kind of spices you can use, and so on. A key feature when it comes to sustainable change and especially prosumerism is that we often lack the skills for certain practices. Consumer capitalism has de-skilled us in a very profound way. Material is everything physical we need to perform the practice (what tools are available?). Be aware that we are not just talking about knives, pans, butter, oil and these materials when it comes to cooking, or any social practice, but also the underlying infrastructures e.g. the gas or electricity infrastructure behind your kitchen without which you could not cook.
All three elements can change, separately or interdependently, and if a lasting change in any element of a social practice occurs, we can speak of social innovation. If the meaning structure changes from using a self-owned car to becoming a carsharing user, the skills to drive the car remain the same and you still need a car to drive. But the practice of individual mobility has changed into something very different. If your skills are expanding thanks to countless attempts to build an IKEA product in your home, you might start to think differently about assembling and disassembling stuff and try to do it with e.g. your coffee machine or other products you own. Suddenly you are practicing DIY and are on the road to becoming a maker. When you use digital technologies for communicating your products to your customers, this new materiality will cause your customers to feedback you in ways you probably have not thought of. Thus the practice of marketing becomes a very different relation and requires new skills and new meanings. Maybe marketing than has to be reconstructed as a learning relation between companies and customers and suddenly you are en route towards open innovation processes.
All of what I just described are social innovations, significantly changed social practices. The great promise of digitalisation, understood as a social phenomenon, is then change in practices through new communication tools and digital products. However, we have to pay attention to the dark side of digitalisation as well, its many un-Sustainabilities. Digital technologies, as new material for social practices, come with a rucksack. They are depending on precious and rare earth metals that are extracted under difficult ecological and social conditions. This Economy 4.0 of the digital age is actually an Iron Age 2.0 and requires a circular economy from cradle to cradle. And here we have a Sustainability challenge: we need a certain volume, a certain material throughput of digital products and their metals in order to make the circular economy of them economically viable; but there is also an ecological ceiling for these materials, a certain volume above which the digital circular economy becomes unsustainable, needing too much energy for its own good. Christian Hagelüken of Umicore mentioned this in a conversation with me very clearly: the digital economy requires both a circular economy as well as a sharing economy – new forms of using less products, of consuming less and very differently.
On the light side of an emerging “Digital Sustainability” we see the strong enabling push from digitalisation for new forms of collaboration and co-creation. This is exactly the kind of new social practices, of social innovation brought about by digitalisation, that can truly deliver in creating a more sustainable society. The empowerment of once passive consumers to becoming prosumers and co-creators of economic, social and ecological value is key here: how can digital technologies, as new material, help to change social practices towards more Sustainability – towards less ecological footprint of our practices, towards greater social value like inclusion, equity and empowerment. Sustainability becomes crucial here as a normative reference frame and new collectively shared meaning of a new political economy. Since the formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals, we can view Sustainability as a universal idea of humankind, on the same level as universal human rights. As a meaning structure it tells us what to do – reduce, empower – and why to do it – because only then we can have a fair and liveable world for 9 billion people, all aspiring to do better and to live productive and meaningful lives on a finite planet.
Above all, Sustainability reminds us of the deeply normative and political nature of all social processes. Social innovators are therefore political entrepreneurs, striving for the public interest, not the private interest, and it is exactly here, in the political arena of the res publica, where the fate of the Sustainability of the digital age will be decided.
This is a rough summary of my keynote talk at the Social Innovation Summit #SIS18 in Stuttgart. Presentation slides (PDF, 24 MB) and video (low quality) are available. Special thanks to Juli Sikorska for creating the wonderful sketchnotes I used as the featured image to this blog post.