How our misunderstanding of the digital and computing revolutions puts democracy at risk (and what to do about it)

The digital and computing revolutions have been underestimated as a destabilising force in democracies across the world. These nested misperceptions have propagated because (a) increases in information were assumed to lead to lower predictive risks for everyone and (b) insufficient attention was paid to perceptual risk. Yet, the realities of these miscalculations are now becoming dangerously clear. Due to unequal access to data and computation, some political actors benefit more from the deep and cheap surveillance and disruptive powers of social media than others. We currently occupy a technological age where the public is largely ignorant of the surveillance they are under from potential adversaries (through digital ad companies), and social science has not probed deeply enough the ease with which individuals and groups can be kept from learning new solutions to problems. It is only by recognising the depth of these challenges that more resilient platforms and potential training programmes can be deployed to rebalance the scales of predictive risk and empower individuals within democracies to take back control of their information environment.