The digital revolution requires participatory democracy, keeping the citizen, not big business or big government, at the centre of technological change. Take smart meters, for example; Morozov argues that if they are closed boxes transferring information, ‘what we are doing is essentially introducing more and more closed systems which simply seek to capture rent from infrastructure that has been funded by us, without letting us the citizens take advantage of the same infrastructure for our own purposes and our own monitoring of the government, whether it is the city, or the national
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