Algorithms, data and artificial intelligence (AI) are not outside our daily lives, since the offline and online spheres cannot be separated, as defined in 2015 at Oxford University by Calzada and Cobo with Unplugging and Luciano Floridi with OnLife.
As the Welsh Marxist anthropologist Raymond Williams said, some words are more important than others. And the current word is not AI5: it is data, it is datafication itself. In other words, the tsunami of data.
Researchers Jose Van Dijck and Jathan Sadowski define datafication as a way of measuring and monitoring all elements of society in which data are used to guide activities, processes and decisions. Adherence to the right to decide is also a reflection of our adherence, preference, behaviour and sensitivity that we show online. Datafication is also setting online procedures: in voting systems, in measurements, in endorsements, in content generation,…. But who is managing all this tsunami of data, how and for what purpose? Where are the analytics? We seem to act without protection, within a blurred enclosure, a black box.
So how to enable AI and datification, inclusive public policies in favour of an active nation-building activity? This is our challenge.
Rather than the causes of disaffection, we must focus on new elements for nation-building in the 21st century. I suspect that the very concept that is being transformed today is rather more complex than the metre, the measurement (the nacio-metre). Defining the Basque nation as an algorithmic nation leads us to propose the variables in a holistic way. As opposed to the static currents of digital constitutionalism and nationalism, the aim would be to achieve emancipatory dating strategies6.
But where to start looking at this black box?
Joxe Azurmendi places the Basque nation in the following parameters: (i) in the historicity of national construction; (ii) centred on culture and language; (iii) claiming the need for political identity; (iv) setting criteria of plurality and inclusion; (v) and which must find its place in globalisation. And here, according to my study, is the missing element: where does dating leave us, then, in the global world?