According to Naziometroa, adherence to the Basque national construction is on the decline. At the same time, hybrid identities are occupying more and more space among citizens’ preferences¹. As if that were not enough, new realities are also taking hold: individualism, neoliberalism, youth political consumerism, migration, and even the very issue of technopolitics². And how does all this affect the implementation of the right to decide?

New realities are also taking hold: individualism, neoliberalism, youth political consumerism, migration, and even the very issue of technopolitics. And how does all this affect the implementation of the right to decide?

In my conference on 22 November in Donostia-San Sebastian, I developed this last key issue from a transdisciplinary perspective, proposing the following: We urgently need to open the algorithmic black box (deconstruct³ it) in order to begin to address the algorithmic nation⁴ of the 21st century. And this inevitably leads us to review the right to decide itself.

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?

At the conference I compared three global processes in the aim of algorithmic Basque nation-building:

Metropolisation or how the Basque national construction should cross/integrally manage the political, digital and urban geography of urban regions.

We should begin to understand datification or the Basque nation as an algorithmic nation:

The algorithmic nation is:

Diasporisation or how we should understand the Basque nation beyond geographical borders. However, this understanding today has nuances from the point of view of datafication¹²:

• Guide to the Basque algorithmic nation:

1.1. At the national and state building level: data strategy and our place in pan-European agencies (data ecosystems/data spaces).

1.2. Pilot and experimental projects between the three blockchain administrative territories with technology.

1.3. Integration in the manifestos and urban coalitions currently underway around digital rights (privacy and property) through the paradiplomacy of our capitals.

1.4. Utilising existing resources in the public sector: Developing public innovation.

1.5. Updating the communitarian socio-economic model that we have been able to develop throughout history, turning cooperativism into a model of origin, a platform and a cooperative datum¹⁵ . We have the EU regulations in our favour for this.

1.6. Technological sovereignty allowing transparency of data flows and free choice of membership (in consumption, contact, etc.).

1.7. Put ethics, geolocation of personal and synthetic data, profiling, modelling and, in general, generative AI at the service of our public policies and civil society.

1.8. Stop being a follower (in the European digital sphere): be at the forefront with our own projects and projects such as the European framework, demonstrating that we are a leading area in digital social innovation.

Images: Dr Igor Calzada