Overview:
Palau’s rush toward “innovation” may be creating more problems than it solves. In this sharp commentary, J. Ngoriakl argues that the country’s embrace of untested technologies—from ballot-counting machines to digital residency schemes—reveals a deeper issue: a growing techno-solutionism habit that risks eroding public trust, governance standards, and even democratic integrity.
By J. Ngoriakl
It’s the evening of November 5, 2024, and a lot of us were glued to live streaming or the radio, waiting for our election results. Like many people, I got my note app ready to write on, some probably created tally spreadsheets, or old school folks might have used the old inked lines over a notebook method. Across Palau, we were all eager to witness the tabulation of votes, the final result of our active participation in democracy that some of us have been involved in for months, even years. What we ended up seeing on the screen, was a rather swift automated counting of ballots, with states being consolidated together, making irrelevant the “hamlet” column we had prepared ahead of time. In what seemed to be a quick moment, the official tabulation of our votes was over, thanks to a newly upgraded ballot-counting machines.
For those of us who follow tech news, data privacy cases, and even geopolitics, we were stunned. In fact, I can’t quite describe how I felt. A new tabulation method was applied in real time during one of our most sacred democratic exercise, with no prior testing, no official ROP standards to follow, and no transparency of how it was procured. But don’t dare complain because it’s technology, it’s modern, it’s innovation. Ladies and gents, it is all of those things AND also problematic; it’s called techno-solutionism.
Techno-solutionism is the naive belief that any problem, even complex societal ones, can be solved by technology. It often disregards the complexities of an issue, or in the case of the ballot counting machine, it disregarded the sacredness of our ballots and the very democracy we so proudly stand on. We, a small island state with less than 20,000 people, somehow decided that a machine that hasn’t undergone any sandbox trials, bought or provided with no guiding legal framework or some sort of transparent technology procurement policy, will be used to count our votes and that’s that. I complained to the immediate people around me but the feeling of distrust and betrayal I felt at the time was just too much to express on social media. Now, a year later, I can say with certainty that the government played in our faces, watering down our civil rights, sowing distrust from people who follow and understand technology, because we have a techno-solutionism problem as a country.
Our leaders are so quick to jump on new bandwagons of technological fixes without establishing a framework to test, procure transparently, include third-party assessment, pilot new systems, and seek participatory consultations from the community. Just look at both the Palau Stablecoin and Digital Residency projects, two efforts that were promoted as cutting-edge innovation, yet exposed and exploited our governance weaknesses. These projects promised to generate revenue for the Republic without proper vetting of the technology partners, without clarity on data sovereignty, and without considering how they might be exploited for money laundering or tax evasion. Now we’re dealing with reputational damage. In hindsight, both projects are perfect examples of techno-solutionism where we blindly relied on technology, no matter where it comes from or who is offering it to us, as a shiny new policy without careful consideration of risks.
This mindset, I’m afraid, will lead us into bigger societal problems, although I’m not sure what’s bigger than a questionable unregulated machine counting our votes. In the age of the AI race, we simply cannot afford to jump on technology bandwagons without proper vetting and an actual legal framework. Technology is going to move fast, and AI is scaling up everything, but we don’t have to navigate this landscape totally blind or trusting of outside actors. We can carve our own path and go at our own pace through responsible agenda-setting and policymaking. We must build our legal frameworks and institutions, agree on standards that align with our Palauan values, and establish guardrails that protect our people as we ride on the waves of innovation. I hope our policy-makers can take this into account, because while our future may be written in algorithms and codes, many problems don’t require technology that we ourselves can’t explain or master. In fact, we can solve many problems cautiously and intentionally without sacrificing our rights, liberties, values, and global reputation. Like the late remarkable Isabella Sumang once said, “What’s the hurry?”