Weeknotes 2021 — week 3. Like the string stitched into Bernie’s…
By: Stephen Miller
Tags: Surveillance Capitalism, Bernie Sanders, Weeknotes, Digital Transformation

Like the string attached to Bernie’s mittens, this week things started connecting together.

Me, taking a break from my desk to warm up my hands

I climbed out of the water with puckered fingers and chattering teeth, and longed to slip on a pair of warm woolen mittens. It was Blue Monday, and instead of diving into my emails, I jumped into the sea. I’m fortunate to work for an organisation that cares about such things. So I used my extra hour off to reinvigorate my weary cells in the English Channel. Fives minutes swimming, 55 minutes shivering. I envy Bernie and his mittens.

From there on, the week only got better. Things started coming together in unexpected ways. In this week’s note I draw a line of thought, connecting seemingly disparate ideas. Like the string running through Bernie’s sleeves, connecting his mittens and keeping his digits cosy.

Research, design and development (R,D & D)

This week I have mostly been thinking about how to support the digital transformation of community businesses. In truth, we’ve been thinking about this for a while. The diagram below is an unrealised idea we had over two years ago, about championing a platform to support the digital needs of communities.

A concept for Twine as a Business Operations Platform

I recalled this piece after a recent conversation with Alastair Parvin at Open Systems Lab. He talked about the need for common digital tools and capacities, to lower the barriers for communities exercising power. Which reminded me of this from Cassie Robinson

Catalysing a community response requires more than just technology, it relies on there already being social infrastructure in place.

Both sentiments have been a key part of our thinking over the past two years. We moved from trying to develop our own digital products to solve all of community businesses’ digital needs, to only developing products where there is a gap in current provision but no alternative provider (such as with our Benchmark tool). So we have seriously considered the idea of using Twine to support the development of a common, core infrastructure of shared digital systems, technology and processes which supports third sector organisations to deliver their activities and services more efficiently and effectively. That means bringing together, maintaining and championing tech owned or managed by the third sector. We are still considering it, given the live discussion about a community tech stack. If this is of interest to you, drop me a line.

This shift has also enabled us to focus much more on providing support to community businesses to improve their digital skills and confidence. This will remain a focus for us in the future, too. We are kicking off the pilot of Dagile, a free online learning platform (developed with a couple of universities) next week. We are also kicking off a new phase of discovery research with Think Social Tech and Reply, consolidating our knowledge and learning to date about the digital support needs of community businesses. I like this quote from Hilary Cottam about the value of this process:

“this first stage [of the design process] is like an archaeological dig. We find unexpected things, we gently dust them down and we keep excavating. We have to get underneath accepted truths.”

Now re-read that quote, imagining the archaeologist is wearing mittens.

What I’ve learnt

Like Bernie, a key motivation for me is how do we enable people to have more control over their own lives? And how do we redress inequalities? So I was struck by this passage in Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. In it she compares David Harvey’s observations about how capital behaves to the tech giants increasing encroachment into our private lives.

[David Harvey argues] “What accumulation of dispossession does is to release a set of assets…at very low (and in some cases zero) cost. Over-accumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use.” He adds that entrepreneurs who are determined to “join the system” and enjoy “the benefits of capital accumulation" are often the ones who drive this process of dispossession into new, undefended territories.

This passage seemed even more relevant this week given the government’s proposed ‘right to regenerate.’ The basic idea is to:

“make it easier to challenge councils and other public organisations to release land for redevelopment — helping communities make better use of public land and give a new lease of life to unloved buildings”.

But the current proposal does not give communities the first right to bid, nor does it include privately owned derelict buildings. We have seen the importance of this in our work, where for example the Observer Building in Hastings sat empty for over 30 years before the community finally wrestled it from the grasp of speculative investors.

At present the proposal has all the hallmarks of a wealth transfer from the public to private sector, which exacerbates wealth inequality. The second half of the passage above describes it perfectly — dispossession being driven into new, undefended territories, whether these are virtual or physical.

Recognising these potential pitfalls, but also having the imagination to envisage alternatives, has never been more important. It’s not a case of defending the status quo, but defending the future.

And if all else fails, the beauty of a mitten is that you can clench it into a very soft fist.*

*to thud on a table and voice your disapproval, obviously.