A vision for public digital work

Humanising the digital dimension

When we do public digital work in 2024, what project are we engaged in?

In the last few weeks I’ve had some great conversations with people doing digital work in and around the UK government, and a common theme has been that we need a new vision.

A compelling vision can generate excitement, turning public digital work from a job into a calling. It can also help to align people, giving the work a shared spirit, or a common ethic. A vision can help us feel part of something.

I think it’s fair to say there was a compelling vision for public digital work in the 2010s. This centred on improving services to better meet user needs, and it got people excited at how much better — quicker, cheaper, simpler — digital services could be. There was an ethical core to the work, with an emphasis on accessibility. And the work had a distinctive look and feel to it. An aesthetic rooted in the long tradition of public design and a disruptive, self-confident spirit.

The 2010s vision was pretty effective. It drew great people into public service and it gave the work a certain unity of purpose. So a good starting point for a vision from 2024 to 2035 would be to update this earlier vision.

In practice, people have been doing this already, updating as the work goes along. So it’s less about writing a new vision and more about pulling these strands together into one compelling story. A new government in the UK is a nice opportunity to do this, as indeed is now happening. For example, see the many responses to a call out from Jeni Tennison on Blue Sky, which is feeding into some promising work happening in DSIT.

This is all still forming, but it seems clear it could add up to a meaningful advance on the 2010s vision, while sticking to a broadly similar form; this is still about using technology to make public institutions work better.

This could include changes such as the following:

• Updating what good services look like today, given how technology and capabilities have come on. e.g. today’s vision entails a quite radical reorientation of public institutions around services as their organising logic. And it is based on a by now mature service architecture — shared platforms, data as a common asset, APIs for connections, etc. See, for example, books from Kate Tarling, Lou Downe, and Richard Pope.

• Setting a broader, more ambitious goal for public digital work, going beyond user needs and efficiency. This could aim, as per Platformland, to ‘reduce administrative burdens’, tackling the terrible time sink and mental burden of badly designed services. Beyond this, today’s public digital work would put more emphasis on democracy, recognising that every interaction with a service is a chance to enhance (or deplete) aspects of civic life, like accountability or trust. And to the extent that services also condition many of our interactions with each other — for example, think of the way schools are civic spaces — a good service can also foster stronger communities, more able to solve problems for themselves. So this adds up to a far more ambitious goal than ‘meeting user needs’.

• Maturing the skills and cultures of public digital work so that they can deliver on these broader ambitions. Focusing less narrowly on ‘DDaT’ skills and cultures — which was needed early on, but now risks becoming exclusive — and instead emphaising what it takes to be a contemporary public servant. This runs with the grain of initiatives like One Team Gov, Teaching Public Service in a Digital Age, and the growing movement of creative bureaucracy festivals. This is about mainstreaming contemporary practices into public service.

There’s a lot to play with here. And I for one think this story, told well, could get a new generation of practitioners excited about public digital work. It’s also clear that there is at least a decade of work to do here. So a vision like this could, I think, serve us well.

Still, I have a nagging feeling there’s an elephant we’re not mentioning. And I think it might be called: the way the internet has played out.

A new (digital) political economy

The more I think about today’s vision for public digital work, the more I think it needs to start from an analysis of our technological moment.

My worry is that, if our vision doesn’t speak to the way digital technology is changing our lives and society — for bad as well as good — then it risks feeling disconnected and not being the galvinising call to arms it could be.

It seems to me that the really big thing that’s changed about public digital work in 2024, compared with public digital work in 2010, isn’t the content of the work but the political-economic context it sits in. Which is to say: it’s not been a great decade for the internet, has it?

I’m sure I don’t need to rehash the life-story of the internet. From its fresh-faced promise — democratising, full of lovely niches, with an empowering DIY spirit — to today’s morass of clickbait ad content, doom-scrolling, attention farming, behaviour manipulation, market power, extremism, etc.

There are couple of reasons I think this context needs to shape our vision for public digital work, the first tactical and the second more substantive.

The tactical reason is that the way the internet has panned out (and, in turn, the early direction of AI) has changed the politics of technology, which are entirely different today to the politics of technology back in 2010.

Fifteen years ago, people working in and around public sector tech were still warmed by the after glow of the early promise of the internet. This included hacker culture and the hippy tributaries that flowed into, and irrigated, early Silicon Valley. In 2010, you could still talk optimistically about the democratising potential of the internet without a hint of irony.

Today, the median progressive person is pretty sceptical of internet-era technologies, or even hostile towards them, and much more so when it comes to AI. In my experience, this hostility sharpens among people who are into technology. The strongest pockets of anti-AI sentiment I encounter are all in progressive techie circles — and of course for some good reasons. When I speak at events on technology policy these days, about 95% of the debate is about downside risks — privacy, bias, misinformation — and the conversation often gets quite heated.

This isn’t universal. There are progressives who lean hard the other way, embracing a naive version of ‘AI will save us’. And, more positively, there is brilliant, creative work being done to use tech for good in ways that address the real risks/downsides — e.g. work in and around responsible and civic tech, and on areas like collective intelligence/distributed governance. Plus the curiosity of hacker culture is alive and well in institutions like Newspeak House. Still, I would describe these as pockets of energy, rather than being a wider reservoir of sentiment that can be easily activated.

This makes me think our vision needs, at minimum, to speak to how the internet/AI has played out/is playing out. We can’t just say ‘we will use digital technology to make public services better’, when people are often starting from a place of deep disquiet about these very technologies.

But more than this, it takes me to the more substantive point. Which is that our vision for public digital work needs to present itself — and actually be — a response to the socio-technological pickle we’re in.

Humanising the digital dimension

I’ve argued for a while that digital technology is now so pervasive, and is so profoundly changing the logic of our society and economy, that progressives need a fuller response.

We need to go beyond seeing digital technology as a tool to be used in our current settlement, and instead recognise that digital capitalism is a new era, requiring a new governing settlement. This means our response needs to sit at the level of political economy.

What would it look like to situate public digital work in a project like this? And how can public digital work contribute meaningfully to such a project?

This is a difficult question. But to provoke conversation, I thought I’d share one way to think about our predicament, and our response, using a metaphor and a historical analogy.

A while ago I wrote an essay, The Invidious Hand, in which I asked what happens to capitalism (and thereby social democracy) when it migrates into a digital dimension.

The essay was based on a metaphor that pictures our discovery of digital technology as discovering a portal to an alien dimension.

In this version of the story, we spent all of human history living in Physicalland and then in the late 20th century scientists discovered a portal to Digitalland, a dimension in which many of the laws of Physicalland don’t apply. We went through the portal and we tried doing things in Digitalland and we found, to our delight, that we could cross vast distances in an instant. We found that two people could use the same product at the same time without degrading either’s experience, sometimes even making the experience better. And we found that people who built spaces in Digitalland — which we later came to call platforms — enjoyed a form of omniscience; they could monitor (and thereby shape) the behaviour of people in those spaces in ways we couldn’t previously have imagined.

We soon realised that these different laws were powerful — they meant you could do things in Digitalland that were impossible in Physicalland — and this was also immensely profitable. We therefore began a great migration — of shops, taxi services, music, friendships, etc — from Physicalland into Digitalland. And soon large portions of our economy, and in a sense our society, were operating from within the digital dimension.

One reason I like this metaphor is that it raises an interesting question: how should the state show up in Digitalland?

Or, rather, how should the notion of ‘public’, more generally, show up in the digital dimension? What kinds of logics, and what character of experience, might we want to play out in the spaces we build in Digitalland? What do we want to achieve, and how do we want to feel, in the time we spend there?

Whatever the specifics, it feels clear that the environment of Digitalland is not yet mature, or at least it’s not well-rounded or healthy. Sure, there are wonderful things about our time there — we discover new films and music; we lose ourselves in rabbit holes; we learn new skills. But the vibe is a weird mix of shopping mall and the dodgy side of town; two parts over-stimulating/compulsive, one part dangerous — especially for children. And our time there often isn’t conducive to authentic relationships, or strong communitities, or agency. Which is to say it’s not very human.

For me what this speaks to, at root, is Digitalland’s immature political economy. It’s dominated by a few large companies, so our time in digital space is spent mostly in structures (platforms) that are optimised for profit, and that are also, by the way, quite unregulated. And so while, yes, governments and charities have outposts there (i.e. websites), it’s not really what we might call a mixed ecnonomy, or a diverse ecosystem.

This takes us to the historical analogy. Because this seems to me quite similar to the early decades of industrial capitalism, after private industrial enterprises — factories, railways, etc — had spred rapaciously and consolidated, but before we’d learned how to govern the new economy.

This was a time, no doubt, of excitement. Those factories were making certain goods affordable in ways they’d not been before, and people were crowding into cities that were no doubt at times quite exciting to live in. But the environment was also exploitative, polluted, dirty, cacophanous, and dangerous, especially for children.

There was then, of course, something of a counter-reaction. From William Blake’s ‘satanic mills’ to socialists like William Morris and the arts and craft movement to not-so-much-socialists like John Ruskin writing feverishly about the ‘illth’ of an industrial economy. And of course the grand political counter-movements of Marxism, socialism, Fabianism.

Where did we end up eventually? To summarise a bit heroically, we fought to round out and humanise the industrial economy. And we did this with an array of governing mechanisms — including formal institutions of government and civic institutions like unions or charities. This led to a more mixed economy, with a range of characters and logics. This included:

• Public spaces like National Parks, which we created by legislating to protect certain spaces from industrialisation, as places of respite.

• Civic spaces — schools, railway stations, pump houses, viaducts — which we built with a new discipline, Civil Engineering, which in turn had its own organisations and distinctive skills and a professional ethic.

• Public health, a new concept we created and built a science around — a way to clean up physical spaces to make them more habitable (free of disease and less noisy and smelly). This sat alongside a wider class of professions like street cleaning, urban landscaping, transport planning.

• Protections for locality and smallness. Which we did through another new discipline, local planning, and with concepts like high streets and conservation areas.

• Conduct requirements for big industrial companies. For example to require that companies stop harming children (e.g. by employing them in factories), and stop poisoning our physical environment.

In short, we humanised our industrial environment. Which raises an obvious question: what is the digital equivalent?

A six part project

I guess one way to describe Digitalland today is that it’s factories and urban slums stretching to the horizon, or rather their digital or mental equivalent. Attention farms, subscription traps, insecure/stress-inducing digital work environments, bullying in school Whatsapp groups, etc. Or at least far more of these things than we would like.

Just as with industrial capitalism, this new world brings upsides and downsides. It’s creating some great stuff, more cheaply than we had before, and sometimes it’s fun. But I’m not sure we could say it’s healthy, or rounded, or serving human flourishing, and once again it’s especially dangerous for children.

So here’s the suggesion: maybe public digital work is part of a wider project to humanise the digital dimension. A project to make Digitalland more safely habitable, even joyful. This includes using those powerful laws of Digitalland to build much better public services. But it also includes work to make the digital dimension healthier, so that it better supports human aspirations like agency, authentic relationships, and strong communities.

How we would we express a vision like this? I guess we’d start with a fuller problem statement than we would normally. Focusing not just on the opportunity to deliver better services but also naming directly the social and cultural downsides of digital technology that we see all around us.

For sure we’d also include an inspiring image of future public services, showing how good they could be if only we took advantage of digital technology. These future services would reduce administrative burdens, making our lives easier, and they would be open and accountable, while also taking every opportunity to connect us into our local communities.

But this would be part of a bigger, more aspirational project — building a digital dimension that brings out the best in humans. A project that would take generations and for which we would need a host of new disciplines and governing mechanisms.

What kind of disciplines and mechanisms? Here are six examples to end with, taking inspiration from history:

1. Downtime and protected spaces. The equivalent to National Parks. Ways to protect time for contemplation, away from having our attention harvested. Partly through civic initiatives (e.g. see the growing movement of ‘offline meetups’ (rule: leave your phone at home) and off-line journals (e.g. Analog Sea)). And a new strand of public policy to support this, e.g. a right to disconnect, banning smartphones for children, etc. Helping us protect offline experience.

2. Civil Software Engineering. A modern analogue to Civil Engineering, with a similar ethic. Building civic digital spaces and infrastructure, today’s digital equivalent to grand railway stations and beautiful school buildings. Proudly designed, so that being there feels different, just as being in a library, or a grand train station, feels different to being in a supermarket. Maybe there are specialist sub-branches of Civil Software Engineering, for example to focus on engineering/designing: (a) spaces for digital public services and (b) spaces for democracy/deliberation.

3. Public Mental Health. A new discipline, like public health but for our mental environment. A practice of making online spaces mentally healthy. This is where we’d develop the agenda for online safety, e.g. to protect children from harmful content. Maybe in time it includes other, softer mechanisms, e.g. ways to moderate content that command legitimacy, and new norms of behaviour, a bit like the mental equivalent to healthy physical behaviours like hand-washing.

4. Civic Technology Infrastructure. Digital infrastructure for a happy, sustainable society. Not public, but also not solely profit-maximising. Using the liberating laws of Digitalland for good social and environmental outcomes. For example, think of platforms like Olio, for re-use, or meetup platforms to help people make social connections. And think of people working to develop open protocols to underpin interoperable platforms, such as for social media.

5. The Little Internet. A digital equivalent to the way we learned to protect locality and heritage in our physical environment, a bit like planning, but better. See the little internet movement. Ways to help small things thrive in winner-takes-all environments — including so that some of them can become tomorrow’s big things. Links to mechanisms like startup studios to lower the bar to new business formation.

6. Conduct requirements on major platforms. An enhanced regulatory regime for platforms of major social, political, economic significance. Recognising these as novel creations — not to be nationalised, but too important to be treated simply as private companies. With an associated set of new responsibilities and governance.

So that’s an option for a broader vision. Seeing public digital work as not just about using digital technology to make public institutions work better, but as one part of a project to make the digital dimension work better for humans.

Sharing, as always, in the spirit of thinking in the open. I can see upsides and downsides to a broader vision like this. Maybe what I’m describing really is a wider narrative for government on digital, in which a vision for public digital work could be nested. Either way, I’d be interested in feedback and critiques.

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Here’s a link to that earlier essay, The Invidious Hand. And two more practical posts on mechanisms to drive AI adoption and the need for a new institution to help local government digital work. You can follow my writing on Blue Sky, Medium, or Substack. And here are some tips on how to leave Twitter if you haven’t already.