Tech Won't Save Us - A Cooperative Vision for Technological Innovation w/ Dan Hind

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Dan Hind to discuss the problems with the existing tech industry and its links to the state, and his proposal for reorienting technological development to promote human flourishing and a cooperative economy.Dan Hind is the author of “The Return of the Public: Democracy, Power and the Case for Media Reform” and recently wrote a report called “The British Digital Cooperative: A New Model Public Sector Institution” for The Next System Project and Common Wealth. He’s also written for the Guardian, the New Socialist, and the New Scientist. Follow Dan on Twitter as @danhind.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

We have to sort of jettison any sentimentality about, as it were, the old public sector, and think much more deeply about what we want the state to look like. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that thinks there must be a better way to organize the development of technology than how it currently works. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Dan Hind. Dan is the author of The Return of the Public, Democracy, Power, and the Case for Media reform. It was published by Verso Books. He also wrote a report last year called The British Digital Cooperative for Next System and Commonwealth. That's mainly what we'll be talking about today. I think you're really going to like this

conversation where Dan presents his ideas for how we can change the way that technology is developed and how we organize our broader society in a way that gives people more power and that encourages the formation of cooperatives. If you like our chat, feel free to give the podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That really helps us out. And make sure to share it with anyone who you think would enjoy our conversation. Finally, if you want to support the work that I put into making this podcast, you can join supporters like Kenneth Marks and Norma Aylward by going to patreon.com slash Paris Marks and making a contribution. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. Dan Hind, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Well, thank you very much for having me.

It's fantastic to talk to you today. I wanted to have you on because you wrote this report last year for Next System and Commonwealth called the British Digital Cooperative, where you kind of laid out this idea for what the future of media and the future of technological production could look like in a way that is democratically organized. So just to start off, could you briefly explain what the British Digital Cooperative is and what kind of problems that you see it responding to with the way things exist today. The idea was really just to think through what a public sector institution for promoting technological development might look like. We have a kind of old fashioned model, like, I mean, the state hasn't unashamedly taken a leading

role in the economy really since the post democratic moment of the 40s, 50s, 60s in Western Europe and North America, where there was a sense that the state would be at the leading edge of technology. Since then, there's been this quite interesting process of obfuscation where the credit for innovation has been foisted onto private companies, which clearly most of the time are sort of piggybacking on the back of public investments. But nevertheless, the idea that the private sector is the sort of lead actor in innovation has really captured people's minds. When we start thinking about the public sector getting back involved, I think it's quite tempting to look back on the old social democratic models

where you really have an idea of the philosopher king or the sort of Mandarin class who would take taxpayers money and would spend it in order to promote the public good or common good. And I think that's a kind of worn out model. I think it's a dangerous model. The reality is the Mandarins always have much more in common with private elites than they do with the majority of population so in the british digital cooperative i wanted to set out a way of doing innovation in the public sector that was much more closely tied to uh you know that that terrible phrase of the end user as much as close to end users so that um the people who would use the technology would be much more closely involved in decisions

about what kinds of technology were going to be developed, what kinds of decisions were going to be made during the development process. So rather than a model where you have these all-seeing technological experts who come down from the mountain with good news you know the kind of promethean model of the innovator whether in the public or the private sector you have a an approach to the technological development which is much more conversational much more egalitarian and in

some ways actually borrowing from some aspects of product design in the in the private sector um i was talking to someone i met um who works for a digital cooperative who works and looks and is very interested in product design he pointed out that a lot of the product design work that goes on in the big digital companies is actually conducted in very close dialogue with the consumer. And I think actually we can learn a certain amount from the actual practices of these big private technological developers, as long as we don't buy the PR, you know, as long as we don't buy into their story about how they're actually these promethean master thinkers but look at what they actually do which is that they they do work very closely with the people

who end up using technology and take very seriously the insights that they can offer and i think this becomes incredibly important when you think about developing in the public interest the whole point i think about tying technological development to a progressive view or an emancipatory view of human life, if you like, the whole point is that we can't try and adapt technologies designed elsewhere for other purposes to the purposes of human flourishing. Too often, we are given material, technological resources from surveillance, from the defence sector,

from business and enterprise software in the capitalist sector. And we try and rework it into something that we can make use of. It seems to be much better when we're thinking about public sector innovation to start with, well, what do people actually want? What do they actually,

what would they value in their lives before a process of commodification takes place? So before someone says, we've developed this thing, we've got to try and make people want it, rather than step back and say, what are the controls of your life now in what ways does technology serve that more or less well how could it serve it better and what is the version of the future that you would consciously choose so you know do you want a platform architecture that promotes cooperative production and that's

a question that every single person should be thinking about right now. You know, we've seen in the last few months what happens when a few big winners in the private sector take this dominant position in a distribution infrastructure. It's pretty clear that, you know, it's not the mandate of heaven that Amazon is becoming this kind of gargantuan presence in all our lives. And it's a perfectly reasonable question, I think, for a public with its own developer to ask itself, well, is that how we want to organize our economy in the future?

Are we okay with that? And I think overwhelmingly, if we were able to pose the question in that sort of conversational way with citizens, then firstly, we'd decide, no, we don't want that. And secondly, we'd start coming up very quickly with much more subtle and interesting solutions to the problems that Amazon at the moment imperfectly solves. so I suppose in a way what I was trying to do with the BDC proposal was to try and look beyond the public service tradition of public sector institutions and think about what a more radically democratic public sector institution might look like and as always once you start thinking about these things you start you start slightly baking pie in the sky. You start thinking, well, you should use random selection. You should embed technological development teams

in particular communities, in particular places. One of the things that I think is really pernicious about our model of development is that developers often think that everywhere is like where they happen to live and everyone aspires to the same lifestyle that they aspire to or that they experience as being quite natural and you don't have to go very far from San Francisco or central London or wherever it happens to be to find communities of people who have a radically different set of needs and a radically different set of needs

and a radically different set of interests, who again are just being kind of given this kit that they're trying to then sort of adapt to their needs and really finding themselves, I think, sort of constrained in what they think is possible for them because they're basically using someone else's tech. So once you start thinking along those lines, you start thinking, well, how many development centres are you going to have? Where are you going to put them? How are they going to relate to the

local public and private sectors and so on and so forth? So there's a certain amount of projecting, to use an old word, in the piece, which is influenced in part by the Democracy Collaborative's kind of tradition, if you like, of working with local government institutions and working with public and private sector institutions, and trying to develop new realities on the ground through things like promoting the cooperative sector, looking at supply chains and procurement patterns. But again, when we think about regional development, for example, the centre usually just tries to find ways of giving money to people who already have money because the state looks for partners for things it can see. And it can see big private operations because private operations make themselves visible and intelligible

to the state so when they start to think about what should we do about this place they start thinking in terms of well can we can we get that big company to create a warehouse there and how much money do we have to give them to sort of entice them into the area whereas actual economic development is a much more granular much much more microscopic, if you like. I don't mean that in a dismissive way. You know, understanding what would be useful in a place takes a deep knowledge. And actually the people who have that deep knowledge

are almost never asked to share it because they are people who are beneath the consideration of big capital, beneath the consideration of the great institutions of state. They wouldn't know how to speak their language. The people who speak the language of the state are people who want something from it and can marshal the resources necessary to engage in that conversation. So if we're going to do public sector development in tech or anywhere, it's got to be a very, very detailed conversation between citizens and experts is ensuring that the public is involved in this and that the public is leading it. Because you kind of build on the idea and the existing institution of the BBC,

right, the public broadcaster in the United Kingdom. And that sort of acts as kind of a basis or a starting point for this larger reimagining of how not just media, but technology would work in the 21st century, right? So how would you see the creation of a British digital cooperative changing what happens in media and in particular, what happens with the BBC to make that a more democratic institution and to give journalism a more democratic role or a role that better serves the public than what exists at the moment. Yeah. I mean, the BBC is interesting from another angle. Just briefly, we mentioned the old public service institutions of the post-war social settlement. BBC is in a way a prototype for that model of a leading-edge public sector institution.

It dates back to the period just after the First World War, and is a product of the high empire in a way. And it lurches increasingly, I think, into crisis as a result of its model, which is a top-down model of an elite who can see reality better than you can and can relay it to mass audiences in a reliable manner. And it has very much been a model, I think, for a lot of other public broadcasters and even media institutions around the world who then kind of adopted that way of doing it, right?

Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's an interesting parallel relationship between the big networks in the United States and the BBC. I mean, they obviously, you know, superficially, they had very similar ideas about performing a certain sort of public service, presenting a sort of mixture of entertainment and information and so on. And I think the BBC does see itself as a sort of lead institution in the broadcast sector. And the BBC is a provocation in a sense, as to say, why are you still clinging on to the idea that your audience says nothing while you speak? Why is that still your default? And why is it so difficult, it seems, for you to embrace the possibilities of technology? When the BBC was a pioneer in broadcast, it was a pioneer in microcomputing in the 80s and so on, it has taken a lead role in various areas,

but it's been completely supine really in the face of the new digital developments. It hasn't developed platform capacity. It hasn't become a space where viewers and listeners can become interlocutors, both with one another and with program makers. It simply hasn't been able or willing to take seriously the technology. I mean, it created an iPlayer, which allows people to watch television programs on the internet, but has shied away, it seems to me, quite consciously from the kind of space which has been taken up by the likes of Facebook and Twitter,

where you can have, albeit one mediated by unaccountable private institutions, you can have a horizontal conversation between users. So one of the first things I proposed that a British digital cooperative would do would simply to provide a platform architecture for the BBC, so that if you were a BBC licensed pair in the UK or you wanted to join from anywhere else in the world, you would be able to access a BBC platform where you could talk about programmes,

talk about anything you'd like. The publicly funded content of the BBC, if you like, would act as the initial honeypot. It's like, why would I sign up to another platform? That seems like a hassle. That's another password. It seems annoying. On the other hand,. It's like, why would I sign up to another platform? That seems like a hassle. I've got another password. It seems annoying. On the other hand, it's the BBC,

so they probably won't steal my data. They're probably not shifty in that narrow sense. Exactly, yeah. I'm not going to go out to bat for the BBC too much, but they're not going to immediately nick my credit card details and run off to Rio. But the fact that there is this kind of wealth of news and entertainment and educational content that the BBC has would give people, as it were,

an initial reason to engage with the platform. And then, as with all platforms, the other people at the Rio become the sort of abiding interest. It's like, what are they up to, right? That then allows, I think, one to think about the audience as an active component of a media system. And this is an abiding concern of mine, is to try and think through how the people who rely on news and current affairs content in particular can play an active role in directing journalistic curiosity and in analysing journalistic content, assessing it, and then redirecting it, right? So the idea of an active citizen body seems to me is incompatible

with the idea of an inert audience, right? If we're to be a citizen body, we can't simply sit and let information wash over us and then discuss it in private life. That leads to a radically atomized citizen body where we are completely dependent on centralized powers to tell us what other people think, which is a disaster for democratic sovereignty. sovereignty um and so yeah my ambition for the bdc would i mean frankly my ambition for the for the democratic state is to subordinate um the economy to democratic liberation right i'm a socialist in that in that sense and and i'd like to see a cooperative democratic platform architecture replace paypal and amazon Amazon and the rest. And not just because, oh, that would be nice.

It would be like Etsy, but with Soviet-style branding. It would allow us to reconsider consumerism itself, right? What do we actually want? What do we actually want? It's not what do you want when you're hungry or depressed or lonely or nervous? And what will the market then give you as a kind of soothing? But what do we as a particular political community or network of political communities, what do we want life to be like architecture that you see it creating for the BBC and for the broader society would not just be used by other public institutions to ensure that the kind of things that theylies and other forms of kind of cooperative governance and communication, cooperation, what have you, to kind of forward this goal of, you know, having the public more involved in the decision making around their lives and, you know and just how everything is run, right? Right. And so you think about how innovation works at the moment, there is a sort of tightly bound set of relationships between venture capital and technological skilled labor, if you like, that is geared towards the production of billionaires through the creation of capitalist enterprises. But the default organizational model, if you like, is the venture capital funded private corporation registered in Delaware with a charismatic CEO and blah, blah, blah.

And we're very familiar with that model of what innovation looks like. Well, what would it be like if you had a model of innovation that's stated purpose was to create cooperative enterprise and that you were building enterprise software for cooperative enterprise so that you'd be thinking, well, what, you know, this kind of cooperative needs this, this kind of functionality in its, its enterprise software, because it needs to have this relationship between the users of the product and the, and the creators of the product. And it needs these kinds of checks and balances to prevent various kinds of misbehavior by managers or misbehavior by one element of the co-op against another and so on. So you'd have a different approach to enterprise software, you'd have a

different approach to innovation, because the end result was different. You didn't want to create billionaires, you just wanted to create wealthy communities. You wanted to create people who were in charge of their lives. And that is not really what's of interest to the capitalist sort of innovation model. It's just not what they're there to do. Or if they're there to create fulfilled lives, it's for two or three people at a time definitely and i thought that was one of the really interesting pieces of the report right because you talk about how you mentioned it earlier how bdc would create a new payment system new kind of e-commerce platform um and and also the different kinds of software that people just need to run cooperatives to engage in everyday life, what have you. And the features of those platforms and of those software systems would respond to the needs of cooperatives. And one of the ways that you explain that that would happen, and obviously it's very

different from how technology is developed now, where, as you say, it's very centralized in these massive monopoly corporations. But you talked about how there would be development teams in towns and villages kind of distributed across the country, and they would be able to kind of take these tools to reformulate them for the needs of local communities, local cooperatives, and also, you know, develop things that they might need that don't already exist. And then when they're created, they could then be used to, you know, benefit cooperatives elsewhere in the country or the world or what have you, right? Yeah, there's always a tension, I think, when you're talking about human emancipation, there's a tension between laying down what one thinks should happen and leaving a space for people to decide themselves. There's a set of things that a serious public innovator

would see as natural and urgent to do. One of them would be to create a platform architecture for public media so that public content was integrated with public discourse in a different and much more egalitarian way. That seems like an easy win. Taking things like payment systems, things like retail platforms and social media at all

at the moment is like we're using it because it has some value but there's there's lots in there that we don't we don't really need or want and there's an unaccountability in its governance that we don't want so let's just build public sector alternatives and do it with a free open software architecture that yes it becomes sort of endlessly replicable people can go off and use that architecture for their own purposes again the point about using the bbc is an accelerator if you like is that it's got all this content that attracts people so you can build mass audiences or mass participation where that's useful but obviously you'd want as many different sort of

variants and flavors of of activity as people found useful to flourish. But there's a point where you can't really predict what's needed. The new needs become obvious as people continue to talk, people continue to discuss the way that their lives work and how they'd like them to work. Again, if you built mapping tools with an avowedly democratic ambition, built a mapping tool that was like,

oh yeah, this will explain who owns what in your town and what the geology of it is and what the soil quality of it is and where the brownfield is and how much that piece of land went for and so on. So you kind of overlay all kinds of publicly useful information onto your mapping tools. As the current model nudges us towards consumption, that nudges us towards democratic agency, where we're like, oh, hang on a minute, we took that piece of land and that piece of land,

and then turned that into a nature reserve or strategic food reserve for the town. That's all public land anyway. So why can't we do that? You know what I mean? And that sharpens the conversations you have with public authorities because you're like, yeah, as a town, we've decided we'd like this to happen. And unless you can come up with a really damn good reason why not, it's going to happen, right?

But that would be enabled by technology. And I think if you put a technological team in a town and talk to the people, if you stayed long enough and talked to enough people, somebody would say, I've always wondered about that field or I've always wondered about that building. I've always wondered about this.

I've always wondered about that. And it's like, oh, that's the kind of information that would be useful for everyone to have. So you could see how figuring out how a town can govern itself becomes fraught with insights for how all towns might govern themselves, all cities might reimagine themselves, and what kinds of tools they might need. In the best way in the world, you're 22 and just frenzied to be rich.

You're not going to chat like some old bloke about how he's had an allotment for 60 years. It doesn't matter how smart you are, you're never going to get there. You're never going to figure that out. You're a greyhound on a racetrack and you want to win. You just want to catch the rabbit.

That's the only game in town at the moment. Again, creating a public realm for innovation offers young people who want to make new things like a different model of innovation. It's like, it's not like that. It's not building an advertising scam, right? It's helping people like flourish.

And doing that isn't about bestowing goodies on them it's about talking to them and figuring out how you can help yeah because the existing model just would never encourage that it's not the kind of information that would be attractive to a venture capitalist right no it's not something that they could make money off of or charge rents for. No, in a way, it's the opposite of enclosure in that sense. Rather than funneling people into consumption opportunities, you're opening up kinds of knowledge and insight that at the moment give an edge to private capital. That's the kind of information that they're very keen to enclose, really, and spend a lot of time obscuring, in a way. The media have a very particular story they tell about place and about why certain places develop in some ways and others develop in other ways. It's fraught with mystification because that's the real stuff, right? That's how you make real money.

And so opening that up to a much broader public would have, I think, profound effects on political life. Because the model that we have of capitalist development in cities is just a complete fairy tale. They're in the business of making money for nothing. That's it. That's all it is. And until people grasp that and see how the state is used to enrich favoured private sector actors, until people grasp that they could use the state to enrich themselves in a much more profound, much more kind of meaningful sense

of creating the opportunities for human flourishing through state control of the physical environment, we're going to continue to see cranes go up, unaffordable flats go up, and see people driven out of where they live and see artists and blame them for it and so on. And our lives will live in a mystery. I think the overriding drive for democrats is to demystify

life in that sense it's kind of create conditions where people can understand their circumstances so yeah so this is of you know this is of a piece with a broader way of trying to reconsider the state but it's certainly you know innovation in the technological spaces is key really and you know we are in the midst of this pandemic experience and there is a lot of people are on a kind of pause it's like what are we doing what have we been doing and it seems to me this is a really good time to sort of step back and say well the state has intervened massively to support the existing social order. And liberals are always amazed by this. They're always like, oh, the game has changed this time, right?

And it's like, it's exactly the same game as it was in 2008. The existing order came, it got into trouble, and the state bailed it out. That's what happens. And the liberals are permanently astonished by this. Oh, my God, there is no free market. But we could be using you know we could be using the state as an expression of our collective wishes to remodel the economy so

that we don't end up killing human life right through climate change and um my hope is that this will be um a chance to call the bluff of people who say that there's nothing we can really do, because obviously we can. We just need to take power and initiative away from a handful of billionaires and take it for ourselves. Because it's like, where else did their power come from? Even when we look at the history, right? In the way that you say that, you know, liberals are shocked to see the state come to the rescue of the system every decade, when we look back at the history of technological development, even though the common narrative is that it's this free market, private sector driven industry, when we look back, we can see very clearly that that is not the truth, that this whole technological system that has been created was really dependent on, at least in the United States, I'm sure it's similar in the UK, but on massive public subsidy, on military spending, on states sending direct investment to particular parts of the country to kind of create tech hubs. Google, Apple,

all benefited from public subsidy to get started and to get them through those early years. So we can see that the creation of this tech industry as it exists today was very much something that was decided by the state and by state actors yeah it's not something that has just kind of emerged and you know created itself in this way out of nowhere no exactly i think we we have got it the wrong way around in that we and this is true on the on the left as well we can sometimes think in terms of this all-powerful corporate sector that drives the world like a colossus. And actually, what we have, I think, is, as it were, a corporate state.

We have a state that looks to corporations as its natural auxiliaries, as its lieutenants. As I said earlier, it's a state that can see corporations. Corporations, as it were, emit the same wavelength of light as states. So they can kind of recognize a corporation. You see this to the point of pathology in the UK, where the state at the moment seems the only lever it wants to pull is giving money to private contractors. So we have accountancy firms running COVID testing in car parks with people they've hired weeks or days before. I mean, it's absolutely baffling. They've ignored

an existing public sector infrastructure in public health, which they've starved of funding for 10 years. So yeah, so we have corporate states where they are looking to enhance the social power of corporations of various kinds. And what we need, I think, is a cooperative state. We want a state that brings corporate developments into its own structures, but sees the cooperative as its natural counterpart in civil society, if you like, its natural counterpart in the economy. So that as with the current relationship between the state and the private economy, there is a kind of harmony where public investments are, yes, they're supporting their favoured sector, but their favoured sector is a sector which is much more egalitarian, much more accountable, and much more embedded in place. Because, as you say, Silicon Valley is famously a creation

of the wartime state in the US. It's where kind of modern air defence has sort of developed. And it is gradually kind of shapeshifts into this apparently civilian operation. But that's, you know, there's a great deal of PR and there's a great deal of bullshit in that. The state is the prime mover. Only the state can really do the kinds of deep,

prolonged, unprofitable work that can later be turned into marketable commodities. And again, this is beyond the scope of this particular conversation, but if you look at life sciences, the corporate state funds basic science, but funds it in a way that makes it available to, makes it, as it were, the first stage in a process of commodification

that ends up in the pharmaceutical sector. If you thought about the life sciences from a cooperative and democratic starting point and thought in terms of population and individual health, you wouldn't be fixated on pharmaceutical solutions in anything like the same way. I mean, it's not to say that there aren't useful things that have come out of that,

any more than there aren't useful things that come out of Silicon Valley and its counterparts elsewhere. But if you're looking at human flourishing, you would think about life sciences in a much more broad way and you would think about it in a much more sensible way in the sense like you would think about the material conditions for good health rather than oh how can we make money keeping people alive a bit longer when they've ruined their health so yeah i I think across the whole kind

of innovation piece, we need to stake a claim really in what the state could be doing and insist that it starts to do it. Certainly. And obviously, if we're going to design technology in service of human flourishing and a wider economy in service of human flourishing, it's through the state and through public institutions that are going to try to encourage that, that we can do it. And, you know, in service of that, you say the BDC is intended to operate kind of as a vanguard institution, right? In the same way as the BBC provided a template for the post-war social democratic settlement, the BDC could lay the way to developing the

structures of democratic socialism. Yeah, I think that's a good way of framing it. I mean, the BBC was not, in a way, a slightly sinister template for the social democratic public sector, because as I say, it is a product of the late empire, and in some ways is the sort of um the perfection of the kind of um foreign office model of population management which so impressed people like walter littman in the us i don't think people quite grasp the sophistication and subtlety of the late empire but but yeah the bbc um comes out of that and becomes something of a template for the nationalised industries in the UK, which were, again, very top-down, very unaccountable, very much reproducing existing patterns of social authority. If we're going to do it differently, then I think we have to sort of jettison any sentimentality about,

as it were, the old public sector and think much more deeply about what we want the state to look like, as well as the public sector that comes out of it, if you like. We need to be very clear that unless we get into the deep guts of the state, it will not produce the technologies or the institutional forms that we need. In fact, unless we tackle that, we'll never be allowed to have that conversation about what we actually need. And that's, I think, the nightmare is that the future becomes

one of disoriented individuals being pushed and prodded around by technologies we don't understand. And unfortunately, that seems to be the path we're on and hopefully we can change it. Dan, it's been fantastic to speak with you

and to hear more about the British Digital Cooperative and how you imagine it. I really appreciate you taking the time. That's a great pleasure. Dan Hind is the author of The Return of the Public, Democracy, Power and the Case for Media Reform. You can buy it from versobooks.com, your local bookstore, you can get it from your local library or anywhere else that sells books.com your local bookstore you can get it from your local library or anywhere else that sells books he's also the author of a recent report from next system and commonwealth entitled the british digital cooperative and you can follow him on twitter at at dan hind if you liked our conversation please leave a five-star review on apple podcasts you can follow the podcast on twitter at tech won't save us and you can follow me on Twitter at Paris Marks. TechWon'tSaveUs is part of the Ricochet Podcast Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. Thanks so much for listening.