Heroic tech innovators generally ignore the "foundational" and "overlooked" economy. Can they be linked to benefit society and planet?

Some good questions to ask: how can we change what we mean, when we say we value innovation? When the challenges of climate crisis and automation demand new models and systems, to help the biggest possible number of people, how do we start to define different priorities (as the current ones clearly aren’t working)?

Here’s two pieces which take a tilt at how we currently talk and think about innovation.

The “foundational” and “overlooked” economy can be the source of innovation

This, from Open Democracy, written by Isaac Stanley (here’s his Twitter profile) takes issue with the current UK Govt’s priorities (now of course feeding into their General Election campaign).

Isaac finds that UKGov’s main objectives - to pursue “world-leading technology” and “regional potential” for the left-behind - undercut each other:

In its current shape, the (UK Govt’s) Industrial Strategy, even with more recent additions, can only fail to achieve this objective. Its overwhelming focus is on frontier sectors, to the neglect of vast swathes of the ‘low-value’ economy.

This does not simply risk exacerbating rather than reducing regional divides; it also fails to intervene in the arrangements that currently devalue crucial aspects of our lives. This devaluation condemns a large, disproportionately female, migrant and minority ethnic section of the population to poverty.

But it also lies behind a deterioration in the quality of services used by everyone – leading to a kind of public impoverishment, even in a society of private affluence.

What would it mean to reorient innovation policy away from the frontier, and its relentless pursuit of mastery over the natural environment, and towards the parts of the economy where most people work – and whose activities give our lives meaning?

How could we invest seriously in innovation in these sectors, on the basis of a more expansive conception of value?

Stanley suggests that the answer might be to redefine who we think of as the character and type of the innovator:

The breathless exaltation of the frontier that can be found in the pages of the Industrial Strategy – or indeed of the innovation policy document of any OECD country – is animated by a particular ideal of human achievement.

Here the hero is the scientist, the inventor, the disruptive entrepreneur; restless in pursuit of progress – of a world that is ever faster, harder, stronger.

But as philosophical thinkers such from Martha Fineman to Andrew Sayer have pointed out, humans are vulnerable as well as capable.

Vulnerability is not an aberration, or the fate of unlucky minorities; it is a universal feature of the human condition. We all need clothing, food, shelter, emotional nourishment, and care in infancy, sickness and old age.

And it is in addressing each other’s basic needs that a great many of us spend most of our days. As in many industrialised countries, much of the UK economy is made up of ‘foundational’ services, meeting the everyday needs of households and small businesses.

The ‘providential’ foundational economy delivers housing, education, health and care, while the ‘material’ foundational economy provides households with daily essentials such as utilities, high-street banking and food.

Distinct but related is the ‘overlooked economy’, which provides goods that are socially defined as essential, such as haircuts, house maintenance, or a meal out. These are usually low-tech and unsung, but nonetheless crucial in shaping our quality of life.

Taken together, the foundational economy and the overlooked economy make up nearly two-thirds of UK employment. Unlike frontier sectors, they are also important across the UK. Around 6% of the population, for example, is employed in the care sector, and this proportion is similar across regions.

So what would innovation in the foundational and overlooked economy look like?

Changing these will require not just more resources, but radical social innovation, in Roberto Unger’s sense of (initially) localised experimentation which can “foreshadow” wider economic and social transformation.

Such innovation cannot simply be imposed top-down, but rather needs to be driven by workers, social movements and other civil society actors, in collaboration with local authorities, employers and researchers.

Supporting such radical social innovation should be a core task of funds such as the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund - just as important and substantial as its support for innovation within the frontier industries. (The Welsh Government’s Foundational Economy Challenge Fund is already showing the way here).

Emerging experiments in the Social Care sector, as well as calls for change from social movements such as Reclaim Social Care and the National Association of Care and Support Workers (NACAS), provide a flavour of what this radical social innovation might look like in practice. Researchers in the Foundational Economy Collective researchers have argued for experimentation in the way services are commissioned, provided and inspected.

Innovation in commissioning should explore how to use the procurement process more purposively to raise the value of care work, and to drive community wealth building in an expansive sense. The process should involve closer working between the organisations that provide care and the local authorities that largely pay for it, in order to move beyond risk-averse commissioning that fails to meet the larger needs of care recipients or givers.

An example is Tameside Council, which has reshaped its home care services away from 15-minute time blocks and towards a more person-centred model by retendering their contract, requiring selected providers to work with them closely on improving outcomes and staff pay.

Innovation in provision should explore of new models of care, giving care workers greater opportunities to apply their imagination and creativity, and drawing on the insights of care-recipients to provide more holistic care.

Inspiration might be provided by the “communities of care” emerging out of anarchist activist movements in the USA, which seek to collectivise the experiences of illness and grieving (as well as the care they necessitate) - in the process redefining the meaning of ageing. New care models should be associated with clearer pathways to progression for care workers, and improved access to life-long learning.

Business and governance models are another area ripe for experimentation. New forms of worker ownership and governance models giving more active roles to workers and other stakeholders (e.g. care recipients’ families) could help raise the status of care work while giving workers more of a say and better pay.

The Equal Care Co-op, for example, is a platform-based social care and support co-operative, operating in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.

More here from Issac’s original article on Open Democracy, Beyond High-Tech Patriarchy.

We are interested in how Isaac Stanley’s take draws on anarchist, cooperative and “localised experimentation” in the Unger style. At the very least, these vital forms should be drawn on, to combat incorporation of new initiatives into the standard statutory services. More here.

Techno-fix futures will only accelerate climate chaos—don’t believe the hype

Here’s another critical take on the “techno-heroic” models of innovation. Specifically, it’s about the way their “solutionism” often cuts against a deeper understanding of how radically we’ll have to change our systems, and lifestyle, to hit our climate targets.

This piece from the Centre for Sustainable Prosperity levels its critique at the ecomodernists and left accelerationists. “In a nutshell, both envisage that technological progress will allow us to address climate and ecological breakdown while also dramatically increasing production and consumption”.

These imagined futures have obvious appeal to those who enjoy the luxuries of consumption and technological innovation. But the premises on which they rest are fatally flawed.

Left accelerationism is completely disengaged from sustainability sciences. Ecomodernism is more engaged, but it tends to ignore the unjust distribution of environmental benefits and burdens from climate breakdown. It downplays how our the organisation of our societies drives ecological crises. As a result, it focuses only on superficial social change.

Proponents of both are often hostile to many ideas and individuals within the environmental movement. As such, they are seriously derailing momentum in tackling the climate crisis.

The scientific evidence tells us that it is simply not possible to continue increasing consumption and greenhouse gas emissions on the current trajectory without exhausting Earth’s resources and crossing planetary boundaries—limits to Earth’s biological, chemical and physical systems that represent a safe operating space for humanity.

Beyond these boundaries, we run the risk of causing abrupt and irreversible environmental changes that threaten the stability of Earth’s systems and human civilisation.

…For starters, all technology-focused future visions require wildly unrealistic increases in energy generation. This is a problem because since we have used up most of the easy to access sources, the quality of our energy resources is declining.

Compared to a few decades ago, we need to input much more energy for every unit of energy we produce. While the energy cost of renewables is falling, vast increases in consumption only make the transition to renewables harder, and will put a huge additional burden on our already vulnerable energy systems.

To navigate the high resource demands of their imagined futures, ecomodernist and left accelerationist visions rely on fairy tale technologies that do not exist. For example, the future vision of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) peddles promises of asteroid mining to address resource shortages on Earth.

But we do not know if low-carbon space travel is possible. Ecological crises are happening now. We need to take action now. Searching for low-carbon space travel takes attention and resources away from social changes that we know can work.

FALC’s vision has been accepted uncritically in prominent media outlets such as The New York Times and The Guardian, despite being thoroughly debunked by environmental scholars.

This distracts from the hard but necessary work of changing the energy system now. Given the risks presented by climate breakdown above 1.5℃ of global heating—possibly just a decade or two away—we cannot afford to back future visions that do not prioritise immediate and large-scale cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

More fundamentally, the ideas underlying technofix futures arguably aren’t far from the type of thinking that created the climate and ecological crises in the first place. They imagine luxury as heavily based in material consumption—as author of FALC’s manifesto Aaron Bastani says: “Cartier for everyone, MontBlanc for the masses and Chloe for all.”

As a result, they tend to overlook and devalue aspects of our world that are less obviously associated with luxury: the natural environment, clean air, animal life, time spent with family and friends, local communities.

These things may not provide material luxury, but they do make life worth living—and do not necessarily have to use up our scarce energy and material resources.

Where FALC attempts to provide for all using the notion of luxury, feminist and ecologically-oriented economists and design theorists look to alternative strategies to generate prosperity.

We propose a redesign of future ways of living based on different values: the ethics of care, regenerating nature, and distributing its benefits fairly.

Cooperatives, time-banks and community-owned renewable energy systems are already putting these values into practice. These organisational models create regenerative and distributive systems supporting prosperity for all, and addressing climate breakdown at the same time.

Of course, these alternative futures will require us to fundamentally transform our culture as well as our economy. Clearly technofix futures are more attractive options for many of those who are not on the frontlines of climate chaos—and who might be able to continue living high-consumption lifestyles for a decade or two more.

But nothing other than dramatic societal transformation will be sufficient to avoid catastrophic climate change for the vast majority of the world’s population—and eventually, everyone.

It may sound daunting, but rejecting the ecologically harmful assumptions on which our culture is currently built offers us a unique chance to build a healthier and fairer world.

More here. Our own investigations into radical innovation would open the door a little bit more to their transforming effects - their ability to turn conditions on their head. For example, our post on the Finnish company Solar Food (see our blog here and this National column). Its process can remove protein production from farmlands and animals entirely, making it out of hydrogen and electricity.

If this scales, and business and products can be built around it, what an extraordinary climate intervention this would be. Yet it’s fuelled with the same tech-heroism that leads us down the toxic paths and systems.

It would be best if the eco modern/left accelerationists, and the regenerative position taken here, could be in dialogue rather than opposition. We hope to be a space for that discussion.