Alternative Editorial: Look to communities - they're the real testbeds of tech innovation

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

By A/UK co-initiator Pat Kane

When you’re an activist, you have an itch to stay active, no matter the conditions. Week 21 of the lockdown saw us absorbing reactions to our new report (with the Local Trust), “A New Story of Us”. We believe the report has many virtues (not least to display the capability and resilience of the citizens of Plymouth, in the face of COVID). 

But one of its virtues is to clearly show how social technology can defy a street-clearing pandemic, and meaningfully bring people together to empathise, envision and deliberate. 

Part of the excitement here is that, like the old days of the internet, it’s currently a level playing field. One of our team is, in their day job, talking with a major creative institution about a global-level project. And they were struck to find that this institution was using no more advanced tools for their ideas-process than we did for our online meeting with our friends in Plymouth, this March and April. 

Like us, they used Zoom, to socialise and discuss; Miro (a digital and shared “whiteboard”), to display clusters of thoughts and images; Google Docs, for mutual notetaking; and Google Drive, for storing the material generated. 

If people wanted to become more coherent and intentional groups, the major institution used Slack, where we used Loomio (a post-Occupy social network). And of course, both of us used texts, emails, Facebook and other now-everyday apps, to stitch up the loose ends of this sociable network of humans.

Scrappy idealists, and major players, using the same set of tools to solve the same problems (that is, how to harness enthusiasm, creativity and purpose, under remote and distanced conditions): these are classic conditions for fertile innovation. They invite the rise of new systems and platforms, aiming to integrate these disparate elements. 

But who will benefit from integrating our pandemic-era tools— the citizen or the investor? Recent tech history isn’t an entirely rosy story here, particularly in the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. In short, gnarly old competencies become seductive new conveniences.

The capacity to download copyable content is eventually corralled into vast platforms like Netflix or Spotify. The early power of digital networks to “disintermediate” - or take out the middle-man - seems to have also perversely created the ultimate middlemen (like Amazon or Apple). 

And the “insanely easy group-forming powers” (Clay Shirky) of social-technical networks morphs into Facebook. They mine your communicative energy to help advertisers target you on their dartboards, using deliberately addictive techniques to keep you on their platform.

So can we learn from history here (never easy)? How do these rich new social and community spaces that digitality has opened up, as we cope with biospheric disruption, not just become the seedbeds of the next Apple or Amazon? Yet more harvesting of our sociality? 

The next stage of civic tech

We can start to answer this via inspiration from an even earlier wave of computing. I have always been charmed by stories of the Homebrew Computing Club, an early computer hobbyist group in Menlo Park, California, running from March 1975 to December 1986. 

Out of its ranks came the two founding Steves of Apple (Jobs and Wozniak), Bill Gates, and other less luminary but significant figures in the development of the personal computer. 

They met in domestic garages and parking lots (and yes, in homebrew pubs). Like the male geeks they were, the HCC exchanged details on opaque bits of tech—but they also theorised about what society would be like when computation was in everyone’s hands. Their photocopied newsletter became a crucible for Silicon Valley’s current supremacy. 

I suggest we need the equivalent of “homebrew” digital clubs today. These would be locally specific, friendly spaces (we assume the spaces would be virtual as much as actual). Here, residents and citizens could explore, benchtest, and co-develop tech that serves their concrete and communal needs. (We’ve called for Learning Clubs before on this site). 

It’s the kind of club we (at A/UK) easily imagine being an element in a CAN (a citizen action/community agency network). But you can see it happening in practice with Ed Saperia’s Newspeak House, which regularly matches needful communities with tech practitioners. 

Or take our The Elephant Meets… Zoom event which took place this week, with Olly Sylvester-Bradley (the edited video will be up soon). This was also a very concrete example of communities seeking empowering technology. In this case, they’re looking for tech that can retain wealth, and the benefits of trading among themselves, in a local area.

Olly admitted that his Open Credit Network - a tech-enhanced version of mutual credit - was a tool to “strengthen community”, as much as it was a challenge to existing financial systems. 

And anecdotally, among our intentional and activist communities, we can report a ravenous appetite for finding technology that brings people together under coronavirus conditions. 

Presuming that central government doesn’t have the willingness or foresight to support such civic tech, is this where philanthropic or foundation money could usefully go? The recent embrace of readily available social tech by hundreds of thousands of mutual aiders shows, at the very least, there is demand that would respond to possibilities and partnerships.

Could one part of the question, “what is the next level of organisation for this flourishing mutualism?” be about how we develop the next stage of civic tech? That is, not just for survival needs, but as a springboard - towards ambitions and visions for more self-organising and self-provisioning? 

Some might argue that this “homebrew” (or maybe techno-social-anarchist) approach is hardly adequate, in the face of the endless capacity for incorporation and absorption displayed by the tech giants. Say, for example, Microsoft follow through on their stated ambition to lead the “social meeting” sector (their “Rooms” software has been a decent competitor to Zoom). Will we all just swarm willingly to their platform, and endure the usual ratcheting up of rents and rates, as we deepen our commitment?

Let’s have some visible victories

Here’s another moment for pause. The Alternative UK proclaims in its banner that official “politics” is “broken”. Surely one of its most shattered joists is the public distrust of how states and corporations handle their access to our personal digital information, post the revelations of Edward Snowden, Christopher Wylie and GCHQ. 

This report from the Ada Lovelace Institute tells of how the NHSX tracing app was beset by issues of popular suspicion about how this data was to be used. (The data-centralising ambitions of the current government hardly allay these suspicions.)

James Meadway in Open Democracy has written about the public-health disaster that this centralising tendency has caused overall in the COVID crisis. Local authorities have had to wait for lumbering responses from Whitehall on track and trace infection. But even when they decided to execute their own schemes, they barely possessed the authority and resources.

Meadway wants us to note that, in the future and as a result of COVID’s public health challenge, our data will be increasingly sought by the state. And that, short of a working vaccine, we will be responding to localised outbreaks until then. 

So shouldn’t localities be empowered, or find ways to empower themselves, to handle and act on such data? Obviously, there needs to be some top-down element in virus management, an all-island overview of dangers and patterns.

But somewhat forlornly (he is an ex-Corbyn advisor), Meadway urges the current government to set up an “Office of the Digital Commons” to oversee the relations between local and centre. As if such a directive institution is remotely likely in the current regime.

Do we have the time to campaign for another four-year turn of the national electoral cycle, with hardly any prospect of a successful progressive government when the vote does come around, to bring about such institutions? In truth, we don’t. Warming, automation, pandemic - all press urgently.

This is why, in A/UK, we are trying to focus on the communities - and in this case, their relation to technologies - that can make manifest material changes, in their assets and resources, in the here and now. 

We have a built a substantial archive of precedents and experiments here - in localism, technology, and democratic innovation - which we invite readers to investigate, and feel the possibilities arising from them. 

One thing that incites and sustains activism is visible victories, at whatever scale they can be achieved. Join us, to see how we might together hack and co-create them into reality.