Digital Watch

This last week or so, my phone has started really pushing a specific category of Facebook reel on me. Mostly: other mothers’ daily routines. This isn’t too surprising because I’m on maternity leave, and anyone familiar with the demands of baby-care will know how strangely compatible it is with watching a 30-second video of someone in Utah cleaning their car and picking up a juice (drive thru – imagine!). In parallel I’ve been reading Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future, courtesy of my local library.

I’m not sure I’d recommend this particular brain cocktail, set as it was to the backdrop of Liz Truss’ demise. It’s been a disorienting week. However the domestic videos and Mason’s book do have something in common. They reflect the benefits of a networked society, and they point to a future in which our idea of labour shifts, and our work/leisure boundary is increasingly blurred.

Mason of course encourages us to be ‘unashamed utopians’ about a world in which technological change (driven by the internet & ‘infotech’) basically does us all out of jobs but means we can live for free. I’m a natural optimist, so count me in. Mostly, isn’t it just refreshing to talk in terms of new epochs for humanity, rather than viewing change as something to be feared?

Not that we should ignore our fears. It doesn’t take much to uncover predictions of mass automation hitting jobs very soon – see PWC’s report here (p29), which projects that globally by 2027 up to 50% of jobs held by young men will be at high risk of obsolescence.

Are we managing our way through any transition in a planned, considered way? That’s an enormous question about the future of work, so let’s just commit to do a lot more reading. But one thing that is immediately clear is that the digital divide needs to be bridged. For anyone unfamiliar with this term, the Good Things Foundation provide a powerful description of how digital exclusion (crucially not just access to the internet, but also digital skills and confidence) can lead to poor outcomes across many aspects of individual lives (health, financial, social, well-being) as well as poorer societal outcomes (less effective public services, weaker democracy, increased social inequality). Our pandemic lives made it easy to feel like everyone was online. But the reality is much more complex. Take a look at this infographic. 5% of households in the UK don’t have at-home internet access. 36% of workers lack the digital skills they need to be effective at their jobs. Sources here. These aren’t small numbers.

We should certainly question where digital innovation will take us if over a third of workers feel digitally under-skilled or lacking in confidence. Maybe we will end up enjoying lives of creativity and collaboration, our basic needs met through incredible efficiency. But even as an optimist, it’s hard not to be nervous about the work required to reach a point where digital technologies and networks are forces for social cohesion rather than privilege.