Digital Watch

This isn’t the post I was going to write this week. Inspired by a reasonably gruelling spin around the Stratford Westfield centre for one pair of kids’ shoes, I had something sort-of lined up on whether shopping online, especially second-hand, is as environmentally conscious as we might dream it to be. I’ll return to it in future when I’ve had a chance to read up on circularity (a friend recommended The Future we Choose – other ideas welcome!). I quickly found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that wading into debates about the carbon impact of online shopping, marketing studies about how we behave online, and conversations about linear vs circular consumption was more than the work of a few evenings.

Then another friend pointed me in the direction of James Plunkett’s new project with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which provides food for thought after last week’s reflections on Mason’s Post-Capitalism. Plunkett and team are considering what social justice looks like in the digital age, importantly asking questions which go beyond applying traditional economic analysis to digitalisation.

As it happens one of the recent outputs of their work is an essay on ‘the care paradox’ which articulates how while in theory, technology-driven productivity gains in certain sectors should push wages up elsewhere, in care (and other high-touch sectors) we are living in a paradigm of:

• Low wage growth
• High institutional and private spending
• High private burdens for informal care

Interestingly, this is exactly the sort of dynamic I think Mason would expect in a world geared towards consuming cheap stuff and diluting workers’ power. Accordingly, there is certainly a debate to be had about whether we can adequately solve the paradox in the context of a capitalist world undergoing a digital transformation. However, Plunkett does ask us to think big: in terms of future spending, and ideas for reform both within the sector and how we engage with it (e.g. reductions to our working week should be in scope).

Personally, I’m onboard with all of those considerations. Though I guess we should enact them quickly in case Mason is right and we should instead be looking to a new epoch.

With that in mind, can we offer up any ideas for reform? I think we’ll quickly realise that aside from the high-touch nature of care, another feature makes generic suggestions for change difficult or unwise – by its nature, care is a tailored, diffuse set of services. There are no big, sweeping, ways to deliver better outcomes with the same resource.

I’ve been reflecting on childcare. First of all, the Government should spend more and I fully support the campaign goals of Pregnant then Screwed. In addition, maybe there are opportunities in thinking local? Doesn’t it seem plausible that community-based co-operative practices between providers (and even parents) could optimise capacity, build resilience into the system and even be fun for the kids? In this context, the role of technology would be to help us communicate better and build trust between families and providers. The digital service would be operating at a very local, neighbourhood or community level.

This example provides us with a further reminder of the challenge we face in trying to understand how digitalisation might shape our futures. The changes are a dizzying array of global, national, local and personal requiring constant zooming in and out. I’m starting to realise that the most important questions are the most human ones, about how we think and function, and what we actually want.