I thought I’d do a round up of what I am reading, and in the case of Late Soviet Britain, not yet reading.
Complex Vs Complicated
A recurring issue in my research into the digital state has been the issue of programmes, structures and funding - and one of my interviewees Jeff Allen who works in the Ministry of Justice in London has written a good blog post on it. It picks up a theme I had scratched the surface of, and digs in.
We still tend to think of digital in government as being both CapEx (capital expenditure) and plannable - like a bridge. What Jeff calls complicated. Whereas services (whether digital or not) are more analogous to building towns - complex. There are skeleton elements, the roads, the drains, that are plannable, predictable and knowable, and there is a ton of organic and unpredictable stuff, where the people push back, do stuff, shape the environment free of the omnipotent planner and creator. Prices for computers have crashed off the scale. To give a price deflator - my best-in-the-UK supercomputer allocation of foot-to-the-floor big science pony of 1987 works out about 1 second of your new phone a year. If your computer is running too slow you should just do less damn work kiddo. Nowadays Harry Hooter’s are mostly OpEx (operational expenditure) and our accounting and planning hasn’t caught up.
Jeff also challenged me as to why my scope was digital services and design and not simply services and design and that, my friend, is a damn good question to which I will return. Follow Jeff on Twitter.
Being or Doing
The second jaw-dropper I am reading is that old-but-goldie, a proper flannelette scorcher of yore, the Audit Office’s Challenges In Implementing Digital Change from 2021. This diagram floored me. A traffic jam of soooooo many transformation programmes:
I think its time to surrender on digital transformation. (I hate the word transformation - it’s a sales weasel word - adjustment is my goto.)
Digital transformation is conceived as doing - we, us do to you, them. I think we need to switch our mindset to continuous improvement, incremental adjustment and conceive of it as being, how we work. Instead of focussing on how to achieve what we want to achieve we should focus on having the skills and organisations that people who achieve what we want to achieve need to have. It’s a paradigm shift that is not without its problems. Drop the sexy-sexy, drop the bluster/hero posing and get on with doing the seemingly dull, mundane and quotidian that actually when you do it, is infinitely complex, intricate and fascinating (but it sure don’t make good telly).
Buckle up kiddo
Alright, alright onto the hard stuff, Late Soviet Britain.
Abby Innes’s takedown of Dominic Cummings (and Michael Gove)’s panoptical pretensions was one of the highlights of 2020. Farewell Whitehall, hello Red Square? On Gove and the ‘privilege of public service’ is still a thrilling read - lightning writ upon the page.
The coming ideological war is between classical liberals who believe in the market-under-the-state and the anglo-saxon neoliberals who believe in the state-under-the-market.
Telling them apart is really about asking the same question 3 times.
Do clearing markets exist for:
cans of coke
rehabilitated prisoners
seats in the House of Lords
If you say yes to 1 and 3 you’re a classical liberal, 1 and 2 you’re a neo.
Her basic premise is that the creation of pseudo-markets in outsourcing for ideological reasons creates information assymetries that lead simultaneously to lack of incentives and bargaining and value extraction by parasitical pseudo-businesses - and that those financial and social structures most closely resembles the Kosygin reforms of the Soviet internal planning system of the late 1960s. The cybernetic solutions that the USSR tried-out resembled the fantasies of the man-behind-the-curtain guru at the court of King Boris.
And she isn’t shy about pointing out that the market in peerages is a natural brand extension from the state capture that neo-liberalism has enabled.
It takes it’s title from her colleague Alexander Clarkson’s tweet of the same name.
Stop whatever it is you are doing right now, go and read all that she has published on the subject and wait for the actual book to come out in the autumn.
The strongest critics of parasitical pseudo-markets have traditionally come from tired old left groups, whose solutions vaguely hint at, but avoid, the 1940s notion of a nationalised economy and it is a delight to see an intellectually fresh, liberal and capitalist critique, like rain after a long dry summer.