Social justice in a digital age: Essay 1
It’s time to update our governing arrangements, so where do we start?
Earlier this year I announced a project with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Social justice in a digital age.
We set up the project to explore whether capitalism is changing in ways that require new strategies for the pursuit of social justice, different to those of the past.
I framed the work by referring to the early 20th century, when Joseph Rowntree and his contemporaries tried to understand the social and economic changes of their time, so that they could help us develop a new institutional settlement.
We’re now moving deeper into a new century and, it seems increasingly clear, into a new technological era, so it feels timely to ask: what would Rowntree do now?
There are two premises that I think justify this as an interesting question, which it’s worth mentioning upfront.
The first is that the governing arrangements we assembled in the early-to-mid twentieth century — the settlement we came to call social democracy — weren’t a timeless solution to the question of how we govern capitalism. They were a set of institutional machinery that was custom-built for the technological, and therefore the social and economic, conditions of the time. So when the conditions change, this machinery needs to be replaced or reconfigured.
The second premise is that the conditions are in fact now changing in ways that require such a reconfiguration. So we’re struggling to govern our society in the way you’d struggle if you drove a car from a road into a lake or a swamp.
This doesn’t mean everything has changed. We don’t need to panic and abandon the vehicle of the social democratic state entirely; we can re-use many of the parts. But the new environment is sufficiently different — or, rather, is qualitatively different — such that there’s no point just revving the engine or fighting over the steering wheel to turn it left or right. If we do that, we’ll only get increasingly angry and confused as to why we’re not getting anywhere.
If we buy these two premises, we see that there’s work to be done at the level of the design or structure of the state, and that it’s useful to start by understanding our new terrain. So as part of the project we’ll publish three essays that describe some qualities that make 21st century capitalism different from its 20th century incarnation, and that are pertinent to the kind of vehicle we now need.
In the first essay, I explore one such change in the nature of capitalism, which I characterise as the rise of the invidious hand. I’m referring to the way choice and competition function differently in a world of digital platforms, so that the market loses its sparkle as a way of solving problems of coordination and information. As a consequence, the way we used to regulate markets within the social democratic settlement no longer works, or at least is losing its purchase.
I believe the invidious hand helps us make sense of the character of life in a mature capitalist society, particularly the sense of compulsion that now pervades our lives as consumers, and the feeling, prevalent in markets near the frontier of technology, that we have to be constantly on guard against tricks.
The bad news is that, because these forces run deep, we can expect more of the same unless we fundamentally change our regulatory approach. The good news is that these forces mean there’s a lot of fresh power to play with. So if we can work out how to govern a platform-based economy, the resulting social settlement would be an improvement on the old one.
Anyway, let’s jump in and see how we get on. Here’s a link to the first essay in the series, The Invidious Hand. I’ll add links to essays two and three — on care and inequality — in the autumn. You can keep up with the work by following me on Medium here or on Substack here.
And as always you can read the big story behind all of this, from Victorian sewers to digital dragons, in my book, End State.
