The fight over our post-COVID future should be as much about welfare as it is about tech
Surveillance thrives in unequal environments, and the pandemic will increase inequality. We need a welfare state for our digital information economy.
Even as states and countries start opening up, it will remain the case that many work, education, and commercial activities will continue to be facilitated by platforms in the near future. Cobbe and Bietti have made a prompt call to reimagine how that platform-enabled future looks like, while Naomi Klein has warned this is an opportunity for the most powerful actors to further entrench their power to further instill in our societies their logic of data-exploitation and intense inequality.
Indeed, not only are platforms even more crucial today to facilitate our communications and how we go about life but their business model might be expanding: mayors and governors all over are conversing with them to track the disease and identify people who might be infected; they are being called to rebuild our cities’ infrastructure — now in a way that is ‘pandemic-proof’ — and companies of all kinds are already buying software to control their remote workers; speeding a trend that was already thriving in gig-work and warehouses, where companies digitally monitor employee performance, efficiency, and overall on-the-job conduct.
As if to make matters worse, it seems to be a fact of the pandemic that it will increase the already staggering levels of inequality. The poor already bear a disproportionate burden of morbidity and mortality; they are more exposed and have worse underlying health conditions associated with poverty, such as malnutrition, psychological stress, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. Additionally, low-wage workers, including many women and members of racial and ethnic minorities, have been hit especially hard by the job losses caused by the economic slowdown. Experts say it’s the worst devastation since the Great Depression.
Unemployment, work precarity, and economic and pandemic-related stress will thus only make it easier for companies to push for surveillance technologies and practices in the workplace, institutions, and public spaces. People under economic pressure and worrying to make ends meet have fewer options to opt-out and will easily “have to consent” — a contradiction in terms — to surveillance practices; not because they are free to do so, but because they are in need. Being somewhat free of surveillance will be even more of a luxury. Indeed, it is not surprising that, for a while, it has been in gig-work and warehouses that surveillance practices have thrived.
In countries, however, where individuals have access to welfare, unemployment insurance, and so on, not only may the economy recover more quickly — as the demand side of it will have been taken care off — but individuals and groups will be less strained to consent to practices that they disagree with. They may also even more able to collaborate and self-isolate if they feel they should. A recent example in France shows, for example, that workers’ bargaining power may even help make going back to work safer, as a judge ruled, after a labor union’s complaint, that Amazon could not deliver non-essential goods until it instituted enough safety precautions for its workers to protect against the virus. More protected workers and citizens could, perhaps, help contain surveillance too.
Indeed, companies can only instill in our societies their logic of data-exploitation and intense inequality — if we let them. The bargaining power of different actors in a given society is shaped by laws, rules, and institutions. Today, however, the balance is heavily inclined towards corporate power and against individuals, families, and workers: Social security programs that don’t create an alternative if we lose our jobs, laws that tax the middle class heavily and the super-rich far less so, making it hard to save for retirement or for a hard time, laws that make health-insurance an expensive luxury, laws that set incredibly low minimum wages, laws that enable companies to reap the benefits of the data we too produce with them, and so on. In sum, laws that determine that the benefits generated in our digitally enabled capitalism are distributed in a way that, right now, leaves too many far behind.
What does this have to do with re-imagining platforms? Well, technology was supposed to set us free, and, yes, it has enabled wonderful things. But technology doesn’t operate in a vacuum and how it is designed, deployed, and used depends much on the institutional frameworks of our societies. What if the early days of the platform collaborative economy — where it was still more about meeting strangers on couchsurfing than renting a bedroom to make ends meet, or spend some time working on Wikipedia or Lynux for the fun of it — were possible because there was a little more abundance (at least for some)? What if part of the sharing economy is that we need spare time and mental bandwidth to actually share because we’re not worrying about the next paycheck or the next health-bill?
If it wasn’t true before, it is definitely the case that some of our most beloved platforms are increasingly crucial infrastructures to keep our societies and markets running. But if we want to have societies where non-exploitative and more cooperative models can thrive, where capitalist models don’t result in exploitative models, or even just avoid that they turn into a surveillance dystopia, we need to think too about how we position users and workers in the imaginary bargain that happens in all commercial, and non-commercial transactions. We’ve actually done that already: In the early 20th century, when other mega-corporations started playing crucial roles in society — like railroad companies or the telegraph — many were regulated like infrastructures, and rules were enacted that forced them to, for example, carry the content or loads of potential competitors, serve all communities, and pay minimum wages. In the US, it was the New Deal.
It’s cliché by now, — and in many places, it may sound impossible — but the NHS and the welfare state in the UK were created after World War II, and Sweden’s welfare system was created, actually, after the Spanish flu devastated the country. Crisis is, also, a time of change and opportunity, and while it still looks like it might get ugly, an election is coming up and, who knows, it can still get better.
