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Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Forget ‘...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 10:59 PMOver the summer we have been hosting nine separate recent graduates who are each working on discreet projects for us (more on all of this soon) and my daughter just got her Higher results. It means I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people setting out on their lives recently, and the picture it paints is fairly horrifying.
Youth is now brutal. Once you’ve been softened up by the marketing industry which has converted you from being a child into a ‘key brand demographic’, the Tech Lords take your battered remains and pick away at them while the schools pitch you into a kind of winner-takes-all Hunger Games of an exam system for getting into university.
If you fail the exam game you better be male and get a trade or you’re off to the retail-and-care mines for a life of in-work benefits. And if you leave university you will have your debt to console you because there is a good chance you’ll be overqualified for the smattering of low-level jobs available.
Oh, and before you get a chance to get an interview for a job you don’t want in a line of work you’re uninterested in, you need to be rejected by a hundred AIs first, there to automate your humiliation.
That’s what I hear. The most common (despairing) comment I’ve heard is ‘none of my friends are in jobs relevant to their degree and they all hate their work’, and I’m still hearing that from people in their early 30s too.
While the generations before went through this to some extent, the structure of the overall economy and the nature of the housing market means we had a decent shot at escaping all of it into a decent life in later adulthood without the help of parents. Is that true for a lot of people now?
This generation is not convinced, and neither am I. Some of the people I’ve been talking to envisage perpetual strings of low-engagement, low-interest, insecure jobs as their future, like itinerant undocumented workers in the US trying to piece a life together one job at a time.
I am not sure youth is a ‘temporary problem’ any more and I think that both mainstream politics and the left should stop assuming that if we ‘get them through their youth’ it will all sort itself out, because the stats on age of first home ownership do not suggest that is exactly what is happening.
We have eroded the meaning of childhood and youth so much that thinking of them as a discreet group fells less and less helpful. More and more I think we need to see them either as what a mathematician calls an ‘extremum’ (the extreme outcome of any given situation) or as what a prophet would call an ‘omen’ (a warning about future events).
Have a look at how we talk about something like the introduction of AI. We see this as coming mostly from a structural point of view – how will AI restructure the labour market? We don’t see it from a longitudinal human perspective – what does that even mean, no entry level jobs? If there is no entry level, how is there a second stage? How does it work?
What does a life look like for a young person emerging into a world distorted by AI and eviscerated by offshored equity capitalism?
Stop seeing this as a series of time slices; what does it look like as a career, as a life? What does a life look like for a young person emerging into a world distorted by AI and eviscerated by offshored equity capitalism? Is anyone asking this? As far as I can tell we’re so busy in a destructive mad-cap race to gain tiny advantages now on issues like AI that we are completely ignoring even the near future.
The heartbreaking conversations I am having with young people have me rethinking policies I have developed, not always to change them but more just to see what they look like as the foundations of a life. It emphasises some things for me. Above all, the market as it stands wants to make the problem worse and it is not clear you can bridge from here to a market which works for people without some really radical changes in how we think about these things.
So this is my radical approach – think about a whole life process when developing policy for the young (or for anything else). Repeatedly ask the question ‘and then what?’ at each policy stage, mapping out a path through to a successful adult life.
How do we get people in the right post-school education? And then how do we get them onto a career path which reflects their hopes, meets their needs and provides the possibility of advancement? And then how do we get them into a positive housing situation? And then, how do we enable them to live a high-quality life?
It is incredibly unfashionable in politics to think about someone’s life. We’ve marketised our brains and we think in terms of choice, not life. Politics thinks someone’s life is only made up of two components – the options for consumption open to them and a wage that lets you access those choices. And as if that wasn’t reductive enough, we do not think either is the business of politicians.
So let me instead imagine a world which had a Department for Quality of Life which instead was dedicated to defining what a decent quality of life involves and what its component parts are, ensuring a real, affordable diversity of opportunity, and doing whatever it takes to help people into a position where they can take these opportunities. For real.
It would start at school and provide much better career advice, based on careers that exist. To do that we need to achieve something that I have heard politicians rattle on about continually all my adult life – achieving parity of esteem for vocation and academic education (which never ends up amounting to more than some leaflets).
Here is my radical suggestion – let’s boost the status of colleges for real. I would in any case like to see much more of the very lower level stuff colleges do (like basic competency skills) going into community education. And then I think I would take the business schools, marketing departments, HR degrees, accountancy and much of the narrowly work-focussed subjects you find in universities and move them to colleges.
Universities would be about engaging with bodies of knowledge that have been developed by humans over hundreds and hundreds of years, creating critical thinking and research skills. Colleges would be about skills and application-specific knowledge. And it would look like we mean it because all the prestigious business schools would be there.
Let colleges confer degrees in vocational subjects and behave much more like universities in their high-end courses, and let’s really try and break down the poor-people-learn-skills, rich-people-learn-to-think model we currently have.
Young people now are an omen of a world to come, a world dehumanised and created for the profit of equity capitalism, answerable to the AI systems of the rich, disinterested in the lives of people
But then what? How do people get into a career that they want, one with stairs that go upwards? Even more importantly, how do we create work with meaning and value? That is the single biggest reason people hate their employment – when they see it as without value.
Is it really that radical to ask young people what they’d actually like to do and see what we can to with public policy to increase supply of those kinds of jobs? There is one graduate I’ve spoken to recently who is happy at work and he works in a craft bakers. I suspect a lot of people would like to work in some kind of skills-focussed food economy.
Is it really too much to try and make much-needed reforms of our food system and do it in a way that creates a lot more of these jobs? I mean, the answer is definitely no. So if we can create a few thousand jobs like this across Scotland, would it not be worth it?
Alternatively, how do we get rid of really low value work so it doesn’t become a back stop? I am far from a luddite and am greatly in favour of automation of routine tasks. At the moment there is no point in investing in automation when you can hire desperate hungry people, but that is what we’re trying to get away from. How do we make automation about increasing job quality, not profits? Not without intervention.
And how do we take the big challenges ahead of us and convert them into careers? For example we need to get onwith house retrofit – how does that skill people up for a modern construction industry? Once we’ve completed retrofitting, how do those turn into prolonged careers? How do we structure it?
How do we make things again? People see building things or working on land-based industries or manufacturing to be interesting and of value. How do we create these jobs? Regulating AI is not the same as rebuilding a meaningful economy with real career structures.
Are we going to be stuck with dismal government like the current one on the housing situation forever? It is utterly hooked to making developers rich using public policy and public money and it clearly couldn’t care less about young people because they know that what they’re doing won’t work.
So how does a Department of Quality of Life prepare a life journey through the housing sector that is fit for this century? If you rent high-quality affordable homes when you’re younger, how do you prepare to own a house when you settle and have kids?
It’s not just material things. The nightlife that used to underpin youth is dying away and young people are becoming more isolated in their own homes. How do we reverse that? How do we create a society filled with things young people want to do? Can we not ask that question without being accused of communism?
And what about the long term? Kids now have no idea how they’re survive their retirement. They ought to be preparing now, but can they? Do we worry about that crisis ‘later’, or do we plan our way out of it now?
Young people now are an omen of a world to come, a world dehumanised and created for the profit of equity capitalism, answerable to the AI systems of the rich, disinterested in the lives of people. They are scavengers in a system that is cannibalising them for profit.. They are an extreme example of what is happening to all of us.
Let’s stop pretending this is going to ‘clear itself up’ and do something about it. This is not a temporary crisis. A decent life should be achievable – and it shouldn’t be a matter of chance, good luck or who your parents are. Bring on a Department for Quality of Life and let’s start making some value judgements about our society again.
Source: Forget 'opportunities'; what about lives?
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Paths to...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 10:29 PMScotland is not just one giant stuttering failure, filled with malfeasance and conspiracy and corruption. The vast majority of people working in the public sphere work hard every day trying to make things better. Nor do I expect errors not to happen. Nor do I think running complex services is easy.
What I do expect is that when errors occur they should be addressed honestly and transparently and if there is any reason to believe that the outcome is a result of anything other than honest error, that there is accountability. It’s not about punishment, it’s about moral hazard, the danger in believing you don’t need to be honest.
What I have been trying to show recently is that is not what happens in Scotland, and since you all keep sending me examples, let me give you a few more. We don’t have systems that hold powerful people to account.
First, how does a trial against presumably wealthy landlords collapse because the prosecution service botches a video? We’re quarter of the way through the twenty first century – that breaches basic competence at the very least.
You can get the full details of this case on Ruth Tingay’s excellent Raptor Persecution blog, but this is the basics. A red kite disappears over a shooting estate, presumed dead, probably shot. These cases generally go nowhere because it is so hard to find evidence that proves the bird was shot and who shot it.
So to have video footage from a neighbouring land owner who was monitoring wildlife and caught two figures with guns carrying a dead red kite was rare and welcome. Multiple people then correctly identified the two people in the video when it was played to them in the police station.
The long and short of it is that by the time the prosecution service brought the video to trial it had somehow been edited in a way that had sharply reduced the resolution. It was so bad that the witnesses in court were unable to identify anyone from the garbled remains of what had been crisp as a bell in the police station.
There were other aspects to this case, but this failure to identify in court was crucial in the eventual dismissal of the two men. And I cannot believe this is justice served. If the prosecution has butchered the key evidence, the trial must surely be adjourned until the problem is resolved. The public interest demands it.
My kids can copy video without accidentally reducing the resolution to the ‘court acquittal’ setting
In medieval Scotland landowners had different legal rights than everyone else. That’s not still the case is it? Because four years ago it also became law that landowners must register their ownership in Scotland but some are simply not doing it and despite Andy Wightman and Alan Brown pursuing them, the Crown Office refuses to take any action. Why?
As I keep pointing out, there are potentially legitimate reasons for some things that look open and shut to not be as certain as they appear. The law can be perverse sometimes, and sadly there is rather a lot of non-compliance that isn’t pursued. But the land registry was crucial national policy trumpeted by the Scottish Government.
And my kids can copy video without accidentally reducing the resolution to the ‘court acquittal’ setting. I just don’t think this should be happening, but will we ever find out what the hell is going on?
Meanwhile another really sad case. A child born with multiple disabilities is taken into care because his mother isn’t capable of looking after him. Relations between the mother and the social workers break down and she is basically prevented from seeing her son. His foster placements break down and ends up in residential care.
From there he had an illness and was put on palliative care and died. His mother only got ten minutes with him. This is all deeply sad and always more complex than it looks. Social work is under-resourced, fragmented and under pressure to take a punitive attitude, this is a case with terrible options. None of this is easy.
But mistakes were made. Procedurally it is non-negotiable that families are included in end-of-life decisions and that did not happen here. And it is hard to feel that there was a lot of humanity towards either the child or his mother that he was left to die over a period with no familiar faces for most of it.
What is wrong isn’t that people are meant to get things right in every way, every time with difficult situations, it’s that you absolutely must be transparent and learn from it afterwards. And that is where ‘bureaucratic Scotland’ kicked in. The council concerned (Renfrewshire Council) opted not to have a significant case review.
Instead what it did was the more minimal ‘regulation six’ report in which it runs over the bones of the case and any learning from it. But that is the authority which failed to follow procedures writing an assessment of its own failures. This went to the Care Inspectorate which (if we’re being generous) is overwhelmed and (if less so) has a track record of being rather soft on the institutions it inspects.
It nods the council report through and there it would have come to an end – but the mum is heartbroken and is pushing it. It’s just that there is no real route of appeal in any of this for someone like her. This is an instance in which I do understand the position of everyone involved, but it just points to the same thing.
The care system is broken (this isn’t hyperbole, literally anyone near care services will tell you this) and so rather than shine more light on where and how it is broken it is just too tempting to not ask the question. But that’s not good enough.
I believe strongly that when there is failure there must be transparency because failure which is not respected and learned from is a moral hazard in the future
Another instance; a different elected member in a different local authority made a complaint about the CEO. Basically someone who should have been a neutral senior council official answering directly to the CEO was caught on microphone badmouthing the councillor concerned in a manner he considered defamatory.
The problem now is that I have been through all the correspondence on this and it just goes round and round with all the familiar features – misdirection, claims of remedial actions which don’t take place, refusal to hand over relevant information, threatening the councillor with the Standards Commission, the usual.
It really is quite Kafka. When I look at it with my ‘what would I do?’ head on it really does feel like the only backstop to bureaucratic power in Scotland is often a Judicial Review. I just can’t see how justice can be pursued using the processes established internally.
I’m going to have to stop there. I keep getting this stuff from people now (one person contacted me telling me that an official they had complained about had accessed information about their children, but I don’t have all the details).
I don’t want to spend all my time writing about this but since nothing is happening in government in Scotland, I thought I’d offer some colour pieces to flesh out the size and scope of what feels like a real problem.
Again, I don’t know in the end what the truth is in many matters I hear about – that is why they’re called ‘disputes’. What I do know is that when I look at these disputes, the rules for dealing with them seem almost custom designed to make sure that only one side has any chance of winning and that rules have been put in place that make it very hard even to disclose relevant information.
But this may not last forever. We’re still awaiting the ruling after Fiona Higgins’ Judicial Review of the Standards Commission, but in some ways it really did feel a little bit of a landmark day. Let me tell you three things the judge said – with a little translation.
"…how can you possibly conduct a proportionality exercise [on right to free speech] when you’re closing your eyes to a good chunk of the facts?". Or “[there’s] something awkward in any judicial or quasi-judicial context about making your mind up in advance as to what you may or may not have an outcome on the hearing".
Or my favourite; "What’s wrong with looking at half a dozen pages of text that provide background and colour?”. Because what indeed? I think we can translate this as ‘people have free speech whether you like it or not, kangaroo courts are generally frowned on and surely you’re not really allowed to make rules which are patently unreasonable?’.
I absolutely do not believe that every failure is the result of ‘conspiracy’. I believe that we hold people to account not to punish but to learn. But I believe strongly that when there is failure there must be transparency because failure which is not respected and learned from is a moral hazard in the future.
And whatever is going on in Scotland, there is far too much failure and far too little accountability.
Source: Paths to justice are closed and it is a moral hazard
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Indy mov...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 09:45 PMIt hadn’t intend to write a three-part series on independence strategy but someone’s off sick so…
Last time I argued that we need to persuade the ten per cent of Scots who take us from round-about 50 per cent support to round-about 60 per cent. While it is an imprecise judgement, 60 per cent is what I think is the minimum threshold that persuades even critics that independence is the settled will of the Scottish people – but I left open how we actually do this.
Mostly until now people have pushed for the referendum route (or some proxy for it) for a specific reason, and that reason is entirely legitimate. If you want someone to change their mind about an issue the first priority is getting them to think about it at all.
Most of us most of the time don’t expend energy thinking about things that are not directly relevant to us or which we do not find intrinsically interesting or entertaining or enjoyable. We make the decisions we have to then pursue the things we enjoy.
In technical terms this is known as ‘issue salience’ – how important is it that I make this decision now and so how important is it that I absorb enough information to make that decision? If I don’t need to make the decision, the issue has low salience so there is little point in me expending effort to gather information.
A referendum creates a decision-point granting the issue high salience, and so people respond differently. That is why we had that remarkably high turnout on referendum day; people thought it was important and so expended surprising amounts of energy engaging with the debate.
Post-referendum there has been no decision-point on independence, making it generally low salience, and we’ve struggled to break that barrier. For the most part we have failed to get our target audience to engage with the information we need them to see if they are to change their minds – so we want another referendum to create a high-salience dynamic.
That is absolutely legitimate and it would definitely work; given another referendum, people would definitely engage. There are just two problems; first, this is precisely the reason no-one is going to give us a referendum if they can possibly avoid it, and second, even if people do see an issue as high valiance it does not mean they will necessarily change their mind.
Referendums have been lost twice in a row; double failure is not impossible. No matter what we do we have to persuade more people and while increasing the issue salience will grab their attention, it does not necessarily mean they will change their position.
It is not enough to claim you’re solving problems, your target audience has to believe it
This is point number one; issue salience has a powerful effect but it is not sufficient in itself so other factors matter. But this also means that there must be other factors which effect attention and decision-making – and there are. That is the second point.
You can get people to pay attention through issue salience, but you can also get people to pay attention through information availability. Adverts on TV are not there to make you think laundry detergent is important but to put a particular brand of detergent in your mind for when you do buy.
Are we putting sharp, memorable messages about independence to an audience in their own environment regularly so it is absorbed and established as an idea? A referendum makes people think about an issue they might not otherwise, but so does message availability. They can’t un-see it.
Another crucial factor is issue relevance. This sounds facile but it is not – we engage with the information we think is most relevant to us. I absorbed zero information about drain augers until I got a blocked drain and suddenly this thing I’d never thought about before was solving a significant problem I had.
We may not be able to force a decision-point on independence, but there are lots of decision-points people will face anyway. These are the endless little problems of life, and when we reach those points we start paying attention to information related to that problem.
In other words, we need to make independence a meaningful solution to the problems people face every day. Every spike in support we’ve had in the last ten years was when the public thought independence was solving something – Brexit or Boris or Covid incompetence.
This does not mean spraying aspirational statements around. We have a tendency to make independence a ‘macro’ issue – ‘it will create ten thousand jobs’. We need to make it a targetted, micro issue.
It has to be about our audience, and they don’t want ten thousand jobs, they want one good job. They want a nicer home, more affordable bills, good public services, better customer service, more parking or better public transport.
How are we solving these problems? What does independence mean for the individual? That leads to another crucial factor – information credibility. It is not enough to claim you’re solving problems, your target audience has to believe it.
We’re bad on this; we make fairly bold statements that aren’t evidenced or explained. We say ‘your electricity will be cheaper’ but we don’t explain how we’ll set up an energy market, how a regulator will keep bills low, we don’t have a credible ‘grid budget’ that explains costs in a way people can examine.
We want too much to be taken on trust and that’s not good enough. And it raises another crucial factor – the messenger effect. This is a term for the differential way people receive information depending on who is giving them the information.
None of this is glamorous, but it works
Think ‘like, respect, know, believe’ – each of these makes us more likely to absorb information from a given source. We need to think in terms of two things here. First, the original source of the material must be from someone authoritative that the target audience believes.
But second, it works best if this is delivered by people the target audience knows or likes or thinks is ‘like them’. This last point is again crucial – we have an enormously powerful resource in the people who support us but aren’t activists.
Getting them involved in message-passing to their peers is (if done well), incredibly effective – particularly where the original source of the information is also trusted.
What I’m saying here is that you most certainly do not need a referendum to get people to engage with information, but that makes it a different game with different rules – and we’re not playing it.
There is something else that is at the heart of this – see every method that I suggest above? They work, but you need to know your audience. You need to know who they are, where they are, where they live, what their problems are (never assume), what their barriers are (why aren’t they supporting us?), what information they need to hear and who they trust to tell them it.
Again, no-one apart from us refuses to do market research. We’ve been so focussed on trying to come up with a scheme so the powerful can cut a deal between themselves to give us a referendum that we’ve lost sight of our audience altogether.
Let me ask you this; all the evidence I have seen suggests that there are undoubtedly ten per cent of the population who can change their minds – but how many of them voted in the Holyrood election? What social class are they? Is there a gender skew? Where are they located? And what is currently stopping them supporting us?
Do we know any of this stuff? I’ve been involved in the limited amount of work which has actually been done on this and I can only answer probably one of those questions with confidence (the last one). That isn’t good enough.
None of this is glamorous, but it works. That is why everything I’ve mentioned above is core practice in the multi-trillion dollar global influencing industries. When I say we need to stop thinking magically and instead think scientifically, this is what I mean.
Use the most effective tools based on the best possible data and use your creativity to make great, compelling messages that really speak to our target audience based on solid product development (independence is our ‘product’ and the current available specifications of our product are rubbish, filled with vague promises and requests to just take our word for it…).
Get that core work done, learn about your audience, create a strong messaging strategy with constant effective feedback, get support over a ‘settled will’ threshold and then press your advantage politically.
It took only a few hours for five per cent of the Scottish public to change their minds on independence when they saw it as a credible solution to Brexit. Why on earth do we think we can’t do twice as well as this within a couple of years with some professionalism, wit and hard work?
Source: Indy movement, there's more than one way to connect
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Drawing ...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 09:15 PMThere is a metric that video game developers use to measure the likelihood that a particular environmental change will lead to behavioural changes. It is known as TTP, and before I spell it out I need to tell you it is a serious concept and that it has very high significance for fighting the rise of the far right and the general breakdown of society.
TTP stands for ‘Time To Penis‘. This is not a childish tech bros joke, it is an actual descriptor of the issue. When developers build a game environment they include varying degrees of ability to change that environment – even in a simple driving game you can knock traffic cones out the way, or you can knock walls down in Mario.
But once you get into large, interactive open-world games, you start to be able to manipulate a lot – for example, dig holes, drag things through sand or build buildings. And it turns out that humans (OK, mostly boys) when given a blank sheet of paper draw a penis. I think of it as one of our most endearing traits; I saw a penis drawn on a stone age cave and felt a deep connection to the (presumably sniggering) artist, separated as we were by millennia.
But I digress. Time to Penis doesn’t measure ‘how long before things get out of hand?’, it is a much cleverer and more sophisticated measure. The question is ‘how long do we go and how much latitude do we give before someone gives up on the main game quest we set and start doing their own thing?’.
To be clear, a lot of game developers actively want you to change the environment and start drifting off the narrative path. They view it as a success, because what they are really measuring is how you are engaging with an information ecosystem. These are all just zeros and ones in code presented to you in a visual fashion. The developers are just making you reorder the ones and the zeros.
Fine, so given sufficient space, people will do something other than you want them to do. What has this got to do with society? Well, this is my response to Megan’s article last week in which she argued that fixing information systems isn’t enough; we need to educate people on how to assess and deal with information.
I don’t disagree, but we don’t have time. Great, let’s start teaching a new generation how to think critically and assess information right now, but the far right isn’t waiting for us to produce a new generation. We have to deal with the shitshow of an information system we currently have, and surrender isn’t an option.
The trick is to learn the lessons of TTP. If someone stars playing your game and they appear to have got bored and stopped engaging properly with it within minutes, your TTP is so fast people aren’t playing the game. If someone gets to the end of your game and hasn’t bothered to explore or do a single thing you haven’t directed them to, your TTP is infinite and the game feels hollow.
It is the same with information. An effective information environment not only enables people to engage with it in a positive way but encourages positive engagement. It’s about giving you what you know you need and making it fun and easy to find things you didn’t know you wanted – without accidentally becoming a fascist.
If you make finding the information someone wants too painful they will go somewhere else. If you prevent them finding information they’ll go somewhere else. If you patronise them or make the experience feel alienating, they’ll go somewhere else. You can’t easily force someone to engage with information.
(Well, you can if you’re an autocratic regime like China, but let it just be assumed that I don’t want us to be a surveillance autocracy…)
There is incredibly good reason to prevent knowledge being curated by the very rich, especially when they don’t care about knowledge
This absolutely does not make us powerless though – because of the principles of TTP. If engagement is poor because the game is too linear or poor because it is too directionless, then these form the ends of a spectrum and you can change parameters in between to get a balance right.
Now before any of the libertarians out there suggest that the idea of a government or any collective entity shaping the information system is somehow evil or wrong, they need to be challenged. Our entire information system has been very carefully engineered as it currently stands.
Worse, it has been engineered for a very particular purpose – to generate monopolies. I know that monopoly is only a step on the path to making money and that making money is the ultimate goal. But in the last 20 years our information system has been completely redesign by a cadre of people who have incredibly deeply-rooted ideological ideas.
They believe in disruption and power. They believe that if they can break something, it deserved to be broken. They genuinely believe that if they can come up with a way to hold you hostage, they should do it. They’re almost all male, they’re almost all white and they’re certainly all donating to Donald Trump’s ballroom.
These are not custodians of the public good and even far-end capitalist theory does not suggest that fundamental knowledge should be subject to market forces (‘belief in gravity fell six points on the FTSE this week while there has been a surge in purchases of flat earth stocks’).
There is incredibly good reason to prevent knowledge being curated by the very rich (though no-one told the Universities Defence Alliance that…), especially when they don’t care about knowledge.
So the question isn’t ‘should we leave knowledge alone?’ but ‘ how should we fight the good fight to save knowledge?’. And now that we’ve decided that it makes sense to have a public good-focussed information ecosystem and we’ve convinced ourselves that it is possible, it all becomes about those behavioural questions, the ‘TTP effect’.
Now I’m skirting round this a bit because we’re doing a big project in this area. In fact it’s why Megan did her piece last week – we want to explore what people think should be in a positive information ecosystem. We have ideas and plans and no space here to explain them.
But I can explain some principles which underpin them. It should be easier and more pleasant to find accurate information than false information. We need to think about how information is presented. The social media info-system is a dopamine system which makes you read information to get a small buzz of strong emotion, then again, then again.
In fact it is info-switching that is key – you probably don’t know you’re doing this but the purpose of social media isn’t the posts but the swipes. It is the swipe that gives you the real buzz, the belief that behind the next door may be something amazing. No? Oh well, let’s try the next door. Forever.
That is the reality and you can’t defeat it by saying ‘but Wikipedia…’. Much as I admire Wikipedia, it is hardly a fun presentation. So how do you make the accurate information nice to engage with? More than that, nicer than the alternative? Learn from social media – curate, but curate for purpose not addiction.
You need to create ways to shape the path people take through knowledge in the way we used to do with schools and libraries and newspapers"
What does that mean? Instead of ‘six times plastic surgery went wrong’ which takes a week to get through because of adverts and stuff, it is ‘six animals with amazing powers’ which is slick and easy. You need clever curation to create the right kind of environment.
You also need to get people who create information to be better at tailoring it to be useable. I keep my eye open for this all the time, not on social media but everywhere I see information. Sometimes I watch a documentary and think ‘oh, that was brilliantly explained – why?’. Sometimes I see science presented in a way that makes me want to dive in. What is so appealing?
In the end, there is a world of this evidence and research and it is 100 per cent possible to beat social media for experience and quality, you just have to want to and you just need to be able to spend the money to do it. Oh, and you need to be ready for the propaganda campaign calling this state censorship.
(On that point, when implementing you need to make sure that there is nothing that is banned just because you don’t like it. You have to ‘beat the internet’, not ban it. The option to do the wrong thing should be there. People have to choose to not take it or you’re losing anyway.)
But it’s not just about punchy presentation, and it’s not just about curation, it’s about structure, and this is where the TTP analogy is closest. If I can find information by going onto an AI platform, spending money and getting a workable answer, a better system only works if it is actively easier to find better information a different way for less or no cost.
It needs to be harder and less joyful to do it the wrong way and it needs to be less accessible. You need to create ways to shape the path people take through knowledge in the way we used to do with schools and libraries and newspapers (which are at least regulated). The BBC is a good example of investment to create a less bad information environment, imperfect as it is.
I should stop. This is an enormous subject and it is complex, filled with questions and conundrums and it involves taking on serious vested interests. There is no half doing it, no ‘part of the way to a better system’. It is like a bucket – if it has a hole in it, eventually everything will drain away through the hole.
But if we don’t deal with this I have little faith in the future of our societies. I am shocked at the speed with which hateful lies about immigration and immigrants has proliferated across these toxic information systems and the starling rise of far right politics that has resulted. I am basically contemptuous of the lilly-livered politicians who have looked at this and concluded they need to do better TikTok videos (though even that is less cringe than Swinney’s summit).
This is an existential issue for our society every bit as much as climate change or economic breakdown – yet we stare at it blankly and do nothing. We must change this system and what I have tried to show here is that the principles for how to change the system are themselves not complicated. It must be won positively, not by prohibition.
But it must be won and we must start now. Because it seems that, on a computer game, give people enough time and they draw a penis, but on the internet, give people enough time and they start reading Nazi propaganda. We need to stop them. But to do that we need to learn. Behavioural science must be our starting point.
Source: Drawing willies and stopping the far right
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] On custo...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 08:44 PMI really had no intention of adding to the wall-to-wall commentary about the Cambridge academic caught up in messy race-and-plagiarism row. Indeed I commend Marrissa McWhirter’s excellent take on it and this thoughtful analysis here.
But there is something I think has been under-examined so I just want to cover it briefly. It’s about the nature of current public service and why its problems are so exaggerated in the university sector. I could write a full essay on this but I will instead pull out three specific points.
First, there is a very specific reason that this keeps happening, that institutions defend the indefensible much longer than they should. It is a result of management theory and New Public Management. This is the theory that from the 1980s onwards transplanted private sector management practices onto traditional public service – in the name of efficiency.
In fact one terminology shift explains the routes of this – people using public services became known as ‘customers’. That is a substantial change. When you serve you do not persuade, you deliver – but customers have to be persuaded. That is the difference.
In pursuit of service you take an inward-reflective approach – how did we do, can we do better? You do not prioritise customer feedback data as much as real, hard evidence. I may not like having invasive procedures but in this context serving me does not mean ‘making me like them’.
With customers that’s completely different – the customer is always right. This starts to make performance subjective, a question of whether the customer is happy or not. Perception doesn’t make a procedure better but it can alter how a ‘customer’ feels about the procedure. That is the mindset of modern service – ‘lived experience’.
This just means you shift away from managing a service and towards managing your customers. That means maintaining their confidence, which in marketing terms means ‘deny failure if you can’. If you are managing customers (rather than serving citizens) then there is always a voice who will seek to balance ‘real harm’ with ‘reputational harm’.
With great power comes great culpability.
I have been quite close to this. I have been offering advice and help to the victims of Tayside butcher surgeon Sam Eljamel and the pattern is familiar. Evidence starts to emerge of concerning clinical outcomes, two colleagues raise their concerns with management – and management disciplines them.
Eljamel goes on harming patients until a second more senior medic raises serious concerns. It turns out that by this stage there are about 250 victims and so after 20 years of this he finally leaves the hospital in 2014. But the Health Board continues to obstruct transparency. It took a decade from the point where it was accepted that this was what happened until a public inquiry was agreed.
Service would have listened to the complaints and taken them seriously; reputation management did the opposite. Good stories are promoted beyond reason, bad stories are suppressed, reputations are burnished, the customer is managed – but the citizen is entirely failed.
Second, with great power comes great culpability. Another feature of New Public Management is the cult of leadership. It created an ideologically-defined centralised management class who are said to embody the characteristics which will make the service better. They are service improvement in flesh and blood form.
But that makes them the flesh-and-blood form of failure too. If you want to be a hero on the upswing, you become the villain on the downswing. In a more serious and grown-up system we’d acknowledge that generally neither the success nor failure of a large organisation is down to those at the top.
But if we pretend like it is, then PR goes from being a communication tool to part of your ideological church. You are the best of the best, and if evidence comes out that you are not the best of the best it harms the organisation, so it is in the interests of the organisation to prevent evidence coming out. Simples.
It’s not just PR, it’s legal action (the Sandie Peggie case for example) and procedural corruption (which is my long-standing beef with the Standards Commissioner). All of this protects those at the top but also has the knock-on effect of suppressing information which would enable performance improvement.
Third, this is all turbocharged in the university sector. If other public services believe themselves to be ‘like’ the private sector, the introduction of variable tuition fees made universities certain they were actually the private sector. Where marketing analogies are used in the NHS, universities are now marketing bodies that deliver education as much as the other way round.
They were made to rely on competition for fee-paying students. Reputation is everything, PR is king, the customer is always right. And their customers are largely liberal, so PR must emphasise the extent to which universities offer a home for ‘that kind of person’. Management then becomes about fabricating the narratives that make their customers believe the fabrication.
There is no service-to-education in this, only education as service to be sold. And these three points help explain the Jason Arday case. He was a brand leader for a corporation targetting a young, liberal customer base. What he represented and projected was more important than what he was.
Why did no-one ask searching questions? That in itself is the wrong question. No-one sits down during the development of an advertising campaign and says ‘hold on, is this actually true?’, only ‘is this all legally sustainable?’. You all think they were appointing an academic when they were really appointing a brand ambassador.
Then, as it starts to unravel, we get back to ‘the good of all requires the reputation to be protected which requires a cover-up’. When that unravels the crisis starts to lap at the feet of those actually responsible and so they go into self-protection mode. This happens in direct relationship to how marketised a service thinks it is, hence the brazenness of this university example.
Incidentally, lots of us warned this was going to happen when fees were introduced and we were dismissed because it was argued strenuously that a university would never sacrifice its academic reputation. That too was just lobbying PR.
When you have really important points to make and you extend them outwards towards ludicrousness, it is the important central point which is damaged
What I’m trying to get across here is that while the right is now scenting blood in its pursuit of black people – hold on, sorry, ‘diversity’ – what we should be emphasising more is that this is in large part the fault of capitalism in its bullshit salesman phase. The whole cult of markets keeps causing this to happen. It is ideological, but not in the way the right thinks.
Cambridge set out on this course to help it market the university to a young generation it judged ‘wanted’ young, diverse academics. I believe this was more about giving an audience what it wanted than it was about an ideological pursuit of the management class.
That does not mean that I think the version of race theory which dominated for a decade was helpful or not culpable for where we have reached. It was. There was genuinely a moment when people were calling for ‘numbers’ to be decolonised. Bizarrely our current number system (which is known as the Hindu-Arabic Numeral system folks) was claimed to be a western imposition on ‘people of colour’ (who invented it in the first place).
When you have really important points to make and you extend them outwards towards ludicrousness, it is the important central point which is damaged. Both Me Two and Black Lives Matter were essential and both tackled very real problems – but that doesn’t mean they were entirely effective, for this precise reason.
But it is wrong to see the Jason Aday case as mostly about tackling structural racism because it should be seen mostly as a marketing stunt in a system of public service which has been forced uncomfortably into the shape of neoliberal capitalism and its obsessive focus on sales theory.
I can’t tell you how much my heart sank when I read the details of this. Every fibre of me wanted to defend Arday, but I can’t. I think race theory fetishisation did play a part in this. But honestly, this was more about the pursuit of cold, hard cash. Don’t let the racists drag your attention away from that reality.
Source: On customers, Cambridge and capitalism
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] The Scot...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 07:49 PMThere is a concept used in the building trade someone told me about – Catnap. It stands for Cheapest Available Technology Narrowly Avoiding Prosecution and while I don’t know how widely the term is used, the mindset it describes is one I know prevails (a friend of mine refers to a Tree Preservation Order a ‘tree removal tax’ because the fine is only £5k).
The key thing about Catnap is the second part. If this was ‘cheapest legal technology’ we’d be in one place, but that is not the mindset. The mindset is about precisely how much you can break the law before anyone takes action against you, and since every government I’ve known is always ‘cutting red tape’, we can be confident that the threshold for action is high.
Now let me introduce you to a new concept I’m going to call Morolaw, or Most Obstructive Response that Only Leads to A Warning. Because that is becoming the driving philosophy of the Scottish Government.
I’ve been dealing with FoI issues since before they were even a law (I was lead for the universities in lobbying over the draft legislation) so one way or another I have a reasonable awareness of how they have been working. And until recently the answer was ‘pretty well’.
I am wracking by brains to try and remember an instances in the first 15 years of devolution where I saw an FoI response and felt it was unreasonably obstructive because of redaction or exemption. That doesn’t mean I was happy – I’m a full disclosure kind of guy and so for example don’t think commercial confidentiality should be a (permanent) exemption when it comes to the use of public money.
What I mean is that over that time, within the system as it was set up and the remit of the legislation as passed, I seldom thought the responses that came from government were unreasonable or outside the spirit of the legislation. It could sometimes be frustrating, but it was seldom enraging.
I can’t even begin to say that now. Every single FoI reply I can think of having seen in as long as I can remember has been utterly littered with cheats and tricks and obstructions which are very clearly outside the spirit of the Act.
Worse, everyone but everyone knows this is happening, but they also know there is nothing much that can be done about it. If you submit a Freedom of Information Request now on any subject that could embarrass the Government, you need to strap in for a long process.
Because the Scottish Government is treating an appeal to the Commissioner as a mandatory third stage of an FoI request for information which might embarrass it, the Information Commissioner is overwhelmed
First, you cannot expect the initial response to come in inside the legal deadline. They just send it late at will – as long (mostly) as it is not so late they’ll end up in court. No-one has the resource to take action on this habitual refusal to meet the law (which is what that is), so you just have to accept it.
Then you’ll find out that you’re staring at multiple sheets of paper with explanations of why you’re not getting the information. The exemptions used will often be entirely spurious – we’ve seen entire correspondence exempted because one person’s email address was visible so a ‘data protection’ exemption was used. They literally don’t care at this stage.
Anything they can’t exempt they’ll just redact, so in between the cut-and-paste list of exemptions you’ll need to read through, you’ll find lots and lots of black redactions. Again, I am struggling to remember a time in the early days of devolution when even a controversial request came back largely blacked out.
But it’s not worth getting too hung up about this because you’re now in what is effectively ‘mandatory stage two in trying to find out something the government doesn’t want you to find out’ which is appealing their decision to them. You get 40 days to write an appeal, they get another 20 days to tell you to fuck off. If they do it in time of course.
Realistically, you’re now four months into the process and this is the first time you can appeal to anyone who isn’t the person you’re appealing against. You can now take this to the Information Commissioner. On the upside, he is very good and is robust in upholding your right to information as a citizen.
On the downside, because the Scottish Government is treating an appeal to the Commissioner as a mandatory third stage of an FoI request for information which might embarrass it, the Information Commissioner is overwhelmed. The number of appeals he is dealing with have more or less doubled since John Swinney took office, and they were rising rapidly before that.
He describes the situation in his organisation as ‘to the bone’ and they are now having to ration how many they can look at. The Office of the Information Commissioner needs three times the funding it is getting, but its funding is set by the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body and that opaque committee doesn’t give the impression of caring much.
Of course, if you do get through the initial submission, the initial appeal, the appeal to the Information Commissioner, he is able to actually look at your appeal and then he rules in your favour, this does not mean you are going to get the information. Because now the Scottish Government can appeal your appeal.
I can’t keep going round this Kafkaesque process much more here other than to point out that you can already have a successful appeal by the Information Commissioner in your hand which he has upheld after appeal, and you can also have a Judicial Review instructing the Government to hand it over and you can be past the legal deadline for that and they might still tell you to fuck off.
Why? Because at this stage in Scotland’s devolution era the Scottish Government gives little sign of caring much even when it is found in contempt of court. For me that should scream ‘powerful actors committing crimes must face powerful consequences’, but all of the above happened and the Scottish Government got nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
Think of it like a Tree Preservation Order – take your slap on the wrist and you can obstruct information for literally years. And yes, all of this is expensive, but those being found in contempt of court don’t actually pay for any of this, you do.
It is almost as if the Scottish Government now refuses to recognise the FoI Act when it inconvenient
The reason I’m feeling this particularly now is that we’re on the wrong end of this one again. We know for almost certain that the Scottish Government pulled its ludicrous ‘First Homes Fund’ out its arse with no impact assessment purely because it had no election campaign so needed some kind of giveaway. We know the impact assessment would say ‘will make the housing crisis worse’.
So we submitted an FoI and got back dozens of pages of excuses for why they wouldn’t give us this information. Worse still, we assumed that would happen when we submitted the initial request. Worse than that, we knew we’d need to appeal – and then appeal to the Standards Commissioner because we never at any point thought the Government would act in good faith. Obstruction is normalised for everyone involved.
They did the same when we tried to show that they also pulled their Council Tax Freeze policy out their ass with no impact assessment and we got the same result. We’ll do the same for the ‘free school bags’ and expect the same. All these are piss-poor policy making, done on an expensive whim for electoral gain, none properly considered.
But because the Scottish Government can just obstruct the public from knowing this it will without real consequence, it does. Like so much in Scottish officialdom, this has gotten out of hand. It is almost as if the Scottish Government now refuses to recognise the FoI Act when it inconvenient.
The problem is that I don’t really trust any of the politicians on this. We worked extensively with Labour backbencher Katy Clarke on extensive reforms to FoI which would close down a lot of these loopholes but the SNP did everything in its power to obstruct it and cause it to time out.
I can go through an explanation of why this has happened (it really started to balloon because Nicola Sturgeon played fast and loose with rules and procedures and spent more time covering things up than getting them right in the first place, and John Swinney is by nature a party hack who has always been the SNP’s cover-up man).
But it won’t help here. The only thing that will help is to focus on this reality – the only people who can clean up the behaviour of politics is the politicians. All the above abuses of the system could be brought to an end swiftly by any parliament with the will to do so.
Unfortunately, as I am trying to document extensively, Scottish officialdom is way past the point of honest straight dealing and well into its ‘cover up of the cover the cover up’ stage. As a result, you don’t get to know the information on which your government operates.
Scotland needs a major political reformation. That will require either an enlightened group of politicians to take power or a public rebellion. In the meantime, we can only guess at how bad policy-making in Scotland really is if this is how hard they are trying to hide it.
Source: The Scottish Government is shutting down transparency, one obstruction at a time
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] Scotland...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Today at 07:15 PMIn the last article I wrote for the National I rejected a de facto referendum as a route to independence. A number of people have asked me why, but to answer that it will be helpful if we start right back at the beginning, with a very basic question; what is independence?
The point of the question is not to have us flailing around to find a precise definition but to highlight the fact that there isn’t a precise definition.
Independence is really just the ability to do things – control your own territory, enter into legally binding contracts, engage with other nation states on an equal legal footing, join international bodies and treaties and so on.
The reason you are able to do these things is because other nations agree to recognise that you have the right to do these things. You can’t force them, they have to agree. In almost all practical terms, independence is really about international recognition.
There is a basic sort of measure of international recognition – membership of the United Nations. To join the UN you must secure the agreement of two thirds of the 193 member states. That’s when you know you’re independent.
But recognition is far from inevitable – Kosovo governs its own territory but Serbia continues to claim territorial rights. In total 111 countries individually recognise Kosovo as independent, but because that is below the two thirds threshold, Kosovo isn’t a UN member, can’t join the World Trade Organisation, can’t sign (or benefit from) international treaties…
Scotland cannot begin to consider being stuck in the Kosovo situation because our economy is too advanced. There is no half-independence for us, no bluffing it, no work-around. Which leaves one major question – how do we get other nation states to recognise us?
In asking this question it is important to put away naïve sentiment; it doesn’t matter how much everyone ‘loves’ Scotland, they will all want to see certain conditions met before they embrace us, and by far the biggest of those is that we are entering the world in a state of agreement with the nation state from which we are departing.
If the rest of the UK has agreed to recognise us, the rest of the world will too. It is possible in theory to gain recognition even if the UK held out, but it would be a long, torturous process during which time we’d be stuck in the Kosovo situation, with the harm that would do to our economy.
I know many of you don’t want to hear this, but you need to – Scottish independence means successfully negotiating a recognition agreement with the rest of the UK
That is the question that should be asked of every proposed ‘path to independence’ – how and where on this path do we achieve full international recognition? If there is no convincing answer, then it isn’t a path at all.
I know many of you don’t want to hear this, but you need to – Scottish independence means successfully negotiating a recognition agreement with the rest of the UK. You can make speeches or fire off furious social media posts about sovereignty or democracy all you want, in your heart I’m sure you know that the world runs on realpolitik.
If you doubt this for a second, note this; there are only two countries which escaped the British Empire without Britain’s agreement. One fought and won a war of independence (the US) and the other declared unilateral independence but wasn’t recognized by the rest of the world for a long 15 years (Rhodesia).
When you focus your mind on this – that as a modern civic nation in an interconnected modern world we need to begin our independence with a recognition agreement from the UK – things become clearer.
The question then becomes ‘how do we get London to the negotiating table?’. If you focus on that, a few things should start to become clear. It is why I am warning you that tricks, proxies and shortcuts won’t work.
Democracy isn’t a science but a collective agreement – it works because (almost) everyone agrees to the rules of how it works in advance. If different parties start to play by different rules, it starts to break down.
For example, a referendum is an agreement signed by both sides which states they will abide by the result. It’s strength is this agreement, this binding commitment. Take that away and it is just an opinion poll. You cannot make another party agree to recognise the outcome of something against their will.
In fact, if you are in two minds on whether I’m right about this, we have a live example. When Nigel Farage got caught in the sleaze scandal of pocketing millions from a rich pal, he decided to run a referendum on his popularity by resigning his seat and forcing a by-election.
The theory was simple; he’d run a referendum on how much the people love him and how much they hate the establishment. But that isn’t what happened. The others refused to play along with him and so he spent the summer arguing with a bin. You don’t get to alter democracy unilaterally just because you want to.
Realpolitik operates in domestic politics just like it does in geopolitics. If you are granted power by law, you can use it at will. But if you want to get elected again, you can’t use it in ways that are wildly unpopular. If you want to talk about a certain subject, you won’t be able to if you are sinking in a crisis over another subject. And so on.
We will win because we build a position of strength, not because we find a way to redefine a no-score draw as a victory
This is how politics works. Scotland does not have the legal power to hold a referendum and it is unlikely that it can effectively bypass that reality and use a proxy, because that is only soft power, and unless you pull a rabbit out of the hat, it is very soft power.
(Incidentally, I am also very sceptical that we can get every single member of the potentially independence-supporting public to play along either. Some will be pissed off with the SNP. Some will be annoyed about education policy, or the state of the roads, or any other subject.
If even some of those people don’t act like it is a referendum and instead vote on a policy basis, our hand gets weaker and weaker.)
As I pointed out in my last article, you know perfectly well that the only thing which can make someone in power do what they don’t want to do is sustained political pressure. In our case it is really, really clear to see what that means.
If you want to be independent, the people have to support it. If a strong majority of Scotland wants to be independent and London continues to block it, then and only then does the political pressure rise high enough that it starts to force their hand.
At that point we can start talking about de facto referendums or unilateral declarations or delegations to the UN or mass protest as negotiating tactics from a position of strength – but as means of skipping the process of building strength? Forget it.
Now from past experience, me making this point usually results in another series of questions – how do we change their minds?, what is stopping them?, what about the hostile media environment?, what do we do once we get sustained support? And many more along the same lines.
But I’m nearly at my word limit so all I can say is that we got our parliament back because the Constitutional Convention spent five or six years doing the hard work of producing credible, agreed, detailed plans about what we were going to do, spoke to the public about their benefits and got 74 per cent support. Might I suggest there is a lesson for us in there somewhere.
But I’d want to leave you without one final point – the fact that we need an agreement from the rest of the UK does not ‘leave all the power in their hands’. Because realpolitik comes for us all eventually, and that also means the Brits. They’ve lost this fight many times in the past and they will lose it again at our hands.
When they do, when we show independence is the settled will of the Scottish people, they will have nowhere to hide and they will not be able to pass a TV camera without being asked about the democratic injustice of it. We will win and we are perfectly capable of outwitting them in negotiations.
But we will win because we build a position of strength, not because we find a way to redefine a no-score draw as a victory. The sooner we stop looking for tricks and start building real strength through a solid, defensible case and an enthused and engaged public, the sooner we win.
Everything else is a distraction.
Source: Scotland will be independent but not through electoral tricks
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Warning - Dan...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 23, 2026, 04:29 AMSource: Warning - Danger - MASSIVE BLACK HOLE APPROACHING and Stew wants to chuck YOUR life savings straight into it - Please learn the lessons of the Dugdale debacle and ca' canny this time
Blogosphere / [SCOT goes POP!] Concerns moun...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 22, 2026, 04:21 PMSource: Concerns mount that the "Scottish Daily Express" may be written by clueless Home Counties toffs, as paper launches bizarre crusade to stamp out the name Queensferry Bothy "because it's Gaelic"
Blogosphere / [Robin McAlpine Blog] A simple...
Last post by ALBA-Bot - Aug 22, 2026, 02:59 AMHere’s a phrase I find myself uttering a lot these days – ‘why does this need to be so complicated?’. Obviously this is something we’ve all mumbled in the face of bureaucracy, but goes way beyond that.
Trying to open a website these days is like a brain training game. I was trying to browse some DIY stuff and ended up trapped in a mailing list pop-up I couldn’t get out of. After I’d wasted enouhg time I just left. These days there seems never not to be ‘an extra step or two’.
But that is peanuts really; I hear complication getting in the way all the time. When an unlicensed vape shop burns down a historic city, finding out who actually owns the vape shop is like a John le Carré thriller.
Just take a look at this. Really, have a look. It is a diagram Richard Murphy did of the ownership structure of the Scottish Police College’s buildings. It is a chain of 32 separate holding companies and ownership vehicles in multiple countries eventually leading back to an ultimate beneficial owner which is a company in El Paso, Texas.
Or let’s have a glance at something as routine as the various subscription services you have. If it’s just TV, then whatever. But if you’re effectively renting the software that runs your business, see if you can switch provider while maintaining business continuity. And many of these bits of software are little more than very basic forms of database. So why is leaving so complex?
And how on earth can a single country not have consistent data on its own citizens? Why have we spent countless amounts of money on IT systems and yet still my health service and my local authority and my tax service barely know I’m the same person. Why? And what do we do about this?
If you have time, it helps to explain this if you look at this analysis I did about why China can build electric cars but the western economies struggle. The short version is that the Chinese try to minimise the ‘leaks’ in the system, to reduce complexity in the manufacturing process because that increases efficiency and productivity.
But western economies are no longer driven by manufacturing but by finance, and for finance it works completely differently. For finance, every leak is profit – that is where the money is leaking to; to them. They like complicated processes because each complication needs consultants and lawyers and financiers and that is the lifeblood of the modern financial system.
Finance actively wants you to outsource your supply chain because for them the extended process is lucrative. You’re trying to make something, they’re trying to take fees and contracts from you at as many points along the way as they possibly can. They love complication, and for them unnecessary complication is literally free money.
You understand the process then. Manufacturer decides to make thing, brings in investor who demands financial review which concludes that it must outsource its supply chain and so the putative manufacturer has to source all its components – and there is a consultant and a lawyer who are just the thing for that.
Now a component doesn’t come in on time. If you were Chinese you’d be making the component yourself whereas in the west you now need to get someone to chase the recalcitrant supplier through the law – and guess who is just the person to get on with that…
Finance stretches process because each gap in process is leakage and leakage goes into their pockets
Finance stretches process because each gap in process is leakage and leakage goes into their pockets. The principle is the same with ownership – they love complex ownership structures because the gap between each holding company is another opportunity to manipulate another tax code to make sure you don’t pay any tax.
Why are we plagued by these clearly not productive vape shops everywhere? Because the rules say ‘if you want to create ownership structures so complex we literally can’t police them you can pay no tax – would you like to do that then?’. The speculator who owns the shop has to make only slightly more than the electricity bill to reap a profit while hanging onto a valuable asset while it increases in value (they hope).
The rest of us get high street blight and raging infernos. So who writes these daft rules which invite abuse? Government departments. Why are the rules not simple? Because the people who wrote the rules told us that they couldn’t be simple and so required that they brought in people who understood the complexity to write the rules.
Cue the finance sector seconding policy staff into government to write the rules that make all this possible, on the basis that it is complicated (it is, they made it complicated) so that they can make it even more complicated. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the UK tax code is ten times longer than the King James Bible.
Now not every instance mentioned above is the same in nature. The example of the ‘enshitification’ of the internet is not about tax avoidance and outsourcing but about wasting your time while they advertise at you. The difficulty of shifting software platforms is purely taking your data hostage by making it painfully difficult to disentangle. (They can’t legally take your data away from you altogether…)
And the public sector IT debacle is absolutely about hustlers pushing for outsourcing. The problem with outsourcing like this is that the contractor has a vested interest in making themselves indispensable, and that means simple, robust systems are unattractive to them. They would rather sell you ‘a solution’ to fragmented data than explain that you’re just going to have to de-fragment your data one day if you want anything to work.
What is consistent in all of this is what is known in system design as ‘friction’. Friction is anything which slows your progress. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing because sometimes the process is the point. When you buy luxury goods you often want to be pampered as part of the process, which is technically friction but is pleasant friction.
But what all of the above examples do is use friction specifically to exploit you. They are monetising friction. They know that this friction is making your life worse in countless ways, but they know that if they can disguise the friction in complexity, they can claim there is nothing they can do about it.
I'm utterly sick of the studied confusion of Scotland's public sector, creating rules and structures it then doesn't police because the whole thing is just such a damned mess
That is a lie, and we don’t need to put up with this. This is my simple proposal – let’s have a war on unnecessary complication. You’d be surprised how robust you can be in this. For example, an existing Common Weal policy is that if Scotland had full control over taxation it should create a ‘simplicity’ rule.
When the tax authorities are looking at the accounting of tax returns, if they find any step in the accounting process which is there for the purpose of evasion, avoidance or obfuscation, they can simply ignore it. Make it legal for tax authorities to undo tax avoidance. End of.
This is perfectly legal, and the principle holds in lots of ways. I would create a database of every single property in Scotland – house, land, factory, retail unit – and I would require that it records the beneficial owner who will be wholly liable for the property, legally and for tax purposes. No hiding.
This gets us quite a long way, but there is loads more we can do. I am now very firmly of the view that we need to create a publicly-built national database of public sector data, collected in a single place. A chunk of what I’ve heard senior policy-makers claiming they will use AI for is to bridge all the different fragmented bits of data that are already there.
That is putting in place a bad solution to a situation which itself was the result of a bad solution – and so on. Where we have complexity because of poor system design (often systems designed by people monetising friction…) we need to ‘stop the line‘ and build the system competently. Most of this stuff really, really isn’t hard to do if you do it right from the ground up.
In government we need simply to take a ‘consultants out’ approach. They are not there to help you, they are there to help their clients and everything they touch seems to go wrong. Create an internal government analysis unit and start hiring civil servants who know how to do something other than turn up at meetings and ask for more performance indicators.
I mean, there is so much more than this. Much of the crisis facing the western world just now derive from the 2008 financial meltdown. That was almost wholly caused by cynical complexity, wholly invented financial products which were ‘so clever’ no-one understood them.
Then again, the whole of international finance is utterly intentionally mind-numbingly complex. If you go and try and understand concepts like ‘shadow banking’ or ‘the repo market’ or ‘hedge funds and shorting’ and you manage to succeed (good luck) you’ll find yourself asking ‘why do we do this, and why do we allow it?’. It is mad.
Then of course there is algorithmic exploitation. You probably know this as concepts like ‘surge pricing’, because having a good old-fashioned set price for something is much worse than a complex system that uses an complicated algorithm to work out precisely it can screw you over at any moment. That can just be banned.
What set me off on this this week was mostly the vape shops. I’m utterly sick of the studied confusion of Scotland’s public sector, creating rules and structures it then doesn’t police because the whole thing is just such a damned mess. Hence it’s three years since Edinburgh prosecuted anyone for business rate non-payment. It’s like the only way to find out if business rates have been paid on a property is to burn it down…
But I’ve been following this aspect of equity-driven capitalism for quite a while – as a consumer, as a someone trying to monitor government, as a citizen. Once you understand this and once you know how it works you’ll find yourself tearing your hair out. We literally let crime and corruption hide in complex bureaucracy and we know it is happening and we do nothing.
Just remember this – doing something is simple. You just have to want to. But to be honest, most of our politicians just get confused by all of this and end up nodding in compliance. Because they, like the rest of us, are drowning in complication. By design.
Source: A simple proposal