Jonathan's Leaving Blog

So these are my last set (of very irregular) weeknotes. I’m heading off to be Head Campaigns at UNICEF UK. I’ll be particularly focusing over the next year on highlighting the issues around child poverty in the UK around the coming election and with a potential new government. It’s an exciting opportunity and one that gets me working on a very tangible social justice issue again (I came from Shelter) which I’m looking forward to.

It’s goodbye from me

But as I leave Connected by Data, I wanted to reflect a bit on the nearly 2 years I’ve spent helping get the organisation and campaign off the ground and running - firstly with just Jeni and Tim and latterly with Adam, Helena, Emily, Maria and of course Gavin.

Start Up

One of the newest things for me when I joined was working in a very small, fully remote start up.

I’ve really only been in larger NGO’s before where you have to make things happen, but there is always a lot of organisational momentum that carries stuff forward too. I don’t think I quite fully appreciated what it’s like to look at the day, sitting on your own at home, and thinking I need to make this.

It’s been a challenge at times but also exciting and a massive opportunity to learn. Looking back over the time now, hopefully we have made stuff happen - in fact quite a lot!

What it has also reinforced for me is how vital creatively running with external opportunities is to making change - using the energy and attention they bring and trying to turn it toward the impact you want. Each time we’ve dived into something not quite knowing where it would go, whether that be the Data Protection Bill, the AI and Data influencing network, work with Unions, the AI Summit, the People’s panel to name a few, so much more has come out of it than we expected. It’s been great to work like that alongside such a brilliant group of people who really do know how to grasp things and make them happen - so thank you.

Datafication of us all

I’ve ended up using the phrase “looking behind the curtain” several times over the last few days to try and explain how I’ve felt about what I’ve learnt at CBD.

When I arrived I had a bit of a grasp of data and GDPR (mainly for the digital campaigning side, so sometimes as a bit of a seeming annoyance…) I’d also read most of Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism (it’s is a very long book) but that was broadly it. I also knew Jeni and Tim wanted a campaigner and someone who came from more of a social justice politics and power and public comms world, not deep data and AI, and saw that as an advantage.

In some ways, I think that was and remains completely right and I hope the focus on people and power that Adam and I have tried to bring has been useful, and on reflection I actually think remains a vital part of CBD’s work.

But I don’t think I had anticipated what a learning journey I was going to go on, despite being used to working on a wide range of issues quite quickly. This was deep!

Seeing for the first time the extent to which nearly every area of our lives is becoming datafied and captured and used by powerful companies, and to some degree the government, has been truly eye opening.

Also the way these institutions use data driven systems to group, predict, shape, prod and sometimes limit our experiences and opportunities, with particularly harm done to those with the least power.

This has led me to really understand the need for us to develop collective responses where we come together to build power, rejecting a simple story about atomised personal control and privacy.

In fact, it took me a while to see that in reality, data is never really individual. It only properly ever means anything, or has value, when used in relation to other people’s data to drive statistical insights and predictions. This is a collective process

So what does this mean? I think it means we need to help many more people to ‘look behind the curtain’. Many of those who collect and use our data, especially for profit, work hard to hide the true nature of the systems they deploy behind shinny interfaces and compelling processes that reflect our individual desires or demands and not theirs. This is a situation where we know very little and they start to know a huge amount. We have to continue to reveal and challenge this.

AI Arrives

When I began at Connected By Data AI was already a thing but awareness and discussion of it was still rather a ‘minority sport’.

How that has changed. With the arrival of the ChatGPT, the AI summit and the explosion of interest particularly around its impact on work, the energy and debate has soared. Seeing Jeni and Adam, with the help of Kev and NEON, land more media than a large NGO would land in months, over the week of the AI summit was incredible.

I hope we’ve managed to ride this wave of AI hype and help form it in a way that again helps put real people in the picture. Again I’ve had to learn hard and quickly: about how the systems work (at least a little); the debates about regulation; the fact that AI is largely here and doing harms now through biased algorithms, incomplete data and unjust predictions; the reality that most AI development is reliant on a small number of companies with a lot of money and influence; and the fact that you need to worry most about those companies, and not the robots, ruling the world!

This has been fascinating and frightening in equal measure and I’ve worked out a lot by trying to explain it to others too, so apologies to my families and good friends down the pub, whose patience I can only admire.

People Power

Finally I still think the key for building the movement round a ‘just tech transition’ is centring people.

In the end it’s people coming together and demanding a powerful say, that will ensure AI and data driven systems work for all of us. This is about ensuring systems that add positively to our lives and help build a caring society, not one constrained by unintelligent machines predicting, dividing and overseeing us for the benefits of those with the power.

This can’t just be left to technical experts or the market.

It means supporting, sharing and amplifying the voices and stories of ordinary people impacted, talking to everyday interests and values in everyday language, resisting the tech utopian spin or tech obfuscation that so often dominates.

It also means thinking about human relationships and what we value and feel deeply, so we can build tech systems designed around enhancing empathy and caring not diminishing it.

Otherwise we we really do risk falling in siloed heartless disconnected existences designed by algorithms and statistical associations.

Heading off…

As I head off I know I can’t unlearn all this and I hope that I will be able to find ways to stay in the struggle. AI and data driven systems really do have the power to be positively transformative but at the moment it still feels like that is in the balance. So I want to send the best to everyone who is working to make sure it that it doesn’t tip the wrong way, especially my fantastic colleagues and friends at Connected by Day - - its important work. Good luck, go well and I’m sure I’ll be back in the fight at some point too!