On waiting, digital and where the state chooses to operate - an extended version of the preface to Platformland
Below is a slightly longer version of what became the preface to my book Platformland. I started writing before the book even existed, when I just needed to start writing something, and ended up writing about standing in queues as a kid. I’ve always meant to publish it somewhere, and given the coming debate about the bounds of state ownership and public infrastructure now feels like a good time._
It’s a bit rough in places as I’ve had to glue it back together from various different drafts and the whimsy level is high in places. It predates the varied and important work the rejuvenated Government Digital Service has done since 2024 ……
On waiting, digital and where the state chooses to operate
Waiting. My first memories of bureaucracy are of waiting. Waiting in the car while my mum collected the Family Allowance from the Post Office near school each month. Waiting too at the big Post Office in the town centre, filing glacially past the green and brown forms for driving licences and passports, all stacked up in plexiglass dispensers. Adverts for government schemes and local businesses looping on TVs encapsulated in beige plastic at the hairpins of the queue. Those TVs-that-were-not-TVs seemed like the future in a world with few screens. There was waiting at the building society too, against the inexplicably carpeted walls, while forms were stamped and scribbled on with pens on chains, and cardboard account books with narrow electromagnetic strips were passed back and forth.
The Family Allowance was part of Britain’s post-war social settlement. A universal benefit paid directly to women with children – part of Beveridge’s ‘abolition of want’. By the 1980s it had long since been renamed Child Benefit, but names stick strongly to the surfaces of public services. Its introduction followed a twenty-five-year campaign by Eleanor Rathbone, a former president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies who was in her final years as a member of parliament by the time her campaign was won in 1945. She remained an MP just long enough to see off an attempt to have the allowance paid directly to men.
Family Allowance payments were made via Girobank: a fully computerized bank (probably the first in the world) launched by the British government in the 1960s. Girobank’s technology was built by the Post Office, which had built the world’s first programmable digital computer only a generation before. The whole post-war welfare state was, in implementation, a technology“effort. Computing resources, huge for the time, made sure welfare payments were calculated and pensions paid.
Post-offices, paper forms, mainframes – public services are built using the materials and infrastructure of the day. They don’t just happen to exist, they are the product of political decisions and, together, they exert an organizing pressure on people’s lives. So, as my mum collected her universal income from a futuristic fully automated publicly owned financial institution, my brother and I sat in the car and waited.
In 1980s Britain, the public sector existed in different places and presented a different surface to the world than today. It was not just the red phone boxes and the blue-grey British Rail trains either: the little white vinyl-seated Mini we waited in was probably built by the state as well. It too was once a vision of the future. We were taught to program on BBC Micro computers, seemingly made from the same beige plastic that housed the TVs in the Post Office. School buildings were immediately recognizable, built as they were using a modular system created by a group of local councils. Eating lunch at school, our cutlery was stamped with SCC, for Surrey County Council, bulk ordered from Sheffield foundries.
The shops down the road from school had glazed tiles with the initials of London County Council above their windows. The LCC had brought land outside Greater London after the war as part of the reconstruction effort (you could tell when you were in London proper because the roadside railings were painted municipal blue). Those glazed tiles still appear all over London: part of a policy of mass home building that declared in public space who to hold accountable.
It’s not so much that the past is a different country, more that the past was a different future. It turned out that the future did have a lot more screens in it (but less carpet on the walls).
Ultimately, Britain’s 1960s ‘white heat of technology’ revolution would fail on its own terms. Technology was supposed to be a meritocratic force within the public sector, but, as historian Mar Hicks notes, the civil service organised its technology around its gender and class-based hierarchies. That, and government consolidation of the nascent British computer industry (a lineage that included Leo, the world’s first business computer), would see it become reliant on outsourced technology companies.
As for the Post Office, in under a century it went from the primordial digital institution to one whose outsourced IT systems have become the archetype for unaccountable failed technology. Bugs in its Horizon computer system led to post office staff being wrongly convicted of stealing. Horizon was created by the outsourcing company Fujitsu, which had absorbed ICL, the result of the 60s government-led consolidation of British computing.
Years after waiting in those post office queues, I found myself sat with a small group of Post Office trade union officials in South London listening to Tony Benn, the former MP and Postmaster General who introduced Girobank and had been responsible for the ICL merger. I’d been invited because I was volunteering on the stage at the Glastonbury Festival that he was due to speak at.
I remember a mix of democratic history that featured nowhere in my school education - the municipal activism of the Poplar Rent Revolt, the means-test riots, democratically elected health boards and workplaces - and the references to technology, such as the creation of the Open University, and, later at the festival, the Post Office’s Datel network, when we were struggling to relay questions from the public over the festival’s creaking internet connection. It was a glimpse into a past where it was possible to be optimistic about democratic institutions and technology, however flawed some of it turned out to be.
The post-war digitisation of the UK’s tax and benefits system, the creation of automated institutions like Girobank, and teaching children programming with the BBC Micro (ironically, the conservative Thatcher government did a better job of ‘picking winners’ with the BBC Micro, than the statist Benn had done with ICL) were all bets on the future.
Those kind of bets have been long absent from British politics, but looking to the energy behind digital infrastructure in Estonia and India and it’s hard not to see the similarity.
It was following that South London trade union meeting that I stumbled across the UK’s emerging civic technology community, based around the charity mySociety (The internet was a small place in the 2000’s if you were interested in politics and the web). MySociety also had an optimism, as well as a way of using web technology on its own terms to create services that worked, but also had a sense of accountability.
Before capability comes community. The health of the civic tech community in the UK that included mySociety, but also GovCamp, the Open Knowledge Foundation, RewiredState and others, was a big factor to the success of the Government Digital Service. I joined GDS as the first product manager on GOV.UK and many others from those communities joined throughout 2011 and 2012.
When government creates organisations they are claiming a right to operate somewhere. So, when the UK created Girobank it claimed a right to operate in the financial sector.
The Government Digital Service was many things back then, but it was partly the state choosing to operate in the digital domain. A choice supported by a networked digital community. It said ‘digital is important and we choose to operate here’. Our digital infrastructure is as important as our physical infrastructure.
Those things are as true today as it was then, but remains only partly realised.
Despite the huge potential for technology and design to improve public services and enrich democracy – the things that got me excited when I stumbled across the emergent civic tech communities of the early 2000s and that eventually led me to working at the Government Digital Service – we have lost something along the way.
Firstly, a never ending search for ‘efficiency’ has too often replaced bolder visions for what a digital government could mean for the public experience of the state.
We wait differently now. Rather than saving us from bureaucracy, digital often displaced and atomised it. Paper forms have become web forms and countless web pages explaining how to complete them. We wait for emails, rather than letters. Communal experiences with public services, however mundane, are now millions of individual interactions. Government has been placed at distance, harder to understand and less willing to account for itself through digital interfaces.
Secondly, despite the public sector’s long history in technology, it is still somehow perceived with newness and novelty, talked about in euphemisms and metaphors rarely used by digital practitioners. Combined with the growing power of commercial platforms, the public domain is at constant risk of both an inability to deliver, and disintermediation by private sector operators.
To understand the possibility of the next generation of public services, is to understand the possibilities of technology, design, and democracy. It is to understand that software is politics now, and that digital represents a medium to redistribute power in society almost as ubiquitous as finance.
I’ve written Platformland in the hope that people can once again get excited about the possibilities of technology, design and democracy. I know I still am.