Speech by Rt Hon David Miliband MP at the ‘zeitgeist’ Google conference "We can: politics for the Facebook generation", London, 21 May 2007
The title of this conference is appropriate to the challenges facing business and government. Wikipedia translates ‘zeitgeist’ as “spirit of the times” (but interestingly points out that the term originally had Latin roots and was ‘guardian spirit’). Successful business and successful governments both need to be close enough to the spirit of the times to be relevant, and far enough ahead of the times to offer change.
This is the theme of my speech today – how the spirit of the age requires a new type of politics, and how the new tools of the age can help deliver economic and social change. The argument is simple. We need the distribution of power to match the dispersal of information. We need the coordination of action to match the nature of interdependence. And in both tasks the social, economic and technological relationships that mark the world of Web 2.0 need to be exported to the political realm.
From I need to I can
My starting point is what I think is a new spirit in the UK. This is how I understand it.
In the years after 1945, after the hardship of the 1930s and the sacrifice of the early 1940s, the defining ethos was "I need . . ." I need the basics of a civilised life: good insurance against ill health and economic hardship, a decent education and housing. The Labour Government understood that mood, shared it and enacted policy to make it real. The solidarity, and confidence in national planning, that emerged from war enabled the emergence of a welfare state providing universal health care and education. Needs still remain, and they must be satisfied as a basic part of citizenship.
By the 1980s, the age of necessity had given way to an age of consumption. "I need" was replaced as the dominant philosophy by the politics of "I want". The Thatcher government licensed this change, encouraged aspirations and captured a new constituency. Number 1 came first.
Since 1997, Britain has changed again. Individual aspiration has been extended; social action has been strengthened. Britain is richer, fairer, more confident as a result.
I also think it is being driven forward by a new spirit. I call it the politics of "I can". It represents a desire for people to not just have access to material goods, but greater power, control and choice over all aspects of their life, from the jobs they do, the relationships they enter, the services they use, the products they buy.
It is an age where people want to be players not just spectators. The drivers of this change are quite obvious: a more educated society, more conscious of its rights, less deferential to tradition as the basis of social organisation. But the cutting edge of the new culture can be seen in three important facets of the world inhabited by your company.
First, the tools of production are in striking ways being put in the hands of citizens. ‘I can’ means ‘I can create’.
The combination of a more skilled population, and access to technology can enable more and more people to create products and services – from blogs, films, music and games, right through to making their own energy as I will explain later. For instance, when Kent suffered an earthquake last month the journalists and cameramen were local residents not professionals. In South Korea, the ‘ohmynews’ newspaper has as its motto, ‘every citizen a reporter’. It is the first newspaper in the world where the majority of the content is written by freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens.
Second, the tools of distribution are also open to all of us. ‘I can’ means ‘I can connect’.
The web slashes the cost of individuals or organisations connecting to each other and distributing content. We are less constrained by physical time and space and can access a limitless range of products, services and people. If you make music or videos, you no longer need to rely on record labels, broadcasters and retailers to get your product to market, you can do it direct through MySpace or You Tube.
But there is a third feature of the way technological and social change are coming together. There is not only dispersal of power and flattening of hierarchies; there are also new forms of collective action. ‘I can’ means ‘I can collaborate’.
The third change is that coordination at scale is no longer the prerogative either the hierarchies of bureaucracies or the price mechanism of markets – either the helping hand of the state or the invisible hand of the market. Computer programmes like Linux, or encyclopaedias like wikipaedia can be developed through mass participation.
From I can to we can
We are only just discovering the potential for these new forms of social action. But Web 2.0 is different.
The internet was born out of the cold war necessity to create a secure information infrastructure; it was a closed system. Web 2.0 is the ultimate open system.
In the halcyon days of the technology boom in the 90s the internet offered new ways for businesses to reach many customers. It still does. But Web 2.0 offers many people the chance to debate and discuss and decide with many others.
In contrast to many technological innovations – after all Robert Puttnam’s work on social capital argued that television had a detrimental effect on political participation and social connectedness, turning people in rather than outwards - Web 2.0 is fundamentally social in nature. If there is no such thing as society, why is there such a thing as Facebook?Web 2.0 allows the spirit of “I can” to transcend the limits of consumerism, and become a mass movement for cooperation. It allows us to address the fact that side by side with a growing sense that people want more power over their own lives is a sense that we need to assert greater power over the things we cannot buy or sell as individuals – collective goods, such as safety, security, national identity and a stable climate. Instead of citizens acting in isolation, unsure of whether their actions are reciprocated by others, feeling powerless in the face of large organisations and global change, citizens can feel part of a bigger project. They can create a shared willingness to act, their preferences can be aggregated, and can give rise to collective action as well as collective discussion.
Nowhere is this more true than in the battle against climate change. Who could fail to be dispirited when individual actions over lightbulbs or transport are contrasted with the new coal fired power station being built weekly in China? The answer is to aggregate concern. Government can do part of the job, negotiating treaties and regulating out energy inefficient products. But citizens can with new technology do it themselves. If you look at the spread of ‘Manchester is my planet’ you see a citizen’s movement driving change. My interest in a carbon calculator for individuals to calculate their carbon footprint – and what to do about it – is born of the same desire to effect change.
But it is not only in the battle against global warming that new mechanisms for dispersal of power and coordination of activity are important.
When we think of education, we tend to think of formal teaching in classrooms by teachers. This remains important. But the range of resources to support learning is far wider than that - from workplaces and museums to individuals with skills to contribute, and passions to share. They lie beyond the school gates and they are 24/7. And the key to genuine educational transformation is inspiring children and adults to learn more for themselves – what Yeats called ‘lighting a fire’ as opposed to ‘filling a pail’. So the challenge is to connect people with skills and time to give, from university students, part-time employees and people in retirement, to others with similar passions and interests. ‘Every citizen a teacher’ may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not impossible to imagine an educational world where a large minority of citizens play an active role, either on a voluntary or paid basis in supporting learners as personal tutors, running after-school clubs, or integrated into the curriculum and the classroom. The web can create the potential to aggregate the dispersed supply of citizen-teachers and connect them to learners with particular interests. It can also help learners filter the good from the bad through peer to peer recommendations and make sense of a world where educational resources are much more diverse.
In energy, the potential for citizens to play a greater role creating energy and connecting up to the grid is huge. Since the opening of the world’s first thermal power station in London in 1882 by Thomas Edison, the trend over the past century has been towards increasingly centralised power generation. Scale economies have driven the construction of large power stations and the transmission of energy through a national grid. And in the short to medium term, centralised energy – in particular, coal-fired power stations fitted with carbon capture and storage – will be critical to meeting our energy needs while lowering greenhouse gas emissions. However, in the next thirty years, we could see the same transformation in energy production that we have seen in computers over the past generation – with a growing reliance on decentralised energy production connected via a network. For example, in the UK, we want to use changes in building regulations to ensure all new homes are ‘zero-carbon’ by 2016 – that means that zero net carbon emissions come from the home’s electricity or heating over the course of a year. That is only possible by ensuring each new development generates energy on site and exports electricity onto the grid. Every citizen an energy producer may be a step too far – but given that a third of the homes that will be standing in 2050 have yet to be built, there is huge potential for a large proportion of households to become energy producers as well as consumers.
In transport, imagine a world where the boundaries between public transport and private transport were blurred. At present the choice is either between public transport where you have to fit into the standardised routes and timetables, and private transport which enables you to travel when and where you want. But aren’t car pools the harbinger of a different world? A world where a fifth rather than a fraction of commuter traffic on the road participated in a car-sharing network would be faster and cleaner. You would have the choice not of a few routes and timetables, but thousands. You could simply text your start point and destination to check if anyone was travelling to a similar destination. This could either find people in real time via GPS, or individuals could log their planned routes in a liftsharing bank.
In all these areas it is the mobilisation of citizens that holds the key to social and economic change. Government has to lead, business has to innovate, but it takes the mass of citizens to bring change to scale. And this has important implications for politics.
We are used to the familiar lament that this generation is less active than the last, and that we are engulfed by political apathy. But people are passionate about a huge range of issues, from local concerns about crime, housing, and health care, to global challenges – often reflecting the fact that we are more and more dependent on each other.
These concerns are being expressed in different forms. MoveOn in the US is a prime example. Within a week of a petition being circulated by two internet entrepreneurs against efforts to impeach President Clinton and calling on Congress to ‘move on’, a 100,000 people had signed up. Half a million eventually signed, and as of early 2007, Moveon had more 3.3m members across the US, with more than 268,000 active volunteers, 700,000 individual donors and just 15 staff.
The potential is for social software to create a new age of social activism – with politics enriched by a mixture of flash campaigns and protests, networks such as MoveOn that are neither political parties nor traditional pressure groups, and new forums for deliberation that deepen the engagement of citizens in collective problem solving.
Conclusion
I believe the businesses and government that succeed in the future will be those that give people greater power to shape the future of their individual lives and greater capacity to collaborate. A sense of I can and we can.
I am passionate about this because I believe it is what people increasingly aspire to. Feeling a sense of self-efficacy and collective efficacy can have a powerful impact in their own right. Robert Sampson’s research into crime in poor neighbourhoods shows that where people feel there is a shared willingness among community members to enforce rules, crime rates are significantly lower, even when you control for poverty and poor education. Leon Feinstein’s research into life-chances shows that whether a child feels that they can shape their future rather than be at the whim of external forces is one of the best predictors of whether a child will achieve good results in secondary education. Research looking at happiness and wellbeing also has similar findings.
This leaves a fundamental but simple challenge: how to avoid a mismatch between the nature of our social institutions, including government, and the ethos of our society. We know from previous technological revolutions that it is not until our social institutions - companies, governments, and political parties – adapt to take advantage of the potential of technologies that we will see its full effects. That is what we need to think through now:
- For citizens, it involves a blurring of traditional divisions of labour - between production, consumption, and leisure, and between traditional divisions between public and private.
- For professionals, it is a challenge to their authority as it opens up the power of production to all, and requires a redefinition of their role – as brokers as much as producers.
- For government, the focus of its activity is no longer solely direct provision but as well the empowerment of citizens to produce, distribute, collaborate and commission. In other words a changing and in some ways more demanding role for government.
My party has on every membership card the commitment to put “power, wealth and opportunity into the hands of the many not the few”. As Chris Anderson has written, we live in an age where the tools of production and distribution are being democratised, and our capacity to collaborate without the need for hierarchies strengthened. You may think that Google and government are unlikely bedfellows. But at the core, we are driven by some similar values – providing a trusted individual service free at the point of delivery and providing a framework for collective action. I hope we can be as inventive in our politics and public services as you have been at applying those values.
Page last modified: 31 May 2007
Page published:
21 May 2007