UK Tech Policy Idea Machines - a Map Without Directions
The UK tech policy scene is thriving. But who is doing what, and how can we coordinate ideas and energies more efficiently?
Nadia Asparouhova recently wrote a brilliant essay on idea machines: ”a network of operators, thinkers, and funders, centred around an ideology, designed to turn ideas into outcomes”.
It used the effective altruism movement as a blueprint for other potential tech subcultures/idea machines to turn ideas into results.
The analysis was, for good reason, of the Valley/Bay Area flavour. I wanted to step away from this milieux, and start thinking about idea machines in the tech subculture context of the UK.
I believe the following things:
There is an enormous tech policy community in Britain, made up of many subcultures
Most of these subcultures believe in progress, and the instrumental role that technology could play in guiding society towards progress
However, these subcultures are not well connected together, and do not know what other subcultures are working on
This means that work is duplicated and ideas are not shared sufficiently
Greater transparency and gateways between subcultures could significantly improve the ability of tech policy subcultures to achieve their aims and have impact.
So, I have had a go at a first draft of these different UK subcultures. I want the UK tech policy scene to have a clear sense of the different communities available to them, and the meetup/ idea exchange organisations that can help stitch it all together.
For future use - I have made an excel sheet with some of these groups - which I would encourage people to contribute towards. I am in favour of a ‘meetup of meetups’ - with some of the key people from these organisations coming together to exchange notes, organise and make stuff happen.
Idea machines - Oi bruv edition
In my humble opinion (and I look forward to being corrected), these are the following UK tech policy subcultures: effective altruism; progress studies; service design; digital democracy; innovation agencies; tech for good/civic tech; opengov; tech for politics; and crypto.
I recognise that these communities are not mutually exclusive. Effective altruism and progress studies folk overlap on a lot of stuff, as do the likes of tech for good and opengov. Yet this is precisely why creating gateways between these fantastic universes is such an important task!
Inspired by Sid Meier’s Civilization, the best-selling strategy game of all time, I have attached a series of features to each of these subcultures. I would be incredibly grateful for people to help me correct/improve my work here.
I have deep respect for each of these subcultures. Each is filled with kind people who are motivated to improve the world, and I want this mapping to describe these communities as accurately as possible. Feel free to email me (westgarththomas(at)gmail(dot)com), dm me on Twitter (@Tom_Westgarth15), or comment below if you think you can help me improve the accuracy of this work.
Effective altruism
Description: Philanthropic and career-based movement that aims to maximise the amount of good that an individual can do. EA uses evidence-based reasoning to prioritise causes and charitable donation choices in order to solve what they deem to be the world’s most pressing problems.
Key concepts: global poverty, long-termism, rationalism, optimisation, Social impact, tractability, importance, neglectedness, philanthropy
Canonical works: Less Wrong blog, The Precipice by Toby Ord, Human Compatible by Stuart Russell, Famine, Affluence and Morality by Peter Singer
Leading UK idea exchange organisations/meetups: EA London (and regional variants), EA Twitter Community, EA Forum, 80,000 hours podcast,
Examples of leading UK community figures: Rob Wiblin, Will Macaskill, Hilary Greaves, John Myers, David Nash
Progress Studies
Description: Progress studies is an intellectual movement focused on figuring out why progress happens and how to make it happen faster.
The field examines the economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organisational changes that have improved standards of living over human history, seeking to identify the individuals, cultures, and institutions responsible for this progress, and to apply this knowledge to the design of interventions aimed at further improving the human condition.
Key concepts: R&D, innovation, metascience, stagnation, cheems mindset, industrialism, talent pipelines: state capacity libertarianism, supply side progressivism
Canonical works: We need a new science of progress by Cowen and Collison, Roots of Progress by Jason Crawford, Progress is a policy choice by Institute for Progress
Leading UK idea exchange organisations/meetups: Progress studies UK slack, TxP, Works in Progress
Examples of leading UK community figures: Sam Bowman, Saloni Dattani, Ben Southwood, Anton Howes, Sam Dumitriu
Service design
Description: Service design is the interdisciplinary activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users. This process is now applied to digital products, platforms and spaces in order to improve citizen experience.
Key concepts: digital public spaces, user experience, usability, accessibility,
Canonical works: The service innovation handbook by Lucy Kimbell, This is service design doing
Leading UK idea exchange organisations/meetups: Service Lab Meetup, Service Design Fringe Festival, Gov Design meetups
Digital democracy
Description: Digital democrats locate the promise of digital technology in its capacity to empower the peaceful coexistence and collaboration of diverse and distributed communities. They centre socio-technical systems (patterns of connections between tools, culture and political economies) over purely technical ones, thereby celebrating a range of technologies serving democratic social organisation.
Key concepts: pluralism, participation, digital dignity, local government, mechanism design, transparency, accountability, pol.is
Canonical works: Audrey Tang’s communications, Who Owns the Future? By Jaron Lanier, “Cryptocities” by Vitalik Buterin, Wiki Government by Noveck, Radical Markets by Posner and Weyl
Leading UK idea exchange organisations/meetups: Demos, Parliament, Data and Democracy Meetup, MySociety
Examples of leading UK community figures: Carl Miller, Oliver Marsh, Rachel Shirley
Innovation agencies
Description: Institutions that are concerned with how we can get more of the stuff that we want. This ranges from deeper, industrial lab research to social innovation. Innovation agencies are fairly academic and often research led, with some having large funding programmes attached.
Key concepts: intangibles, R&D, funding, public services, missions
Canonical works: Collective Intelligence by Geoff Mulgan, Economics for the Common Good by Jean Tirole, When the State meets the Street by Bernardo Zacker
Leading idea exchange organisations/meetups: Nesta, ARIA
Examples of leading UK community figures: Mariana Mazzucato, Ravi Gurumurthy, Dominic Cummings
Tech for Good/Civic tech
Description: Community that brings together hackers, coders, developers and designers with people who really understand a social problem and want to build digital solutions to social and environmental challenges.
Key concepts: responsible use, social justice, collectives, digital rights, digital social innovation
Canonical works: Race after technology by Ruha Benjamin, Automating inequality by Virginia Eubanks
Leading UK idea exchange organisations/meetups: Newspeak House, Tech for good (with UK regional hubs), Digital for Good, Social tech Northeast
Examples of leading UK community figures: Cassie Robinson, Dama Sathianathan, Ed Saperia, Ellie Hale
OpenGov
Description: movement that explores how government can value openness, accountability, transparency and involving people/technology in the process.
Key concepts: transparency, open data, civic participation, public accountability
Canonical works: How democracies die by Levitsky and Ziblatt, Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice by Lathrop and Ruma, Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation
Leading UK idea exchange organisations/meetups: UK Open Government Network, Open Rights Group
Tech for politics (political parties)
Description: Individuals that are working to improve the underlying tech infrastructure for UK political parties.
Leading UK idea exchange organisations/meetups: Green Party coders, Liberal democrat software group, Coders for Corbyn
Crypto
Description: Movement aiming to build decentralised governing institutions (using the blockchain) in order to protect a particular set of rights. This governance can be both of the free-market (see Vitalik) and socialist (see Yanis Varoufakis) variety.
Key concepts: blockchain, digital social institutions, decentralised, web 3, DAOs,
Canonical works: The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan
Leading UK idea exchange organisations/meetups: Bitcoin and Blockchain London, LondonCryptoNetwork, Cyperphunks, MonDao
Once again - this is a first draft attempt. I really want to iterate this into a better product, one that can be used by the tech policy community to coordinate bigger and better events and movements.
Also inspired by Sid Meier’s Civilization, I had a stab at placing these subcultures on the following axes.
This could definitely be more accurate. But I still think that it outlines the overlapping of these subcultures fairly well. Note that ‘Tech for politics’ is not in here as I don’t believe it fitted into any of these categories. I also see VC firms, rather than as a specific subculture, as ‘supporting organisations’ of specific idea machines. For example, a16z would be more likely to invest in the corporate libertarian/synthetic technocracy axis, whereas Bethnal Green Ventures support the Tech for good movement.
Regardless, these subcultures all have plenty in common and need to do more to work together.
The vision for TxP, a tech policy meetup group that I have helped to setup, is to become an ideas factory - connecting together the different idea machines to produce a tasty menu of products.
Maybe these are the wrong idea machines. Maybe I haven’t included the correct organisations and values underpinning these ideological infrastructures. But again, maybe me getting things a little bit wrong is the point.
These different communities should be learning from one another. I hope to continue learning by getting some great responses from people to this post, how to improve it, and what we can build together.
*Thank you to Ben Yeoh (link to his Substack) - for pushing me to get this written up. I also take inspiration from Glen Weyl’s essay on “Political Ideologies for the 21st Century” in constructing my mapping and Newspeak House’s website for being a source of ideas.
** If I have put yourself or your organisation in the wrong subculture - I do apologise! Please let me know if/where you think you fit somewhere better, and if I can help you in any other way.
*** I am also keen to get more suggestions of other important meetup groups I have missed out on.
Of the Week - My Favourites
Podcast: High Performance Podcast - David Moyes
Youtube Video: The Fake Critic - Everything Everywhere All at Once - A Cinematic Miracle
If you haven’t watched this film already - then you should be going tonight. My favourite new release of 2022. Beautiful, surreal, relatable.
Song: Sub Focus - It’s Time
Article: Matt Yglesias - Understanding Effective Altruism’s move into politics
Hey Tom, have been reading some of your writing. This one intrigued me as I used to work in human rights .. now a tech founder and do a bit of social innovation now and then. I think you've missed a fundamental analysis of where the money comes from in all of this. You've also missed an analysis of the power dimensions within each. There's also a kind of coming at this from the outside rather than the inside, where you might see the conceptual value alignments but it doesn't really look like that from within. You've clearly got a big brain so interested in where this has come from and how this has been informed. It's also likely that you've moved on from this model a little. If you'd like to have a chat let me know.
Hey Tom, really interesting concept you’ve got going here - very useful to read and have as a resource moving forwards.
Given my background in university research, I was interested to see that, whilst academic research/ers featured in the canonical works / community figures lists, not as many academic research groups or institutions were listed as idea exchange orgs - why do you think this is? maybe the work of university research groups is too niche and the work of university institutions too broad, with both being less focused on meaningful exchange as they should be?
I wonder if, in this case, your map highlights a problem that needs solving… keen to hear yours (and others) thoughts on this :)
P.S. in Cambridge, I found my tech policy community in CSAP and the Bennett Inst — I feel these places qualify as “ideas machines” but I’m unsure where they’d go on the map (I’ll give it some more thought!)