Digital Understanding

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

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[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho]

That this House takes note of the case for improved digital understanding at all levels of United Kingdom society.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, the last time I secured a debate in your Lordships’ Chamber, it was to mark the 25th anniversary of the world wide web. We marvelled at having Bach and da Vinci at our fingertips and celebrated 94 year-olds on social media. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, called the internet,

“the greatest transformative force in history bar none”.—[Official Report, 16/1/14; col. 403.]

However, even on that day we were cautious. I said that,

“we are sleepwalking into assuming that the platform underpinning so much of our daily life is not changing”.—[Official Report, 16/1/14; col. 396.]

I am sad to report that nearly all of us, including me, have spent too much of the past three years continuing to sleepwalk. If that debate was a birthday party, today’s must be a mid-life crisis.

We are in the midst of some major geopolitical shifts. The planet is hotter than it has been in 115,000 years. Populism has seen a worrying resurgence, both at home and abroad. Stagnating wages mean that young people are earning thousands less than generations before them. Alongside these, we are living through the staggering transformation brought by the internet. Technology is changing our world at a speed we have never seen before, a speed that I believe will now never be reversed. That is a challenge, but if we allow ourselves to awaken we can make it a source of tremendous opportunity: if we seize them, if we own them, we can harness the power of these technologies to address the other great challenges we face. I am calling today for digital understanding to be improved everywhere because I believe it is central to our ability to create better outcomes for people in the next century.

For as long as we have had the internet, we have had the internet’s promise. The internet promised us energised democracies and a world where all could speak to one another. In a way, it has fulfilled that promise: we can register to vote, petition the Government and support candidates who match our values with just a few keystrokes. But in addition to that, we have emotionally manipulative advertisements that target us based on our gender, our faith, and even our sexual preferences. The Vote Leave campaign last year spent 98% of its budget on digital adverts and boasted that the advantage of doing so was that it was so poorly scrutinised by the political media. Just this morning, as many noble Lords will have heard, Facebook revealed that many thousands of dollars of political ads were bought by Russian trolls during the US election, and I am sure there will be more revelations to come.

The internet promised us flexible, creative work that could be done anywhere. Again, it delivered: today we have the biggest tech industry in Europe, with 1.5 million people employed and £7 billion invested last year alone. However, alongside that we also have Amazon delivery drivers receiving as little as £3 an hour with no breaks, while CEO Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth surpasses $92 billion. Not a day goes by without headlines wrestling with the nature of artificial intelligence and how it will affect the world of work. Enormous and extraordinary leaps in quantum computing and machine learning somehow feel dislocated from the people who will inevitably be affected by the ways these innovations are deployed.

The internet promised us free access to the world’s information. We now live in a world where every single piece of art at the Tate has its own web page, but also one where fake news is an art form, slickly produced by anyone who wants to profit from our confusion. The internet promised access to new ways of learning and creativity for our children and in many ways, again, this has been true: learning has become democratised and more accessible, with everything from Khan Academy to the amazing BBC resources. But who in the early days of the web would have imagined the creation of Instagram and foreseen its damaging effects on young people’s self-esteem?

For a dotcom dinosaur like me, one of the most surprising developments is the domination of our experience of the internet by a handful of companies. Twenty years ago the rise of these so-called platform businesses was not anticipated. Now the flows of money, power and usage are controlled in a way far removed from the open, distributed, fragmented early years. We can point to these tech giants, the monopoly platforms, the wily political strategists who have shaped these phenomena, and try to blame them for all this, but the truth is that they only created some of the hollow vessels. We are the users.

Every time we use the internet, we leave a data trail of valuable information to be transformed into personalised and targeted advertising. That may be a tantalising holiday home in Europe for some of us, but for the poor and vulnerable it is likely to be a high-interest loan or a bad insurance deal. Every time we share some outrageous piece of invective or agitation, we encourage the creation of even more content which erodes the factual base of our public conversation. Every time we tap our phone to choose the convenience of a short ride home, we buy into the idea that it is okay for a driver to have no job security or holiday pay. To paraphrase John Lanchester recently in the London Review of Books, “We are the product”.

Now we are seeing the outcomes of these contributions. Expertise has been devalued and emotion reigns supreme. Take a look at the climate crisis. The internet has helped to drive the exponential increase in information, but the public’s ability to accept it has slid. YouTube videos with titles such as “What They Haven’t Told You About Climate Change” and “The Great Climate Change Hoax” have driven millions of views. Is it any wonder that in the UK, Australia, Germany, Canada and the US the average partisan divide over the climate crisis is now 40 points?

We have let these things come upon us, but it is not too late to wake up. If we want to change this dynamic and shape the future we need to recapture some of the internet’s original promise and more of its positive transformative power. That means we need to understand—at all levels of society—what our digital world really is. We need to address the challenges that already exist and pre-empt the ones we do not know about.

We live our digital lives this way because we have the skills to do so. Some 91% of us in the UK have the ability to use the internet. This is a remarkable achievement. It is important to continue the work to close the remaining gap and include those who do not have the skills or access. But we also need to move beyond skills to understanding. Nearly all UK internet users have the digital skills to use a search engine but only half know how to distinguish between search results and adverts. Around two-thirds of our digitally skilled population can shop and bank online but a third of those do not make any checks before entering their personal or financial information. More than 1.4 million of us work in tech-related jobs but, as the recent WannaCry attack showed us, hardly anyone is investing the time, resources or expertise to keep our systems safe. This list could go on for ever.

Becoming a nation of people with digital understanding will be different and more complicated than becoming one with digital skills. For starters, skills are tangible and teachable—can you download this app, programme this device or complete this transaction? They also reinforce the notion that digital is something we do. It is time-bound and transactional. But in a world where we spend more time online than we do asleep and where everything from televisions to kettles can connect to the internet, digital is something we are. Understanding is not a race to be run. It is a lifelong process of learning unique to each of us.

We in this House have a particular responsibility as we have the privilege of playing a role in public life. We must ask ourselves whether we have the digital understanding to provide the leadership needed in this time of technological change. I cannot stress how vital it is that we—parliamentarians, policymakers and politicians—absorb and engage with the realities of how digital technologies work. We must see where our country can make the most of them and be alert to the potential dangers.

In recent months I have heard frankly anodyne comments such as “enough is enough” or “we must scrap end-to-end encryption”—the very system that keeps our personal information safe. This is alarmist and a disservice to the people we serve. Just as it would not be acceptable for a Minister not to understand how her departmental budget works, it is not acceptable for her not to understand how technology affects her brief. It is not an insurmountable task. We live in 2017, not 1817, and we have form to follow.

I had the pleasure of working at the beginning of the Government Digital Service. It has shown how digital understanding can be applied to the world of government, from scrapping paper car tax discs to simplifying the appointment of power of attorney. It has also shown us how not to do it. It saved us £4.1 billion by not creating expensive and complicated apps and by salvaging doomed projects such as universal credit. But the good work being done to help the Government modernise and to make it work for people who live their lives digitally is being dismantled. Departmental silos are creeping back, replicating cost and inefficiency. GDS is celebrated and copied around the world. Last year we were ranked top for digital government by the UN. How ironic if we fail to recognise and nurture this great asset because of a lack of digital understanding.

There are other pioneers making digital understanding a reality. The Open University—in which I declare my interest as chancellor—makes digital literacy integral to its students’ experience. OU students graduate able to manage their digital identities, separate fact from fiction and make sense of what they find online. It is sharing its experience with other institutions. Citizens Advice—a reassuring hand on our high streets since the war—now has a digital dashboard showing what advice people are searching for and is helping millions of its users navigate the new challenges in their lives, from Facebook scams to online identity theft. London has just appointed its first chief digital officer, making our capital a role model for making the city digital. This is not about shiny new gadgets. It is about using technology so we can recycle better and have fewer potholes and more effective parking.

I call on the Government to support and amplify the good things happening and to bring these people together in a more structured way. How about we create a formal network of public organisations that can tangibly build our nation’s digital understanding? Much of their work is admirable but it is co-ordination and focus that will embed digital understanding in the fabric of our lives. Perhaps too this network could have a more formal role as a resource for elected and public officials needing support. But while we do this at a granular level, we need to do it with a purpose and a destination. We need to know what kind of digital world we are trying to shape. For this reason, I welcome the Government’s role in developing a digital charter. It presents an opportunity for us to argue and articulate what we want and to design a moral compass for our digital age.

We know that the digital landscape is currently monopolised by a few American-based platforms—although I would watch out for the Asian digital tigers which may soon join them—which are steeped in the world-view of Silicon Valley with its love of the First Amendment and libertarianism. We can build a charter of our own—an articulation of the nation we want to be and then perhaps we can globally find our commonalities and create the basis of a Geneva Convention for the web. I believe we must come together and attempt to put some of these universal principles in place for the next phase of our digital world.

No matter how we move forward, we must do so in modern ways. We do not need a Select Committee on digital understanding beavering away in a closed-off room. We need smart people working in creative and agile ways to get to the bottom of what is really going on. Difficult or not, this work must be done and done now. It is an issue not just of technology but of fairness. It is simply not fair that only a few people understand technology and are taking advantage of the billions who do not. None of this means that we can rest in the mission to bring basic digital skills to everyone or roll out high-quality broadband to the rest of the country. It just means we need to expand our goal. It is not an either/or but a both.

If there is anyone still struggling to comprehend the universality of tech in our lives, I recommend taking a look at today’s list of speakers. We have a composer, a neuroscientist, the Astronomer Royal, a filmmaker, businesswomen and a Bishop—not to mention the man who brought us Amstrad. I am heartened by the fact that, as this Chamber debates digital understanding for everyone in the UK, we are not simply hearing from those whose careers, like mine, have been built around technology. Members from all over the House will speak and, if a 700-year-old institution can see the value of digital understanding, I have no doubt the rest of the British public can too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho]

My Lords, you would have thought that, as a director of Twitter, I would be expert in reducing complicated content to just 140 characters—but even I am flummoxed by how to concertina such an erudite and interesting debate into the few short seconds that I have left. I feel as if I had opened a huge dam—or perhaps that is not the right expression. Anyway, a huge amount has come out and a huge amount of emotion has been expressed. I hope we can continue the conversation. We need to have it, and more importantly, the country needs us to have it. I hope that Sir Alan—or rather, the noble Lord, Lord Sugar—will forgive me: I was on my device, but I was making notes, because I too have learned a lot this afternoon. I thank noble Lords for their contributions.

Motion agreed.