No one is excluded from digital opportunities, or any other opportunities!
We don't live in a centralising, homogenising plutocracy in which rule sets are made in the best interests of a few tens of thousands of wealthy and privileged people.
The last 18 months have proved that.
So there is no need to challenge the plutocracy, or challenge exclusion.
Martha Lane Fox isn't at the heart of, and hasn't profited from, a plutocracy and that is why she will never ever need to suggest anything to challenge it.
And just because she has done a bit of charity work on her gap year doesn't prove otherwise.
Which is why she wasn't appointed as “digital exclusion tsar” (or Champion, or whatever).
Because there won't be people up and down the country from Hackney to Inverness with years of hard won experience in trying to reduce digital and every other kind of exclusion (and if there were they'd all have their own charitable foundation anyway!) – so there is no need to give them some money to experiment with, let them get on with it, measure what works and copy that.
And we don't need structural changes, so we don't need any negotiation about new rule sets – Sunderland should continue to be governed by rule sets designed for Canary Wharf!
Sunderland shouldn't define its own rule sets in its own best interests.
Appointing yet another consultant wouldn't be a very tired old New Labour way of trying to change things – it's effective and at the same time not at all starry eyed in the presence of rich and powerful people who got their wealth from their existing privilege.
And if there were ever to be such a thing as digital exclusion, the only possible solution would be to appoint someone who is adept at using wealth and privilege for gaming the hidden mechanisms of analogue power, because it wasn't rich, powerful people shamelessly gaming the mechanisms of analogue power (old school connections, lobbying, political party funding, corporate hospitality, corporate sponsorship, internships for each other's children, board membership of private companies and public institutions and so on and so on and so on) that got us in this mess in the first place.
Everyone is included in power, no one is excluded!
No, it wouldn't be naff to appoint Martha Lane Fox as digital exclusion tsar!
It wouldn't be like voting for Ester Ranzen to "clean up politics"!
"Digital exclusion? Martha Lane Fox!" It's easy to say out loud and keep a straight face.
Which explains why whoever would have made the decision to appoint her didn't have any fear that it could or would be held up to ridicule, and it doesn't prove how secure powerful people feel in their control of politics and media.
Martha Lane Fox may or may not be an admirable person in her private choices, but I would never question her good faith in public action.
Because in good faith, she would never take the job!
TL;DR? In seven words.
Comments