Digital Inclusion Coffee Morning Part 2: Wake up and smell the exclusion.

Not all attendees were helpless and downtrodden. One woman of at least my own mum's age told me how she'd installed GrapheneOS and was looking at degoogling her tablet to a more secure and private OS too. "You had some help with that?", I asked. "Of course, my grandson is a whiz".

At the heart of our problem is the utterly unreasonable demands that society now places on the individual through technology, which can hardly be enumerated let alone exaggerated. And we are not quite sure if more "security" makes things better or worse - or most importantly - whose security that means? One thing is for sure, that giving back more control over technology to people, giving them more choice about how, or even whether to use it at all, is extremely important.

We sat down next to a group from Age UK. They brought glossy leaflets on spotting online fraud, and very sane literature on moving away from Apple or Microsoft Windows to Linux, a much friendlier and more secure operating system for everybody.

Normally we'd expect to see older volunteers helping bewildered peers, but Age UK sent along a highly experienced middle-aged system administrator - easily a six figure salary dude - and a fresh young graduate with a degree in cybersecurity and GAF ¹ from Portsmouth University. Both were deeply concerned, sincere, humble and painfully realistic about the vast challenges we face in Civic Cybersecurity.

Engagement with older people is one of our many initiatives for research, consultation and action on the causes of technologically rooted strife in society. We'll soon resume work at the other end of life investigating a rather inevitable Nursery Breach and failures of maternity services in the UK due to the NHS's over-zealous project to shoe-horn all human affairs into the "digital" realm - where it does not belong.

What we've seen over the past few decades is that governments lack any coherent, active plan about digital technology. It is something that happens to them. It is their environment. In the worst cases it is taken up as a weapon, rather than a tool, to use against their own citizens, creating an arms race of competitive technological tyranny amongst nations. We retreat in the face of complexity. Whether we identify as such or not, once we give up on the idea we can control technology we become Technological determinists who have essentially given up on the ideas of progress and liberal democratic governance. Progress is something that one embarks upon, not a new secular religion to bow down before.

A stable society is maintained by investment in human beings like doctors and teachers, but also in solid knowledge, habits and institutions that hold relations of power. All the great political thinkers have said that people must not merely use the technology of the day, but fully master it or become its slave. Technology holds invisible power relations incidental to its function. The complaint of the Luddites was not weaving looms, but who owned and controlled them. It is one thing that a peasant can read a propaganda leaflet, but entirely another that she can write one to her member of Parliament. A grave danger with e-governance and over-bearing use of digital systems, especially if thrown out to markets as in Britain, is that they eat away every other facet of life and society.

Among the many societal harms we see are:

• injustice, exclusion, marginalisation
• spiralling costs of digital technology
• unacceptable emotional and mental-health cost of tech
• hidden costs and harms to the environment
• false positives, stress, worry, cancelled appointments
• disappearance of manners and mutual respect
• vanishing communicative and cognitive abilities
• inappropriate collection, storage and sharing of data
• unreliable technology as devices and systems
• hostile foreign influence and interests
• blaming and scapegoating 'minority' groups
• control and manipulation through technology

In order to champion the use of good technology, we see that organisations, schools and local authorities need to abandon over-reaching and poorly performing digital projects and invest in humane, properly researched and tested systems for long-term public and political health.

As an example of complexity, we discussed with Age UK the necessity of home visits. "Digital Health Visiting", is my name for it, inspired by talks with my good friend Dame Professor Sarah Cowley, a pioneer of visiting care in Britain.

Those we spoke to at DICM are obviously mobile and sprightly enough to attend a local community centre. Many more people over 75 are stuck at home in technological torment with nobody to talk to.

Age UK reach out to this rapidly growing cohort, excluded and "left behind", via home visits. But it's not easy. Digital Champions (volunteer assistants) travel far to reach many homes. Where does the funding come from? Who manages the risks? How can we provide training and vetting for assistants, so that neither they nor those they help are put at risk? Sometimes volunteers find:

• persons without legal capacity due to dementia etc
• homes that are unsafe or individuals who are at risk
• evidence of ongoing digital crimes, intrusion, extortion
• conflicts with family members or other carers

And besides, why exactly should society foot the bill for "savings and efficiencies" (read: higher profits) made by giant billionaire corporations and foreign tech monopolies?

As the banks get richer by closing branches and pushing ever more cost and responsibility onto customers, why are they not being taxed to pay for Civic Cybersecurity and the other security and health externalities they foist onto everyone?

HSBC, Nat West and Nationwide were also present at the coffee morning - and disproportionately represented in our opinion. We spoke to them, though naturally that was a disappointing interaction. None of the banks sent along credible technical experts capable of discussing complex issues at a serious level.

We spoke about various authentication schemes and why they don't work for everyone, and about the crucial need for customers to authenticate banks too, but the response was mostly blank faces. Mentioning branch closures and the undeniable deep need for in-person engagement met with sighs, shrugs and avoided eye-contact. When I've spoken to bank people before they've at least tried to put a "face" on their abject withdrawal from physical reality, but this time I could sense they weren't trying. Overall we felt the banks at the DICM were there as "political balance" and to do "PR and damage limitation" against a swelling tide of disaffection.

For some older technological losers, frustration and anxiety is giving way to learned helplessness, despair and depression. They are giving up on the ability to drive cars or use public transport due to technological obstacles. They cannot shop as more retailers refuse to take money and high-streets give way to the empire of Amazon delivery. They cannot get medical help because care is vanishing into unfathomable "apps" and "online".

Digital technology is building a cruel "ableist" society that's hostile to those outside the bell curve of full intellectual and physical capacity within an approximately 18-50 age range. And it punishes those who exercise any standing on ethics, privacy, dignity, and the environment.

What banks do offer is "training to use our app". In the bigger picture this is as much use as a chocolate teapot in the Sahara, and devious of the banks, NHS or anyone else hoping to force people onto "apps".

Not only will the interfaces of these "apps" be ever-changing labyrinths, their constant "security updates" will require an impossible circus of new hardware, dignity violating biometrics, notaries, extra verification and intrusive questioning. That, or every persons financial and health data will be in hostile hands within years or months. Deliberately increasing necessity against a backdrop of decreasing quality, security and availability is a suicidal policy. The whole model needs to change. Smartphones and apps may play a part, but they are not 'the universal answer'.

Since no two apps are the same and there are no standards of interaction, any application-specific education is really a form of lock in, leading to less choice, distorted markets and corruption of innovation. There seems to be precious little honest acceptance that huge numbers of people don't want mobile "apps" as a way to manage their lives and will not and cannot live that way. To systematically and instrumentally ignore almost one third of society is foolish whether you're in government or business.

Ross Anderson's work on the "costs of cybercrime" showed a direct correlation between a drop in burglaries or violent street crime, and increased cybercrime. Crime moved online. In any system of technology there are winners and losers. Corporations benefit by making the harms of technology an externality to be absorbed by the people. Banks may claim "savings" from using "apps", but aren't these proportional to the losses experienced elsewhere in society by their failure to provide actual service?

The result is a still-accelerating explosion of cybercrime and disaffection with technology. Toleration of white-collar crime, first by bankers and then by unethical US technology companies lent tacit acceptability to cybercrime now seen by many young people as cool and fashionable. They say; if Mark Zuckerberg and his friends can steal and spy with impunity, and society holds these sorts of people harmless or elevates them to "role models", then why shouldn't I use technology to get what I want too?

Thus casual criminality became fashionable in everything from stalkerware and bossware to selling keyloggers, remote access tools and trading data about vulnerable people. Aristocratic entitlement and technical privilege once the preserve of elite "spooks" went mainstream and now we have a vast petite bourgeoisie of a thriving insecurity industry enmeshed alongside our technological infrastructure and security industry. Banks, governments and health services are willingly becoming part of a burgeoning problem by their refusal to consult, reflect, moderate and engage in responsible, cautious development.

The inability or justified unwillingness of nearly a third of the population to meet increasing digital technology demands is a cause of resentment, exclusion, anxiety, lost opportunity, financial loss and negative effects on health.

In previous industrial revolutions technology divided society because a minority of industrialists and their political supporters saw misery and exclusion as an acceptable price to pay for "progress". They still do. The tragedy of course is digital tech was supposed to make life easier and more convenient. In a different world it might have done so, but under corporate tutelage it's done the opposite for the most vulnerable; the young, old, poor and least intelligent or educated.

We hope for government that can protect people's right to live without enslavement to undesirable, intrusive, precarious and confusing technologies. To do so it must give them choice. However, in a Britain no longer governed from Westminster but from Redmond and Cupertino in the United States, let's not pin too much of that hope on our elected representatives. More likely is that we're sleepwalking into a society that's quite unconscionable in its imposition, ever shifting in its complexity, callous in its disregard for human dignity, yet still unable to offer any semblance of social or psychological security.

Like other projects of economic brutality like "austerity" and "shock therapy" imposed on developing nations by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), we are meant to believe this "tough love" is a benevolent but painful means to improved ends. In the first round of the digital revolution we enthusiastically put on our own chains, in pursuit of "being modern and efficient". Today, powerful but mistaken voices are needed to tell us how despite the pain, somehow this is all good medicine, and that we will thank our masters when we reach the promised technological Utopia. Like all Utopias it will never come. Instead we ratchet ever more toward a callous, divided, anti-democratic and illiberal society in which hostile technology tells us what to do rather than being a tool for human improvement.