Newsletter Issue #2 - 17th Feb 2025
UK digital governance review, Elon Musk backseat driving, AI safety rebranded, and more.
The Political Technologist (TPT) newsletter brings you the latest news, events, and opportunities in the field of political technology. TPT is run by a group of mid-career technologists searching for groundbreaking projects to affect meaningful change in the UK civic landscape. Throughout this unending journey of discovery, the TPT editorial board shares with you exciting developments and activities that may inspire new visions and innovations.
If you’d like us to feature your work, activities, or opportunities, reach out to us at thepoliticaltechnologist[at]proton[dot]me.
Editor’s welcome
Dear readers,
It’s been a tumultuous week for political technology at home and abroad - this week's newsletter focuses on reports from various events, big AI policy news, and rumblings around Westminster and international policy within the space. There are many causes for both hope and trepidation; we hope this edition provokes much of the former and little of the latter.
As ever, we welcome any feedback, suggestions, or otherwise, via substack or via email at thepoliticaltechnologist[at]proton[dot]me.
Best,
On behalf of the editorial board
In the spotlight
Last week saw the AI Action Summit in France, and its corresponding fringe in London, which brought together policymakers, industry leaders and civil society organisations for discussions about the future of AI. Unlike in previous years, the summit’s focus has shifted away from AI safety, and towards a focus on ‘unlocking economic opportunities and enabling growth’ via artificial intelligence. In keeping with this trajectory, the UK ‘AI Safety Institute’ announced midweek that it was being renamed as the ‘AI Security Institute’, and shifting its focus from a broader lens on AI safety, bias and societal harms, towards “safeguarding Britain’s national security, and protecting citizens from crime”. Much still remains to be seen about how this change in focus will impact the work, and indeed trajectory of policymaking from DSIT with respect to AI, but this article from Politico EU does a good job of covering the ways in which the UK Government’s approach to AI regulation has shifted, and the extent to which they remain in political lockstep with our neighbours across the Atlantic Ocean.
On everyone’s lips
In this section, our anonymous little birdy [BD] brings you bite-sized chunks (no full meals!) of our choice of gossip from the world of political technology right now. This week:
AI Safety is dead (sort of)
Rumours abound in Westminster that the AISI is not the only AI focussed institution about to see a pivot in focus - the turmoil-ridden Alan Turing Institute (ATI) might find itself soon focussing on one of its three ‘grand challenges’ more closely than the others. In the ATI’s defence, that agenda setting is out of their control….
Speaking of Westminster agenda setters, the government’s unofficial second-in-command has lost control of the narrative surrounding her previous employment record. Perhaps not unfairly given the runaway failure to control the line on this, the Comms SpAd responsible is rumoured to be shortly finding himself subject to a similarly acrimonious departure from his current employer.
It has been a bad week for AI Safety proponents across Westminster and the UK government, but equally a bad week for fans-of-the-genre closer to home. Proponents might wish to encourage colleagues to spend less time tweeting about deporting minorities and excluding women from the workforce, and more time tweeting about their apparent area of focus, lest further AI safety-shaped gaps find their way onto the MooseBeak House calendar.
TLDR: State of Digital Governance Review by Sinead Doyle
The State of Digital Government Review is a welcome sequel to 2013’s Government Digital Strategy. The UK now spends £26bn a year on digital technology, employing 100,000 digital and data professionals. That may sound like a massive investment, but for perspective, it’s 30% less than the equivalent benchmark level of private sector tech spend.
Hard to believe it’s 2025 and we’re still bemoaning the lack of digitally skilled people in the public sector! Despite over a decade of focus on upskilling the civil service and improving Digital, Data and Technology career paths, the government still spends £14.5bn a year on third-party suppliers, contractors and consultants. The average contractor is three times more expensive than a permanent member of staff, but with pay lagging behind the private sector, advertised roles go unfilled.
Another sign of chronic underinvestment is the increasing proportion of critical services dependent on decades-old technology: in 2024, 28% of systems in central government departments were categorised as “legacy”. These are end-of-life products that are no longer supported or updated, posing increasing risks to stability as they age into obsolescence. Worryingly, 15% of government survey respondents could not even estimate the size of their legacy estate. Imagine having so much old software knocking about that you don’t even know (can’t even guess!) how much of it is currently on fire?
The accompanying policy paper “A blueprint for modern digital government” provides familiar recommendations: joined-up public services, investment in infrastructure and re-doubled digital leadership. These all sound good in principle, but difficult to achieve without first successfully reforming funding and procurement. If we can shift from perpetual reform programmes to the continuous funding of multidisciplinary product teams, there’s a chance we may see real, lasting improvements.
WTF is happening in the USA: by Matt Stempeck
With carte blanche from President Trump, Elon Musk's lackeys have raided government offices and servers in a tech takeover of the state.
From accessing US Treasury payment systems and citizens' personal data, to assuming control of (or just supplanting) official web and email servers, the foundational technologies undergirding the entire federal government provided the vector for a de facto coup of the United States of America.
Those of us who have spent our careers promoting and leveraging ICT (Information & Communications Technology) for public good are in a state of shock. Not least of all the remaining 200 or so employees of the United States Digital Service, the digital transformation unit that the DOGE initiative glommed onto to establish their beachhead on the org chart. The shock isn't less that a technical shutdown could occur, but that the rest of the foundational layers of constitutional, checks-and-balances government could be so ill-prepared to respond to it. Above all else, the past week has been a failure of the core concept of law enforcement within the most sensitive inner chambers of America. Security teams protecting access to America's vulnerable inner workings wilted in the face of an executive claiming absolute power and his gangly IT guys.
Elon's marauding IT teams appear to consist of ideologically aligned, under 25 year old male tech workers brought over from the private sector. They're moving quickly, literally ripping out the cables within critical department after critical department, and running laps around the reaction time of the courts and minimal Democratic party opposition, not to mention any formal rules, laws, or core constitutional arrangements of how government is meant to function.
Nothing is safe. They may have started by shutting down diversity programs, but they've since come for veterans services and NOAA, the agency that collects basic meteorological weather data. The full list as of February 7th, via the Verge: the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration, the Department of Labor, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Small Business Administration, and the Treasury.
In short, they have destroyed core technical state infrastructure in a (thus far successful) attempt to destroy large swaths of the state itself. Our attempts to modernize the US federal government are beginning to look like a historical afterthought amidst this tech-facilitated institutional suicide.
Back from the field
Here, our contributors share key takeaways from a few memorable events from the last few weeks.
UK GovCamp | 18 January
For anyone interested in the craft of the government, a long-time political technologist embedded in the government scene, Alex Vince, brought us fresh takes from UK GovCamp 2025. The titled event is a free annual unconference for those within the public sector to gather across organisational boundaries to discuss the how of government. By design, attendees are free to discuss any salient topics that come to mind; however, the world is facing a new pandemic called “we need to talk about AI”, and GovCamp is no exception. Alex gave us a deeper reflection on his experience at GovCamp as digital governance and AI jumped to the forefront.
Read his article here, or visit our brand new section, Articles, on The Political Technologist.
Paris Participatory AI Research and Practice Symposium | 8 February
AI Auditor Yung-Hsuan presented his co-authored paper at the first-ever Participatory AI Research and Practice Symposium in Paris; other than an obscene amount of 🍷et 🥐, he brought back some fresh observations in the field of participatory design, development, and governance of AI systems.
Run by passionate volunteers/longtime experts from Connected by Data, Data & Society, and Aapti Institute, the symposium convened a huge multidisciplinary crowd to answer one of the hardest questions we’re facing in AI: how do we make sure communities of people from all over the world get to be a part of this profit-driven, capital-heavy, and break-things-ask-for-forgiveness-later-or-never AI frenzy? The stories that brought everyone together are probably way too familiar: AI products created by and for people from a certain region are increasingly exported to and adopted by people from other parts of the world. We’re seeing all sorts of clashes, from baked-in implicit biases and discriminations to unequal distribution of power, where the people whose lives are upended by AI cannot change or resist the latter. Established fields of design justice principles and participatory action research (PAR) exist to tackle this issue, but what would they look like in the context of AI?
Speakers at the symposium presented quite a few innovative ways to engage with affected communities and allow their voices to be heard during the development of AI systems:
👉Lizzie Remfry (Queen Mary University of London) and her team used art-based methods to involve underrepresented groups to inform research priorities and the use of AI in healthcare.
👉Luke Thorburn (AI & Democracy Foundation) and his team provided a framework to evaluate just how democratic (i.e. how much decisionmaking power is given to the public) the participatory processes of AI DDD are.
👉Prajna Soni & Deepika Raman used grounded theory (one of my fav theories!) to allow communities to code and let ‘context-specific preferences and values’ emerge, instead of asking participants to follow coding schemes predetermined by removed researchers. (read their work here and here)
👉Monique Munarini drew from feminist theory to operationalize equity; she’d be hosting workshops with affected groups to cocreate equity indicators for AI systems in recruitment, which is certainly something to look out for!
Some cheeky self-promotion:
👉Gemma Galdon-Clavell, Yung-Hsuan, and Greta Byrum worked together on community-led approaches to AI auditing, arguing that an audit must place communities’ concerns at the front and centre in the evaluation of AI systems so as to empower them to take meaningful actions.
👉Yung-Hsuan, Nitya Kuthiala, Joanna Wiaterek, Jonas Kgomo, and Chinasa T. Okolo provided a conceptual framework to posit the entrance of an ethnographer into AI labs and AI deployment scenes, stating the obvious: we need to first understand “what humans do” before we can answer “what humans CAN DO with AI”.
Many more thought-provoking presentations and publications are featured on the agenda; check out all of them from AI-assisted citizens’ assemblies and the negotiation of data futures to generative AI in education!
Art Made AI: Demos, Discussion, DJs | 31 January
Digital Creative Tristan Spill attended the sold-out showcase of creative technology and policy at Newspeak House, organised by TxP and Restless Egg.
👉Mat Dryhurst spoke about The Call, which he created with his partner Holly Herndon at the Serpentine Gallery in London's Hyde Park in conjunction with Serpentine’s Arts Technologies programme. The vocal training data led to the founding of an opt-out protocol for AI data at https://haveibeentrained.com. Two billion works now opt out, and it’s used by Huggingface. “[...] let’s turn the production of training data into art.” – Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst.
👉Will Freudenheim spoke of tinkering with game engines for playful camera work and automating complexity to merge the boundary between tool-making and art.
👉Sarah Drinkwater from Common Magic spoke of how she’s investing in individuals and community start-ups to back the future she wants to see.
👉Flora Weil demoed her ongoing Nephila project, as an aggregator and liquid swarm of media worlds. She spoke about how relational schemas are the large hidden forces beneath the surface and how AI can unlock that potential. Check out her new project here.
On the horizon
Looking for the chance to find your tribe, your next adventure, or that dream job? We recommend the following events and opportunities for you to keep track of.
Events
Open Source Club: Marketing & Design of Open Source Products | 18 February
AI for Digital Democracy: How to navigate opportunities and threats | 18 February
Writing Club: Workshop with Georgia | 20 February
The Democracy Network Summit 2025 | 28 February
Social Meetup with Civic Future, FutureHouse, and Looking For Growth | 3 March
codebar Festival 2025 Fringe | 8 March
7th Public Sector AI Week | 10 - 14 March
AI UK 2025 | 17 - 18 March
Career opportunities
Tarbell Fellowship, Tarbell Center for AI Journalism (deadline: 28 February)
Other opportunities
Cooperative AI Summer School (deadline: 7 March)
Social Data School (deadline: 1 April)
Third annual New Media Writing Prize Unconference (deadline: 25 February)
Ways to engage with us
This year’s Newspeak House cohort is exploring a range of possible services we could be offering to our peers and colleagues in the civic tech space. We’re always open to new ideas here, but for the time being, here's what we’ve got on offer:
Stay overnight: We have a guest room, and we’re always up for hosting people who wish to get the most out of the community. Book your Newspeak stay right now!
Coffee roulette: It’s a non-romantic and political-tech-focused Tinder thing. Sign up to be matched with someone with complementary knowledge, skills, and experience to share!
Stay tuned for more activities to come, including Word Lab, Sensing projects, etc.
What’s cooking?
From the kitchen of the legendary Wednesday Ration Club comes a curious smell… What’s on the menu for the next few dinners, and who are the master chefs?
What is Ration Club: Every Wednesday (almost), for the past 10 years, Newspeak House has been hosting Ration Club dinners where the community of political technologists come together to eat, meet, and greet. It is open to anyone!
While most meals are cooked by Newspeak House fellowship candidates throughout the year, community members also often bring in their favourite dishes from time to time. Rumour has it that an MP once wore the Newspeak House apron.
Chef report: Our Visionary Leader Richard teamed up with digital creative Tristan on the 5th of February to make Briam, a traditional roasted vegetables Greek dish that looks like this:
Digital system researcher Jyo took us to Malaysia with some delicious laksa on the 12th; it was so good everyone forgot to take a picture.
Next up: (Change of chefs) Software developer Mel is cooking up a mushroom risotto for us on the 19th; a mystery chef is coming on the 26th; our favorite mathematician Paulina is returning to the first ration club in March on the 5th. Don’t miss out on the food (and the people)!
Thank you for reading this issue.
You’ve reached the end, but the possibility doesn’t stop here.
Reach out to us via messages and comments on Substack or send us an email at thepoliticaltechnologist[at]proton[dot]me. We welcome guest contributions and suggestions.