The real cost of broadband
Noticings 1: The Real Cost of Broadband
Hello! 👋 This is Rachel Coldicutt welcoming you to the first edition of Noticings, Careful Trouble’s newsletter.
Everyone has a newsletter now, so we didn’t want to be left out. We think this one will be a semi-regular update on things we’re up to and things we’ve noticed going on at the intersection of tech and society. And if you’re interested in working with us, we’re looking for some freelance support with our comms (link at the end of the newsletter). We don’t have much of a mailing list yet, so sign up! Tell your friends! Share this on social media!
New research: the real cost of broadband
Everyone should be able to afford to get online, which is why we’re campaigning for broadband to be reclassified as a utility.
As the UK cost of living crisis continues, and the evidence mounts that poorer households are being hardest hit by price rises and limited incomes, the status of home broadband as an essential household spend is under-recognised.
Being online is a vital part of daily life, but low income households spend much more of their income on broadband than the typical household – as much as 6.5 times more for a household on Universal Credit.
📈 Quickest read: Fact sheet [PDF]
📃 Full report: The Real Cost of Broadband [PDF]
🔢 Deep dive: Economic Modelling [PDF]
Or come along to our online presentation to hear more: Thursday 28 September 1-2pm where Anna Dent and I will talk through the research. Reserve a spot.
As part of this project – funded by Impact on Urban Health – we’re also getting ready to pilot some form of community-owned connectivity in South London. We’ve been working with technologist Tom Armitage to make sense of how to deliver the connectivity part of that puzzle: Tom and I have written up thoughts from some of our early conversations here and, if you’re really very interested, here’s a slide deck I presented about our even more work-in-progress thinking at Wuthering Bytes last weekend.
What else have we been up to?
On the Careful Industries side, this summer has been busy for us with client work. We’ve just wrapped a foresight project with the Royal Academy of Engineering on the role of engineering in solving superwicked problems which we hope to be able to share soon. We’ve also been getting back into tech policy work and are looking forward to publishing a new report in early October, ahead of party conference season.
At Promising Trouble, as well as the Community Connectivity programme, we’ve been continuing to work with Power to Change to support Community Tech organisations across England. One of the best bits of that work is bringing together Community Tech makers and doers, and Inclusion Producer Roseanna Dias has blogged about how we’re applying principles of care and connection to the Community of Practice. If you’d like to join the next meet-up, it’s online on 26 September, 11:30-12:30. Book a spot here.
Given it’s been the Summer of AI, we have some obligatory AI things to mention:
I wrote something for The Society of Author’s magazine, The Author, about AI, human creativity, copyright, and collective action. They don’t have a website so I popped the long-version on Medium.
We submitted evidence to the House of Lord’s Digital and Democracy Committee inquiry on LLMs. They haven’t published the evidence yet, so here’s a Google Doc version, where we advocate for a rights respecting approach to AI governance that prioritises Public and Planetary benefit.
In non-AI news, we’re also still trying to get funding to create a speculative Department of Care and Repair, which I maintain is a great idea, even though most funders we speak to aren’t quite sure.
If you’d like to commission us or partner with us, then get in touch by emailing hello@carefultrouble.net. We’d love to hear from you.
Things our friends are doing
🛠️ Sign up for the Coop Hackathon in London on 19 and 20 October
📚 Lots of brilliant people we know have books coming out this autumn – the three at the top of our pile are Jay Owens’ Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles, Deb Chachra’s How Infrastructure Works, and Georgina Voss, Systems Ultra: How Things, People and Ideas Collect in a Complex World
📃 Labour Together have a new report out with British Future called Culture Clash: Bridging Our Divides
🕸️ Watershed have documented and shared a number of their organisational processes, including random selection and climate action.
Opportunities and Events
Last but not least!
📯 If you’ve read all the way to end of this newsletter, you’ll probably agree that we need some help with our comms. We’re looking for freelance support for the next 6 months. Expressions of interest are due by the end of September: read the brief on Google Docs here.
And we’ll leave you with news of talks and conferences we’re doing in September:
12 September (London): I’m on a panel at CogX in London with MIT Tech Press reporter Charlotte Jee, Dex-Hunter Torricke from Google DeepMind and Prof Sana Kareghani, talking about whether ethics matter in the age of AI
13 September (Rotterdam): brilliant novelist and game designer Naomi Alderman and I are having a chat about New Economies, AI Systems and Big Tech at the Partners for a New Economy conference
19 September (London): Anna Dent, Head of Research at Promising Trouble, will be speaking at the digital health benefits model we’ve been developing at the Ada Lovelace event Tackling Health Inequalities in Data-Driven Systems
20 September (Liverpool, online): Anna will be at the University of Liverpool Digital Inclusion Policy and Research Conference to talk about community connectivity
Thanks for reading! And take care
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If you want to read more from us, take a look at our websites – Careful Industries and Promising Trouble.