Who’s Faring Well?

 

What began as observations about loneliness, education and systems moved, by the logic of following an argument where it goes, into territory that is harder to name. The territory is the encounter between the person and the state—or, more precisely, between the person and the various institutional arrangements that have been built, in the state’s name or in the market’s name or in the community’s name, to manage the conditions of human life at scale.

Welfare, in its original sense, means the condition of faring well—of being in a state of health, safety, and sufficiency. It has been progressively narrowed by institutional usage into a term for the specific programmes that governments provide to people who cannot provide for themselves, which is a narrowing that carries within it an assumption about who requires welfare and who does not.

Welfare

Systems

The essays in this section resist that narrowing. They treat welfare as the broader question: what are the conditions under which people fare well, and what happens when the systems designed to support those conditions substitute their own operational requirements for the conditions themselves?

The answers that emerge are not dramatic. Nobody in these pages is a villain. The agents who asked about cleanliness were following the habits of their industry. The ISP support staff were executing the script they were given. The organisation that did not reply to the email was almost certainly understaffed and underfunded. The reference system that converted testimony into data extraction was responding to the legitimate concerns of liability and comparability. The rental system that stored data overseas was using the infrastructure available to it. None of these are acts of malice. They are acts of systems operating within their own logics, and the logics have not been recently examined against the question of whether they serve the people the systems were established to serve.

That question—whether the system serves the person, or whether the person has been recruited to serve the system—runs through every essay that follows.