We already said that
Wading through the AI debates over the last year I’ve come to understand sometimes the call for AI literacy can be used as an accountability mic drop. A way to allocate assumed capacity deficit as the root of our inability to embrace AI technologies at work, clubbing the green shoots of data and algorithmic transparency and with it a regulatory dream of tech accountability.
On a good day there’s no doubt that a great critical read of AI technology offers a way to step back from staring into the automation abyss and draw back some control. And then there are the bad days when the institutional drive to blame and shame the individual in an attempt to evade tech accountability lands all that non-machine learning onto the individual. The efficient appeal to our assumed capacity deficits gaslighting us into thinking that when the numbers don’t add up then it’s down to our bad maths.
Over the next few weeks myself and Linda Michaels are recording a series of six podcasts about the rise of UberTherapy, inviting psychoanalysts, trade unionists, radical mental health and welfare reform activists and people who actually understand the technology to talk to the six chapters of the book (an invitation to you dear reader to the podcast series launch will come shortly).
During this process I’ve learned a lot about the constantly moving AI debates, and about my friend Linda who I rate as one of the most disarmingly radical therapists I’ve ever met under her leadership of the US Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN). At the beginning of our association we started The Digital Therapy Project to talk with people from a range of disciplines to both understand and raise awareness of what is already happening under UberTherapy. Much of this discussion has concentrated around building AI literacy materials for therapists, and long term work around promoting mental health and safety under platform capitalism.
Linda laughs at my jokes and I try to push her to be my de facto therapist by peppering our work calls with TMI and invasively existential questions. I am grateful to have another middle aged woman to navigate this terrain with as we have become fast at processing the cultural norm that assumes our deficit in being able to understand and take a position on AI.
Just before Xmas Linda’s organisation produced a report that provides the missing link in the UberTherapy argument and the evidence for why all of us should be concerned about the rise of platformization in mental health. Their research outlines the link between practice management tools, used by the vast majority of US therapists in private practice, and the private medical insurance companies and their digital providers. By providing a tech platform for private practitioners (1099 independent contractors in the States) to manage their clients, notes and pay they are tied into the creation of mega group practices that platformize therapeutic work.
The report argues convincingly that it raises a range of ethical and financial issues for therapists – including the extraction of patient data, performance metrics used by insurance companies to rank and rate therapists and the standardization of low rates of pay, as we see across the platform economy.
They already said that.
In its most spicey formulation, PMCs are the gateway drug for therapists to wage theft, dynamic pricing and robofiring, as our colleagues at Worker Info Exchange working with platform workers, including Uber drivers, have evidenced. What is happening to App drivers is a roadmap for the platformization of professional workers including therapists.
They already said that.
Most significantly, through looking at the business model behind PMCs the link is made to their digital health investors, private medical insurance companies and private equity, all with an uberization agenda across the therapy sector. And so the link is made between therapists in private practice and the UberTherapists of the future as we come to understand that technologically UberTherapy is already here.
We already said that.
I now have to squint when I login to LinkedIn where much of the UberTherapy debates are starting to happen. Ironically for a therapy profession dominated by middle aged women we still have a problem recognizing that often the question about whether ChatGPT or Claude can do therapy has already been answered by us but people just weren’t listening. It took the #FairnessInTheFeed campaign driven by women to be able to talk about algorithmic bias and how what we say has been automated out of our own debates.
Sometimes, you have to put down your algorithmic defences and take it on the chin that someone else has probably already said it. It’s only then that our collective AI literacy can be operationalised in a way that’s actually useful to us.
Read Linda’s most recent article in TAP magazine about PMCs here
Read PsiAN’s report about Practice Management Companies here
You can buy a copy of UberTherapy: The new business of mental health by BUP here
@survivingwork.bsky.social @survivingwk
@UberTherapy.bsky.social @ubertherapies