The Datafication of Despair
Book Launch & Discussion 26 June 6.30-8pm Onlinevents
Book your tickets here
As we start to join the digital dots about how Big Tech’s Big Extraction of NHS data took place over the last fifteen years, it seems that we’re finally ready to start having a problem with Palantir. As the Greek tragedy of what Nick Srnicek’s devastatingly useful book calls the Silicon Empires rolls on, we are starting to see the next stage of their extractive logic, combined with the ordinary ‘enshittification’ associated with platformization of care. As the NHS strategy to form a Federated Data Platform to hold sensitive NHS data was awarded to Palantir we start to see the problem as one third of NHS trusts using Palantir software don’t meet minimum data security standards. Surely with all that compute power and data centres at its disposal it’s worth it? Nope, turns out that despite a catalogue of decades of poorly managed ICT contracts in the NHS, Palantir software is still ten times slower than the existing NHS software.
There’s probably a guided self-help meditation tool tucked away on the NHS app for staff tasked with using Palantir’s software called Cheer Up Love (Step 2) and Where’s Your Sense of Humour? (Step 3).
Layer on top of this Duncan McGann’s work at The Good Law Project which helps us join the political dots with the digital ones. The dots of how in such an ordinary way successive health ministers came to be OK with selling off our data. Tracking political donations from private healthcare and insurance companies and associated providers of AI helps us understand how collecting and selling off biometric data during Covid19 became so normalised. And why our datafication became so very very valuable.
As someone who researches therapeutic labour and digitalization, it’s a big sigh moment when another call for impactful mental health innovation comes out as part of the 10 year plan. How to play the game of saying what nobody wants to hear about complex states and complex systems. The only reason I could stomach a weekend of clearing the ideological decks to fill in another neurolinguistically programmed set of questions about stimulating innovation in mental health is that it affords me the practice of formulating a depressing smorgasbord of reasons why the emergence of UberTherapy will most likely make us feel a whole lot worse. From attrition by design to the datafication of despair there are important reasons why we need to talk about whether a MuchBetterHelp is possible.
On the 26th June 6.30-8pm BST Andrew Samuels, Linda Michaels and Elizabeth Cotton will discuss the new book UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health and the politics of digital therapy in the face of widespread platformization. The event will challenge participants to raise their consciousness and consider a defence of deep work and the what next in the story of UberTherapy.
Reserve your tickets for the book launch of UberTherapy here.
Submit your evidence to the NHS Consultation Informing the mental health strategy for England by the 10th July here.
@survivingwork.bsky.social @survivingwk
@UberTherapy.bsky.social @ubertherapies