Introduction

It is a continual refrain that we are living through a time of unprecedented change. The challenges that societies such as the UK are facing in the 21st century are not new. They echo, in fact, those of the 20th century. Coping with new technology, the movement of people, the presence of religious tensions – these are perennial problems. Nor are present-day changes necessarily any greater than past changes. Moreover for all the changes introduced by new technologies in the latter years of the last century and the early years of this one, they do not match the introduction of technologies such as telephones, cars or televisions (Ridley 2011). It is not my intention here to argue that the problems with how success and social mobility are defined are a product of an inherent or inevitable teleological process such as industrialisation. Rather, defining social mobility entirely in terms of economic progression (and narrowly at that) is a long-standing problem that has become a pressing issue because of a particular set of circumstances that have come together at this point in time. These circumstances are partly the nature of the technological developments from the latter part of the 20th century, but more the social and economic context through which they have become manifest. And the internet provides the best example. Rather than bringing the foundation for new sets of more (utopian) human relationships, as some hoped, it has become a mechanism to enable capitalism to reinvent itself, to develop new markets and to do this while reducing the demand for labour and producing a new set of all-powerful multinational global companies (Morozov 2011).

Technology itself has not led to this outcome, but rather the inability or unwillingness of governments to create structures that can effectively marshal technology for different ends, and create effective bulwarks against the power of capital, or more accurately, transnational capital. The marketisation of not just economic relationships but also (as the US philosopher Michael Sandel argues) of social relationships, which have gathered pace especially in the US and the UK since the 1970s, has created a specific context within which technological change has occurred.