# Capital, infrastructure, revolution

**URL:** https://forum.meet.coop/t/capital-infrastructure-revolution/686
**Category:** commons.hour
**Created:** [17 July 2021 09:49 UTC](https://forum.meet.coop/t/capital-infrastructure-revolution/686 "2021-07-17T09:49:20Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 3

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### Author: ![mikemh](https://forum.meet.coop/user_avatar/forum.meet.coop/mikemh/32/358_2.png) [@mikemh](https://forum.meet.coop/u/mikemh)
#### Post date: [19 July 2021 22:55 UTC](https://forum.meet.coop/t/capital-infrastructure-revolution/686/3 "2021-07-19T22:55:18Z")

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Your points [in the other thread](https://forum.meet.coop/t/radical-forking-of-tech-and-radical-tech-practice/680) run quite deep @nolski, thanks, and bear directly on the strategic challenges that meet.coop is facing: as an ‘ethical’ **coop** , a coop that means to develop **multistakeholder** governance, and an organisation that provisions **digital infrastructure**. See [commons.hour](https://forum.meet.coop/t/commons-hour/663)

I found that what I was writing as a response was getting quite long, and so far I’ve only addressed the first of your four comments, on ‘human centred’ design being quite widely available and practicable. Here’s a link to [what I wrote](https://cloud.owncube.com/s/QpcLe2X8EqZwSJN). My main drift as regards **human centred design** seems to be:

- ‘Human centred design’ has a 50-year history, and that history doesn’t give reason for a whole lot of optimism. Looking at **the 70s and the 90s** brings some perspective and tempers expectations somewhat.
- The game shifted in quite real ways in the 90s: much more complex now as a ‘design’ reality.
- I find I need to look at a whole history of ‘the professional-managerial class’ in Fordist capitalism, which has been going a looong time now. In its own locations (where its wage-worker members have occupational licence to work) the class seems to have little capacity for real change: it’s a creature of ‘the Fordisms’.
- The hegemonic cultural and economic order has managed to very effectively incorporate PMC members as wage-workers, whose merely ethical and aesthetic values (‘good’ design, ‘better’ specifications, etc) lack muscle - and anyway, they’re easily suckered and distracted by tools and techniques: mere _style politics_ (deckchairs on the Titanic, etc).
- Strategically alternative **locations** for alternative designing seem to matter - as distinct from altered **styles** of design in _existing_ locations.
- As a member myself by occupation and training, I’ve felt it necessary all my working life to work _in-and-against_ the professional-managerial class.

It’s pretty grumpy-old-man stuff, and I’m a bit shocked to see how negative I am. But I’ve seen 70s’ and 90s’ ‘human centred’ radicalism absorbed into the mainstream or sidelined, just as previous generations’ tech radicalism has been, and feel a much harder look at the tacit politics is called for, as a ‘professionalist’ politics.

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