Tony Blair’s Strava governance Will he make Gaza a technocracy?

People generally prefer not to talk about the lockdowns these days. But, as far as I can remember, the English middle class responded in one of two ways: day drinking, or fitness obsession. I’m not much of a boozer, so I went running.

Pounding the footpaths, watching the hedgerows change with the seasons, was my one permitted outlet from an otherwise claustrophobic daily routine. Nor was it just me. The run tracking app Strava, which combines fitness monitoring with social-networking, has grown so rapidly in popularity since the pandemic that it’s planning to launch an initial public offering.

I didn’t use Strava to log my runs, but I did track them with a smartwatch. Looking back over the data, I realised I’d clocked up more than a thousand miles during that first pandemic year. I wasn’t the only one: since Covid, endurance sports have only grown in popularity. The Financial Times reports that over a million people applied to run this year’s London Marathon, and across the world other “fitness races” and formats are booming.

But perhaps this is to be expected. For the preferred sporting and leisure activities of the middle class have long served as a kind of gamified echo of everyday life. In 19th-century Britain, for example, the emergence of team sports mirrored the gradual domestication of our national culture. The nation’s roaring, piratical 18th-century love of blood-sports and bare-knuckle boxing gave way to the symbolic “combat” of team competitions, reflecting both Britain’s increasingly formal and orderly public morality, and also a crystallising sense of “team” unity in public life at scale. The assertion, popularly attributed to the Duke Wellington, that “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton”, is probably apocryphal. But it echoes an intuitive sense that there’s a link between our sporting preferences, and the broader conduct of national life — up to and including in war.

What does it say about us, then, that amateur rugby, football, and cricket appear to be in decline, even as endurance sports boom in popularity? For those who value the idea of national “teams”, the answer is an unnerving one: we appear to be re-imagining both sports, and also politics, as a relationship less among a defined community than between an individual and a centralised, de-materialised digital mediator.

At elite level, even team sports have shifted focus. Premier League and international football, for example, are more popular than ever — but here, the real “game” often seems to take place not between competitors in a match, but rather via the many secondary ways in which the resulting data are used, mined, and gambled against. Athletes themselves are tracked and algorithmically optimised in every imaginable way, from wearables for sleep tracking to machine-learning tools to improve in-game tactics. Software systems and performance-tracking hardware devices leave elite sports players as fully “under the algorithm” as an Amazon worker (albeit considerably better paid). For fans, meanwhile, there’s an ocean of in-game and player data, covering every imaginable facet of every elite sport. This, in turn, has fuelled eye-wateringly lucrative secondary sports-data subcultures, from online Fantasy Football leagues to the multi-billion-pound international sports betting industry, estimated to be worth around £625 billion a year.

In a sense, then, the real “product” of elite sport is now its digital footprint. At amateur level, though, this doesn’t work nearly as well. How do you persuade every Sunday league player to wear the same tracker, like Premier League athletes? By contrast, an individual runner can easily join Strava and gamify his or her own “performance” on an opt-in basis. So perhaps this is at least part of the appeal of individual endurance sports: unlike weekend football, it enables amateurs to enjoy the experience of data-driven sports self-optimisation, just like an elite athlete.

How, then, did we get to a point where the amateur feels “real” in proportion to their ability to generate an analysable, optimisable data trail? Arguably most of us signed the digital Faustian bargain a long time ago. I recall weighing up the benefits of a searchable email inbox against letting Google’s bots crawl my correspondence, two decades ago, and deciding to accept the deal. And, since then, the social media revolution has redefined the public square. Now it’s a non-physical space, of seemingly infinite possibility, in which participation is nominally free — but the price is accepting that your every move is tracked. In the process, those of us who grew up in a relatively un-surveilled offline world have become accustomed to the nagging half-awareness that our data are being tracked and agglomerated all the time. It creeps me out, but not enough to stop me from using Gmail.

Over those two decades, the surrounding culture has also shifted. I know one mother of a university-age daughter who still keeps an active tracker on her adult child’s phone. She told me her daughter could switch it off, but doesn’t; it feels less like surveillance than watchful care. In any case, her daughter’s friends all monitor one another using the same technology.

The generation that read about Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map has grown up expecting to be able to locate their friends on a map in real time. And when everyone is accustomed both to this kind of hypervisibility, perhaps sport simply doesn’t feel like it has happened unless it’s also visible and analysable on-screen.

So what does the digitisation, gamification, and individuation of sport tell us about public life today? The 19th century scaled the “team” model of sport up into a nationalistic model for geopolitics: the doctrine of “balance of power” pitted a Premier League of European powers against one another, in an ever-shifting contest for supremacy. Today, by contrast, we appear to be sliding in our sporting preferences toward more individualistic endurance pursuits, enhanced by smart wearables and data analysis.

And the Strava model, applied to governance, in turn also looks considerably more borderless, more individualistic, and more data-driven. We already see wonks hailing the reconstruction efforts in former warzones as exciting test-beds for this sort of networked governance. Tory grandee Sir Ed Vaizey, for example, recently addressed an international digital cooperation summit on the benefits of digital ID in rebuilding war-torn polities such as Syria and Ukraine. The Centre for International Governance Innovation also hailed Ukraine’s innovations in digital governance. It’s hard to avoid the sense that for some, at least, warzones figure less as human catastrophes than exciting technological frontiers, spurring developments from drone tech to surveillance and digital services.

Should Tony Blair secure the role Donald Trump has allocated him, as chief colonial administrator in the Gaza demilitarised zone, will he join the push for such innovative measures to be rolled out as part of its reconstruction? A longstanding supporter of digital ID, Blair’s own Institute recently extolled the benefits of these tools for Britain, especially combined with AI and facial recognition. It would be surprising if he didn’t view the reconstruction of Gaza as an opportunity to push the envelope in digital-first governance.

What might this mean in practice? Perhaps, again, the popular shift from team sports to gamified solo endurance activities offers a clue. Vaizey invites us to imagine the benefits digital innovation brings to post-war reconstruction, such as “a refugee mother who can prove her identity on a basic phone, redeem a payment nearby and book a clinic appointment without queuing all day”, or “a mine clearance team guided by artificial intelligence maps that help families return to their fields”.

This all sounds nice and humanitarian. What it also implies, more tacitly, is a distinctly post-national sensibility. Once equipped with a unique digital identifier, Vaizey’s “refugee mother” theoretically becomes analogous to the long-distance runner: a single unit in a data flow, with a unique digital trail. This is a very different model from the “sports team” one, which views the basic unit of governance as the national “team”, comprising citizens defined as such by a mix of esprit de corps, geographical proximity, and other common traits.

The digitally-enabled Strava model, on the other hand, views governance as a porous, opt-in constituency of highly mobile individuals, originating potentially anywhere, defined by a digital identity and associated data trail. How, in that context, do you create any sense of togetherness? If anything, this approach militates against esprit de corps, as it’s cross-border by design. As Vaizey points out, the more transnational digital governance is, the more efficient and effective it can be.

Whether you think this good or bad surely depends where you’re standing, and how much you trust your leadership class. At scale, digital governance shades potentially into alarming levels of power: it’s one thing to be kicked off Strava for going running in North Korea, another altogether to be frozen out of your bank account for protesting a government policy. In theory, for example, the Palestinian inhabitants of a hypothetical, reconstructed, shiny digital Blairtopia would be free to go anywhere. In practice, the more transnationally monitored they were, the more easily terrorist suspects could be contained — or anyone else, for that matter.

Again, whether or not you consider this a good thing depends on how much you trust Blair. Going by the recent travails of his former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who recently lost an undisclosed sum investing in an allegedly fraudulent sports betting syndicate founded by his son Rory, New Labour’s judgement on matters of data (and sport) may not always be reliable.Closer to home, the fact that more Britons supported digital ID before Keir Starmer announced it attests how little the electorate here believe his government could wield such power benevolently. But more broadly, these developments imply the crystallisation of a consensus among those in charge, on how the polity overall should be defined. Is Britain a sports team, or a Strava leaderboard? It is perhaps the most irreducible divide in contemporary politics. It ought at least to be up for discussion. But the Blairs of this world assume the latter, and seek simply to present this as a fait accompli.

But the more relevant question is surely: do we have a choice? I don’t use a smart watch to track my runs any more. But that’s more about the gloomy spectacle of my advancing age and worsening pace per mile, than any privacy concern. I worry that we made our decision when we got Gmail and Fitbits, and taught our kids to love their phone trackers and ourselves to post our Strava routes. If I’m right, it might already be too late to walk (let alone run) it back.

---