Ubercaring ‘#2 – ‘All of children’s lives will be digitalised’
Please read Ubercaring #1 here– this provides the context for this lyric.
Some say Gil Scott- Heron with his jazz poetry was a forerunner of rap (in that case you could say Langston Hughes?) He also wrote songs.
Everything he wrote had a message concerning people who were oppressed. One of his most famous tracks is ‘The revolution will not be televised’. It will help the understanding of the origin of this blog to listen/read it before reading the lyrics below. Remember is it was written at a time of social turmoil.
If we were alive today he would be making comment. He would be concerned that children are not aware of the current and intended handling of data about them. He might have raised concerns like ‘… we not even know what we are saying yes to, which blurs the parameters of what counts as a consensual process’ (Elizabeth Cotton 2025).
He might even write a song called ‘All of children’s lives will be digitalised’. It might even go something like this …?
When all of children’s lives are digitalised
You will not be able to feel at home, young sister-brother;
You will not be able to settle in, tune in, and flop out;
You will not be able to lose yourself on TikTok and skip out;
Because the DfE is rolling out a brand-new script.
Where all of children’s lives will be digitalised.
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
The single coordinated plan will not have sanctuary as a destination
There will be no slow, reasoned, cool consideration,
The Regional Care Cooperatives will not bring peace of mind.
No space given for reflective or alternative design
Because platform capitalism has taken the wheel
And human relationship is no longer what they feel. Is it real?
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
The datafication of despair will be a tracking profile,
A child’s deep trauma squeezed into an Excel file
You will not have to worry about out-of-area costs
Or unregistered placements where a soul gets lost
Because the algorithms will do the heavy lifting
While the real, messy reality keeps on shifting
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
There will be no corporate profiteers to point at and blame
As the national and local state play the exact same game
Treating human suffering as a simple transaction
Tracking success through a dashboard fraction
Attrition by design will clear the path clear and bright
Trading deep development for a flash of “CBT-lite”
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
You will hear promises of an “enduring relationship,”
Will they survive the reality of the platform’s tight grip?
There will be no stable care with precarious labour,
Low pay and high turnover doing nobody a favour.
The state’s grand promises will stand as a structural paradox
While the living, breathing child is locked inside the digital box.
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
There will be no space to hide behind a Deprivation of Liberty order
When they standardise the boundaries and fence in the border
The single identifier will know where you stand
A checklist metric ruling over the land
UberCaring is coming to manage the pain
From here on things will never be quite the same
Because all of children’s lives will be digitalised.
Digitalised.
Managed by metrics.
Frictionless pathways.
The revolution in care will not look back, young sister-brother,
All of children’s lives will be digitalised.
If all of children’s lives will be digitalised.
We, the children, uphold the principle of nothing to be decided about us
Nothing in any way, nothing to be made, without us.
Surely all that money has not been spent
Before asking how each individual one of us gives consent
Having had it explained who and how they will look and see
And determine our future from the way they see our history?
Let nothing be assumed or presumed if all you have is our silence.
All of us children’s lives will be digitalised
