For one of the classes I recently finished at Strathclyde, I was assigned a piece of homework reading which…well…let’s put it this way. In a postgraduate tech law course, much of the reading can’t help but be a bit dull. It does not move you emotionally, and it does not move you physically out of your reading chair. This particular piece, by contrast, quite nearly sent me on a rage walk.

It’s a report by the Demos think tank on the state of the UK digital rights sector in 2025.

Let me save you the trouble of reading it with this helpful summary:

By Martin Grandjean (vector), McGeddon (picture), US Air Force (hit plot concept) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102017718

My brief time in the UK sector taught me that the sector is part of the problem, not the solution. The UK sector is not a grassroots movement, nor will it venture outside of a London bubble so tightly constrained that you could draw its boundaries on a map.

The UK digital rights sector is a chummy social club for academics and think tankers, with a Ph.D being the cost of entry. Nor is it a genuine nationwide movement. It is located in Zones 1 and 2, Oxford, and Cambridge. A physical location in one of those places is mandatory.

The parochialism of that social club ensures that none of its members have any emotional comprehension of the real world outside their ivory towers, nor for the lived experience of the non-executive staff in digital rights organisations who actually do the work, for insult salaries, no career progression, and infantile management who need so much babysitting that it becomes your main job duty.

And why would they see those things, much less comprehend them? They’re alright, Jack.

(Oh and believe me, if you do a write-up of what you experienced as a glorified typist working in a UK digital rights organisation, for the board’s attention, you don’t ever hear a word back from them. That’s not just because they have each others’ backs. It’s because to academics, your human experience does not compute.)

And as if to prove that very point, here’s a report on what the sector looks like and what its challenges are, written by professional researchers sitting in an intellectual bubble in Zone 1, who talked to other Ph.Ds, academics, and VIPs, all of whom sit comfortably in well-paid executive roles.

So their report reflects the perspectives of people who do not have an inch of their own skin in the game. Digital rights are their subject of academic expertise. They don’t live it.

And their report reflects the perspectives of people who are paid very well to ponder these things, in a reflective academic manner. They’ve not been given a 12 month contract on a salary which, you later find out, is literally less than what a front desk receptionist is paid.

All of those people are in the club.

Which is why they didn’t speak to the legions of real activists, with skin in the game, who showed up to commit themselves to the movement, were priced out of working in it and gatekept out of progressing through it, and have had to leave the movement altogether to keep the roof over their head and, as I’ve seen far too many times, reclaim their own mental health and sanity.

So that’s why the report’s conclusions assume a fully-functional digital rights movement ready to show up for the fights ahead. That’s what their world looks like, to them.

That is not what it looks like to the people in the real world doing the real work.

The sector is part of the problem, not the solution. This report shows exactly why.

There. I just saved you a read.