This is a powerfully argued manifesto for service design in a digital age. It’s not good enough just to put a digital layer on top of organisational and service architectures which predate the internet: that results in services which are unstable and unscalable and so unsatisfactory and ultimately unviable.
There is much here which is persuasive and important, but it underplays a critical part of the overall picture. The new organisations and approaches Ben lauds have in common that they are all comfortable with the rhetoric of sharing, but they are all completely conventional market organisations whose relationship with their customers is one-dimensionally transactional. Amazon is the one partial exception to that, but even they do more to fit the institutional model of the pre-internet firm than to challenge it. Public services are – or should be – part of wider conversations. To define them solely through their transactions is to miss something essential.