Weeknotes: quarantine, metaphors, memes, technology theatre, hope
Devon Powers on quarantine. Highlights mine.
Kirsty McNeill writes about activism now. Highlights again mine.
Thanks to The Prepared, I found this by Lisa Nakamura in 2014, which goes from
Rachel Coldicutt notes that civil society should be seen as a source of data, information and expertise, not just as a responder to needs:
Anoushka Khandwala asks: what does it mean to decolonise design? I'm just picking out the bit which I think was most challenging and relevant for me and the people I encounter:
William Fitzgerald tweeted "On the google policy team we did this as well, we approached academics who we knew what their findings would be because they were 'like-minded', we had a whole team set up to 'cultivate relationships with academics.'"
Nathan Matias has a thread on this with several useful links and comments:
Martin Tisné has a paper on The Data Delusion: Protecting Individual Data Isn't Enough When The Harm is Collective, which in essence says:
Google has betrayed the web:
Tom Forth looks at fruit - a reminder that IP is everywhere:
Thanks to Andrew Sleigh for this - Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope which is full of little gems, especially on anger, love, and celebrity. 💛
... quarantine baking, quarantine nesting, and quaratinis. Quaranteams: workplace near-togetherness, a longing for what we used to dread. ... Quarantine was a vocabulary. It was the language we conjured to bear the unbearable, to speak the present without the future.
But that’s just me. For others, quarantine was a sale. A great time to go to Orlando or Vegas, a sweet deal on gasoline or jeans. Quarantine was a day off from school, an extended spring break, a much-needed vacay. That knock on the door of a pop-up speakeasy? That notification disclosing the secret location of an underground party? That was quarantine. Quarantine was what other people in other states and countries did, when fake news and weak leaders and aging and general whatever made them fear freedom and each other. Quarantine was malaise. Quarantine was the problem, not the solution.
... And then there are those for whom quarantine never began — lying in hospital beds, stricken too early, gone too soon. Those who tend to hospital beds, who tend to our needs without knowing who will care for theirs. ... It is a privilege to say that quarantine changed everything. In the prison and the sanctuary church, on the street corners where people beg or score, quarantine was the same tune in a different, flatter key.
... Quarantine did not suspend the normal so much as expose it as both fierce and vulnerable, all sharp teeth and soft underbelly. These months have been beautiful, with their hand-sewn masks and rainbow drawings and the indefatigable yearn for companionship, community, and change. These months have been horrifying, with their needless death and unending loss and the ignorant selfishness that masquerades as liberty, or individualism, or courage. Quarantine taught us that it is never one or the other but always both. Quarantine reminded us that as much as we might care to, we cannot get along without each other. Everyone is connected. It took the solitude of quarantine to remember that we are the connection, we are the guts of the network, who will live and die as one.
... The irony is that even people who disagree vehemently about quarantine are very likely to agree that a life without dignity, freedom, and equality is not worth living. The painful antagonisms come when trying to define what dignity, freedom, and equality are.
... The most radical gesture, then, may not be to emerge from quarantine but to figure out how to persist within it, always. To appreciate complexity, to acknowledge hardship, to wonder why things are what they are and whether they must always be so. (They mustn’t.) To wake and sleep, gain and lose weight, grow gray and cover it up, bake bread this week and buy it the next. To be inside/outside, here/there, past/future: that was the lesson of quarantine and will be its memory.
Kirsty McNeill writes about activism now. Highlights again mine.
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| https://www.globaldashboard.org/2020/07/08/effective-activism/ |
[...] many of our missions face an existential threat from climate change and the need to dismantle white supremacy and racism could hardly be more urgent. But it is precisely because the stakes are so high that we have to focus on winning big rather than talking big.
How should we respond to the evidence that many people are absolutely desperate for a “return to normal” and not sure if they’d like to change very much, never mind “everything”? .... If what’s happening in popular culture is any guide, people want to look back before they move forward. We need to accept that in a fight between a rewind and a revolution, revolution’s gonna lose.
Likewise, publics may not recognise the two separate worlds that Arundhati Roy charts so beautifully in her “The Pandemic is a Portal” essay. ....
I wonder how many people see the pandemic in quite this way, with a clear delineation between the old world ‘yesterday’, the crisis ‘today’ and the recovery ‘tomorrow’. Some may also see today’s pandemic as merely what journalist Ros Wynne-Jones called “a grim dress-rehearsal” for the emergencies to come. For that constituency there will be a real premium on immediate strategies for securing recent gains...
Fighting campaigns that can deliver immediate and tangible change isn’t a substitute for bolder transformation, but it is a necessary precursor to it, because strategies which confuse a public appetite to build back better with one to build back completely different just aren’t going to attract a big enough base. As one union organiser told me, “there’s no point asking people to trust you to organise a revolution if you can’t get a microwave in the staff canteen”.
... A ‘new front in the culture war’ is opening and it’s increasingly clear that “retoxification” is not a by-product of the strategy, it is the strategy. ...
Professor Tim Bale’s excellent research into the divergent attitudes of voters, activists and political leaders shows where we are headed, at least in the UK. The voters who have ‘lent’ their votes to the government on the basis of values alignment and economic competence are going to start peeling off fast as soon as furlough ends, unemployment climbs and the government’s reputation for economic competence takes a battering. At that point, this research implies, there’s no strategy available to the government other than dialling up the cultural campaign. We can expect to see more, and not less, of “the war on woke” and an increased push from the ‘Britannia Unchained’ generation in the cabinet to do away with regulations and protections.
If that analysis is right, activists have a strategic choice to make and only a matter of weeks to make it: are we here to win a culture war, or to end one?... And we have grieving of the more abstract sort to do too – the kind of coming to terms with loss we all need to do when something we truly value, not just desire, has gone.
The Collective Pyschology Project’s “This Too Shall Pass” report gives us a toolkit for how to grieve but it is actually earlier work by its founder Alex Evans that tells us why activists have to learn to grieve. If we don’t work through denial, anger, bargaining and depression properly, we’ve no hope of getting to acceptance and, therefore, to a place where we can see clearly what our next move should be.
... Both reports also contain some interesting watch-outs about what might happen when we move from the ‘honeymoon’ to the ‘disillusionment’ phase that is often seen in the aftermath of an emergency, and encourage us to recognise that communitarian feeling is often rather fragile and dependent on a sense that others are doing their bit.
... Support for both local mutual aid efforts and international solidarity efforts is, in other words, conditional. We instinctively feel the local and the global are the right levels to deal with different elements of the pandemic and its effects, but we want to be sure everyone is pulling their weight, and we’re getting enough out of it for what we’re willing to put in.
That means we need to be planning now for campaigning infrastructure that can turn the new neighbourliness into the new normal, while helping people draw connections between their new local involvement and the need for active citizenship at a national and global level.
The Dignity’s Project’s research on the mutual aid movement suggests there are foundations already in place, but activists will need to be careful not to over-interpret the data, with 57% of respondents saying “mutual aid groups like mine have nothing to do with politics”.
So if we want people to move towards more active civic involvement, to make what the New Citizenship Project calls the big shift “from consumer to citizen”, we need to introduce the idea of political activism as something that sits in service of, and not in a separate realm to, people’s individual moral choices and willingness to muck-in locally.
Thanks to The Prepared, I found this by Lisa Nakamura in 2014, which goes from
For my latest book project I wanted to take a different research path and became interested in the history of people of color as workers in Silicon Valley’s computer chip industry. Stanford University’s Special Collections and University Archives is home to boxes of both organized and unorganized material on William Shockley, a towering figure in the history of Silicon Valley. Shockley was best known for having co-invented the transistor with Walter Brattain and John Bardeen... However, I was less interested in Shockley as the “Father of Silicon Valley” and more interested in Shockley’s later years, when he became a very public advocate of scientific racism, also known as eugenics.to
... Despite his shortcomings, Shockley was a brilliant scientist and an influential entrepreneur. Shockley was as well known for being a legendarily poor manger, as he was a masterful hand at hiring the best talent. I was curious to see whether his opinions influenced his hiring decisions, and by extension, those of other CEO’s in Silicon Valley’s formative years. Could it be possible that the Asian “model minority” stereotype, and the scarcity of African American and Latinos in the computer industry, might have something to do with hiring practices based on opinions like Shockley’s? Could he have had a hand in stacking the deck for and against racial groups that he thought were inferior or superior? Might Shockley’s loudly espoused racism have deepened the “digital divide” and prevented the computer industry from being more diverse?
I learned that from 1965-1975 the Fairchild Corporation’s Semiconductor Division operated a large integrated circuit manufacturing plant in Shiprock, New Mexico, on a Navajo reservation. During this time the corporation was the largest private employer of Indian workers in the U.S. The circuits that the almost entirely female Navajo workers produced were used in devices such as calculators, missile guidance systems, and other early computing devices.
Here's the actual Shiprock in 2016:
Bruce Sterling was interviewed on a podcast in May, along with Jasmina Tesanovic, but I only just got around to listening to it. I love the different perspective he brings - covering soft power and how it appears in China and Serbia, the way people and communities forget things, the lived experience of being in an area dominated by organised crime or under sanctions. It's a good podcast, with densely interesting content, even if you aren't into science fiction or Sterling's work in general.
On tech, Sterling talks about Big Tech becoming a utility, part of life, uninteresting, no longer moving fast or scaling. Today's tech titans perhaps running for office in the US (and then needing to take on the grim problems of tomorrow). We are getting close, perhaps, now, to the new tech establishment, a revolving door between big boring tech and government. With the current crisis, as with other emergencies, big tech platforms become pseudo governmental platforms. We don't really have an internet, these days, let alone an internet of things - we just have a selection of big internally tangled platforms. Coders are no longer the pop heroes they were, and the Silicon Valley ethos isn't where the action is. Valley companies have lots of cash, but they don't own the culture or ethos of a larger sphere now. In this more bureaucratic world, social stuff matters more, and that's where science fiction is going - changing the focus from tech.
I also appreciated the comment that Twitter could, in some ways, provide a certain form of collective intelligence, with rapid data gathering and collating capacity.
Rachel Coldicutt notes that civil society should be seen as a source of data, information and expertise, not just as a responder to needs:
Civil society is well-placed to use its empirical and on-the-ground expertise to forecast and anticipate societal issues. Leveraging that wisdom more effectively will be critical to realising the government’s levelling-up agenda.Molly Sauter wrote about the internet as apophenic machine in 2017:
... Actionable insight is more valuable than any quantity of data, and it can be easily shared in privacy protecting ways and challenged via ethical oversight and public engagement. Frontline civil society organisations have an abundance of actionable insight about how social inequalities arise and the lived reality of the people who experience them; listening and acting upon this insight at an earlier stage could prevent inequalities spreading and deepening.
Humans are storytellers, pattern-spotters, metaphor-makers. When these instincts run away with us, when we impose patterns or relationships on otherwise unrelated things, we call it apophenia. When we create these connections online, we call it the internet, the web circling back to itself again and again. The internet is an apophenic machine.Sometimes I think we forget that 'filter bubbles' exist offline too - people are exposed to very different information based on friends, family, traditional media.
Though conspiracy theories are, in essence, a social side-effect of human pattern-spotting behavior, the internet’s structure has encouraged a similar obsessiveness. As Kathleen Stewart notes in “Conspiracy’s Theory Worlds,” “the internet was made for conspiracy theory: it is a conspiracy theory: one thing leads to another, always another link leading you deeper into no thing and no place, floating through self-dividing and transmogrifying sites until you are awash in the sheer evidence that the internet exists.”
... Conspiracy theories are a reactive interpretive mode that, according to Stewart, allows theorists to maintain a sense of personal agency while disclaiming responsibility. ... “Conspiracy theorists are, I submit, some of the last believers in an ordered universe,” Brian L. Keeley writes in his essay “Of Conspiracy Theories. “By supposing that current events are under the control of nefarious agents, conspiracy theorists entail that such events are capable of being controlled.”
... When faced with a global catastrophe that is simultaneously the responsibility of no one and everyone, there is a human preference to replace that chaos with narrative. Climate change, like global capitalism, is too immense for specific, recognizable heroes and villains, but that doesn’t mean people won’t try to construct a narrative with the tools nearest to hand....
... The Lavoisier document would appear to be a cynical attempt to unsettle political debates about global warming, but the kind of power it ascribes to a handful of climate scientists also indicates a basic, desperate desire to believe that anyone at all is in charge — that a central, coordinated agenda really does exist as an alternative to the apocalyptic chaos driving carbon extraction.
If financialized capital excels at dispersing agency, blending villainy with bureaucracy and good intentions, networks (like conspiracy theories) excel at creating the illusion of the world as graspable, strung together with links even as the socially contingent markers of importance, trust, and validity are increasingly on the fritz.
A given economy ‘is the result of a set of processes that involves its culture, values, education, technological evolution, history, social organisation, political structure and legal systems, as well as its geography, natural resource endowment, and ecology, as main factors. These factors give context, content, and set the conditions and parameters in which an economy functions. In other words, the economic domain is a social domain of human practices and transactions. It does not stand alone.’... Consider that the current economy we have built acts to reward those who are willing to win at all costs; to foster aggressive competition; to reward those who already have assets; to keep us all in a state of feeling we need more; to hide our real selves at work; to aspire to have more than others and grow bigger than others; and ultimately to make as much financial profit as possible. Is that what we want?
Values of the Feminine Economy created by sister.is
Can you imagine a world where your work is a healing for yourself and others? Where telling the truth is rewarded more highly than turning a profit? Where feelings are celebrated and seen as a vital part of a thriving economy? Where you feel you are enough, just as you are? Have you ever experienced that in your life, or seen that in others? Can you recount a story, or give an example of what that looked like? If you are having difficulty just take a moment to realise what that means, how deeply it is engrained in us that we must participate to win, to accumulate assets for ourselves, to be better than all those around us and to always feel we aren’t enough. Is that what life is for?
This leads on to the reflection on metaphors in a subsequent article, from old metaphors:
Within a performance review, someone is assessing someone else rather than it being a collective reflection. Employment means that someone is in the employ of someone else. The payslip on the one hand provides stability and legitimacy (and acts as a certificate). But it also is an arbitrary value someone else places on you (and bears no relationship to the actual value you have created that month), and places the receiver in a passive position of power (as opposed to issuing an invoice).to new artefects eg
Payslip. Wouldn’t just be a certificate or proof of how much you’ve been paid in a transactional way, but could be a moment of giving thanks and acknowledging value. If work is around being in a relationship with other people to create some value, you are bonded to them through that creation, and it could be celebrated as a monthly moment of collective achievement.
Bill Thompson seeks a new metaphor and gets some nice ideas to stop 'running on fumes'. Let's decarbonise all the metaphors and similes.
Thanks to a Liminal coffee chat I am now saying "too many coaches and not enough
players" and I am very glad to have decolonialised a phrase I use way too often.
I plan to start saying "opaque box" instead of the hopelessly inaccurate term black box, thanks to Jon Crowcroft.I loved Dan Lockton's exploration of meme categories [thread].
He's recently been updating it:
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| https://twitter.com/imaginari_es/status/1282047243281997831 |
I've enjoyed several of Coney's remote socials, and so when David Finnigan (who has hosted many of these) was running an event about modelling I went along. (He ran it twice, to support different timezones, so I ended up in the early-morning-UK time one with mostly Australians and far East folks, which made a nice change).
David works as an artist with scientists exploring complexity, often in the context of climate, and approaches systems thinking and modelling from this perspective. A science/academic perspective on this work might be called outreach or public engagement. He's making models to help people explore systems, which both artists and scientists do, but the artistic model gives you what it feels like to be in a system in a way that a numeric model can't. Much of David's work creates ways for people to experience things, to be properly immersed in the sense of something, not just briefing passing through it. The playful, game experiences are really just a set up for a richer conversation after the show, a way to draw in people and make a space for meaningful discussion.
For some topics, using a traditional, well-known story structure works well - such as a police procedural, used to explore alternative futures - where participants can recognise the story beats as they come up. But for more serious topics this doesn't work so well, as in an open-ended exercise there may not be a classic climax or story arc, and there may be too many perspectives for the participants to consider. David described how you might run a game, then cycle back running it in the other order, to see how decisions made affected other stakeholders and communities, to explore contradictory needs.
It was fascinating to hear about how games might work for larger numbers of players, and how to design interactivity so you still get the intensity without collapsing to the cop out of a vote to make decisions.
He started off with the Waters Foundation graphic of habits of systems thinkers (attendees commented on the lovely 1990s feel of this version):
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| https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*Ishs9r0FeqGQAL8vQX4LrA.png |
Material 2020, "a conference exploring the concept of the Web as a material," didn't happen but sounds intriguing:
We have lost the apprentice / master relationship in the digital world. Spending years getting our hands dirty with an expert, learning slowly and really understanding the material rather than the framework. We need to be asking ourselves what sacrifices should we be making for the convenience of our customers rather than shortcuts for ourselves.
A work-in-progress guide to web scraping as an artistic and critical practice, created by Sam Lavigne.
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| https://twitter.com/melissaterras/status/1282635091005657089 |
Anoushka Khandwala asks: what does it mean to decolonise design? I'm just picking out the bit which I think was most challenging and relevant for me and the people I encounter:
Clara Balaguer of the Filipino publishing imprint Hardworking Goodlooking proposes the following exercise for “the Comic Sans, design-educated haters” in an interview with Walker Art’s The Gradient: “Use Comic Sans, Curlz, Brush Script, Papyrus. Understand why people respond to it. Accept that social constituencies (not clients but constituencies) have made a choice that should be respected instead of ridiculed […] Challenge yourself to dismantle what the (Ivy League?) man has told you is ugly, uncouth, primitive, savage.”
Another new term to adopt, thanks Abeba Birhane:
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| https://twitter.com/Abebab/status/1281887870622539779 |
Depressing - real fake:
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| https://twitter.com/tirath/status/1282562667920539649 |
Patrick Meier summarises (on Twitter) Jessica Alexander's special report for New Humanitarian on the state (and history) of humanitarian aid. (I also found the article via Heather Leson.) The full report is a long read but really eye-opening around how the aid sector has changed (or hasn't) through recent crises. Patrick picks out the best bits.
So much this -
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https://twitter.com/CassieRobinson/status/1282980818567208960 |
How should research which involves big companies be funded? I don't think tech is unique in having challenges here.
The New York Times explored research around Uber and Lyft which spurred much debate on Twitter, mostly seeming to say that this is normal practice.
The New York Times explored research around Uber and Lyft which spurred much debate on Twitter, mostly seeming to say that this is normal practice.
William Fitzgerald tweeted "On the google policy team we did this as well, we approached academics who we knew what their findings would be because they were 'like-minded', we had a whole team set up to 'cultivate relationships with academics.'"
Nathan Matias has a thread on this with several useful links and comments:
"One of the hardest things about working on industry-independent methods for 6+ years is that when inspired people ask me how to build sustainable industry-independent research labs/agendas, I am genuinely unsure if the funding ecosystem is there yet"Nathan wrote about this earlier this year too. Hewlett Foundation and others attempted to do something different with Social Science One as a way to work with Facebook. It didn't work.
"Whenever I see a flourishing social tech research endeavor that is solidly industry-independent, I tip my hat to them for their innovation in funding models as much as anything else."
Martin Tisné has a paper on The Data Delusion: Protecting Individual Data Isn't Enough When The Harm is Collective, which in essence says:
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| https://twitter.com/martintisne/status/1283043118741422081 |
Google has betrayed the web:
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| https://twitter.com/lutherlowe/status/1282707155683020806 |
Sean McDonald writes about technology theatre. It seems a really useful concept and the article was great so I'm quoting way too much of it. That's why it's at the end this week...
Whether it’s the national release of contact-tracing apps meant to battle a pandemic, or Sidewalk Labs’ (now defunct) bid to create a “city built from the internet up,” public conversations about major policy initiatives tend to focus on technological components and evade significantly harder questions about power and equity. Our focus on the details of individual technologies — how the app will work, whether the data architecture is centralized, or the relative effectiveness of Bluetooth — and individual experts during the rollout of major policies not only is politically problematic, but also can weaken support for, and adherence to, institutions when their legitimacy is most critical.- I find this a very interesting comparison.
There’s a well-documented history of the tendency to hype distracting, potentially problematic technology during disaster response, so it’s concerning, if not surprising, to see governments turning again to new technologies as a policy response to crisis. Expert public debates about the nuances of technologies, for example, provide serious political cover; they are a form of theatre — “technology theatre.” The term builds on security expert Bruce Schneier’s “security theatre,” which refers to security measures that make people feel secure, without doing anything to protect their security. The most prominent examples of security theatre are processes such as pat-downs at sporting events or liquid bans at security checkpoints in airports. Technology theatre, here, refers to the use of technology interventions that make people feel as if a government — and, more often, a specific group of political leaders — is solving a problem, without it doing anything to actually solve that problem.
... Technology theatre is particularly visible when expert debate, amplified through broadcast and digital platforms, creates the appearance of public debate while doing very little to meaningfully engage the public. When the public is focusing on a technology instead of a holistic solution to address complex policy issues, technology theatre is working.
The largest and most damaging cost of technology theatre is the political fragility that results when institutions are built without public understanding, investment or interest. Substituting expert input for public support is a structural choice, with major impacts on the amount of public debate or engagement that precedes large project announcements; the accountability of the people involved in designing and defining institutional change; and the standards and protections available to the public to challenge decisions. Each of these shifts structurally changes the way that activists or members of the public are able to raise concerns, define new protections or engage, which functionally limits the scope, focus and long-term value of institutional growth initiatives, by undermining their legitimacy. ...
Most industries use some form of specialist expertise, which is then held accountable through public engagement; in public services, usually that’s measured by impact, and in technology, it’s usually measured by adoption.
... There has been significant debate about governments’ progressive turn toward privatization, managerialism and austerity, much of which was designed by well-insulated experts inside of academia and policy institutions. The problem with expertise is that it’s politically fragile — expertise can lead in defining potential solutions, but democracy is designed to require public support for large changes and long-term sustainability. In most democracies, this power is managed through budgetary authority, which, especially in countries focusing on privatization and digital transformation, has shifted toward executive agencies and procurement processes. And, public institutions are starting to experience the political fragility of relying on expertise.Echoes of the questions of how tech industry-related research is funded there maybe.
.... The political fragility of expertise isn’t new — but in the context of technology theatre, it’s creating an under-examined layer of fragility in public digital transformation projects, the governance of which is handled very differently than most might assume. We tend to think governance happens by way of representative, legislative debate, flawed as it often is. With these projects, that’s not always the case, which creates two significant, structural problems.
First, the digitization of public institutions changes the balance of government power, by shifting a number of political issues out of public process and framing them instead as procurement processes. Whereas questions around executive authority were historically defined in legislation, they’re often now defined in platform design — and disputes are raised through customer service. This shift extends executive power and substitutes expert review for public buy-in and legitimacy, in ways that cumulatively result in a public that doesn’t understand or trust what the government does. Importantly, the transition from representative debate to procurement processes significantly changes the structures of engagement for public advocates and non-commercial interests.
The second structural problem results when nuanced conversations about the technical instrumentation of a publicly important governance issue are sensationalized. For example, focusing on COVID-19 contact-tracing apps instead of the large institutional efforts needed to contain infection frames the issues around the technology and not the equities or accountability required to serve public interest mandates. One of the reasons for this is that experts, like everyone else, are funded by someone — and tend to work within their own political, professional and economic perspectives, many of which don’t take responsibility for the moral or justice implications of their participation. Consultants tend to focus on technical solutions instead of political ones, and rarely challenge established limits in the way that the public does.
... No matter the challenge, there are technology companies, academics and non-profits agitating for the use of increasingly surveillant technologies to monitor, model and predict complex social problems — often without considering whether deploying such tools would aggravate the people or trust relationships involved. There is no app architecture to prevent police abuse, no amount of computational surveillance to arrest climate change and no group of expert consultants who can replace the value of clear, equitable public legitimacy.
... The true test for any public program, digital or otherwise, is whether it’s demonstrably useful enough to the public or vital enough to the institution or, ideally, both, that the program achieves broad political support and sustained investment.
.... Governments are procuring services from an industry they largely know they can’t control, and intermediating them in their most fundamental operations.
For activists... challenging procurements has to focus on either challenging the authority of the issuing institution to issue the RFP; arguing that the RFP will result in an imminent and knowable harm; or arguing that the outcome of the process is in some way invalid. Each of those challenges is legally and procedurally difficult (and expensive) to make — and all require the kind of vigilance that is absurd to require of the public. As a result, a significant number of procurement (and regulatory) processes are dominated not by people focusing on directly representing the public’s interests, but by professionals with the resources and reasons to invest. There is a profound difference between being able to debate and constructively decide how to solve a problem, as legislatures are designed to do, and having to challenge the integrity of a civil servant or their institution to raise predictable policy challenges posed by digital transformation projects.
... Members of the digital policy community, unlike public representatives or legislators, do not necessarily have a direct mandate, nor the inherent protections direct mandates are meant to create. There is no public interest support for digital rights advocates, so they are forced to rely on patrons for funding and access to influence. Strong structural barriers — perhaps created by the acceptance of funding, or due to the limitations of those the advocates seek to influence — impede this community from proposing political ideas, let alone radical reforms. And when public rights advocacy is contingent on the patronage, amplification or consideration of well-positioned, private interests, there are real, cumulative costs to the legitimacy of the whole community of practice. Experts in these institutions are neither able to fall back on the credibility of representation nor to claim independence from the politics required to be heard. The community is thus left vulnerable and dangerously out of sync with the people who experience the failures of technology and politics most directly.
And it is here, of course, where expertise becomes “acting.” While there are a lot of important technical things to get right in a technology deployment, very few of them can fix the way that entrenched interests can exploit technology. If anything, technology is more often used by entrenched interests to avoid meaningful accountability. Rather than engage with the mechanisms of power that have influence over technology companies, most of the digital policy community agitates by drawing public attention to the details of the technology, like its privacy or security features. But, as discussed, most of the harms that technology can cause can’t be contained by the technology.
... The ultimate vulnerability for democracy isn’t a specific technology, it’s when we stop governing together. The technological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t technologically remarkable. They are notable because they shed light on the power grabs by governments, technology companies and law enforcement. Even in the best of circumstances, very few digitally focused government interventions have transparently defined validation requirements, performed necessity analyses or coordinated policy protections to address predictable harms.
... Emergencies exacerbate the worst of those gaps, as the typical, good-faith panic to do something has created a huge number of high-profile technology hammers in a world largely without nails. ...
Each of those power grabs could, instead, be negotiations — and negotiations held in courts and legislatures, as opposed to headlines or closed-door policy announcements.
... If recent events have proven anything, it’s that everything can change and, in a lot of places, more needs to. There are no inevitabilities, not even technological ones — and we humans still experience the world through problems, not just user interfaces. Mature industries recognize the role of self-regulation in ensuring quality and sustainability, but they also recognize the role of meaningful public engagement and political support. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it painfully, globally clear that there aren’t techno-solutionist approaches to building trust in governance or any expertise that outweighs the value of public equity.
The more our institutional politics are procured like technologies instead of agreed through governance, the more we’ll feel the limits — and inevitable costs — of relying on technology theatre for progress.
Tom Forth looks at fruit - a reminder that IP is everywhere:
