Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part IV
By Dr. Andy Farnell
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Back to Part III
"Responsibility" is a much more complex claim than it first appears and does not easily fall to the ableist objection nor to technological totalitarianism. Our responsibilities to each other as citizens (governing and governed) are wider.
Digital justice
Most of the people I encounter who would identify as activists, journalists, campaigners, lawyers, advocates or progressives are driven by a familiar sense of social duty and justice. Indeed it's a trait they share with those who are less vocal, ordinary civil servants, soldiers, healthcare workers, police, and teachers. People who fully participate in society, who care about other people and their well-being, defence and safety.
Responsible people aim to leave society in better shape than when they were born, rather than just make a buck, bathe in the vainglory of status and legacy, and "die on the biggest pile of toys". Historically, for the most-part they've never cared about nor even seen technology, except where it helps them do their job or where it intrudes and obstructs.
But a growing cohort are increasingly aware of the ways that technology is itself the source of problems they work to correct - a source of abuse and insecurity. Digital systems have become an overbearing epidemic. Intrusion, obstruction, devaluing, and stripping of dignity become daily injustices people struggle name or discuss with colleagues and bosses.
Examples like wearing of body-cams that turn humans into fleshy CCTV poles, or hostile school technology that turns teachers into passive administrators; these are things that civil professionals struggle to challenge. Of course they should, since many of the harms being perpetrated against the public - which are sources of mental ill-health so widely experienced - now occur through tech rather than directly by other people.
Existential angst over climate is not our main source of torment, rather it is our helplessness in the clutches of systems of living that we feel we cannot escape yet have no stake in except as "consumers", "targets", "subjects" and "users". While we are incessantly told this provides "food and security" it violates almost all the principles of justice and rights. Bare existence does not suffice human needs. It is by definition a Dystopia, a "technically" perfect society which is not worth living in.
To the extent we as professional classes are recruited as instruments of hostile systems and fail to push-back and speak-out, we are responsible for harms. That guilt and conflict is very distressing. Today professionals feel they have ever-less control, authority and dignity in their roles and so are exiting, taking early retirement, or soft-quitting. Regularly now I hear super-intelligent people at the peak of their experience and powers say "I've had enough". Industry leaders and PhDs are choosing organic farming, brewing beer, or just staying at home to spend time with children in order to escape a culture of mindlessness.
While older people may have the savings, stability and maturity of outlook to quit miserable enslaved existence, what about younger people? The term "recruitment crisis" is not something unique to the military. A global workforce crisis is touching every facet of human affairs. Gen-Z are not satisfied with purposelessness, insecurity and domination as foundations for working life, but have, through technological dependence, placed their heads entirely in the mouth of the beast. Zoomers and the Alphagen coming up behind them are the new blood for the survival of our society, but cultivated technological ignorance is disempowering them. They know what works, but have no idea how it works or how to change it. They have yet to understand the extent to which they are manipulated. A new form of digital literacy is thus required. A new hacker culture is needed to move past this stuckness now dubbed a "permacrisis" for youth.
Questioning technology is the last unacceptable heresy of secular dogma, on par with defaming the clergy in a rigid theocracy. Although we know that "AI" decision making threatens to further erode professional judgement and undermine humane relations, even if there are people capable of saying so there is nobody left capable of hearing it. At least nobody that matters. To "matter" would require power, but leaders have already abdicated that power. The adults have left the room. Therefore, if the next generation want to overcome technological slavery they must do so themselves.
As the hegemony of BigTech "investment" occludes more of everyday life this is a social catastrophe unfolding that governments do not even have a language to describe. Our leaders are betting the farm on pulling a magical "AI rabbit" out of the hat at the 11th hour. In a culture of growth uber alles, if growth cannot be realised through economic freedom then economic slavery will do. Our present governments are quite ready to sacrifice the values of Western liberal democracy at the altar of tech if it allows us to "compete" with illiberal regimes.
Few would dispute that technology today is driven by an insane greed for growth, profit and a fetish for efficiency, rather than actual utility. It has become a runaway self-feeding phenomenon. It seems tragic that after 3 million years of human technological evolution, and given the food, environment, energy and conflict problems we face, that our species still focuses on a few microscopic and pointless values: growth, efficiency, money, vanity and banal entertainment. All are overrated, and most work against our long-term survival goals, but our inability to move beyond them and beyond our smartphone and social media hell seems insurmountable. Our entire species seems stuck in a kind of tragic logical dead-end.
With regard to rights, we live in a liberal society, and people have the right to build businesses and make a living in any legal way. But rights to develop, sell and use technologies with deleterious side-effects are almost never weighed against the rights of those on whom they impinge. In this regard rights are always situational. They speak to a parochial present. They have no currency as "rights to a future" or respect for coming generations. Nowhere in the text of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights do the words "future", "responsibility" or "consequences" appear.
Unlike other trades, digital tech has some peculiar properties with regard to reach, scale, impact and indirection of harms. Digital technology is highly addictive and its pushers (who refer to the public as "users") have none of the impediments traditional narcotics suppliers faced. Addictive software products can be replicated at zero cost and distributed instantly across the globe. Silicon is the second most abundant element on Earth after Oxygen, and the cost of hardware is essentially that of rather cleverly baking sand in an oven.
Digital harms are also cumulative and viral. Each layer builds on priors such that progress begets progress but by the same token mistakes beget further mistakes. Harmful technology is also desirable. It signals status and creates mores and fashion. For example; personal drones and camera-glasses are a social "fuck you" to everyone else, but we tolerate transgressions as we are easily hypnotised by the questionable utility of new trinkets. We selfishly fantasise about our own empowerment and are apt to enthusiastically spread desire, a trait seen in the fascinating phenomenon of Chindogu and the "I am rich" smartphone app.
Developers of technology play to this childish individualism. There is almost no "joined-up thinking" around directions in tech. It seems almost impossible to find developers who wish to design more simple benevolent applications with limited scope rather than something that will proliferate and inevitably become an enshitified monstrosity. The language of venture-capital funded Silicon Valley "bros" has its own code for betrayal of public good like "pivoting". This culture is drenched in megalomania and open in its disrespect for "users" who are seen as stupid and gullible cattle. All discussions of tech are about an "arms race" in which technologies are implicitly typed as weapons.
Indeed it's a mindset that openly discusses the weaponisation of digital systems against society, especially the old, young, women and ethnic minorities. It celebrates anti-intellectualism, revels in the harm its products cause, celebrates disruption and chaos, and treats those who do not embrace its callous neophyte values as "throwbacks" and "Luddites". In Mark Zuckerberg's eyes people are "Dumb Fucks". And Zuckerberg is probably the least odious of the current crop.
In Plato's terms these kind of people are unfit for governance. They, and their technologies, lack the virtues and competencies necessary for a balanced, harmonious, and equitable, world according to the justice of a republic. Yet increasingly "tech bros" are positioning themselves as a de facto governing class and imposing their one-dimensional values on society.
Technology does not have to be this way. It could benefit everyone. It could be secure. It could be respectful. It could advance democracy. It could enhance education. It could be something we design and work on together. Instead we get patrician, dystopian traps, surveillance capitalism, criminally-minded business practices and worthless information slop from BigTech that seems to have a perverted and grubby enchantment with spying on everything.
More than gold, oil and drugs, information technology has produced more billionaires than any other venture. No governments have had the courage to intervene and regulate. Instead of taking pride in British innovation which created many world-changing inventions, the UK government under Prime-Minister Keir Starmer is set to treacherously remove the last threads of regulatory safety and trade law in order to encourage more BigTech "investment" in (capture and destruction of) Britain, and the enslavement of its people to foreign money and values.
Lack of regulation has led to such inequality that for the first time in centuries there is serious consideration of ways to safely deflate economies and redistribute wealth and power in order to avoid revolution or unrest. Maybe something along the lines of the religious moral concept of a jubilee is needed soon? Governments around the world, even in the USA, are poised to break up BigTech and pass sweeping new laws to curb its anti-democratic power. Surely, encouraging even more growth of BigTech is societal suicide? It is abdication of democratic governance.
But embedded in the origin story of Silicon Valley as an offshoot of Californian counter-culture is a different tale. The geeks who inherited the Earth mostly started off as "helpful computer guys" who just wanted to "make the world a better, fairer place". The tragic irony of consumer computer technology cannot be understated.
Many influential technologists have been motivated not by a gap in the market, but by experiencing or witnessing injustice. They've seen a gap in the rights and opportunities of people. To take Steve Jobs' biography on face value he was foremost a technophile and lover of enabling creativity, and only incidentally a shrewd, mean and unlikable businessman.
It's said that there are two dominant motives for people to make or do anything; to alleviate suffering, or to obtain convenient utility. Injustice is a severe discomfort to mentally-well people. Dr. Richard Stallman was famously inspired by the absurd injustice of not being able to modify a program running on his own computer. That inspiration led to the idea of Software Freedom, a creed that united hackers around the world.
But an ancient nihilism is rearing its head. Perhaps because its proponents are not well grounded - something understandable in the global poly-crisis. It is Thanatos or abandonment of the "will to power" and self-directed living. It comes with the bankrupt philosophy of technological determinism. Although we talk about "liberating" technology we often use the term "dystopian" in the same breath.
We must not ignore the deeply troubling political implications of a culture that feels downtrodden and yet wants to be liberated from responsibility by something "strong". This happened before in the mid 20th Century. We talk of authoritarian tech, but we do not hear much about "right-wing" or "left-wing" technology. Is that distinction meaningful? Does the disregard that Silicon Valley has for minorities and difference require understanding as "far-right tech"? If so let's remember that anything propagating extremist political values, including technological values, has never been favourable to rights.
Common purpose ultimately led to the Free (Libre) Software movement, which arguably built almost all the software that runs the world today. The key principle in effect with Libre software is the ability and duty to share - to simply pay back what you have been given and pay forward to future generations with what you have created - though Stallman seldom uses the words "duty" or "mutuality" when talking of "freedoms". Today a new common purpose is needed that champions justice of technology rather than mere freedom.
To quote another insightful tech thinker, Prof. Ross Anderson says; "There are basically two ways of getting what you want. You can make something or trade it for something else, which we call economics. Or you can just take it, by force - which is politics." BigTech uses force, albeit a less violent force, that goes far beyond markets and choice. Its use of regulatory capture, bribery, abuse of patents, "lawfare", intimidation and sabotage is unmistakable gangster behaviour.
Of course Anderson echoes fellow Scotsman Adam Smith, who is perhaps most interesting as an ethical philosopher as well as being known as the seminal "economist". Smith emphasised the positive (societal) aspects of trade and industry rather than what has become the BigTech American Libertarian creed of purely private gain and domination. In Smith's world, corporations are defined as much by duties as their commercial "rights".
Contrary to common misunderstanding technology is never neutral. All technology carries values. Justice, if it is a value that exists within our technology must come from its operators. We alone can choose how to use tech, whether to use tech, and what we use it for. Justice cannot come from its designers, manufacturers, and salesmen who have learned to be helpless before the forces of efficiency, convenience, vanity, greed, and unchecked growth.