Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part V
By Dr. Andy Farnell
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Back to Part III
Back to Part IV
Who sets the direction of tech?
There is another category of people who get involved in technology and that's career politicians, ambitious bureaucrats and MBA types. For the most-part they've no real interest in technology except to advance their careers. Technology is a powerful lever. There are always bandwagons to jump on, and the ever present Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse.
As the well known quote of Archibald Putt so perfectly nails it:
"Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand. β Archibald Putt"
Healing the schism between those who claim to know what technology should be used for and those who understand what it safely can be used for is an urgent matter.
Although governments have changed with the times, traditional structures don't touch technology as a separate concern. International coordination and regulation led us to bodies like the Information Commissioner's Office, but generally tech gets lumped in with "innovation" or "trade and industry", and occasionally "education". This is surprising considering the broad impact all digital technologies have in society and the immense potential for positive transformation, and the incredible scope for harm, foreign and private influence. At one time in the UK tech was thrown in with "sport and culture" as a miscellaneous hot potato for ministers to avoid.
As modern media and communication systems became fully digital, control of the medium became inseparable from control of the message. Potential for power, not vast wealth, is what attracts political movers to tech, indeed they bring money as "investment".
In recent years technology has seen an influx of people who "work in tech" but know nothing about the subject. They have realised that obtaining high positions in the digital space is a path to personal and political influence because of the widespread social reach of coms-tech. They take the "professional management" route to becoming C-level executives of complex technical projects of which they have scant understanding.
But understanding does not matter for them, because they are set on imposing their will regardless of whether their ideas clash with technical reality. Those who think they can work only at "layer-9", in the "policy" of technology, without any connection to lower layers like basic physics, logic, and human psychology, are the nemesis of competent but terribly over-worked technical engineers who are already skirting the limits of possibility and clinging to their sanity to keep things running.
Political pseudo-leaders arrive with chirpy optimistic "positive psychology". They rarely listen to technical advice, other than to nod along in a simulation of attention. This leads to terrible project management, poor maintenance, ruined safety and security, over-reaching, and setting of unrealistic goals. What happened to the Boeing company is an exemplar of rapid uncontrollable descent when systems fail this way. The feedback to correct broken management is there, but the management system is unable to listen, because it is unable to understand. Or worse, as with the 737 Supermax, it thinks it knows better than the experts.
How did this state of affairs come about? Consider the role of CISO (the Chief Information Security Officer). Many CISO will say, quite of their own admission, that they know rather little about "technicalities". The role is only 30 years old, and came about in the mid 1990's when Citibank created the job title for Steve Katz. Since then mushrooming compliance regulation created an almost total vacuum at the C-suite level for people able to understand not only the mechanisms of security but the value (and nature) of the data on their watch. With so few people able to master both roles a default pipeline emerged where it is said that it's "easier to teach an executive to hack than to teach a hacker how to put on a suit." Sadly, this is horribly wrong on almost every level. Most hackers already know a great deal about the political value of data, they're just not terribly interested, whereas the normative businessman is equally dismissive of "mere technical stuff".
Indeed many already influential persons are "placed" in high positions within tech where they can steer decisions while "making the right noises". Modern companies run by global capital have no technical meritocracy but instead have a separate layer of "professional management" who rotate by a revolving-door system of appointments. That is great business for those of us who are cybersecurity consultants hired in to "assist" CISO's and do the actual thinking, but it's a poor show for those CISOs who are forever at the mercy of trusted emissaries, lieutenants and - in the final moments of their careers - ransomware negotiators and ronin IR (incident response) teams parachuted in to save the day.
Lest this sound like an argument for philosopher-kings - that we ought to put more "tech leaders" in charge of things - that would be a complete and utter catastrophe. It may be what the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg have in mind, but God forbid such narrow minded individuals ever get close to real power. The problem we're addressing here is the total disconnection of tech from the needs and hopes of ordinary people. Actual political leaders need to get much more educated, and very quickly.
The problem is that technology can achieve almost anything, from the most joyous Utopia to invoking literal Hell on Earth. Often the difference is a little technical detail that only a seasoned expert would spot. Those in charge do not know the difference and so cause chaos. They've started to have a very deleterious effect on the direction of technology as their narrow personal or economic interests take on an outsize and undue influence on what ought to be determined by more sensible, reflective, inclusive and mature opinion.
This is infuriating and humiliating to real scientists and engineers who must play second fiddle and see quite insane ideas pushed forward. We are then asked to help implement and even teach as facts quite twisted ideas that go against the grain of logic, reason, morality and common sense.
An important "right" then might be framed as a "right to truth", although the word "authenticity" is a softer substitute. It is the "scientific right". It is the basic right not to be forced to act against ones better judgement, formal education, lived experience, personal morals, or shockingly incontrovertible evidence.
Moral rights are recognised in the creative industry. For an artist to have their work subverted, misused for purposes that go against their most dearly-held principles, is a harm actionable in Law. Why are scientists and technicians not afforded those rights? From where do we get the popular notion that technology is "neutral" and therefore its creators have no stake in whether it is put to good or evil use?
It is urgent we examine such "digital rights" because technology is so often hijacked and misused as a justification for wicked things. It is used for gaslighting, claiming normativity or necessity⦠because "the system requires it". Wicked people use technology as a proxy, an excuse or front to disguise their real aims. They use it as a shield from any moral consequences and leverage the widespread ignorance of ordinary folk to bamboozle them.
Such negative freedom from dishonest pseudo-science and even straight-up fraudulent corporate-sponsored slop, is really the right to abstain from imposed systems that run counter to a common-sense understanding of progress and go against the implied moral duty of science to improve our way of living. Although most people with a glimmer of common-sense recognised the negative effects of smartphones around 2010, it took 15 years from smartphones being foisted upon the population as "normative for kids" to the burgeoning movement in the UK and Europe for a smartphone free childhood. Let's hope we can soon extend the same rights to adults. Our point is that it takes time for people to find their voice and too often reason is drowned-out by the shrill clink-clink of the cash register. Too often nowadays truth is set aside to give space to parochial and ideological economic fancies.
As technically aware people we know better. We need not participate, and we certainly need not lend voices of support. Perhaps put better; a "tech right" is:
The right for people, through democratic discussion, thought and education, to a self-determined appropriation and affordance of technology that transcends the influence of both market and state, for a higher purpose.
To "go our own way". Otherwise technology becomes a kind of communism not a tool of freedom. Done wrong, tech is both anti-capitalist and anti-social.
Examples are the obvious right to walk instead of use motor-transport, to use cash, to repair and fully own your property without lien or encumbrance, to choose the devices and software your child is exposed to at school⦠It is also the right to forgo disingenuous "security" which is really an imposed protection racket. Cybersecurity comes from the individual and must start there, with firm boundary-setting and exercise of choice by right.
But there is a lot to do to make our voices heard. For those peddling their wares, technology combined with demagoguery is a spicy dish. A soup of technology and fear. We call this the "insecurity industry". It floods the world with dangerously shoddy goods and ideas (for example IoT), which it then offers itself in service of remedying and protecting you from. What a caper!
Devious or confused thinkers often level the accusation of "Luddite" against anyone who even mentions autonomy and negative freedoms. For them, platform normativity is a stick with which to beat others, as a cover for their own ambition, insecurity or identification. They misuse words like "compatibility" and "interoperability" to mean domination of their own standards, rather than real plurality.
These are the people we must be most wary of when they claim to "speak for technology". Those who claim to be political or "thought leaders" and who claim to tell us "how technology will shape our future", but are far too close to industrial interests to be disinterested. We must treat them with great suspicion, since they are often owners of the platforms on which debate occurs and of the factories that make our gadgets. They surround themselves with yes-men "expert" advisers who tell them the things they want to hear, and their CTOs and CISOs are chosen carefully for what they do not know or believe.
