Sept. 14, 2020, 9:58 a.m.
Ethical Technologist Issue 3: Protecting Our Communities
The Ethical Technologist
Hello again! One aspect of the tech business that I really love is that we think about our customers and our users not just as individuals who give us money or attention, but as a community. This kind of thinking really helps us to focus our priorities not just on increasing sales, but on lifting people up. Building a thriving, healthy community, as we know, is not easy; but tearing one apart is dead simple.
Thus, this issue's loose theme: Protecting our communities from harm. Whether we are in the process of deliberately building a community, or we are only discovering that one exists after the fact, the technology we build has an impact on people, and sometimes that impact is harmful.
In this issue:
- Identifying toxic influencers who are tearing your community apart
- Valuing those who do the often invisible work of keeping things running
- How technology can be racist
- Don't let your fascination with technology distract you from how it impacts others
- How open source's implicit incentive structure encourages injustice
You may have noticed that I've switched newsletter platforms to Buttondown. There were several reasons for this, but largely it was because Buttondown's operator shares a portion of his profits with the open source projects he relies on. I like this. The practical upshot for you, dear reader, is that the archives have moved.
And if you found this issue thought-provoking and informative, don't forget to share!
[ 🛢 How to Identify Toxic Community Influencers ]
Communities, like gardens, only thrive when we're willing to pull the weeds. With people, though, it's not always obvious who is going to build others up, and who is going to break them down. We often are all too willing to let toxic individuals slide when they are providing a necessary service to the community—yet those are the very members we need to take most care with. As Erin "Folletto" Casali tells us, the most toxic members of our communities make themselves essential, while also hewing closely to the letter of the law, confounding our ability and desire to give them the boot.
https://intenseminimalism.com/2020/the-impact-of-toxic-influencers-on-communities/
[ 🛣 The Importance of Valuing Maintenance Work ]
Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell have long argued that economists' laser focus on innovation as an economic driver is short-sighted. By celebrating innovation, we devalue maintenance work. And when we devalue maintenance work, we put critical infrastructure at risk, whether it's highway bridges or the internet.
Russel and Vinsel's new book The Innovation Delusion lays out their argument for the necessity of valuing maintenance work, from a cultural and economic perspective. Fast Company recently interviewed them about their book, and it's worth a read.
[ 👮🏻♂️ Is Your Tech Racist? ]
The Detroit police have, Vice reports, once again wrongly arrested a Black man based on faulty facial-recognition software. And as Charlton McIlwain argues, so much of our technology is racist by design.
The authors say technology alone can’t remove bias from decision-making processes, that algorithms and testing practices reflect the biases of those who built them. This kind of bias shows up even in such mundane situations as racist soap dispensers, but increasingly law enforcement departments are relying on facial recognition and other profiling tools, and the results are only cementing a century of institutional racism, rather than removing it.
[ 🔫 Don't Get Distracted ]
Caleb Hearth once helped build software designed to pinpoint human targets for assassination by drone. Seduced by how interesting his work was, like many of us, he didn't stop to reflect on how his work would be used, or the impact it had on others. Now he regrets his choice, but has reflected deeply on just how easy it is for software developers like him to lose sight of the impact our work has on others. His talk at RubyConf 2017 is a powerful story of his own introspective journey, and a call for each of us to question why we build what we build.
https://calebhearth.com/talks/dont-get-distracted/
[ 🔥 Rethinking Open Source ]
Last week, I delivered a talk to the Open Source Initiative's State of the Source Summit, their first-ever annual conference examining the direction of the open source movement.
Open source has always seen itself as a force for freedom. Yet, the idea that anyone should be free to use open source for any purpose, perhaps paradoxically, removes freedom from others. Resolving this tension, I believe, requires that we pay closer attention to the incentives for participating in and consuming open source. In this essay, I argue that we need a thoughtful set of incentives and regulations aimed at retaining what is good about the open source model, while empowering developers to fight oppression instead of fueling it.
The full text of the talk is now on my blog (and the video should soon be online).
https://don.goodman-wilson.com/posts/state-of-the-source/
[ ❤️ Sponsor ]
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And that's it for Issue 3! Thanks once again to our amazing content editor, Amy Goodman-Wilson, for all her hard work getting this issue out the door.
And thank you for subscribing. If you enjoyed this issue, [share with your friends]((https://buttondown.email/DEGoodmanWilson/archive/issue-003/)! If you have an article that should be featured in an upcoming issue of The Ethical Technologist, let me know by either replying to this email (what, a newsletter you can reply to!?), or pinging me on Twitter.
Until next time,
yours,
Don Goodman-Wilson