Sept. 21, 2020, 3:31 p.m.
Ethical Technologist Issue 4: The hidden problems in technology
The Ethical Technologist
Hello again, and welcome back!
Last week, Apple announced the first of its fall line up. It’s always exciting to get a peak at the newest iPhones and Apple Watches, but as we’re looking forward to new gadgets and devices, it’s worth reflecting on what happens to our old ones. Most of us dutifully send our electronics off to be recycled at the end of their life. But what does recycling old electronics actually mean? The answer to this question is unfortunately not very encouraging.
So, this week’s theme: The hidden issues that lay in our technology. From the unrecognized cost to recycle them, to the assumptions built into the software that runs them, there’s a lot more to the technology we use than is apparent at first glance.
In this issue:
- What happens to our gadgets when we’re done with them
- How cameras lie
- Hidden economics of open source
- Why we need diversity of technology (and not just of people)
- Meritocracy was meant as satire
You can find back issues of The Ethical Technologist in the archives. And if you found this issue thought-provoking and informative, don’t forget to share!
[ 📱 Planned Obsolescence and the Growing Problem of E-Waste ]
It’s autumn, so that means Apple’s got new products to sell us. And who doesn’t love having a new iPhone? But as we evaluate our older devices and decide what to do with them, we ought to reflect on just where our old devices end up, and the hidden costs of making new ones.
- E-waste recycling is a growing industry in India, but with a heavy cost on both human health and the environment.
- In Accra, Ghana, what was once a thriving market has transformed into a sprawling e-waste “urban mine”.
- The biggest contributor to pollution and waste is the manufacturing of devices.
- Even the plastics in our devices aren’t recyclable, and the plastics industry has known this from the beginning.
[ 📷 All Cameras Lie ]
We would like to think that cameras can’t lie, but it turns out capturing an accurate rendering of a scene is much more complicated than we once thought. From the earliest days of film photography, the chemistry used to define how color is captured was decidedly racist. But if you live on the American west coast, and tried (and failed) to photograph the uncanny red skies last week, you might have noticed your digital camera didn’t want to cooperate. That’s because they use software to automate the many decisions that have to be made to render color accurately. Ian Bogost takes us on fascinating journey into how even seemingly objective technologies embed hidden assumptions.
[ 🏛 Bringing Feminist Economic Theory to Open Source Governance ]
Nathan Schneider believes that open source software projects have a governance problem. In the absence of explicit structure, the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ takes over, creating a set of invisible rules. We can uncover and understand those rules by turning to feminist economics, a field aimed at uncovering and evaluating just such hidden structures.
https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/economy-governance-open-source
[ 🧭 Web Browser Inbreeding ]
Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox…there are a lot of web browsers out there. Most of them are built with their own technology, but there’s a growing movement to consolidate them. Dave Rupert asks the intriguing question: What would we lose if every web browser were built with the same technology? He believes that browser diversity encourages deliberate decision-making for web standards, and fosters consensus and cooperation over corporate rule.
https://daverupert.com/2020/09/the-value-of-browser-diversity/
[ 🧞♂️ Meritocracy Is Not What You Think It Is ]
Meritocracy is the concept that individuals are judged only on the quality of their technical contributions, but great ideas can come from otherwise awful people. So why shouldn’t we consider the whole person, and not just their technical achievements, when deciding who to promote or fire? In this essay from 2015, Coraline Ada Ehmke argues that our human traits are just as important as our technical output.
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of-the-meritocracy
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And that’s it for Issue 4! 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! 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