Sept. 28, 2020, 10:24 a.m.
Ethical Technologist Issue 5: The evolving political meaning of technology
The Ethical Technologist
Hello and welcome back to The Ethical Technologist! As a software developer, I spend a lot of time thinking about open source software, and I’ve had the privilege to watch it grow from a small movement into a major economic force. Like many technologies, open source came with a promise of social change, of making the world a better place. But with that growth has come a decreased emphasis on social justice, and an increased focus on economic efficiency. So it goes.
Thus, this week’s issue has a loose theme of change. Below you’ll find a collection of articles that examine how how the social meanings of technologies change over time, and how the technologies we create often end up serving the status quo whether we intend them to or not. They ask that we examine the technologies we build, and ask ourselves: How will this be used in the future, independently of the narrative I attach to it?
In this issue:
- When Search Algorithms Make Finding Things Harder
- Architecture as a Political Act
- Personal Computers Were Supposed to Set Us Free
- The Evolving Political Meaning of Open Source Software
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!
[ 🔮 When Search Algorithms Make Finding Things Harder ]
So many startups have attempted (and failed) to solve the music discovery problem: How can you use data on music someone likes to recommend new artists and albums to them? Spotify is the current darling among music listeners (I’m listening to it now, in fact), and it offers a number of algorithmic attempts to get you listening to new songs. However, Spotify users are increasingly searching for music that creates a specific mood, using atmospheric terms. And now artists and producers have found that by adopting artist and track names that correspond with these search terms, they can boost their listen count—and their profits. The result is a massive catalog of generically-branded music focused on creating a particular atmosphere, a catalog that makes it increasingly difficult to discover indie artists. Technology that started off as a way to locate a needle in a haystack now instead serves to grow the haystack.
Why Spotify Has So Many Bizarre Generic Artists Like “White Noise Baby Sleep”
[ 🛤 Architecture as a Political Act ]
Many American cities still bear the scars of racial discrimination in the form of walls designed to psychologically and physically separate Black neighborhoods from white. Sometimes these barriers are entire highways that cut through neighborhoods; sometimes they’re a simple lack of crosswalks. Many were designed using the politically-neutral language like “civic engineering” or “city planning,” intended to obscure their true purpose. Chat Travieso shows us how these scars are a reminder that all engineering work is political, and to ask ourselves whether the language we use to discuss technology hides racist ideologies.
https://placesjournal.org/article/a-nation-of-walls/
[ 🖥 Personal Computers Were Supposed to Set Us Free ]
In a paper that remains as salient today as when it was first published in 1988, Bryan Pfaffenberger discusses how new technologies, such as the personal computer, often come with claims of revolutionizing the social order. Yet, the author argues, these claims often only serve to paradoxically reinforce the existing social order. Because the creators are only able to express the power of their invention in terms of the existing social order, they end up reproducing the very social order they aim to overturn. As a result they typically fail to achieve the radical restructuring they seek. What’s interesting to me is that we can apply this very analysis to more contemporary cases, in particular, open source software.
[ 🔙 The Evolving Political Meaning of Open Source Software ]
The final entry in this week’s newsletter is a twofer from Steve Klabnik. Following the pattern established by the previous entry, Steve tells the story of the rise of fall of the ideology behind open source: Originally intended as a radical tool for empowering individuals, open source is now commonly viewed as an apolitical tool for accelerating businesses. Steve examines the mechanisms and political shifts that led to this change, and spends some time extrapolating the story to predict how open source will continue to shift over the coming years.
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And that’s it for Issue 5! 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