[liberationtech] No such thing as liberationtech [Was: Deep Divers]

Wed May 6 20:11:12 CEST 2020

After Doug Schuler chimes in here, I have to follow, and thanks Aram, Winograd and Flores were among my early influences in this discourse.  Winograd’s Bringing Design to Software was an important update in the field, and Fernando Flores continued in this direction with Disclosing New Worlds (with Dreyfus and Spinoza).

These discussions just starting on embedded values in technology and appropriate design have decades of insight and literature, from social critics Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, designers Victor Papanek and John Chris Jones, and systems scientists Wiener, Mumford, Boulding, and others like Özbekhan and Winner. In Participatory Design and HCI we saw Batya Friedman, Peter Kahn’s program on values-sensitive design. And Rob Kling’s work in the 90’s on appropriate technology design. He headed up Indian U Informatics back then and died fairly young, but you need to see esp. Computerization and Controversy https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en <https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=rob+kling&btnG=> &as_sdt=0%2C5&q=rob+kling&btnG= 

There are the brilliant ethical and industry muckrakers Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov. 

My doctorate explored embedded values in processes and practices in innovation processes at software firms. Nothing about Google’s practices or other Silicon Valley organizations surprises me - I spent a lot of energy in attempt to design better practices and organizations, and the sociology of values in practice never became influential. And I no longer work with startups or big tech.

These are the issues I had always hoped the list would explore, not so much breaking news on encryption and open source projects. I’m concerned about how we design for new technologies with complex outcomes, how they  are financially supported, the backstage business models of data use, the interaction models that maintain addictive behavior, the lack of competitiveness among alternative platforms, our total consent to 5 Big Firms in the network era.

There are signs of hope and interest, as a participant in the IEEE Ethically-Aligned Design for prioritizing human  well-being in Autonomous / Intelligent Systems (for IEEE Standard 7010) we witnessed hundreds of discussions about appropriate design for problematic autonomy and AI. The standard was just officially announced May 1: https://standards.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-standards/standards/web/documents/other/ead1e.pdf

There is a budding and active Humane Technology group formed in Toronto, perhaps one of the most active outside the SF/SV center: https://humanetech.com/ 

Lets see some other rants. 

Yours truly, Peter

PETER JONES, PH.D.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

OCAD UNIVERSITY

 <http://designdialogues.com> http://designdialogues.com

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E   <mailto:pjones at ocadu.ca> pjones at ocadu.ca

T 416.799.8799

From: LT <lt-bounces at lists.liberationtech.org <mailto:lt-bounces at lists.liberationtech.org> > on behalf of Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com <mailto:ycompanys at gmail.com> >
Date: Tuesday, May 5, 2020 at 7:58 AM
To: Aram Sinnreich <aramsinnreich at gmail.com <mailto:aramsinnreich at gmail.com> >
Cc: LT <lt at lists.liberationtech.org <mailto:lt at lists.liberationtech.org> >
Subject: Re: [liberationtech] No such thing as liberationtech [Was: Deep Divers]

I will just note that historically speaking, Liberationtech was born out of a human-centered perspective in computer science, political science, sociology of technology, and STS.  

Co-founder Terry Winograd's foundational treatise for the field of HCI is one of our foundational texts: https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Computers-Cognition-Foundation-Design/dp/0201112973.

Co-founder Larry Diamond's seminal book on liberationtech emphasized that liberationtech is really "liberationtech" because the worthiness and ethics/morality of technology depend both on values and use such that they may be used for liberation and/or oppression: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/books/liberation-technology/.

Following the sociology of technology and STS, my own research on liberationtech based on the history of the netroots movement suggests that the values and use of technology are historically imprinted and socially constructed: https://is.gd/urBnHn.

Finally, I will note that in terms of values we always tried to abide by the UN Declaration of Human Rights in terms of both our research and highlighting of activists around the world doing tech for good. (That said, sometimes values that are considered good within that framework pose contradictory demands, so there is no easy answer.) 

YC

On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 7:39 AM Aram Sinnreich <aramsinnreich at gmail.com <mailto:aramsinnreich at gmail.com> > wrote:

What do you make of Langdon Winner's work, arguing that sociotechnical artifacts have inherent "politics?"

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 5, 2020, at 10:33 AM, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com <mailto:grarpamp at gmail.com> > wrote:
> 
> Technology is but an agnostic tool.
> There is no such thing as a liberation tech,
> only applied tech via paths toward something.
> One cannot apply a tech toward liberation
> without first considering what a state of being
> of actual liberation might variously be about,
> to know where to go, what to make with the tech.
> Democracy being nothing more than a
> decentralized form of the murderous dictators
> many claim to be liberating themselves or people from,
> both forms hardly a state of liberation at all,
> yet worshipped and profferred by all too many,
> we therefore continue this random series
> on path choices...
> 
> How to be a tyrant. Sound Familiar?
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4LtEciQUF8
> 
> Deep Divers, let the balloon go!
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbX-Bvb2u_w
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U3lEc-IFr8
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWLntHoTgDA
> 
> -- 
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