Tools and purposes

I’ve been dwelling on digital technology as a tool for public good. For me, technology offered freedom, possibility and a future I’d otherwise have missed due to the circumstances of my upbringing, the trauma I experienced and, as life has gone on, the disability and mental ill-health I have lived with. In this way, tech offered a social space with the dawn of the 28k modem that I’d otherwise have had no real way to access. It connected me with communities across the world ~ some of which no 10-year-old should connect with, admittedly.

Over the years the commercial internet provided me with a lot of friendships, communities, ideas and spaces to learn from. As someone who was headstrong against learning at school, from homework or, frankly, anything that wasn’t self-paced, the internet became a primary source of my learning. Part of that learning was coming to understand information literacy, a side quest for another day ¹.

So I owe a lot to these tools. And yet the same network that raised me is now the thing I spend most of my time indicting. That tension is what this title, tools and purposes, is really about.

The first thing that jumps into my mind when I put it that way is the tripe:

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

And that my mind goes there signals to me that there’s a flaw in my rationalising of technology. The gun line pretends a tool is neutral until a person picks it up. But a gun is built to do one thing. All tools carry intention, a philosophy no matter how simple. The honest question, then, isn’t whether digital technology is neutral. It’s what its intentions are. On its face, what we see now is a network built on the same ideas as colonialism: those with means extract from those without, and in meatspace the law enforces the class divide. I’ll come back to what I mean by that. But digital tools are still tools, and a radical rethinking of what they can be used for is possible.

Audre Lorde said that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. The line is often intentionally misquoted, or relayed in a sense that asks the proletariat to ‘give up’ on anything the powerful built. That isn’t fair to the argument, its just liberalising² radicalism. Her essay asks us to think of difference as strength, and of interdependency across difference as the thing that actually threatens the house. She never said stop using hammers.

A computer is a computer. A network is a network.

The master’s tools are the business model. (Hyper)Scale as a virtue. Owning the intermediary so every relationship runs through them. Data as something they can extract from people. Growth funded by venture capital, which means growth funded by someone with vested financial interest. Engagement as the metric. Architected lock-in. Terms of service as law. “Free” at the price of being watched.

That is what I meant by colonialism. Extraction, enclosure, and an intermediary who charges rent for an ill-gotten ‘road’.

Other tools which accompany digital technology, such as copyleft, open software and protocols, were (mostly) built inside the house (universities, Bell Labs, the military). Even so, they are still not the master’s tools, because what they demand is sharing. They lean towards reciprocity, not business, and they smuggle labour out of corporations into the public(ish) domain.

The radicalised version says the artefacts are not innocent either. Some of them carry the business logic inside. An engagement feed is the model made into code. An ad auction cannot be repurposed for anything good. App stores, most cloud infrastructure, and frameworks built to capture attention from a billion users. Each wants your ‘thing’ to become a certain kind of ‘thing’, and for that ‘thing’ to make (them) money. So the test for each piece of technology is what relations it comes with and what it asks you to become to use it. A mailing list passes. A recommendation feed doesn’t. Many things are more grey and so we have to remain vigilant.

Lorde’s (actual) positive programme translates cleanly. Interdependency across difference becomes federation. Many small houses that host open walkways between, none of them the master’s. Interoperability across difference rather than one platform absorbing everyone. You can tell what’s next, yeah? Fuck off, zucc.

And, as with all things, there’s way more nuance here too. Even building a computer demands cobalt, chip fabricators, and a labour chain we didn’t choose. Nothing passes the test cleanly, including the machine I’m typing this on.

To close, I’ll put the question to you so we can both share some puzzlement. Run the test on the (digital) tools you rely on every day. Which relations do they demand, and who do they need you to be?

Curious answers, more questions? Let’s yarn!

aidan@ursa.nz

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Footnotes

1. I still passionately believe that critical literacies, specifically critical digital literacies, are systematically undertaught, and increasingly this is deliberate. With so much fake news, artificially generated content and deliberate attempts by media of all forms, old and new, to foster social group segregation, ignoring critical literacy is a crime. Fuck capitalism and fuck the oligarchy. ↩

2. if this isn’t a phrase, I’m coining it. Liberals, not in the ‘blue aussie’ sense (ew) but the moderate centre (also ew). These capitalist bootlickers read radicalism, often in defence of life, and tone it to something they have appetite for: mild reform that doesn’t inconvenience them. Someone next door being beaten by violent cops because of their skin colour? Just as long as its not too loud, on rare they “might send a nicely worded letter asking for this to please be done in a nicer way”, but “othwerise be quiet”. Gross. Bootlicking. ↩