“It just works” — the three stages of technological depoliticization

“It Just Works” is propaganda: it hides the trail that products cut though our societies and the natural world to get to us.

When it comes to technology, we are depoliticized: too often we talk about technology as something for which “making decisions in groups” (politics) is irrelevant. We think that technology is a little out of reach, that its structure doesn’t concern us or is better arranged by someone else. Or, worst, we don’t know that the technology in question even exists.

The phrase “It Just Works” is a propagandistic lullaby, from the diet-coke-button attitude that technology “just” appears at our doors and stores. From where? Who knows?

“Exposure” by Antony Gormley. Without politics, issues are like the figure here: hollow.

In a wonderful article in the Russia Post, the authors discuss how the Putin regime depoliticizes topics in order to reduce scrutiny. The idea is to make certain topics no longer political issues, thereby sucking air away from the people who would otherwise pressure for change or even become centers of power outside your autocracy.

Putin can more easily control an issue which lacks compelling people, debate and energy:

“…depoliticization. Its grip on society got tighter and tighter. People with democratic and liberal views who continued to be interested in and engage in politics were painted as ‘demschiza’, short for ‘democratic schizophrenics’.”

People free of democratic schizophrenia thus say, “We are simple people, we don’t get involved in big politics.” The affable Vlad Vexler smartly summarizes the Putin project and depoliticization in the video below:

I’d like to draw a parallel to a similar trend, found in technology: there are areas of technology in which we tolerate normally morally objectionable issues (monopoly, restrictions on freedom, environmental damage etc.), either regarding them with apathy, not regarding the issues as issues, or not being aware that the thing exists at all.

“I don’t know that much about technology, it just works.”

Politics and depoliticization

Politics is, according to Wikipedia, “the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups.”

There are of course other colloquial senses of this word: one is roughly equivalent to “party political” or “partisan”—pertaining to political parties and their activities, the latter “strongly” so. For instance, when Gavin Newsom warned Trump not to make his visit to LA during the fires “political,” he meant, “Don’t use this tragedy to try to hurt my side and boost your side.”

The other sense is equivalent to “Machiavellian” (describing a means of operation based on whatever works rather than virtue): in politics this means alliances, favors, leaks.

When our friends at Russia Post talk about depoliticization, they don’t mean that Putin is making his country less Machiavellian: they mean that he is preventing people from effectively discussing issues and forging change. While party politics is tiresome, it is partly a natural outgrowth of democracy; it too is compromised in Russia.

That said, one might argue that some things are properly non-political, where politics might distort things.

In science, for example, politics bears on our decision of what to study, but we take pains to reduce the impact of irrelevant inputs like politics in our experiments. For example, in a “double-blind” experiment, neither the subject nor those who have contact with them know which is the real drug and which the sugar pill.

There are some issues that we can’t vote on, and that may harm us if we go against the facts. The most disastrous example is probably Lysenkoism, wherein one man’s pseudoscience was elevated to state doctrine, yielding famine in the Soviet Union and later China.

Stalin looks on as Lysenko speaks at the Moscow Kremlin.

The American and Western European equivalents of this delusion are pseudo-scientific racism in many forms, and the cartoonish idea that we humans should breed ourselves. These are tools of plain old xenophobia.

In both cases, people’s politics (and prejudices) tried to go against reality, with unhappy consequences. This distinction is of course not simple: anyone who wants to have it their way will say “this is how it is.” They will say of how you want to have it, “that’s politics.”

Many of our public debates break down into two or more groups of people who regard themselves as comprehending reality (sometimes, but not always, claiming via biology, medicine, economics, physics, etc.) and regard everyone else as being hypnotized by politics.

So, I say:

1. To the extent that something matters, we should care about it and make decisions about it as a group: this is politics.
2. There are certain things that we can’t change: fooling ourselves into thinking we can change them hurts us in nearly all cases.
3. The first fight is, therefore, over which is which.

Technology

To what extent should technology be depoliticized? Technology touches our morals when we:

• Manufacture it (mining, worker rights, etc.)
• Operate it (energy consumption, information rights/intellectual property, information structure and culture etc.)
• Form organizations (usually companies) to do the above (finance, monopoly)
• And more.

I direct most of my attention to a subset of the “operate it” focus, thinking about how using computers (particularly to create, organize and retrieve information) changes our consciousness.

For me, it’s political. The computer screen is the retina of the minds eye, and we should act and advocate for free vision.

For most of the people around me, it’s not. This is just a little surprising: people seem to care, advocate, and feel less agency when it comes to technology, compared to other fields: e.g. the environment, health, business.

I’m not hereto moan or finger wag: I’m here to say, dear reader, I’ve heard people like you sense and decry injustice before. As such: I give you technology, and I give you injustice.

This injustice, however, is under layers of depoliticization telling us that matters of technology are primarily reflections of personal or business choices, or brute technological facts; or that they’re otherwise better handled by someone else. The most dangerous form of depoliticization is of course making us forget that thing in question exists altogether.

So, the stages:

As a fish in water

When people don’t know that the technology in question is even there, they are “like a fish in water.” The best example of this relationship is the Web. (The Web is a hypertext system, allowing users to publish, read and navigate among documents, and increasingly applications, online.)

I regard the Web as significantly invisible and unnamed because, when people refer to the activity of going online and reading documents, they say “I am going to go on the Internet.”

If you look at the ngram graph below, you’ll see how both terms take off in the 90s when these technologies properly entered the public imagination. The term “Web” peaked in 2011 (probably due to soporific discussion of the “Web 2.0” concept): the term “Internet” has since superseded it.*1

This is quite incorrect, as the “Internet” refers to the underlying system of data transmission (fiber-optic cables, routers, switches, etc.), not to the hypertext application running on top of it. When people say they saw something “on the Internet,” they do not mean that they received it via email or a secure shell (other Internet applications), they mean that they got it via the dominant information system on the Internet and in the world: the Web.

We are living Web lives, and every time we touch the Web it destroys information. Its links are visible only from one endpoint, meaning that the overall structure (i.e. a web) of information will always be invisible to us. But people rarely say the word.

The Web is a monopoly, and monopoly — although it’s open source and its standards are published by a non-profit—always stifles technological innovation. Note that there are alternatives: Gemini, Gopher and more, including the technology on which I am working. But why seek an alternative so something one rarely (or never) thinks about?

A screenshot of a “Gopher Hole,” a site on Gopher.

We thus do not apply the standards we would normally to other industries or fields: imagine if there were only one company that manufactures computers, or cars or lamps. The Web’s monopoly is permitted in that, as my generation would say, it is “not a thing.”

Here, the depoliticization is complete: like, say, technological society after the creation of Freon in the 30s and before the discovery of the ozone hole in 1985, our destruction is total, because we don’t know what we’re doing.

Aware but unconcerned

Oddly, the conceptual layer on which the Web operates (the Internet) is more well-known. In the public imagination there is a concept of a network (physical, connected by wires and fiber-optic cable) among computers through which we communicate: we know what it is, but it is a monopoly on the same level as the Web, and people rarely complain.

Of course, the Internet Society is not profiteering through monopoly in the same way that a for-profit business could. But, as mentioned above, monopolies cost us in lost technological progress and freedom.

For example, while IBM had a similar level of dominance in the computer industry, many argue that this held back the development of the personal computer by years. (Not IBM’s late-to-the-party “PC” brand, but computers for one person that can fit on a desk.)

In the case of the Internet, it appears that people know that it exists and what it is, but feel as though the comparison of alternatives is for some reason not relevant.

You may not know that, like the Web, the Internet has a set of obscure cousins; x.25, for example, still offers similar capabilities.*2

You might counter that the Internet holds a position somewhat like that of the railways, wherein diversity of leadership and operating principle can lead to waste and corruption: surely, the more railways that are on the same track gauge the better, leading to more interoperability?

This is challenging indeed. I say, however, that we need to make a trade-off: standardization and even centralization can be convenient, but when absolute, they strangle us.

Let me put it this way: those arguing for railway centralization have good arguments; however, if you want to get somewhere, you can still take a car, plane or boat. When it comes to information transmission, what is the alternative to the Internet over wires owned by colossal ISPs?

Heroic people operate amateur networks: some via satellite, some local over WiFi, some run packet-switched radio. We owe a lot to these people, who maintain essentially the only alternative we have: it’s mostly Internet standards-based, with a little x.25, but it’s something.

What I want, and what I think our society needs, is an alternative to the Internet that is as straightforward as choosing to take a car instead of a train. Don’t mistake this for a breathless exaltation of the free market: I just don’t think that the right number of viable alternatives when choosing an information network is 1.

Here the depoliticization is partial: we know the Internet is there, but are somehow happy for other people to shape its structure and operation, and don’t care that we can’t compare alternatives.

Apathetic awareness

The third attitude is a common posture toward our biggest tech companies — Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. — which all control monopolies. My friends and colleagues often feel that it is immoral for such companies to maintain such monopolies and/or are frustrated by their offerings, but they often do not look into alternatives, or know about alternatives but don’t try them.

Often, the alternatives are much better:

• You can replace Google Search with Duck Duck Go or Ecosia, for example; the latter is somewhat troubling in that it aggregates other search engines’ results (such as Microsoft’s Bing) but is has a strong environmental stance, and even Microsoft’s pushback against Google’s monopoly is useful.
• You can replace Facebook’s social networking features with tools like Mastodon or Microblog, or even just call or email your friends.
• For Microsoft’s Windows operating system, for consumer purposes, the GNU/Linux offerings are excellent, with great options for beginners. When someone tells you Linux is hard, ignore them: do your own research and make your own choices. For enterprise purposes, e.g. for those requiring support and uptime-guarantees, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is out there for you.
• In place of Amazon, for books, one can use Better World Books, which donates to charity and prioritizes eco-friendliness.

Unlike with the Internet and the Web (non-profit, open source standards) the above companies are colossal and usually profitable: it is in their interest that you stay apathetic and ignorant. Myths like “Linux is hard,” “Google is the only good search engine” and “I need Amazon” are worth a lot of money. I recommend, if you don’t already, automatic and intense skepticism towards any claim in this style.

A screenshot from my computer: I use the popular user shell GNOME, which is straightforward, simple, and surprisingly macOS-like.

Here, the depoliticization is miserable: we all know these companies exist, their products and services depress us, but we’ve got it in our heads that the people who run them are in charge somehow and there’s nothing we can do about it.

It’s easy to finger-wag. I know how hard and time-consuming it is to research and change our habits. I know that even thinking about switching from these companies is daunting. I am lucky never to have developed a Windows “habit,” but am painfully kicking mine with Amazon, Facebook and Google.

We can’t give up the fight: our minds, communities and ecosystem will not survive otherwise.

What should we do?

I had a conversation with two people at a networking event the other day. The subject turned to AI, and I asked what they thought of the criticisms against it. Even before I had finished my sentence, they both assumed that I was referring to AI “taking people’s jobs” (which is only one criticism) and answered in quickfire. One said “AI won’t take people’s jobs.” and the other said “AI is already taking people’s jobs and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

This feeling is common in response to my above concerns about monopoly: there’s nothing we can do, people are too lazy/ignorant/busy. This is a real charmer: to say in response to unethical monopolies — or as my acquaintance did in response to people losing their livelihoods to enrich AI supercorporations like Open AI and Google — that people are too wretched to seize something better.

There’s also something very unsettling about people cutting you off to give contradictory answers to half your question in defense of the thing making them money for less effort than before. This is the depoliticization deal: you get money and convenience, and in return you shut up and don’t criticize.

I disagree with the idea that people won’t seize something better. I sense an overall feeling of injustice and unease. The recent annoyance at Twitter and Facebook is small but useful. If we take action, it could be like Hunter S. Thompson said of San Francisco in the 60s, “You could strike sparks anywhere.”

Indeed, we can and have taken unethical actions and organizations to task: drunk driving used to be common-practice, tobacco companies held publicly that nicotine was not addictive, and, as mentioned above, IBM used to stultify the computer industry with its monopoly: no more.

Of course, everyone can’t be interested in everything: it’s right that each person cares about different things. But I think that some subjects are important enough for us to help everyone to know a few pieces of information.

We should think about and teach technology not as either a bore to learn in order to be “employable” or a regrettable brain-rot dispenser, but as a political fight between those who wish to use technology to control and/or extract profit, and those who want to shape it into a tool of freedom.

Moreover, we should:

1. Know about the technology we use and how it works
2. Set up new organizations to build technology the right way
3. Pressure companies to change
4. Buy from a smaller company where possible to save it from monopoly competition, especially if it is more ethical
5. Join and participate in the organizations that set monopoly standards, like the Internet Society and the World Wide Web Consortium

Synthesis

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

— Linus’ Law

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is saying that free/open source software can be as good or higher quality than proprietary software — despite the fact that many (but not all) of its creators are volunteers — because its openness allows huge numbers of people to participate, and use scale of numbers rather than time (or even skill) to spot and fix issues with the software.

I propose similar action towards our tech companies. We must learn, pressure and participate ourselves. Enough of us, pushing as hard as we can, can do for technology what we did for the ozone layer.

In his book Literary Machines (1981), Nelson splits people into groups according to how they relate to technology (apologies for the prickly names):

1. Technoids, who naturally embrace technology and who are drawn to creating it more by the thrill of technical problem-solving than by making the world better.
2. Fluffies, who naturally shun technology, and are alienated by colossal, inflexible systems and care most about achieving social change.

Today things are broadly the same, except for the fact that the Fluffies have mostly given up and embraced technology. You could say that, today, the mottos of these groups are:

1. Technoids: “Act fast and break things.”
2. Fluffies:*3 “It just works.”

Nelson descried a third group, Systems Humanists, who use an attachment to problem-solving (like the Technoids) to solve social problems (like the Fluffies). I call you to join our number, to get political, and to say our motto: “The purpose of computers is human freedom.”

*1 Note that “the Web” was already in use to refer to something other than the technology we’re talking about, unlike “the Internet.”

*2 Indeed, there appears not to be a common term for the category of network that includes the Internet and x.25: I recommend the term CNAS (computer network of arbitrary scale).

*3 Only those who have given up and now use computers.