Technology policy is also cultural policy
Technological companies should be held to a higher standard
Less than a week from now, the voting population of Canada will make a definitive comment on the past 11 weeks of campaigning. For the past few weeks, this column has focused on issues of technology policy that were ignored on the campaign trail. This week, it focuses on the truth germane to those issues: technology policy is cultural policy.
Traditionally, the divide between the arts and sciences has been useful for students and professionals deciding on career paths, provided they are privileged enough to make that choice. But dividing intellectual and academic pursuits in that way has resulted in a false dichotomy that creates more problems than it actually solves. In separating the humanities from the sciences, we have separated the people who use technology from the people who develop it, and replaced qualitative evaluation with an endless parade of push-button metrics. This is the emoji-fication of sentiment writ large: users whose primary recourse for participating in the development of life-changing technologies never reaches beyond deciding how many stars it receives in an app store.
Take Peeple, the “Yelp for people” app that wants to let humans “rate” each other as though they were objects. Membership is not required for a rating; anyone with your phone number can rate you. Negative comments are given a 48-hour waiting period, because founders Julia Cordray and Nicole McCullough seem to think people enjoy prolonged conversations with stalkers, harassers and bullies. When the Internet cried out in terror, Cordray and McCullough wrote a passiveaggressive non-apology about how tragically misunderstood their special snowflake app was. The app’s public relations were such stunning failures of both empathy and technological foresight that Internet debunker Snopes even poked Peeple to see if it was real.
Meanwhile, in China, tech giants Alibaba and Tencent have developed very similar apps. Because China lacks a centralized credit scoring system, the creditors themselves have developed multiple systems using data stripped from social media networks, credit card purchases, and the content of online conversation (including, naturally, online conversation about politics). And at the same time, the Chinese government is working on their own solution to the credit score problem, and according to documents released last year, it intends to design a credit score that rates and rewards, among other things, “sincerity.” Perhaps Peeple was simply founded in the wrong country, for the wrong government.
From the Sony hack to the Ashley Madison hack, from Edward Snowden to Jennifer Lawrence, this year has seen unprecedented breaches of privacy and security. And those breaches are possible because the companies who were breached treated their data like ones and zeros, not human lives. Unless you’re a fembot coded into existence by Ashley Madison or some other Internet long con, the person on the other side of a profile is just that: a person. But we live in an era and use technologies that encourage and thrive on objectification. And the more our data is commodified, the more our identities are transformed from the complex to the simple, from the distinctive to the statistical. The cost of lost privacy is not simply financial, it is human. The ongoing harassment of women online should make that clear. And whatever government takes on the leadership of Canada in the New Year should understand that.
Technology isn’t an issue that Canadians should consider only when thinking about how people with access to the Conservative database suppressed votes with robocalls in 2011. Or whether the former head of CSEC, Canada’s version of the NSA, thinks Canadians are stupid.
Or how much information Canadian companies share with the NSA itself. Humans are tool-users. Our technologies think for us, speak for us, and act for us.
We are more than machines, and hold ourselves to a higher standard. It’s time we started holding our technologies, and the industries surrounding them, to that higher standard as well.