Technology and (Dis)Empowerment: A Call to Technologists

"...how we can build a movement to ensure that technology becomes an unambiguous force of social good and transforms the world rapidly into a more equitable and fair ecosystem, capable of handling the grave impending challenges of inequality, exploitation, poverty, and climate change that we face today." - Aaditeshwar Seth

This book is based on Gram Vaani's experiences with the use of voice-based participatory media technologies for community empowerment. Its primary argument is that the goal of technology should be to overturn unjust societal structures and that technologists should take steps to ensure that their labour gets channeled singularly toward the goal of empowering the weak and oppressed. Specifically, the book:

• Distinguishes between the ends and means that a technology project may aim to meet. A social good project must clearly define its end goals. However, many information and communication technology (ICT) for development projects adopt generic ethics statements that focus only on the means - "do no harm" guardrails the projects should follow - and this approach, as argued here, is not sufficient.
• Stresses that technology should be meant to bring power-based equality in the world by removing unjust hegemonic structures that perpetuate structural injustice. If this is not the goal, then technology often tends to reproduce inequalities - being wielded more easily by those who can gain access to it, or design it for their own agendas.
• Delves deeper into the need to go beyond ensuring safety and equity, or goals like power-based equality, not only in the technology design but in the management of the technology, too. Most complexities at the management stage arise at the socio-technical interface when technologies begin to be used by people, which invariably leads to surprises and unforeseen situations largely due to the complexity of the world that cannot be modeled completely at the design stage itself. Feedback processes to learn about these gaps, humility to acknowledge them, and proactiveness to correct them by evolving better policies or re-designing the technology systems, become essential.
• Borrows from the concepts of appropriate technology by E.F. Schumacher and the Scandinavian methods of participatory design to emphasise that the users of a technology system should be involved in its design and management. Only when the users understand the technology can they steer it from avoiding harms in their diverse local contexts. This has always been a key principle for Gram Vaani and led them to develop the hybrid online-offline Mobile Vaani model - where the online technology is governed by an offline team of community volunteers. It is the volunteers who are able to ensure a close embedding of Mobile Vaani within the communities, convey editorial preferences for the content carried on their platform, and ensure that all operations adhere to the ethical principles of inclusion and empowerment of the weak and oppressed. At this point, the technology simply becomes an infrastructure, and community institutions such as the Mobile Vaani volunteer clubs do the rest.
• Discusses what might prevent technologists from following these principles. For example, profit-seeking goals of corporations or social control goals of the state (and often interlocks between the two) can lead to harms such as surveillance-based models that at worst are designed to disempower individual and group freedom or at best are prone to errors. In this context, the book is a call to technologists to realise their position of strength and to take steps to ensure that their labour is indeed able to lead to empowering effects for the weak. Collectives of technologists that can change their organisations from within, public spheres that connect technologists with end-users of their technologies, and new economic structures such as the commons, may hold the key to the way forward.
• Argues that such a value-driven ethos for technologists can exist only within the morally grounded rules of behaviour that democracy tries to create for society. Pluralism to listen to diverse voices, learn from them, and change one's preferences based on these insights is what drives democracy. For their own humanism, technologists have a role here, too, to build meta-social good infrastructures that strengthen democracy through pluralism and structures of accountability and transparency. Participatory media systems such as those created by Gram Vaani, and the community media ecosystem in general, can enable deliberation and learning. More strongly, media as a tool in the hands of activists and communities, and not as a mechanism for propaganda wielded by the powerful, can ultimately increase freedoms and democracy.

From the publisher:

"The complex relationship between technology and social outcomes is well known and has recently seen significant attention due to the deepening of technology use in many domains. This includes issues such as the reproduction of inequality due to the digital divide, threats to democracy due to misinformation propagated through social networking platforms, algorithmic biases that can perpetuate structural injustices, hardships caused to citizens due to misplaced assumptions about the gains expected from the use of information technology in government processes, and simplistic beliefs that technology can easily lead to social development.

This timely work draws attention to the varying factors by which technology often leads to disempowerment effects. Featuring a Foreword by Tim Unwin, UNESCO Chair in ICT4D, Seth makes a call to technologists to burst the technology optimism bubble, build an ethos for taking greater responsibility in their work, collectivize to similarly shape the internal governance of their organizations, and engage with the rest of society to strengthen democracy and build an acceptance that the primary goal of technology projects should be to bring equality by overturning unjust societal structures."