Technology Mediating Relationships

In a May 2020 essay, @NaomiAKlein explains how Silicon Valley is exploiting the COVID19 crisis as an opportunity to reframe a long-standing vison of an app-driven, gig-fueled future. Until recently, Klein notes, this vision was being sold to us in the name of convenience, frictionlessness, and personalization. Today we are being told that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe. Klein fears that this dubious promise will help to sweep away a raft of legitimate concerns about this technological vision.

In a subsequent interview with Katherine Viner, Klein emphasizes the importance of touch. In order to sell a touchless technology, touch has been diagnosed as the problem.

In his 1984 book, Albert Borgmann introduced the notion of the device paradigm. This means viewing technology exclusively as a device (or set of devices) that deliver a series of commodities, and evaluating the technical features and powers of such devices, without having any other perspective. A device is an artefact or instrument or tool or gadget or mechanism, which may be physical or conceptual. (Including hardware and software.)

According to Borgmann, it is a general trend of technological development that mechanisms (devices) are increasingly hidden behind service interfaces. Technology is thus regarded as a means to an end, an instrument or contrivance, in German: Einrichtung. Technological progress increases the availability of a commodity or service, and at the same time pushes the actual device or mechanism into the background. Thus technology is either seen as a cluster of devices, or it isn't seen at all.

However, Klein suggests that COVID19 might possibly have the opposite effect.

The virus has forced us to think about interdependencies and relationships. The first thing you are thinking about is: everything I touch, what has somebody else touched? The food I am eating, the package that was just delivered, the food on the shelves. These are connections that capitalism teaches us not to think about.

While Klein attributes this teaching to capitalism, where Borgmann and other followers of Heidegger would say technology, she appears to echo Borgmann's idea that we have a moral obligation not to settle mindlessly into the convenience that devices may offer us (via Stanford Encyclopedia). This leads to what Borgmann calls Focal Practices.

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Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A philosophical inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 1984)

Naomi Klein, Screen New Deal (The Intercept, 8 May 2020). Reprinted as How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic (The Guardian, 13 May 2020)

Katherine Viner, Interview with Naomi Klein (The Guardian, 13 July 2020)

Peter-Paul Verbeek, Devices of Engagement: On Borgmann's Philosophy of Information and Technology (Techné, SPT v6n1, Fall 2002)

David Wood, Albert Borgmann on Taming Technology: An Interview (The Christian Century, 23 August 2003) pp. 22-25

Wikipedia: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Phenomenological Approaches to Ethics and Information Technology - Technological Attitude

Ethics of Transparency and Concealment

Last week I was in Berlin at the invitation of the IEEE to help develop standards for responsible technology (P7000). One of the working groups (P7001) is looking at transparency, especially in relation to autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. In this blogpost, I want to discuss some more general ideas about transparency.

In 1986 I wrote an article for Human Systems Management promoting the importance of visibility. There were two reasons I preferred this word. Firstly, "transparency" is a contronym - it has two opposite senses. When something is transparent, this either means you don't see it, you just see through it, or it means you can really see it. And secondly, transparency appears to be merely a property of an object, whereas visibility is about the relationship between the object and the viewer - visibility to whom?

(P7001 addresses this by defining transparency requirements in relation to different stakeholder groups.)

Although I wasn't aware of this when I wrote the original article, my concept of visibility shares something with Heidegger's concept of Unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). Heidegger's work seems a good starting point for thinking about the ethics of transparency.

Technology generally makes certain things available while concealing other things. (This is related to what Albert Borgmann, a student of Heidegger, calls the Device Paradigm.)

In our time, things are not even regarded as objects, because their only important quality has become their readiness for use. Today all things are being swept together into a vast network in which their only meaning lies in their being available to serve some end that will itself also be directed towards getting everything under control. Levitt

Goods that are available to us enrich our lives and, if they are technologically available, they do so without imposing burdens on us. Something is available in this sense if it has been rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy. Borgmann

I referred above to the two opposite meanings of the word "transparent". For Heidegger and his followers, the word "transparent" often refers to tools that can be used without conscious thought, or what Heidegger called ready-to-hand (zuhanden). In technology ethics, on the other hand, the word "transparent" generally refers to something (product, process or organization) being open to scrutiny, and I shall stick to this meaning for the remainder of this blogpost.

We are surrounded by technology, we rarely have much idea how most of it works, and usually cannot be bothered to find out. Thus when technological devices are designed to conceal their inner workings, this is often exactly what the users want. How then can we object to concealment?

The ethical problems of concealment depend on what is concealed by whom and from whom, why it is concealed, and whether, when and how it can be unconcealed.

Let's start with the why. Sometimes people deliberately hide things from us, for dishonest or devious reasons. This category includes so-called defeat devices that are intended to cheat regulations. Less clear-cut is when people hide things to avoid the trouble of explaining or justifying them.

(If something is not visible, then we may not be aware that there is something that needs to be explained. So even if we want to maintain a distinction between transparency and explainability, the two concepts are interdependent.)

People may also hide things for aesthetic reasons. The Italian civil engineer Riccardo Morandi designed bridges with the steel cables concealed, which made them difficult to inspect and maintain. The Morandi Bridge in Genoa collapsed in August 2018, killing 43 people.

And sometimes things are just hidden, not as a deliberate act but because nobody has thought it necessary to make them visible. (This is one of the reasons why a standard could be useful.)

We also need to consider the who. For whose benefit are things being hidden? In particular, who is pulling the strings, where is the funding coming from, and where are the profits going - follow the money. In technology ethics, the key question is Whom Does The Technology Serve?

In many contexts, therefore, the main focus of unconcealment is not understanding exactly how something works but being aware of the things that people might be trying to hide from you, for whatever reason. This might include being selective about the available evidence, or presenting the most common or convenient examples and ignoring the outliers. It might also include failing to declare potential conflicts of interest.

For example, the #AllTrials campaign for clinical trial transparency demands that drug companies declare all clinical trials in advance, rather than waiting until the trials are complete and then deciding which ones to publish.

Now let's look at the possibility of unconcealment. Concealment doesn't always mean making inconvenient facts impossible to discover, but may mean making them so obscure and inaccessible that most people don't bother, or creating distractions that divert people's attention elsewhere. So transparency doesn't just entail possibility, it requires a reasonable level of accessibility.

Sometimes too much information can also serve to conceal the truth. Onora O'Neill talks about the "cult of transparency" that fails to produce real trust.

Transparency can produce a flood of unsorted information and misinformation that provides little but confusion unless it can be sorted and assessed. It may add to uncertainty rather than to trust. Transparency can even encourage people to be less honest, so increasing deception and reducing reasons for trust. O'Neill

Sometimes this can be inadvertent. However, as Chesterton pointed out in one of his stories, this can be a useful tactic for those who have something to hide.

Where would a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. If there were no forest, he would make a forest. And if he wished to hide a dead leaf, he would make a dead forest. And if a man had to hide a dead body, he would make a field of dead bodies to hide it in. Chesterton

Stohl et al call this strategic opacity (via Ananny and Crawford).

Another philosopher who talks about the "cult of transparency" is Shannon Vallor. However, what she calls the "Technological Transparency Paradox" seems to be merely a form of asymmetry: we are open and transparent to the social media giants, but they are not open and transparent to us.

In the absence of transparency, we are forced to trust people and organizations - not only for their honesty but also their competence and diligence. Under certain conditions, we may trust independent regulators, certification agencies and other institutions to verify these attributes on our behalf, but this in turn depends on our confidence in their ability to detect malfeasance and enforce compliance, as well as believing them to be truly independent. (So how transparent are these institutions themselves?) And trusting products and services typically means trusting the organizations and supply chains that produce them, in addition to any inspection, certification and official monitoring that these products and services have undergone.

Instead of seeing transparency as a simple binary (either something is visible or it isn't), it makes sense to discuss degrees of transparency, depending on stakeholder and context. For example, regulators, certification bodies and accident investigators may need higher levels of transparency than regular users. And regular users may be allowed to choose whether to make things visible or invisible. (Thomas Wendt discusses how Heideggerian thinking affects UX design.)

Finally, it's worth noting that people don't only conceal things from others, they also conceal things from themselves, which leads us to the notion of self-transparency. In the personal world this can be seen as a form of authenticity; in the corporate world, it translates into ideas of responsibility, due diligence, and a constant effort to overcome wilful blindness.

If transparency and openness is promoted as a virtue, then people and organizations can make their virtue apparent by being transparent and open, and this may make us more inclined to trust them. We should perhaps be wary of organizations that demand or assume that we trust them, without providing good evidence of their trustworthiness. (The original confidence trickster asked strangers to trust him with their valuables.) The relationship between trust and trustworthiness is complicated. 

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UK Department of Health and Social Care, Response to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report on research integrity: clinical trials transparency (UK Government Policy Paper, 22 February 2019) via AllTrials

Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford, Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability (new media and society 2016) pp 1–17

Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (University of Chicago Press, 1984)

G.K. Chesterton, The Sign of the Broken Sword (The Saturday Evening Post, 7 January 1911)

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (Harper 1977) translated and with an introduction by William Lovitt

Onora O'Neill, Trust is the first casualty of the cult of transparency (Telegraph, 24 April 2002)

Cynthia Stohl, Michael Stohl and P.M. Leonardi, Managing opacity: Information visibility and the paradox of transparency in the digital age (International Journal of Communication Systems 10, January 2016) pp 123–137.

Richard Veryard, The Role of Visibility in Systems (Human Systems Management 6, 1986) pp 167-175 (this version includes some further notes dated 1999)

Thomas Wendt, Designing for Transparency and the Myth of the Modern Interface (UX Magazine, 26 August 2013)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Heidegger, Technological Transparency Paradox

Wikipedia: Confidence Trick, Follow The Money, Ponte Morandi, Regulatory Capture,Willful Blindness


Related posts: Defeating the Device Paradigm (October 2015), Transparency of Algorithms (October 2016), Pax Technica (November 2017), Responsible Transparency (April 2019), Whom Does The Technology Serve (May 2019)

Technology and The Discreet Cough

In fiction, servants cough discreetly to make people aware of their presence. (I'm thinking of P.G. Wodehouse, but there must be other examples.)

Technological devices sometimes call our attention to themselves for various reasons. John Ehrenfeld calls this presencing. The device goes from available (ready-to-hand) to conspicuous (visible).

In many cases this is seen as a malfunction, when the device fails to provide the expected commodity (obstinate) and thereby interrupts our intended action (obstructive).

However, in some cases the presencing is part of the design - the device nudging us into some kind of conscious engagement (or even what Borgmann calls focal practice).

Ehrenfeld's example is the two-button toilet flush, which allows the user to select more or less water. He sees this as "lending an ethical context to the task at hand" (p155) - thus the user is not only choosing the quantity of water but also being mindful of the environmental impact of this choice. Even if this mindfulness may diminish with familiarity, "the ethical nature of the task has become completely intertwined with the more practical aspects of the process". In other words, the environmentally friendly path has become routine (normalized).

Of course, people who are really mindful of the environmental or financial impact of wasting water may sometimes choose not to flush at all (following the slogan “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down”) or perhaps to wee behind a tree in the garden rather than use the toilet. It is quite possible that the two button flush might nudge a few more people to think this way. 

So sometimes a little gentle obstinacy on the part of our technological devices may be a good thing.

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Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago, 1984)

John Ehrenfeld, Sustainability by Design (Yale, 2008)

Pax Technica - The Conference

#paxtechnica Today I was at the @CRASSHlive conference in Cambridge to hear a series of talks and panel discussions on The Implications of the Internet of Things. For a comprehensive account, see @LaurieJ's livenotes.

When I read Philip Howard's book last week, I wondered why he had devoted so much of his book to such internet phenomena as social media and junk news, when the notional topic of the book was the Internet of Things. His keynote address today made the connection much clearer. While social media provides data about attitudes and aspirations, the internet of things provides data about behaviour. When these different types of data are combined, this produces a much richer web of information.

For example, Howard mentioned a certain coffee company that wanted to use IoT sensors to track the entire coffee journey from farm to disposed cup. (Although another speaker expressed scepticism about the value of this data, arguing that most of the added value of IoT came from actuators rather than sensors.)

To the extent that the data involves personal information, this raises political concerns. Some of the speakers today spoke of surveillance capitalism, and there were useful talks on security and privacy. (See separate post on Risk and Security)

In his 2014 essay on the Internet of Things, Bruce Sterling characterizes the Internet of Things as "an epic transformation: all-purpose electronic automation through digital surveillance by wireless broadband". According to Sterling, powerful stakeholders like the slogan 'Internet of Things' "because it sounds peaceable and progressive".

Peaceable? Howard uses the term Pax. This refers to a period in which the centre is stable and relatively peaceful, although the periphery may be marked by local skirmishes and violence (p7). His historical examples are the Pax Romana, the Pax Britannica and the Pax Americana. He argues that we are currently living in a similar period, which he calls Pax Technica.

For Howard, "a pax indicates a moment of agreement between government and the technology industry about a shared project and way of seeing the world" (p6). This seems akin to Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony, "the idea that the ruling class can manipulate the value system and mores of a society, so that their view becomes the world view or Weltanschauung" (Wikipedia).

But whose tech? Howard has documented significant threats to democracy from foreign governments using social media bots to propagate junk news. There are widespread fears that this propaganda has had a significant effect on several recent elections. And if the Russians are often mentioned in the context of social media bots and junk news, the Chinese are often mentioned in the context of dodgy Internet of Things devices. While some political factions in the West are accused of collaborating with the Russians, and some commercial interests (notably pharma) may be using similar propaganda techniques, it seems odd to frame this as part of a shared project between government and the technology industry. Howard's research indicates a new technological cold war, in which techniques originally developed by the authoritarian regimes to control their own citizens are repurposed to undermine and destabilize democratic regimes.

David Runciman talked provocatively about government of the things, by the things, for the things. (Someone from the audience linked this, perhaps optimistically, to Bruno Latour's Parliament of Things.) But Runciman's formulation foregrounds the devices (the "things") and overlooks the relationships behind the devices (the "internet of"). (This is related to Albert Borgmann's notion of the Device Paradigm.) As consumers we may spend good money on products with embedded internet-enabled devices, then we discover that these devices don't truly belong to ourselves but remain loyal to their manufacturers. They monitor our behaviour, they may refuse to work with non-branded spare parts, or they may terminate service altogether. As Ian Steadman reports, it's becoming more and more common for everyday appliances to have features we don't expect. (Worth reading Steadman's article in full. He also quotes some prescient science fiction from Philip K Dick's 1969 novel Ubik.) "Very soon your house will betray you" warns architect Rem Koolhaas (Guardian 12 March 2014).

There are important ethical questions here, relating to non-human agency and the Principal-Agent problem.

But the invasion of IoT into our lives doesn't stop there. McGuirk worries that "our countless daily actions and choices around the house become what define us", and quotes a line from Dave Eggers' 2013 novel, The Circle

"Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? … It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted."

So personal identity and socioeconomic status may become precarious. This needs more thinking about. In the meantime, here is a quote from Teston.

"Wearable technologies ... are non-human actors that interact with other structural conditions to determine whose bodies count."

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Related Posts

Witnessing Machines Built in Secret (November 2017)
Pax Technica - The Book (November 2017)
Pax Technica - On Risk and Security (November 2017)


References

Dan Herman, Dave Eggers' "The Circle" — on tech, big data and the human component (Metaweird, Oct 2013)

Philip Howard, Pax Technica: How The Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up (Yale 2015)

Laura James, Pax Technica Notes (Session 1, Session 2, Session 3, Session 4)

Justin McGuirk, Honeywell, I’m Home! The Internet of Things and the New Domestic Landscape (e-flux #64 April 2015)

John Naughton, 95 Theses about Technology (31 October 2017)

Ian Steadman, Before we give doors and toasters sentience, we should decide what we're comfortable with first (New Statesman, 10 February 2015)

Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things (2014). Extract via BoingBoing (13 Sept 2014)

Christa Teston, Rhetoric, Precarity, and mHealth Technologies (Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 46:3, 2016) pp 251-268 

Wikipedia: Cultural Hegemony, Device Paradigm, Hegemony, Principal-Agent problem

Understanding Technology

Many people talk about "technology" as if this word needed no definition or explanation. They imagine there is a clear boundary between "technology" and other stuff, and they perhaps also imagine that all technology-literate people have a common view as to where this boundary sits.

For example, I have recently been following a debate between Andrew McAfee (originator of the term "Enterprise 2.0") and several other bloggers, including Tom Graves and Oscar Berg. They complain that McAfee's definition of the term focuses on the software devices rather than on the emerging working practices (possibly supported by these software devices).

Both McAfee and his critics appear to use the word "technology" to refer to the software devices independently of their use. McAfee refers to something he wrote a couple of years back entitled It’s Not Not About the Technology, in which he criticizes two different versions of the statement "It's not about the technology". He argues that it is dangerous to ignore the details of a given piece of technology, and I presume he is referring to the software device. Berg complains that McAfee's definition is technology-centric, and McAfee's response is that his definition refers to people AND technology, from which I infer that he accepts a notion of "technology" that doesn't include people-using-technology.

This is an extremely common view of technology, but it is also highly problematic, as social critics of technology have long argued. Lewis Mumford preferred to talk about Technics, and Albert Borgmann has produced an extremely well-argued analysis of what he calls the Device Paradigm.

In my own work on technology adoption, I have always placed equal emphasis on assimilation (tuning the devices to fit the organization) and accommodation (tuning the organization to fit the devices). (The concepts of assimilation and accommodation come from Piaget via Leonard-Barton.) I don't find it helpful to think of software existing in some purely abstract shrink-wrapped world independently of being used, and I draw a more nuanced notion of technology and its development from sociologists such as Latour and Bijker.

In his latest post A comment to McAfee's "A Defining Moment", Oscar cites some statistics on social media and asks "How much would you attribute to technology for this development, and how much to human attitudes and behavior?"

But this question only makes sense on the assumption that we can cleanly separate "technology" from "human attitudes and behaviour", and I challenge this assumption. Graham Hill quotes an extreme example of how technology is inextricably intertwined with human attitudes and behaviour. "The mobile phone is the most personal of devices. It's like entering the customers bedroom. So brands need to be very sexy!" In other words, the mobile phone is not just a "piece of technology", it is a socially constructed artefact, what Latour calls a "black box".

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By the way, I don't agree with everything written by Bijker, Borgmann, Latour and Mumford, and I don't expect you to either. But I wish more people had read them, and I wish more people were prepared to think a bit more deeply about the nature of technology.

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Here's another example. In New Swimming World Records: Technology or Training?, Carlos Gershenson classified fancy swimsuits as "technology" but better techniques and understanding of fluid dynamics as "training", points out that different policies (regulations) apply to the two categories, and (rightly) asks where to draw the boundary?