I love making tools and devices. Technologies such as cars, engines, electronics, science instruments or even, I shall admit, attack/defense technologies like guns, fighter aircrafts, ships, etc entice me. There seems to be an innocent joy on seeing and relating to how these machines work, unrelated to the political and social contexts where these are used/misused. The movements of the parts, their relationship with each other, technicalities of design, materials used, challenges to be solved within given resources, the histories and stories of evolution and uses, etc., all these make me glue in to the subject. My own journey as a maker has similar acts of learning new tools, designing within constraints, troubleshooting, struggling with materials and their properties, thinking about the end-use situations, identifying right machining methods and so on. As a maker the world is full of very interesting toys, one could happily get lost in. Except perhaps when one opens one’s senses to the real wide world.
While I love being a hardcore technical maker, I am also a sensitive human being, with feelings and emotions, living and absorbing signals from a complicated and dynamic society around myself. Environmental crisis, class divide, hate, unfair distribution of resources and power, insult and oppression of the unfortunate by the fortunate, the examples just go on and on. I can’t stop noticing them, not being affected by them, not asking myself how am I, with my relatively immense privileges, adding to the tragedy. It makes me deeply divided in conflict. And to discover that so much of technology is directly involved in increasing the unfairness in the society and cause environmental destruction, is a real tragedy. For many years I have had this struggle, and it still continues. I am only beginning to ask deeper and better questions to myself. I have changed my profession a few times in an attempt to find a place where I could practice my love of making while also behaving as a conscientious designer. And I know that many fellow technologists do not have this privilege, or worse, do not wish to acknowledge and practice this privilege.
My main conflicts with modern industrial technology lies in the following observations:
- 90% of the population are poor, and can’t afford basic technologies for basic quality of life. Remaining 10% live a highly affluent life, causing immense social stress, environmental destruction, and inequality. Technological divide is significantly observable in these 2 broad classes.
- Much of the technology in use, is of exotic nature. It costs a lot to make (environmental costs + economic costs + social costs), creates a lot of byproduct pollution, after use it itself contributes to human waste pollution, perpetuates direct inequality in the society.
- Much of the technology disconnects us from our surroundings, be it escape via entertainment and social media, to escaping waste by dumping it elsewhere out of sight and senses. Often technology helps us work from a clean home while ordering environmental destruction elsewhere.
- Technology causes subduing of senses and their connection with the world. Each sense, especially audio, vision and tactile interacts increasingly with technology, rather than the real world. We have earbuds in our ears, and even when without them, we are drowned by industrial noises, traffic, firecrackers, speakers, etc. We see through glasses of windows and high rise buildings, and more so via the digital interface. Our vision field is full of selected and curated technical objects like in a home or office environment or viewing the outside world from the safe confines of a moving car. Our minds have been bombarded with advertisements.
- Each new technology adds another convenience and comfort and each convenience distances us from the raw nature. As we know in ecology, any species requires a natural check and context to survive and survive sustainably. With technology we remove ourselves from nature, thereby avoiding any natural checks and any co-existential dependence on other species. On those species on which we depend, like dairy industry or agriculture, we have converted them into non-natural forms, more resembling industrial production units than naturally occurring species.
But since all of these are lofty concerns, I would rather like to focus on the makers of technology, my tribe and my territory.
Technology is often portrayed as being unbiased and neutral. It is argued that technology is designed while not worrying about who uses it, how and to what end. An aloofness of the maker is imbibed as the dominant technological culture of our times. A similar argument is used by the proponents of personal guns in the US or the proponents of nuclear weapons or even the people working in a nation’s defense industry. The arguments put forward by corporations sell a similar story. They say we make technology to serve the interests of a market and if we don’t do so, how will we survive? They say the market buyers will have the moral duty of when, where and how to use the technology while the makers of technology need not be burdened with such lofty philosophical and political questions. In short, makers of the most powerful augmentation of the human experience conveniently insulate themselves of the consequences of what they make.
Many proponents of the “tech is neutral” school of thought may agree that the world of technology is costly, hence we need to make the economy better (trickle down school of thought), so that more market opens up and technology becomes accessible. When it comes to environmental crisis, the argument is that technology by itself didn’t cause it. It allowed for the greed of the human being to be expressed instead, which turned out the way it is now. If the environmental crisis has to be controlled, the people who use technology should learn better, take it on themselves to not pollute or abuse the ‘gifts’ of technology. One may also argue that tech is the only way we will get A) a good quality of life for all B) solution to the environmental crisis and C) all novelty that the future has a potential to hold. In all cases, the maker of the technology, the producer of it are conveniently let off on the responsibility of technology.
Makers of technology, like me, the ones who are nerdy enough to pick up engineering/science as a career, essentially work in a super-hierarchy, far removed from the end-user as well as the context of use of their technology. A big chain of administration, sales, marketing personnel, bankers, market researchers, market forces block the direct view between the maker and the user. This distance automatically makes it impossible to control how the tech will be used, thus implying a kind of systemic neutrality by default. The distance also has the consequence that the maker no longer can design with a relevant enough understanding of the end-user/context, thereby making it mandatory that the end-user/context has to adapt instead to the technology. Such an arrangement implies that most technologies are meant for a niche section of the population which meets an arbitrary but absolutely necessary criteria for access. Criteria could be listed as those having adequate economic surplus, education and training to use such technologies, capacity to adapt one’s ability towards a remotely designed often miss-fitting technology and an unmet need which the said technology promises to satisfy. These criteria are stringent and non-negotiable, and therefore by design, technology only reaches a small proportion of the population.
An example could be found in the domain of assistive technology where one person’s adaptability to technology is quite limited, in contrast to the mainstream neuro-typical and body-typical population. The scope of adaptability also varies between individuals, or even as the individual grows older. Such a diversity is therefore never catered to by the mass production philosophy of the industrial model, which solely functions on the assumption that any individual, however unique, will and can morph into a standard “average” stereotypical consumer. Those who need customization, well they either should have a lot of money, like the defense industry or just struggle with a low quality of life, example being the people with disabilities.
To my naive eyes, I see more than 90% of a population, be it in India or in the world, not having access to technology. Technology seems to be the reserve of the top few percents of the population, although the statistics and sophistication of technology certainly has many variations within this range.
My thoughts expressed here originate from a certain despair. I see most people who do not have the money to buy technology not have access to technology. I see technology producers only be concerned with the small niche of the human population. I see technology as the prime driver of bringing conveniences to people (who can afford it). These conveniences only increase the distance between the users and their environment. In ecology we study that the most sustainable species is one where there are multiple other spices which co-exist and balance each other. If the number of a species grows, then ecosystem balances itself by increase in predation. If a predator or food species is removed from the system, dependent species may either increase into too many and upset the balance or may just die off due to lack of food, respectively. In a similar way I think the human species needs the ecological counterparts to balance itself. But conveniences brought in by technology are the key reason for our unbalanced and unchecked existence. Each technology essentially takes us away from being vulnerable to the ecosystem in a good and healthy way. Our state of the world is nothing but a demonstration of what disconnection looks like in reality. Technology makes us the evil gods, we destroy each other, and we destroy the ecosystem.
Who makes technology? People like me, makers who are good in the making of machines, who are perpetually fascinated by them. Who pays us? As you may know, the making of technology, its design, its various prototyping stages is an intensely resource intensive process. It takes a lot of time, lot of materials, a lot of testing, and a lot of failures to make a new technological change which may or may not lead to an ‘innovation’. No wonder it is amazingly costly to do hardware engineering. Having produced and failed multiple times in many such projects, I now can vouch for what I say – that its not easy to make hardware. But we makers are not in this game to find ease, is it? We love the technical challenges and get kicks out of them. And to keep this bunch of hardware nerds (like myself) going as well as the flow of materials and prototypes, there have to be significant economic resources to fund such experiments. Who pays for innovation in the hardware world? The government to some extent and mostly the private companies who see some future profits. Common people can’t fund hardware R&D, in the way it is known. All the people involved in these powerful places, have higher ups who they wish to impress, so that they can “survive” and grow. These higher ups have more higher ups, and the chain continues. By the time this impression chain reaches the top of the mountain, its far from the people it wants to serve. The sea of the willing, imagined people, is all they can look from the top, people those who can easily be clubbed as an average consumer. In terms of the government, this chain ends into political leaderships who are always deeply concerned about their own ‘survival’ in terms of votes and popularity. Both the bulk mass market and mass votes visionaries are similar in 1 aspect. They consider a small but powerful and noisy faction of the population as the whole “world”, it becomes their ‘bubble’. They also think in averages, and in large numbers. “Scale-up” is the business buzz word! As one operates away and distant from the people for whom one designs, the language used changes. Needs of the people, expressed in a nuanced and subtle language get trumped by popular buzz words which could be sold to the niche world. This niche crowd are also those people who were born into privileged societies, having access to parental exposure to technology and fashion trends. They are also less affected by local factors such geographic locations, local cultures, local climate and environments. In effect they are a completely disconnected, a different sub-species of the human population, only remotely related to the people expressing grave unmet needs. Yet, it is exactly these elite classes who have the capacity to pay and popularize a tech, irrespective of who needs it. The neglect of small communities with diverse sub-cultures, diverse languages, diverse needs, lack of economic resources thus becomes profound. The subsection of the human population with most critical needs (therefore implying non-adaptability) who are obviously without money and without politically relevant and consistent voice are no more the target audience of tech makers and promoters. Diversity is bad for either the politicians or the corporations, thus the need to standardize the population. Our educational system is a prime example of the “averaging” process to produce close to stereotypical consumers and voters.
My realizations may not hold true for other keen observers of the society, yet this is my experience. In my own work I try to navigate through this jigsaw of moral dilemmas and the joys and turbulence of making technology. My current idea of ‘good’ tech is one where the developer is in close proximity to the end-user, where the development and consumption of tech co-exist within an environmentally vulnerable ecosystem. I stress vulnerability here! This essentially implies smallness. The opensource movements, the citizen science movements, ideas and thoughts of various scientists, engineers, teachers and fellow makers help me articulate this, help me dance in hope of finding this dynamic sweet spot within the tech spectrum. Being a small developer allows me to have small overheads, and thus a small development fee structure affordable to the common people or NGOs. It also forces me to not be disconnected from the local circumstances, local cultures, local dreams of my end-users. As a cautionary note, what I am expressing here is still a dream in progress and I flicker about this central theme. My comfort/conveniences are pricey as compared to the people I wish to serve (being so privileged and all), and so is my social status. Both are in a state of hand-to-mouth existence often, which is a struggle at times. But I feel immensely lucky to have come across some teachers and practitioners, who are themselves in search of the sweet-spot. And no, these few folks are definitely not to be found in the elite (read elite-loving) tech organizations of the country like the IITs or the various government labs and tech-hubs. However, its sad to be locally alone and not being able to find day-to-day collaborators in this space. I am often surprised why so many bright minds can be seen pursuing often silly, artificially generated and sterile problems of the rich (particularly the defense, space tech, IT, bio industries), while the real and interesting challenges lay open for exploration in the places where a diverse population lives.
There is an old story of relevance here. A police officer finds a man frantically searching for something under a streetlight in the middle of a dark night. Worried, he asks, “Hey! What have you lost?”. The man says, “I’v lost my keys”. Policeman “Where did you see them last?”. Man, “In the alley over there”, pointing a finger to a dark unlit building far off on the other side of the road. Baffled, the policeman asks ” Then why the hell are you searching for it here?”. The man: “Its bright in here, I can see”. One does what one finds easy, and not necessarily what is right or necessary, it seems. This is the dilemma of us technologists.