Technology Is Political. No Matter How Much People Try to Say It's Not.
Talofa Reader,
In my career and in life, the following statements I've heard repeatedly make me want to headbutt a brick wall to save me from a lawsuit:
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"Don't bring politics into x, y, z!"
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"I don't do office politics."
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"I don't care about politics, I just want to write code!"
Sure, they're all worded differently but essentially all say the same thing, which is, "I don't understand how society and human beings work and I'm basically an underdeveloped human being."
I mean, even look at the recent uproar over a women's rugby team doing a Haka that was critical of the government.
"Keep politics out of sports," scream the same crowd that tells everyone else to "harden up, change the channel if you don't like it".
Weakest demographic of human beings to ever exist.
Politics is in everything because people are in everything and people are inherently political beings shaped by the ideologies, values, and power structures around them.
This is just a fundamental understanding ofpeople, so it pains me to think this is missing from anyone's consciousness.
In terms of technology - not just the way people who work in tech think about politics, but just how anyone views technology, the most dangerous misunderstanding about technology is thatit's not political.
People think the technology is objective; it's just doing what it's programmed to do, abdicating it of any responsibility.
But the truth of the matter is, technology is very much political - in how it's created, developed, by whom, for whom, and why?
Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum.
It's developed within socio-political contexts that influence how it's designed, where it's deployed, and how it's used.
A great example of this is the development and debate around encryption technologies.
You have governments and law enforcement agencies on one side arguing that encryption helps criminals and that there should exist backdoors in the technology.
On the other side, you have privacy advocates and technologists counter that backdoors in encryption technologies inherently compromise the security of the technology, thereby making them vulnerable not just to law enforcement agenciesbut to malicious actors as well.
Here we’re talking about the mathematical algorithms that encrypt and secure data, how it's developed (with or without backdoors) and who it's developed for and against.
It’s very much the proverbial football being kicked between two sets of political ideologies.
The encryption debate has raged on for a long time now, but a lot has developed and evolved for tech over the years, and in the exact same way, the same political vulnerabilities for encryption are there for these new topics as well.
Let’s have a look at some of these topics shall we?