This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately. It’s exciting to be living through the advent of what feels like a major technological change, but I feel like this isn’t a question we never really stop to think about. So much of our lives are immersed in technology and influenced by its creators. And pivoting from philosophy to a career in “tech” — by which society mostly means software these days, well, it leaves me feeling reflective.
I do know what kinds of enduring technologies exist that I love and I know what kinds of technologies exist that frustrate me. In my About page, I mention that I think that RSS, the bicycle and Wikipedia are examples of great technologies. I mean that in a normative (and moral) sense. They’re the sort of thing that I think are genuinely praiseworthy. So, let’s see what kind of a theory we can come up with to account for why.
What is technology?
This is our first stop. Did you expect anything different from someone who spent too much time in the philosophy room? I think how we answer this actually has important results for how we evaluate technologies.
Technologies, first off, are things that are produced, they’re the result of some kind of directed action.They also require the application of knowledge (whether explicit or implicit), in pursuit of achieving some kind of end. Technologies can be used for things other than their intended ends, but technologies have a functional goal that result from their standard application. Importantly, technologies also require that things be a certain sort of way in order for them to function. This is both social and material.
There’s a certain sort of weak normative force around technology. There is a sense that you should use it in certain ways that’s related to the original goals (e.g., you should hit a nail with the flat end of a hammer, not the claw, if you want to drive it in effectively). And technologies that are easy to use in that sort of way are good at what they do. This isn’t moral force, but technologies are forces for coordinating the world around us.
And it’s in that normative sense that I think we can evaluate technologies as good or bad on their own terms. This is a kind of functional goodness. It’s good for the task it was meant to be put to. We can also evaluate technologies in terms of the outcomes they are designed to produce and how they require us to organize materials and people (both of these are moral evaluations). A technology is organized towards achieving some kind of goal and it’s good or bad in terms of both the nature of the goal and in terms of how well/easily it facilitates achieving that goal. It’s genuinely important to evaluate technologies in terms of both of these parameters.
For example, license plate reader cameras are a remarkably effective technology in terms of the functional achievement of their goal. They enable the vast collection of data, the coordination of those datasets, and access to that data by law enforcement organizations. But the construction of a surveillance state is not a laudatory goal, as it is vulnerable to abuses by bad actors such as this officer who used it to stalk an ex-girlfriend. So I think we can use both senses when evaluating technologies.
But I don’t want to focus on bad technologies. I think that it’s more powerful if technologists (people who care about and deploy technology) have a sense of what good technologies are and use that to shape and coordinate their efforts. And it’s important to have these discussions so that we can evaluate new and emerging technologies and systems.
Good tech
The bicycle
Let’s start with the bicycle. Bicycles might seem a little weird to include in my understanding of technology, after all, this started with my reflections on software, right?
Bicycles have been around since the 19th century in various forms. The functional goal of the bicycle is to convey a person using two wheels, and the mechanical effort of the rider, translated through pedals. This goal - transporting a person, is pretty excellent. It allows them to achieve a variety of other goals in reduced time. It can also be recreational and social. So on the whole, the bicycle passes the goal check.
But how well do they achieve this goal? Well, this is an interesting point - because it depends on the bicycle and the conditions you find yourself in. It’s why we see so many different forms. My single speed road bike excels in flat urban environments. A downhill mountain bike with full suspension and knobbly tires could go places that my commuter could never do that. Both scenarios require a bit of expertise to use, and also the presence of certain kinds of infrastructure.
I think it’s important to note though, that the idea of a bicycle imposes very few costs or burdens on the world around it. In many ways, bicycles easily fit with the rest of our social and technological fabric. It doesn’t generate pollution and only requires me to eat and stay healthy to operate. With a few basic tools and parts, I can perform most of the maintenance my bicycle needs. This is an important part of why I think that it’s a good technology — it requires spaces where I can operate it (though those are mostly spaces that exist) and minimal upkeep that I can provide by myself.
There are some drawbacks however: manufacturers have specialized parts so the supply chain might not always be available. And I may be sweaty when I arrive at my destination. And it’s not a great means of conveyance for larger distances and using it in the winter is a bit of a hardship. But for getting groceries, a short commuting, or popping over to a coffee shop? It’s much better than a car.
I’ve had my bicycle for more than decade, and it was purchased used. It takes me all kinds of places. It’s fun, it’s relaxing, it’s reliable. It’s the sort of thing where I’m considering get another specialized bicycle so that I could ride more in harder conditions. It’s a good technology.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is interesting — the technology is built for the communal aggregation of knowledge. It’s a database and a front end that comes together to produce a website where anyone can functionally contribute knowledge. If it was just that, though, it’d be a horrible mess of edit wars and chaos. It’s also an organization, and a scheme of processes about how to make those contributions. It’s that social coordination through norms that makes it relatively successful.
People can attempt to coopt and influence it, but if a company attempts to use it for marketing purposes, these processes attempt to shove the whole enterprise back on to the rails. Strong norms regarding citations and point-of-view in authorship make it an excellent place to conduct initial research on a topic, pointing you to primary resources that can be the basis for successful direct research. In many ways, it’s the perfect secondary source to get you started, even if it’s a little messy at times.
Because Wikipedia is a collection of open knowledge, the practices, standards, and what is done on it, are all transparent. That’s how it builds it’s trust. It’s kind of remarkable that these are the things that the blockchain is supposed to provide. In part, I think this is because of the social goals behind both technologies, and that Wikipedia functions because of the ease and transparency of contributions. So, I think that Wikipedia is a great example of how the social dimensions of the technology work to set a standard.
It’s also not perfect. Standards and practices can vary within communities inside of the contributor culture. Learning and understanding Wikipedian culture and terms is a process. And low priority articles can tend to be messy. But it’s a genuinely impressive and vast collection of knowledge that is freely accessible on the internet, maintained by a non-profit and volunteers. It’s an astounding achievement of people coordinating effort, software, and practices to produce an objectively valuable resource.
RSS
I feel like folks who might find their way to my blog are familiar with RSS. It stands for really simple syndication. I feel like this is probably a little contentious as a candidate for inclusion, since it’s probably a thing that most people thought died out as blogs went out of fashion.
Here’s the basic idea behind RSS. If I publish a stream of content to the internet (say blog posts, podcast episodes, videos, etc.) I can have a single file on my website that summarizes the posts into a feed. People who would like to access the feed can use programs that are built to interpret that standard and consume the feed on their own devices.
So if you use a podcast aggregator, then there’s a pretty good chance that you use RSS. As someone who writes a blog, complete with an RSS feed, it’s easy to set up and configure, and when I publish changes to my website, the RSS feed updates automatically. So it’s pretty great from an author perspective.
From the perspective of someone consuming writing or podcasts, a feed aggregator/reader is a powerful tool. I can control how my tool presents content to me - and I have a chronological feed of posts from a range of sources. I can choose to bulk skip posts from particular aggressive publishers. It offers me a great deal of control about how I receive what you put out.
Why did these fade away? A big reason is that open content and advertising weren’t served by this mode of content delivery. And social networks began to provide streamlined, high engagement content. But I think that podcasts have been so viable shows that there’s ways to deliver content regularly. RSS is also a bit of a mess: as a standard it’s difficult to enforce, and different websites may use different versions of the feed. It’s an old standard that faces the difficult problem of being superseded by a new standard. It’s also difficult to monetize.
But the idea of integration of feeds is alive and well, and I think quite exciting in the ideas behind federated social media at Mastodon and Bluesky. Podcasts are a great reminder as to why this technology is great: enabling you to control the algorithm and build your own collections of media. So I’m optimistic for things to come, and will point to RSS as a powerful form of one-to-many communication.
Concluding thoughts
So, I’ve discussed a bunch of technologies and what makes them good or bad technologies. I think that we should celebrate good technologies. And that identifying them involves thinking about the goals they achieve, how we use them to achieve those goals, and what kinds of demands they make on the world. We live in an era where people are enthusiastic about technology because it enables us to do things (yes, the subtext is large language models/generative AI). Stepping back though, I think it’s important to be careful to think about how a technology works, what it requires of the world, and what it produces.
It’s important not just for personal or political reasons, but that as a worker and user of technology, having a framework for thinking about whether what I’m building or using is good is valuable professionally. For example — does it make sense to use an LLM for feedback over a linter? Or are there combinations that might be effective?
I’m going to use this reflection as a bit of a kick-off. I’ve been interested in critically thinking about technology for a while, but a 2023 interview with Meredith Whittaker tipped me off to the work of [Ursula Franklin]. In 1989, she gave the CBC Massey Lectures — which were collected into The Real World of Technology. Here’s what Whittaker has to say about Franklin’s lectures:
…an incredibly clear-eyed view of the dangers of social control related to computational technology, networking, database, and the early visions of what would become the Internet that were emerging around that time.
This early vision for the commercial internet, the idea that we would connect every computer to every other computer and this would create social benefit and economic benefit, looks strikingly similar to the promises being made today. If you read back to the primary documents you’re looking at incredibly familiar imaginaries: Health care is always available, education is free, all the world’s information is free. The promises haven’t changed, just the configuration of our social and economic lives. Her book was clear-eyed about some of these dangers, and very clear-eyed about how the information asymmetries that this technology would create could be used for social control.
As I read through it, I’ll post some of my thoughts to this blog. I think it’ll be interesting to chart the progress and if my views change as I work through it. I’ll post reflections chapter by chapter, and I’m looking forward to getting started.