[PeDAGoG] Book announcement - Technology and (Dis)Empowerment: A Call to Technologists

Thu Sep 8 11:19:14 CEST 2022

**

*Dear all,*

*

I teach at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT 
Delhi in India, and I am also the co-founder of Gram Vaani 
<https://gramvaani.org/>, a social technology enterprise that since many 
years has been providing voice-based participatory media services to 
rural communities.

I was working on a book and I am excited to announce that it is now 
published. It’s called Technology and (Dis)Empowerment: A Call to 
Technologists. It's an attempt to understand why technology often goes 
wrong and possibly how can it be done better. I argue that technologists 
have a strong role to play in ensuring that their creations do not 
disempower the people they were meant to support. I wanted to address 
the book towards technologists for several reasons. One, as an educator, 
to try and convince our students that they cannot simply outsource their 
morality to regulatory institutions or the markets, and in fact they 
need to actively shape these very institutions. Two, as a practitioner, 
I realized that there is no escape from having to continuously steer 
technologies to avoid harmful outcomes, so any technology design and 
management comes with its baggage of responsibility. Three, 
technologists are in a powerful position in the world today to affect 
change, and if done well then they can potentially make the world a 
better place.

I would love feedback from the PeDAGoG community on what methods can be 
used to constructively engage with technologists and students of 
engineering and design, and especially connect them with the actual real 
problems that need to be solved in society.

****

The book is available on Amazon.in 
<https://www.amazon.in/Technology-Dis-Empowerment-Call-Technologists-ebook/dp/B09V1349C4/ref=sr_1_1>, 
Amazon.com 
<https://www.amazon.com/Technology-Dis-Empowerment-Call-Technologists-ebook-dp-B09V1349C4/dp/B09V1349C4/>, 
Emerald 
<https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/technology-and-disempowerment/?k=9781803823942>, 
eBooks.com 
<https://www.ebooks.com/en-in/book/210514131/technology-and-dis-empowerment/aaditeshwar-seth/>, 
with previews at Google Books 
<https://books.google.co.in/books?id=k96DEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false>, 
and you can also write to me <mailto:aseth at gramvaani.org>for my local 
electronic version - I understand that the current pricing may be too 
high for retail purchases. The preface, introduction, and foreword (by 
Professor Tim Unwin 
<https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/tim-unwin(bfad958b-8f3b-410a-9073-9645be169a85).html>) 
are available here 
<https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~aseth/Technologies_that_Empower.pdf>. Some 
comments by eminent researchers and practitioners are mentioned towards 
the end of this email, and below I try to summarize a few of the key 
points I have tried to make in the book.

**

First, I try to distinguish between the ends and means that a technology 
project may aim to meet. Most ICTs for development projects are unique 
in having identified some clear end goals for the projects, and which I 
found in Gram Vaani’s case helped provide us with a compass - a guiding 
light - to aim towards and to continuously steer our decision making to 
meet these goals. However, many technology projects adopt generic ethics 
statements that focus only on the means - do no harm guardrails that the 
projects should follow - and this I argue is not sufficient, like a ship 
without a compass to point it in the right direction. It could take the 
ship to many different destinations, not all of which may be desirable. 
A social good project must clearly define its end goals.

Second, what should these end goals be for a social good project? I 
argue 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. I draw on 
works by researchers like Tim Unwin who argue for the same reason 
<https://academic.oup.com/book/27718>that technology should be designed 
only for the poor, feminist scholars like Iris Marion Young who define 
the purpose of justice 
<https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691152622/justice-and-the-politics-of-difference>itself 
as showing the path to remove the underlying processes that cause 
structural injustice, Amartya Sen who makes similar arguments in terms 
of freedoms 
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/development-as-freedom-9780192893307?lang=en&cc=nl>, 
and Marxists like Harry Braverman 
<https://nyupress.org/9780853459408/labor-and-monopoly-capital/>or 
technology historians like David Noble 
<https://www.routledge.com/Forces-of-Production-A-Social-History-of-Industrial-Automation/Noble/p/book/9781412818285>who 
document the processes through which technology often serves the agendas 
of the powerful.

Third, I delve deeper into the need to go beyond ensuring safety and 
equity, or goals like power-based equality, in the technology design 
alone. I argue that attention should be paid to ensuring the same 
ethical principles in the management of the technologytoo. I define 
management as what comes post-design when technology is deployed 
<https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~aseth/limits-of-design.pdf>, and I argue 
that it is important to make this distinction between design and 
management because often in practice the teams of technologists playing 
these roles are distinct and the methods employed by them are also 
distinct. Most complexities at the management stage arise at the 
socio-technical interface when technologies begin to be used by people, 
and invariably lead to surprises and unforeseen situations largely due 
to the complexity of the world that cannot be possibly modeled 
completely at the design stage itself. Feedback processes to learn about 
these gaps, the humility to acknowledge them, and proactiveness to 
correct them by evolving better policies or re-designing the technology 
systems, become essential.

Fourth, I borrow from the concepts of appropriate technology by E.F. 
Schumacher <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful>and the 
Scandinavian methods of participatory designto emphasize that the users 
of a technology system should be involved in its design and management. 
Only once the users understand the technology and are able to 
un-blackbox it, can they steer the technology from avoiding harms and to 
neatly handle exceptions in their diverse local contexts. This has 
always been a key principle for us at Gram Vaani, and led us to develop 
the hybrid online-offline Mobile Vaani model 
<https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~aseth/camera-ready-1598-4953-1-PB.pdf>- 
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 the platform, and ensure that all 
operations adhere to the ethical principles of inclusion and empowerment 
of the weak and oppressed. We have always endeavoured to get to a point 
where the technology simply becomes an infrastructure, and community 
institutions such as the Mobile Vaani volunteer clubs do the rest.

Fifth, I discuss what might prevent technologists from following these 
principles above. I delve in detail into the current structures of the 
market and state that often compromise these values, either by design or 
by sidelining these principles in favour of other objectives. 
Profit-seeking goals of corporations, or social control 
<https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-like-a-state/>goals 
of the state, and often interlocks between the two, infiltrate multiple 
spheres that lead to fallouts from technology. They infiltrate 
organizational culture by creating role-based segregation and moral 
buffers for various teams. They influence the incentive structures for 
technologists by emphasizing profit-maximizing metrics rather than 
impact-maximizing or harm-avoiding metrics. And in the current context 
of increasing digitization led by centralized architectures they 
inevitably lead to surveillance based models 
<https://profilebooks.com/work/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/>which 
at worst are designed to disempower individual and group freedom, or at 
best are highly error prone and often not scaffolded by fault-managing 
systems like for grievance redressal.

This is why the book is really a call to technologists to realize their 
position of strength in today’s world and take steps to ensure that 
their labour is indeed able to lead to empowering effects for the weak. 
This is not just a hope. I rely on Marx’s concept of humanism here. For 
Marx, social relationships 
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm>arise 
from relations of production and consumption, and positive social 
relationships are those that create genuine use-value, without coercion 
or instrumental use of others. Technologists are workers too, and I 
believe we are driven by these same desires of reclaiming our humanism. 
I strongly believe that sooner or later technologists will indeed see 
through the fog that often surrounds them and paralyzes them from taking 
deliberate action towards social good and only that. Collectives of 
technologists that can change their organizations 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 for 
the way forward.

Finally, I argue that such a value-driven ethos for technologists can 
exist only within the morally grounded rules of behavior that democracy 
tries to create. Pluralism to listen to diverse voices, learn from them, 
and change 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. I argue 
that participatory media systems such as those created by Gram Vaani, 
and the community media ecosystem in general, are crucial for this 
purpose. These systems enable deliberation and learning, and see the 
media as a tool in the hands of activists and communities to increase 
freedoms and democracy, and not as a mechanism for propaganda wielded by 
the powerful.

**

*I look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas on how we can build a 
movementto 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. *

****

And if at all relevant then do also reach out to us at Gram Vaani for 
any collaborations in the space of social entitlements and rights 
<https://gramvaani.org/mar-21-delivery-of-social-protection-entitlements-in-india/>for 
rural communities and industrial sector workers, and explore new 
directions in improving gender equality by creating women-driven 
community media platforms 
<https://gramvaani.org/meri-awaz-meri-pehchan/>, improve natural 
resource management by making it easier for communities to demand 
relevant water conservation structures and adopt alternate land-use 
practices <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvU1T10oTa4>, and design more 
appropriate community and health-worker facing applications for public 
health systems <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGbCu--Z1HQ>that can put 
the power of data in the hands of the users.

sincerely

Aadi

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Given the enormous influence and control of technologies over our lives, 
an ethical enquiry into their development, use and ownership is of vital 
importance. This book provides an incisive account of how state and 
market-led technologies have exacerbated socio-economic and 
environmental injustice, and conversely, how technologies based on the 
ethics of plurality, diversity, power-based equality, freedom and 
participation can help the movement towards justice and sustainability. 
Seth's call is not for rejecting technology, but for paradigm shifts 
towards more socially engaged technology and technologists.

-- Ashish Kothari: Kalpavriksh, Vikalp Sangam and Global Tapestry of 
Alternatives

If you want to use information technology to make a positive difference 
in the world, then you need to read this book. Aadi Seth combines 
careful analysis of the interplay between technology design and 
socio-political processes with a wealth of practical experience to 
identify key challenges that efforts around IT for Good will always have 
to face.

-- Andy Dearden: Professor (Emeritus) Interactive Systems Design, 
Sheffield Hallam University

Professor Aaditeshwar Seth has spent years developing technologies 
through Gram Vaani, a social enterprise delivering a voice-based social 
media platform in northern India. Based on wide-ranging scholarship and 
hard-won experience, he counters market values with an approach to 
social impact that takes ethics and socio-technical theories seriously. 
If you're a technologist hoping to contribute to social good, this book 
will keep you honest!

-- Kentaro Toyama: Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan

What comes out most importantly in the text is Aadi's two-fold firm 
conviction - one, that a technological community committed towards 
social good is indeed possible; and two, that dividing lines across 
technologists and ordinary people can be bridged, and this is what he 
has argued for. I hope that the technological community engages with 
these arguments.

-- Rahul Varman: Professor, Department of Industrial & Management 
Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

*

-- 
Aaditeshwar Seth
Computer Science and Engineering
IIT Delhi

http://www.cse.iitd.ernet.in/~aseth
http://act4d.iitd.ernet.in/
https://gramvaani.org/
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