Whose Interests Should Technology Serve?

It might seem like the question lacks nuance but how would you feel if we replaced “technology” with “electricity”? The way we experience tech and IoT in our lives these days — at home, in cities, or even on our bodies — requires us to put on a new lens when looking at those who make it and the powers at play. If commercial entities take over areas traditionally understood as public, such as mobility or public debate, wouldn’t we need to rethink the rules the online economy runs on to fit the new social dependencies?

“When the Amazon Kindle was released, their ebooks didn’t work with commonly used screen readers, making accessibility difficult for the blind community. The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in the United States campaigned to change this for years, in vain. Then Amazon won a $30 million USD contract with the New York City Department of Education in 2015 to create an ebook store for educators in 1,800 schools. City schools delayed a final vote until Amazon and the NFB came to an understanding. Since then, the Kindle now has a built-in screen reader and Amazon has improved accessibility across many products.”

This is a story we told in Mozilla’s 2019 Internet Health Report in an article highlighting the potential of cities as new champions for digital rights. The outcome of this battle was a win for children and educators in New York, but also for people around the world. A million dollar procurement contract and a commitment to serving the public interest helped persuade a giant corporation to change their revenue-driven mindset in this case.

Cases like this illustrate the question at the heart of the tech debate these days: whose interests should technology serve? I am aware that any questions around remodelling economy demand nuance and historical memory. I still think it’s more important than ever to ask them, even if fast answers won’t do the trick here.

At a time when over half of the global population is online and the internet has become so “general purpose”, more and more commercially-owned services have taken on the role of public utilities without fully assuming the responsibilities that come with it.

But should every tech be social good tech? The traditional incentive in business, the maximization of revenue, often drives results and product decisions well beyond social good goals, but then again, making a profit is inherent to doing business and foundational to economies.

At the same time the definition of ‘social impact tech’ broadens quickly, when we consider what an outsized impact our daily tech has on our wellbeing, relationships, finances or chances of advancement in life. Once purely a technical domain, the internet is now part of our social fabric and the online economy is driving painful social consequences that we just recently started waking up to. We all know the sins of the tech companies these days: hungry for ad revenue, they exploit our data, lure us into dark UX patterns, rush algorithmic solutions that seem to do more harm than good. Is it really so naive to strive for both a sound business plan and a genuine vision to, for lack of a better expression, “make the world a better place’’?

It feels important to define our aspirations for the human experience of the internet and not to just “go with the flow” because of how it’s always been.

A healthy society needs a healthy technology sector, and it can’t just be the job of understaffed and underfunded NGOs to think about how to encode societal values in technology.

We need all sorts of people thinking about and building technology aimed at providing broader benefits than financial return to shareholders. In order to advance the understanding of how we can shape a future that is beneficial to our societies we need (at least) three things to happen.

1. Restore trust

Who is best positioned to restore and expand citizens’ rapidly collapsing trust in tech? Governments, cities, and civil society are natural hubs for such trust: their mission and reason for existence, by design, is to represent the interest of the public (with the disclaimer that all such actors, and especially governments, need to be kept in check by the people). They have the mandate but what they also need (and often lack) is the competence.

Governments, city administrations, and advocacy groups need experienced and talented technologists to transform the way they work, face the inequalities and exploitation arising from technological change and frankly, shape that change by either creating regulatory and supportive environments for innovation or leading the innovation themselves. Local civic tech communities can and should play a vital role in bridging the still persisting cultural gap between administrations and citizens. Coalitions such as Cities for Digital Rights are a great way to advance such developments, either by learning from each other or inspiring a common commitment to incorporate human rights principles into the digital services they control or oversee.

Working together with aggressive commercial tech companies who drive “smart” developments and occupy more and more space in our daily urban environments is another challenge for the public administration but if done right, it could be turned into an opportunity to define and reshape the relationship in a way that benefits citizens. For example, opening and using vast, but often closed, mobility databases from Google, Uber or e-scooter companies could help answer policy and research questions in cities. But such data sharing agreements need to be carefully designed with a good understanding of what ‘public interest’ means, and a deep consideration of any bias and privacy concerns that this kind of data collection might entail. Debates like the one around Sidewalk Labs in Toronto, although often unnerving, help engage multiple stakeholders in a discussion on how to govern the new public-private marriage of urban tech.

2. Rebalance Power

Restoring trust via public institutions and civil society is not enough. There is a systemic power imbalance encoded in the commercial world of tech that needs to be challenged. Who is building for whom, and what are the incentives at play?

The power imbalance and accountability crisis between those who create value as users and those who make the decisions is today inseparable from the social challenges we are facing with rapid technology expansion. How do we create the right incentives that put people first in business?

Civil rights groups and politicians are increasingly demanding regulation of tech and breaking up monopolies, but this is not enough. We need the business world itself to change.

In our current capitalist system, there is very little wiggle room for a “people before profits“ approach, unless it is implemented by design. In order to succeed, such a design would need not only founders’ good intentions, but also clear business incentives aligned with funders, business models, and corporate governance structures.

In a world focused on the prestige and scale of investments that come with traditional Venture Capital funding, this is not an easy task, but a movement is emerging. Models like platform coops, steward ownership, and the Zebras Unite movement deflect pressures for exponential growth and exploitation of the people generating value. They honour agency, inclusion, and democratic ownership and above all, incentivize sticking to the original mission.

At the same time, in big tech employees organize to exert pressure on their leadership, demanding more transparency and ethical decision making. Earlier this year, more than 6,000 Amazon’s employees from every background and department signed a shareholder resolution to adopt a company-wide climate plan and ban the company’s sales of facial recognition tech to governments. The resolution was voted down but it was an important signal that ownership — even, in this case, a minority vote — is a powerful path to express voice, especially if the voices unite.

3. Shape the mindset

For many years employees in tech companies held the belief that technology equals progress and its distribution will obviously be good for society. It’s hard to blame them entirely. This is what most of the startup-enamored world believed and what the media constantly echoed: investments of hundreds of millions of dollars and bombastic events celebrating yet another unicorn disrupting yet another area of life that wasn’t up to speed with the technological potential.

Initiatives like tech employee organizing prove that this belief is eroding, slowly giving way to a more genuine, investigative interest in understanding the impact of tech on a broader level.

But why work tirelessly to change the industry’s mindset if we could teach a healthy mindset from the start? When we think about business schools or computer science degrees, meaningful education about the consequences of pure commercialization of technology is still missing in most curricula. We need more than Black Mirror episodes, preachy events, and scary news headlines. Programs like the OpenDoTT PhD on responsible IoT or Mozilla’s Responsible CS Challenge are a step in the right direction but not enough. Ideally, the education needs to start at the very beginning, when our future leaders and makers start jotting down their first algorithms. We need to educate them that code, design and business models are a powerful mix, that they are political and have real social consequences.

We can and should embrace the notion that we can change how we build businesses, educate people and build governments, offline and online. After all, the internet belongs to all of us, and the way we treat each other today will determine how we’ll live tomorrow.

This article was published as part of the State of Responsible IoT 2019 by ThingsCon. Thank you for motivating me to finally put into words what’s been on my mind for a while.