"Why is this here?"
One of Alexis’s favorite tenets is that the future is accretive: that it builds upon the past, and that things happen at the same time as other things. These last two weeks have shown that quite viscerally, with global protests against racism on top of historic unemployment and economic upheaval on top of an unprecedented pandemic and the social responses to it.
This week we focused on how to make real, lasting change from such radical confusion. We start by challenging our deepest premises, and end with resources on self-care and self-education.
—Alexis & Matt
1: We don't have to do it this way
One of the most powerful and difficult-to-remember tools a good futurist has is to challenge the built environment. In most interactions every day we are guided by and constrained by walls, roads, laws, economics, societal norms, and more. There’s a lot of space to be creative inside those constraints, but one of the most liberating things to do is to point at one and ask, “why is this here?”
In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police, protestors have been advocating for police departments all over the country to be defunded. The reasons are clear; in some major cities the police use 15% or more of the municipal budget, often not counting overtime expenses, leaving everything from schools to transit to parks to fight for the remainder. The Minneapolis city council has passed a resolution to dismantle their police service and build a new community-led service in its place. In Los Angeles, Mayor Garcetti has pledged to move $150 million from police funding (from a budget of nearly $2 billion) to fund educational and health initiatives. As Angela Davis points out, defunding the police is about shifting those public fund elsewhere, choosing to prioritize other services and institutions. Cities across the country are asking “why is this here” of their police, and finding new ways to serve their communities.
Kim Stanley Robinson, writing in Bloomberg, goes much further, asking “why is this here” for the rules of our labor-driven economy. Current economic thinking says “natural” unemployment is about 5%, to create enough wage pressure to make people take lower-paying jobs. Unemployment now stands at at 13.3% (some economists think that’s closer to 18%), the jobs that do exist pay poorly after decades of leaving the minimum wage static, American infrastructure is crumbling, and our climate is in dire need of massive remediation. Robinson argues for a Job Guarantee, something the US had following the Great Depression, so that anyone who wants a job can have one. This seemingly radical idea is an old one, one that’s worked in the past, and one that could deliver prosperity, increased equality and climate safety. If we can take a few million from a police department to fund better schools, couldn’t we also raise taxes, close loopholes, and defund costly military systems to help strengthen our entire society?
The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee
Is there enough work for everyone? Kim Stanley Robinson on the future of planetary employment.
2: A reckoning for facial recognition
With few exceptions, companies rarely decide to pull their products voluntarily, particularly in cases where the products aren’t directly contributing to illness or death. This week we saw a rare occurrence when IBM decided to stop producing facial recognition products altogether. Amazon soon followed with a one-year moratorium on sales to law enforcement, and Microsoft announced it wouldn’t sell to police until there is federal regulation controlling its use.
IBM’s stance here is, by far, the most absolute. CEO Arvind Krishna said that IBM opposes use of facial recognition technology “for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms.” IBM says they’ll continue to work on algorithms for object detection, but will cease work on, and support for, any products that may help identify faces. (Amazon and Microsoft have not made such a statement, instead limiting their pledges to whom and when they sell these products.)
Deborah Raji, a fellow at the AI Now Institute, stated most clearly the impact of these moves on regulators: “If [tech companies] can disavow the technology, it can send a signal to policymakers and the public that this technology is not okay.”
Big tech companies back away from selling facial recognition to police.
After IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft upend their facial recognition businesses, attention turns to federal lawmakers.
3: Data in a racist system is inevitably weaponized
The history of technology and its relationship to racial tension is long and disheartening. This MIT Tech Review article describes the origin of “criminal justice information systems” during the 1967 riots — how they were framed as beneficial “media studies” and subsequently used to surveil and target members of black resistance groups. Over and over, we see how systems that are initially (or ostensibly) deployed to assist and support are soon used to surveil and subjugate, using the same algorithms and same data.
As Covid-19 continues to plague our populations, tech companies and health authorities have been pushing for contact tracing data. Said another way, parts of the government would like to see where people are moving, with whom they’re spending time, how long these interactions take, and more. It’s impossible to see this data collection in isolation from the protests currently taking place all over the country; in fact, identifying how protest participation may be leading to additional outbreaks would be of particular interest to epidemiologists. But while epidemiologists may have beneficial uses in mind, history should warn us that any data collected will inevitably be weaponized against oppressed populations. Given that Covid-19 is striking Black and Latinx populations harder than others, it’s not hard to imagine the potential misuse a data set like this would tempt.
Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way.
Black Americans have seen technology used to target them again and again. Stopping it means looking at the problem differently.
www.technologyreview.com • Share
4: The library of the resistance
In our last issue, we wrote about a party that was hosted exclusively in a Google Sheet, and discussed how collaboration and co-presence are making their way beyond video and audio into other forms of media. In the couple of weeks since then, you may have noticed an unusual number of links to Google Docs making their way through your social media feeds: resources for anti-racism, links to racial justice fundraising organizations, instructions for contacting your elected officials, salary transparency spreadsheets, and more. This MIT Tech Review piece outlines how the cloud-based, collaborative word processing software has become the de facto platform for the resistance. While social media services like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram allow for wide reach, they are inevitably ephemeral, constrained, and single-author. They can’t be collaborated on, and they don’t create a “persistent artifact” for reference and sharing.
The article doesn’t dig into the complexity of a company like Google storing the authoring and viewing information for hundreds of highly political documents. It makes us a little itchy to see Google named as the “platform of the resistance”, for a multitude of reasons. Nevertheless, the piece illustrates how critical it is to examine the affordances of a particular technology, and how those capabilities bias it towards particular types of use cases.
How Google Docs became the social media of the resistance
One of the key tools for organizing recent protests is a surprising one: it’s not encrypted, doesn’t rely on signing in to a social network, and wasn’t even…
www.technologyreview.com • Share
5: The arc of social media is long, and bends towards absurdism
From the people who brought you Weird Twitter and Weird Facebook (or at least, some very similar folks), we now have Elite TikTok — which also comprises Alt TikTok, Deep TikTok, Retail TikTok, color TikTok, state TikTok, and more. Whichever rabbit hole you choose, it’s definitely in opposition to the Straight TikTok you may be more familiar with, that’s replete with dancing and kitchen island culture. Elite TikTok is full of absurdist riffs, including a whole subgenre of accounts that pose as anthropomorphized retail chains:
“Megan, 14, who runs @walmart.department.store, said that acting out scenarios as a multinational corporation is a fun creative exercise. ‘Some stores date,’ she said. ‘They make fake things happen between them. I know Goldfish and Fruit Gushers are dating. I’m pretty sure In-N-Out Burger and some other restaurants are a couple too.'”
Teenagers on the platform have inherited the legacy of Weird Twitter and Weird Facebook, posturing as multinational corporations and posting about beans and frogs.
6: Self-care for futurists
For all of us, the last few months have been incredibly exhausting and stressful. But for those whose professional work involves forecasting and futures research, the work itself can exacerbate that stress and anxiety. Looking deeply at the future when so much of it feels incredibly dark can be emotionally taxing, and our friends over at Changeist have written some guidance on managing work and self-care. Tips include balancing the load with your network, finding new voices to learn from, maintaining some distance from the data, and taking time to step away and breathe.
Managing Abyss Gaze In a Time of Difficult Futures
Listening for signals when the news is dark
One reading recommendation
Action item if you work in design or tech: educate yourself on the relationship between race and technology, and understand the systems your work upholds or subverts. Two books I highly recommend: Algorithms of Oppression by @safiyanoble and Race After Technology by @ruha9.
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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