A dream of liberatory technology

Technology should work for its users, not exploit them. At the moment, this is a very counter-intuitive position to hold. Social media platforms monetize the attention and relationships of their users. Platforms owned by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) have become the communications backbone of large parts of society, with even governments buying into closed and exploitative technology ecosystems because that’s where the people are. Buying software is no longer buying. We rent software from companies which encourage vendor lock-in and then impose new and increased fees. Tools we rely on are actively user-hostile, going to far as to integrate features that put us at risk.

Technology does not have to be like this. Undeniably, the currents of technology adoption and use in western capitalism have historically oscillated between the potential for liberation and the potential for subjugation. The factory assembly line (and other forms of mechanized specialization) represented a boon to the factory owner, and a loss of control and skill for the skilled craft worker. The technology itself did not need to lead to the outcome of wealth consolidation and de-skilling, but it broadly did. The belief, however, that the outcomes of technological changes to society are inevitable, that they will fall into the shape they have previously fallen into, needs to be challenged. Technology can offer opportunities for liberation, alongside the opportunities for subjugation and concentration of power. At one point, many people believed that social media had liberatory potential, thanks to events like the Arab Spring movement (such a long time ago, if judged by the pace of enforced change we're currently experiencing), which was heavily-facilitated by use of Twitter. We now look at big social media platforms and see a concentration of power in the hands of the few, and very little exercise of social responsibility by those few. A technology which at one point offered the possibility of being hopeful did not live up to its early potential.

Liberatory potential

For the last few months, I've been trying to think my way around the idea of technology which offers liberatory potential to it users. I'm very picky in my use of terminology here because I don't believe that a technology, in and of itself, can be inherently liberatory. I've previously summarized a key work by Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" which concerned itself with the debate over the embedding of politics in technologies, things, and the built environment. The broad conclusion from Winner, and something I mostly agree with, is that politics and values can be built into artifacts, whether deliberately or accidentally, but this embedding isn't the end of the story. Indeed, if we argue that a technology can be inherently and only liberatory, then we're straying into the area of technological determinism – suggesting that the form of a technology determines which social circumstances can come out of its existence and use.

Along similar lines to Winner's arguments, I'm sympathetic to many points made by Murray Bookchin back in the middle of the 20th century – in his essay "Towards a Liberatory Technology," he makes the case that we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater and give up on technology wholesale, just because it's frequently used to do extremely bad things. We should not accept, he argues, that technology can be only harmful, merely because it is currently wielded with extreme frequency and prejudice by those in power. With a vision of communitatianism in his sights, Bookchin argues for the utility of many technologies which, more than half a century ago, were quite new or only just on the horizon, for the reduction of toil and the efficient use of resources in small-scale, semi-agrarian communities. He envisions solar power, effective agricultural machinery, and advances in extraction and processing of minerals for the benefit of well-running communities. A specific form of liberation he touches on repeatedly is liberation from toil – technology should be used to liberate people from work like mining, which is unnecessarily harsh and dangerous. This aim is hard to disagree with.

But I suppose the exact shape of the better worlds is where I differ in my understanding of what it might mean for technology to have liberatory potential. I am not optimistic that there's a revolution coming in the near future that will make it possible for communitarianism to thrive. I am not looking for answers to the question of how groups of people will be able to exist outside of current industrial structures. I have a far more modest dream. I would like effective civil society, democracy which is not for sale, and for people other than billionaires to believe that they have a reasonable opportunity to make choices in their lives and have an impact in their communities. Many decades on from that Bookchin essay, this also feels like a pretty wild dream.

Re-orienting priorities

So now what? What's technology with liberatory potential, and why might it be a good thing to aim for? These are some darn good questions, and I don't currently have complete answers. What I do already know is that we need to pick this question back up – we need to re-envision technology with liberatory potential. One area where I think we very much do need to listen to Bookchin is in his point that areas of intellectual effort which were once seen as liberatory are now more seen as instruments of domination. In "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" (in the same volume as "Towards a Liberatory Technology"), he argues that

Largely functional or instrumental in intent, the branches of science that once tore at the chains of man are now used to perpetuate and gild them. Even philosophy has yielded to instrumentalism and tends to be little more than a body of logical contrivances; it is the handmaiden of the computer rather than of the revolutionary.

This is a fair point, though it may over-idealize the previous state of science. Regardless, the neoliberal capture of knowledge, discovery, science, and technology means that it is increasingly hard to envision that one is doing something for the good of the world, rather than for the eventual good of the bottom line. This is thing one that needs to change: we need to re-orient our imaginaries, point them towards the idea of social good instead of private economic good; collective gain instead of individual capture of wealth.

This is a start, then, for liberatory technology as it might be now: technology and systems surrounding it which do not buy into technocratic or techno-utopian views, but recognize that a re-orientation of power relationships is a necessary pre-condition for development and deployment of tools which help more people. Even before that, the recognition that while the form of a technology does not fully determine the way it is used and the impact it has on the world, the idea that a technology is apolitical is just not on. We must start from recognizing that we are building technologies which mirror ourselves and our values, and move towards building systems which reflect the world we want to see.