Perhaps it's the extreme concentration of the industry that leaves most
people unexposed to, let's call them core engineers. While everyone is
aware of the tremendous impact of the technology, very few understand
who the people producing it are. When some technology comes along, it's
named after the corporation that produced it, but the general attitude
seems to be that the corporation extracted it, through drilling rights
or similar. This is not true. It was made by humans, hundreds of
thousands of them. They are called engineers.
There is a disturbing sight in the San Francisco south bay, around late
afternoon: thousands of MAGAf employees waiting for buses to take them
to the dormitories. The disturbing part: they all look the same, like
clones. Of course, it must be illusion, as they are of different races,
ages and sex. But they all do look the same in a very eerie way (apart
from being uniformly absorbed into their handsets.) It's the way they
stand, the de-facto uniforms they wear, and the careful avoidance of eye
contact with non-employee passers-by [there have been incidents when
passers-by would challenge them - asking if they are clones, and the
response was quiet re-grouping, like when you get too close to the ducks
in the pond. There are also ongoing incidents of buses being shot at,
but that's a different story.]
Another place where you can encounter them are various forums. What you
will find there is extreme conformity and deference. While mostly
younger adults, there is unbelievable sycophancy towards big
corporations and support for the approved tools de jour. This is
something usually seen in older workers, while the younger are expected
to rebel and carve out new spaces. Not so. The extreme carving out is
'Airbnb for dogs', and the rebels cast a bit of polite doubt in the
latest crop of OS containers.
The article below casts some light on the issues that must be understood
if you want to do anything about technology. It will involve doing
something about the people that produce it. Is it going to be called
class war or something else is TBD. I don't think it's a class war. I
think it's a phenomenon that doesn't have a proper name yet.
The article is a mixed bag. The idea that the morality can be instilled
by liberal arts education is frighteningly dumb and sinister, it
legitimizes propaganda as the antidote for propaganda (and we've seen
how it ends - safe spaces, trigger words and identity politics.) But it
does unearth the problem.
(from https://thebaffler.com/latest/engineered-for-dystopia-banks )
Engineered for Dystopia
Engineering is full of authoritarians who, predictably, take all the
wrong lessons from pop culture
Cathryn Virginia
Some of the first people to be called “engineers” operated siege
engines. A siege engine is a very old device used to tear down the walls
of an enemy city. Depending on the century and the army it might have
had a battering ram, a catapult, or even a simple ramp that would let
soldiers jump over the walls. Engineering has long had a reputation as a
“war-built” discipline, to borrow a phrase from scholars Dean Nieusma
and Ethan Blue. Masons and artisans built things. Engineers tore them down.
Nieusma and Blue, experts in the field’s pedagogy and history,
respectively, note that engineering labor has not strayed far from its
military origins. Engineers are trained to “plug into chain-of-command
decision making structures that direct and constrain the input provided
by individual engineers and engineering generally.” Engineering students
are taught that this is the only way to organize their work. Engineering
is a collective endeavor that needs a team and those teams are usually
corporations. Or, at least, that’s the mentality that corporate-led
engineering accreditation organizations have fostered over the years.
Unlike medical professionals who have a Hippocratic oath and a licensure
process, or lawyers who have bar associations watching over them,
engineers have little ethics oversight outside of the institutions that
write their paychecks. That is why engineers excel at outsourcing blame:
to clients, to managers, or to their fuzzy ideas about the problems of
human nature. They are taught early on that the most moral thing they
can do is build what they are told to build to the best of their
ability, so that the will of the user is accurately and faithfully
carried out. It is only in malfunction that engineers may be said to
have exerted their own will.
Modern society as we know it is predicated on the things engineers do
and make, which means that a critique of engineers is ultimately a
criticism of how we manage everyday life. At least, that was the
argument made by terrorist Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who, in a move
that is uncharacteristic of most critics of technology, came down on a
very definitive answer: death to engineers. Technology, Kaczynski
concluded, will always limit freedom because technology requires
predictable order to work properly. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired
Magazine, largely agrees, stating in his 2010 book What Technology Wants:
The Unabomber was right about the self-aggrandizing nature of the
technium. [“Technium” is Kelly’s patentable word for the “greater,
global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around
us.”] But I disagree with many other of Kaczynski’s points, especially
his conclusions. Kaczynski was misled because he followed logic divorced
from ethics.
Kelly’s objection is chilling: “Kaczynski confused latitude with
freedom. He enjoyed great liberty within limited choices, but he
erroneously believed this parochial freedom was superior to an expanding
number of alternative choices that may offer less latitude within each
choice.” He goes on to make a disturbing comment about Kaczynski’s
current conditions in a supermax prison, calling it a “four-star
upgrade” compared to a solitary cabin overlooking miles of national forests.
Throughout his book Kelly finds common ground with the Amish, Earth
First! activists, and even skeptics of civilization itself, like Derrick
Jensen. His argument is, in essence, that people terrified by technology
are closer to the truth than most others; the only thing they get wrong
is the median reaction to technocratic control: most people just accept
such an arrangement. Unsurprisingly, Kelly is fine with this.
This is a common theme in Silicon Valley, and among engineers in
general: their devotion is just as rabid as the Unabomber’s, but they’re
safely on the winning side. Technology is ordering our lives and
inflicting stricter, more authoritarian modes of control. For the modal
engineer, this is a good thing. It brings order to entropy, limiting
individual autonomy in favor of systems performance.
The false choices Kelly loves are the same ones adored by the likes of
Matt Yglesias and Hillary Clinton. It is at the heart of the neoliberal
political philosophy that refuses to die no matter how many times
individuals in ostensibly democratic societies organize against it.
Kelly is at least refreshingly honest when he admits that neoliberal
choice rhetoric is actually based in a radial, authoritarian form of
societal control. Freedom looks like picking your jail cell—or your ride
sharing app, or your smartphone, or over-priced health care—not choosing
from a much larger set of more politically relevant life choices.
It is only in malfunction that an engineer may be said to have exerted
their own will.
Of course no reasonable person should have to choose between agreeing
with Derrick Jensen or Matt Yglesias, and yet would-be engineers find
themselves in such a position when asked to think politically about
their own field. Neoliberals, whether they choose a right-leaning “there
is no alternative” rhetorical approach or a center-left “end of history”
narrative, do a good job of coming off as the reasonable option. This is
especially true when there is a cottage industry of Silicon Valley
people selling disconnection from their own devices. The Nicholas Carrs
and Sherry Turkles of the world provide a puppet opposition that leaves
political power intact while finger-wagging at teenagers and working
people. It is this double false choice that makes any sort of radical
critique of engineering come off as Luddite rambling. Stick a pin in
that last point for now though, while I unpack the contours of
engineers’ authoritarian proclivities.
It should be said that many people who choose the engineering profession
are motivated by an earnest desire to help people. Many of the
engineering students I have had the pleasure of teaching have been some
of the most compassionate and politically astute people I have met. The
particularly sharp ones are also, speaking generally, the ones who
already feel ostracized from the professional community they have only
barely met. They notice that the career fairs are dominated by military
contractors and vigorously apolitical tech companies. They chafe at the
needlessly imposed hierarchy and sacrifice-the-body-for-the-mind culture.
Without the baseline assumption that chaos reigns without imposed order,
engineers would be tempted to ask if they are interfering by building
something, rather than improving lives by default. This happens even in
the more design-oriented classes that encourage creative thinking and
open-ended problem solving. In one such class I worked with, students
were asked to spend a semester working in teams to design an
organization. Despite working independently on radically different
projects, every single group made competition an integral part of their
design. I don’t say this to sneer at my own students, I only bring it up
because it is illustrative of how pervasive and deep this thinking goes.
Even after everyone had shared their projects, none of them even noticed
the shared competitive elements of their design until I asked them about
it. Some defended competition as a natural sorting mechanism of quality.
Others looked disturbed, having never noticed that they were reproducing
an antagonistic dynamic they knew how to critique.
Engineers in league with lanyard-wielding means-testers are bad enough,
but that predilection for control can go into even deeper, darker
places. Diego Gambetta & Steffen Hertog’s unfortunately titled Engineers
of Jihad, published in 2016, explores how and why engineers’ politics
skew in this authoritarian direction. Despite the book’s baiting title,
Gambetta and Hertog also show that engineers were vastly
over-represented in the Nazi party, and the leadership of contemporary
American and Russian neo-Nazi organizations. Osama Bin Laden was an
engineer, but so was Aryan Nation founder Dick Butler and Sheriff’s
Posse Comitatus leader Wilhelm Schmitt. The correlation is striking:
“the overrepresentation of engineers occurs in vastly different social
and economic contexts” and they show up in “many different unrelated
radical groups.” Not only are engineers over-represented they “appear
more firmly committed to their cause, as shown that they are less likely
to defect from Islamist groups and by their commitment to the nascent
Nazi movement.”
Gambetta and Hertog point to the potency of frustrated expectations as
one of the main causes of engineers’ participation in right-wing
extremist groups. Engineering requires precision and money to be done
right—and neither of those things are easily found in war-torn regions.
Spending years abroad studying in wealthy nations with the desire to
bring prosperity to your homeland through vast public works, only to
find someone has used your sacred knowledge to destroy it, can
understandably breed resentment and anger.
What’s more concerning though, is the metaphysical similarity between
authoritarians and engineers. They share an aversion to ideas,
phenomena, and even people who do not fit into neat categories. It is
this desire for a well-ordered world that comports so nicely with
fundamentalist tendencies. Things work, be they bridges or societies,
when all the components are predictable and behave the way they are
told. Demanding recognition outside given categories, radically changing
the environment a system must work in, and dismantling long-held
practices and theories are equally frustrating for the aspiring dictator
and the aspiring engineer. It is that tradeoff between latitude and
freedom, as Kelly puts it, that is at the center of the
authoritarian–neoliberal–engineer Venn diagram.
Freedom looks like picking your jail cell—or your ride sharing app, or
your smartphone, or over-priced healthcare—not choosing from a much
larger set of more politically relevant life choices.
What Gambetta and Hertog are not clear on, is whether engineering
attracts authoritarians or makes them. Of course, the answer is probably
a mix of individuals’ self-selection and the cultivation of the
qualities that lead to the sorting in the first place. But if I had to
choose which factor was stronger, my money is on the latter: that there
is something about engineering pedagogy that encourages authoritarianism.
Some students are attracted to engineering’s style of thinking, but many
are lured in by their opposite: the fun things (particularly American)
grade school teachers call engineering: open-ended tinkering with
electronics, playing with robots, and building things out of balsa wood.
Quite often, these students are disappointed when they get to college
and find themselves in a world of black-and-white schematics where there
used to be colorful LEGOs. Nieusma and another colleague Michael Lachney
have called this sudden change, noted by education experts, as exactly
what it is: “a bait-and-switch.”
Those students who brave out the bait-and-switch still make up a diverse
cohort but it is increasingly the case that the STEM fields are not only
crowding out other subjects in curriculums, but are increasingly being
lobbied for, to the disadvantage of other college majors. LinkedIn
founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus are pushing hard
to get the Democratic party to run candidates who would support a
universal free engineering degree. No other degrees, just engineering.
In 2012, Florida’s Board of Governors, the cadre of Tea Party
fundamentalists appointed by the Governor tasked with running the
state’s university system, floated the idea of letting schools set
different tuition prices for different degrees with humanities degrees
being more expensive than those in STEM fields. Choices!
This all comes at a time where tech companies say they are embracing the
liberal arts. Steve Jobs, towards the end of his short life and apropos
of seemingly nothing except imminent death, decided to devote the end of
a March 2011 keynote to a discussion of liberal arts and the humanities.
“Technology alone is not enough.” A skeletal Jobs intoned, “It is
technology married with liberal arts—married with the humanities—that
yields us the result that make our hearts sing.” (The thing that made
our hearts sing that morning, by the way, was the iPad 2.)
Most of the talk of the liberal arts in technology rarely goes further
than justifications for letting the children of petit-bourgeois parents
major in literature. I got a liberal arts education and it taught me
that America is an apartheid state and capitalism is beyond reform. I
doubt Jeff Bezos wants me to make an app about that. Tom Slee, in a
recent Boston Review article covering two new books on the subject of
liberal arts majors in Silicon Valley sees one of two possible options:
“join together in harmony,” as Scott Hartley argues in The Fuzzy and the
Techie or,—as Ed Finn prescribes in What Algorithms Want—develop a sort
of checks-and-balances system between engineers and their critics.
Hartley’s thesis sounds like more of the same. Finn’s idea would require
establishing a political power base for critics and curators—and ever
since the Gingrich-led Congress killed the Office of Technology
Assessment in 1995, no such institutional power has existed in this
country. Regardless, either scenario is unacceptable because engineering
itself must change, not just its relationship to other fields or
institutions.
The subservient role of the critical disciplines to engineering, has
left the door open for a particularly robust version of hegemonic
ideology. That is, without conscious training in more critical fields of
study, engineers interpret media as technocrats even in the face of
obvious satire. This means that when engineers take inspiration from the
world around them, as we all do from time to time, they are unlikely to
pick up on even heavy-handed warnings about technological avarice.
Stuart Hall, one of the founding fathers of Cultural Studies, famously
observed that media is encoded with ideology, but then must be decoded
by an audience to be meaningful. Audiences might accept a dominant
frame, or they might provide a resistant reading and take away something
very different than what dominant ideology would want you to think. One
could decode fifties sitcoms as tales of feminist empowerment or
interpret CSI as one long warning about the subjectivity of DNA evidence.
Hall and other Cultural Studies scholars, on the whole, assumed (or
perhaps hoped) that resistant readings would skew toward the liberatory.
Engineers have called that into question by ignoring the obvious
warnings found in movies like RoboCop and Minority Report. The people at
Axon (né TASER) have interpreted both of these movies as roadmaps for
utopia, not obvious warnings of a path toward dystopia. Ava Kofman,
writing in The Intercept, describes a company that is proudly dystopic
in its corporation mission to bring surveillance and new forms of
non-lethal weaponry (read: torture) to America’s streets.
“No longer is the question whether artificial intelligence will
transform the legal and lethal limits of policing,” warns Kofman, “but
how and for whose profits.” She points to Axon’s LinkedIn page and “a
little-publicized Law Enforcement Technology Report released earlier
this year” that are replete with science fiction references. The
LinkedIn profile describes their headquarters as a fusion of Star Wars,
James Bond, Get Smart, Star Trek, and Men in Black. The report goes into
great detail about the business’s roadmap to developing RoboCop and
Minority Report-style technology: predictive policing algorithms,
exoskeletons, and facial recognition.
One need not graduate magna cum laude with a philosophy degree from
Vassar to understand how profoundly dumb it is to compare your workplace
to Get Smart or think that Minority Report is a tale about the benefits
of machine-assisted policing. What, exactly engineers are resisting when
they read these media is basic human decency. Someone at Axon must look
at their TASER X26C with “Electro-Muscular Disruption technologies” and
say, “wow that really makes my heart sing.”
Weapons dealers aside, we all are familiar with the way technology rags
giddily compare any new gadget to those seen in science fiction, albeit
with far less overt fascist day-dreaming. Flip phones were compared to
Star Trek communicators. iPads and voice assistants have gotten similar,
“It’s like you’re on the Enterprise!” treatments. Comparisons like these
make it seem like we just so happen to be achieving, in fits and starts,
some guaranteed future when, in fact, technologists really are aping
television shows they saw as kids.
Brian Merchant, in his book The One Device: The Secret History of the
iPhone, quotes Chris Garcia, the curator of the Computer History Museum:
“The tricorder and the communicator are direct influences, and I’ve
spoken to several innovators who have specifically cited Trek.”
Similarly, the telecomm parts manufacturer Qualcomm recently declared a
winner in its X Prize contest to see who could build a “medical
tricorder” that could detect vital signs and a range of diseases. Robert
Picardo, who played the holographic doctor in Star Trek: Voyager was
there to hand out the giant ceremonial check and everything.
Engineers don’t merely attempt to reproduce what they see on screen
verbatim (oftentimes mistaking dystopia for a product roadmap). They
also produce their own source material that gets filtered through pop
culture only to arrive back in reports and position papers. Back in
2012, I co-authored an article with Arizona State University professor
Joseph Herkert about the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s report,
Grand Challenges for Engineering—an immensely dry document save for one
unexpected reference to Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth installment of
the Bruce Willis Die Hard franchise. The authors of the report warned
that the United States was in danger of experiencing the main plot of
the film: a wholesale hijacking of the nation’s digital infrastructure.
Live Free or Die Hard began life as a 1997 Wired magazine article that
describes the war games state actors play to prepare for cyberwarfare.
The takeaway is summarized nicely in a quote from a professor from the
Naval Postgraduate School: “We have spent billions in the last few
decades on large, expensive aircraft carriers, strategic bombers, and
tanks. The information revolution suggests nothing less than that these
assets have become much more vulnerable and much less necessary.” The
war machines of past aeronautics engineers are the unguarded targets of
today’s software engineers.
The engineers are still operating the siege engines, but they are also
the ones building things back up, all the while warning us of the new
siege engines they’re building.
After ten years of writing and production both pre-and post 9/11 the
article becomes a big-budget summer action movie. The final product, we
argued, had a very clear message: If you care about cyber security, you
had better do it the way engineers tell you to. Radicals who question
the value of the system as a whole (represented in the film by the
patently un-radical Justin Long) and nostalgic moderates that wish to be
left alone (Willis’ John McLane) are actually just as dangerous to
everyone’s collective livelihood as the terrorists themselves. Herkert
and I concluded. “Conversely, the established order should be ready to
sacrifice itself for the wellbeing of the younger class of knowledge
workers that (literally as well as figuratively) hold the passkeys to
our digital infrastructure.”
The engineers’ worldview and the fiction that is created as a critique
to engineers’ creations forms an Ouroboros of destruction in the name of
engineers’ own job security. Engineers’ work begets fiction, begets new
engineering projects, begets fiction again, which in turn begets
position papers about the possibility of it all going wrong. Each step
requires additional funding, that cannot wait because the latest threat
is already overdue. Charlie Brooker makes a Black Mirror episode about
it, and then another engineer reads dystopia as a new product idea and
so on. The engineers are still operating the siege engines, but they are
also the ones building things back up, all the while warning us of the
new siege engines they’re building. Perhaps, instead of such fictions,
we should have more stories about engineers coming to terms with the
consequences of their creations.
All of this might be less worrying if there was a robust and popular
movement against this authoritarian engineering establishment that
manufactures its own worst enemy. What we have instead are people who
prescribe block chains and disconnection sleepaway camps. The former
conflates encryption and privacy tools with confronting the corrupting
influence of power. The latter clutch their pearls at teenagers and wax
nostalgic about conversations and deep thinking.
When the TSA announced plans to require passengers to remove books and
other reading materials my friend and colleague Nathan Ferguson shared
the announcement on Facebook with the note, “this is why you need strong
encryp— oh, wait.” The program was short-lived and only affected a few
airports but the joke is telling nonetheless: privacy advocates have
spent so much time hyping and developing encryption technologies that we
are in danger of ignoring the politics that make encryption necessary in
the first place. That 1997 Wired article bemoaned the fact that
malevolent software was “easy to duplicate, hard to restrict, and often
frustratingly dual-use, civilian or military.” The same can be said in
the opposite direction. Every time a new privacy invention is produced
under the auspices of individual privacy, that technology is no doubt
also useful to the powerful entities that we want privacy from.
As for the pearl-clutchers, we would do well to interrogate their class
allegiances. As I argued a year ago in an essay about Sherry Turkle’s
body of work, critics who write about the importance of disconnection
generally show “a dedication to a fairly conservative worldview where
the pace of work and the environment in which it takes place should be
set exclusively by bosses acting as wellsprings of morality.” Busy
parents and lonely kids are often the biggest targets of invective for
finding escapism or connection on screens while corporate bosses are
celebrated for mild changes to governance structures so as to require
in-person meetings instead of Skype calls.
Equally important is to reckon with the trends in our culture that give
us people like James Damore, the former Google engineer who wrote a memo
decrying Google’s diversity initiatives as a “politically correct
monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.”
He was quickly fired and —irony of ironies for someone that describes
himself as “centrist with libertarian inclinations—has taken the issue
up with the National Labor Relations Board. The memo’s contents should
surprise no one with a cursory knowledge of Silicon Valley’s culture.
And here I am not necessarily talking about the retrograde gender
politics per se, but the science he brings to bear to defend his positions.
Rather than consult anthropology and sociology to study an issue that is
distinctly social and cultural, the links that pepper his ten-page
manifesto are mostly evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and
sociobiology. The very premise of his memo is that biology trumps
society in the formation of individuals. This is an idea that is shared
by both the reactionary right that has welcomed him as a righteous cause
célèbre and the ostensibly liberal left whose popular views on society
and individual behavior are pulled from similar fields. The mainstream
liberal is fed a steady diet of Radiolab, The TED Radio Hour, Hidden
Brain, Invisibilia, Note to Self, and Freakonomics Radio, all of which
heavily favor the same sort of logic—humans behavior is largely
determined by biology and best studied using statistical analyses using
big data—that Damore used. Damore, like the Unabomber, only differs from
the Silicon Valley consensus in that he has a different take on the same
set of basic premises.
So what is to be done with the engineers who see their profession as a
means of expressing care through building things? The first step is to
cultivate that very mindset: building things as a form of care.
Engineers need to think of their work as both a humble contribution to
the ongoing social order but also as an imposition—as a normative
statement with politics and consequences. This has to be done in the
universities that confer engineering degrees and in the workplace. Such
changes are already underway at Purdue University, where the School of
Engineering Education hired Donna Riley as department head. Her work has
been at the center of recognizing the political valence of engineers’
education and changing it for the better.
In times like these it is important to remember that border walls,
nuclear missiles, and surveillance systems do not work, and would not
even exist, without the cooperation of engineers. We must begin teaching
young engineers that their field is defined by care and humble
assistance, not blind obedience to authority. Without this crucial first
step, organizing engineers’ labor in Silicon Valley and elsewhere may
only yield counter-productive results. After all, police have benefited
from some of the most powerful union representation and that has not
proven liberatory for anyone. It is only after the engineering
profession takes its place among other professions—ones that recognized
their power and created systems of independent review and
accountability—and comes to terms with its relationship to ethics and
morals, can it be trusted to organize. Only then can we trust them to
leave the siege engines behind and join us in building something new.
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