I have given, for some unholy reason, something like ten different talks this year. Almost all of them have been to undergrad or graduate audiences in computing or surrounding disciplines - all of whom are dealing with the tremendous weight of the world, the horrors it contains, and the helplessness those horrors provoke. And since they are computing students, they are additionally having to grapple with the specific and particular culpability of their chosen industry and profession. What all of this means is that I inevitably get a question that’s something along the lines of:
What the fuck, as technologists, do we do right now?
There are a lot of answers to that question, which I provide, because, well, they’r perfectly good answers; you can try to be thoughtful about where you work, what you work on, and how, if you’re able to do so. You can work to smuggle the resources available to you in tech out to other spaces (Corinne and I wrote a whole book chapter about this). All of this is good and necessary and only partly sufficient, because approaching this moment “as technologists” is a trap.
It’s an attractive trap, to be sure. And it’s an understandable one. School and employment and society writ large encourage us to think of being technologists as the most important aspect of our identity, and our skillset - as part of encouraging us to think of technologists more broadly as the most important part of society (I once had a boss who opened the company wide all-hands meeting with “programmers are wizards” and it got worse from there). If you’re in a U.S. university to study computer science or UX design or anything in that range, you’ve made a commitment of tens of thousands of dollars to the idea and image of yourself “as a technologist”. So it stands to reason that’s a big part of the lens through which you would view the world, and select your responses to, well, Events.
And so when confronted with Events, and Horrors - particularly those enabled by the technology industry - it is entirely understandable that many of us ask, to be facile, for a second, whether there could be an app for (fixing) that. And if the answer is no - if our expertise as computer scientists, or data scientists, or designers, doesn’t obviously map on to solutions to the problem - we…freeze. Or, having framed ourselves as technologists first and foremost, guiltily declare the issue to be a matter of someone else’s expertise, and go in search of problems that fit ours. It’s part of why you have little unionisation within technology; organising is a matter of social expertise. It’s also part of why you have people trying to fix police brutality, or government transparency, with apps and websites; it’s what we know how to do.
But: we are not simply technologists. We are entire people, with other interests, lives, and forms of expertise. This expertise may not look like a degree: it’s often a matter of experience, or access. It’s knowing how to cook, or having a car, or access to a printer. It’s living in a particular neighbourhood, with an investment in local organising or elections. All of those are things we can contribute, right now.
Moreover, we are never just what we are right now. We are also who and what we choose to put the work into becoming. Part of the trap of thinking of ourselves as technologists, first and foremost, is not only that it stops us from taking action in other ways right now, but that it stops us from seeking to develop the ability to take other action; to flourish in other ways, that will provide more resources, more angles of contribution and attack, in the future. Doing so is…hard; I know that far, far too well. But it is also human. To expose ourselves to tasks we are not-good-at, or problems we do not have a familiar solution to. To see ourselves as more than the tools we have to hand, that we have internalised as our “thing”, and to ask what else we can do, or what else we could do, in the future.
Design that app, if an app is needed. Build that website, if a website helps. But if you find that it doesn’t - and you probably will - then cook. Clean. Drive someone somewhere. Show up to meetings. Organise your coworkers. Contribute in ways that build meaning beyond your degree, or your job. Because if people can only see themselves as their work, we’ve already lost an important part of the fight.