GLOBAL JUSTICE IN THE 2020s: Technology and inequality: can we decolonise the digital world?
| Author | Sampath, Padmashree Gehl |
Despite a dominant narrative that sees technology as a force for social progress, it is never neutral. Current ways of thinking about tech promote a coloniality of knowledge and create a new form of technoimperialism. Creating a fairer data economy requires us to think again about how we frame the debate.
The current era of Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) has rekindled the age-old debate on the role of technology in society. On cue, data economy experts have swooped in to promote a dominant perspective that casts technology as the pre-eminent force for social progress. This ideology, now endemic to most data economy debates, casts complex social questions of politics, democratic accountability, the rule of law, education, development, employment and equality as problems that can be categorised, optimised and solved through computable solutions. (1)
In this dominant narrative, technology is empowering, equalising and participatory, and technical progress is tantamount to social progress. Any policy response that tries to control the march toward automation or critique technical process is automatically cast as anti-growth, or anti-productivity, or both. Instead, it is proposed, a better option would entail allowing technology to deliver empowerment and market gains, and then thinking separately about how the distributive choices we make through the welfare state can play a role in improving social outcomes.
These arguments are not without detractors. Economists, who have traditionally been in favour of technological change on the grounds that average real wages grow in line with average labour productivity, are now concerned with rising income disparities, labour market dynamics and the destabilising effects of inequality. Socio-political studies have argued that technological change and labour market uncertainties create anxiety in society, translating eventually into a 'resistance toward innovation'. (2) There is concern that suggestions for compensatory schemes from the welfare state deflect attention away from de-industrialisation, which remains a major issue in many economies world-wide. (3) From a more epistemological perspective, it has been suggested that Big Data and the data economy promote hyperbolic claims that position it as the new 'frontier of innovation', with 'cost-effective', 'profit-generating' properties for all. But such market-centric metaphors divert focus from the extreme knowledge dispossession that the data economy facilitates, that helps shift power into the hands of a few actors who claim to '"innovate" for the benefit of all in society'. (4)
But the current back and forth on what technology can or cannot do focuses on the role of machines and markets unduly, eschewing some of the central questions on the role of technology for society. (5) Can technological change deliver social progress on its own? Do historic and current geopolitics allow us to seek, and more importantly to align ourselves to, common ends in this regard? If so, can we really work within the current market-centric ideology to create technological change that is empowering, equalising and socially responsible for all?
In what follows, I argue that techno-centric explanations of progress and industrialisation are deeply entrenched in a wider social psyche that encourages us to ignore the roots of current inequalities - which, in fact, are not amenable to a technological solution alone. Tracing the role of technology from a historical perspective, I make three points. First, technology is never neutral despite its socially beneficial characteristics: it is a product of careful design, and an instrument of power. (6) Second, current rationales of technology and development are rooted in epistemologies that leave them unequipped to question existing frameworks and institutions: these frameworks dictate notions of technology and justify institutions based on a constant dependence of the South on the North, thereby promoting a coloniality of knowledge. (7) Third, in the data economy, historical inequities of knowledge intertwine with new power asymmetries to create newer, and more drastic, degrees of exclusion of countries and people, thereby promoting what this article terms a new form of techno-imperialism. (8) Making the data economy work for all will require a serious reflection on how we want to frame this debate, and how to align ourselves to a common vision of social progress that technology could help to accomplish.
Technology: an unequalising historical force
Although the relationship between technology and humanity dates back to the origin of human history, we mostly think of technology as something particularly Western in the making. Most historical accounts of technology share an instrumentalist explanation, suggesting, in the language of science and technology...
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