Geek Heresy (5 page)

Indeed, Negroponte is persuasive because he speaks with deep conviction. He’s a true believer. Negroponte’s backstory involves a rural Cambodian village where out of a charitable impulse he handed out laptops to twenty children. When he found both the students and their families making innovative use of them, One Laptop Per Child was born.
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And Professor Warschauer at UC Irvine, no utopian when it comes to technology, found that in some American schools with one-to-one laptop programs, the students became better writers. They wrote more, revised more, and got more frequent feedback from teachers.
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And what about the evidence under my nose? The proof of technology’s value in my own learning as a research scientist? It is thanks to the Internet that I can look up papers without a trip to the library. It
is thanks to email that I can stay in touch with colleagues on the other side of the world. And it is thanks to Wikipedia that I can brush up on knowledge long forgotten or never learned.

So in some cases, technology does help – but not with the consistency required to fix larger social problems. The MultiPoint experience was repeated in all of my team’s other projects – in agriculture, in health care, in governance, in entrepreneurship. On the one hand, it was easy to develop innovations that had some merit; on the other hand, those same innovations rarely led to large-scale benefits. How could this be? It was a paradox. I was missing an explanation of how and why machines contribute – or don’t – to social change.

Actually, modern society as a whole lacks a good framework for thinking about technology’s social impact. As children, we learn how our bodies work in biology classes and how our government works through civics lessons. Computer courses, though, only teach us how we can use the devices, not how the devices affect us. As adults, we’re inundated with news about Facebook revolutions in the Arab Spring, long queues for the latest iPhone, and email spying by the National Security Agency. Yet we have no consensus view of the technologies’ net effect.

Toward the end of my five years in India, I had a glimpse of a hypothesis. I knew there was a way to make sense of the apparent contradiction whereby isolated successes weren’t easy to replicate elsewhere. But since I worked at a company whose soul was software, I kept wanting to see the technology prevail. I felt disloyal doubting its value. As Upton Sinclair said, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
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I needed some distance, and I needed some time. So in early 2010 I left Microsoft to join the School of Information at Berkeley. The dean, AnnaLee Saxenian, had arranged a research fellowship for me. At her school, people not only built technologies but also studied how they affected society. Technology’s impact was complex, but I hoped to find a concise way to understand when it was good, when it was bad, and when we could know in advance.

CHAPTER 2

The Law of Amplification

A Simple but Powerful Theory of Technology’s Social Impact

N
akkalbande is a small slum community in the southern part of Bangalore. Hidden within the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Jayanagar, it’s formed around a single, straight alley that is covered by a canopy of grand old trees that have survived the city’s aggressive road construction. The unpaved alley is strewn with plastic debris and the occasional dead rat. As slums go, though, it’s doing all right. Instead of the improvised tarp-and-tree-branch shelter you might see elsewhere, most of the houses in Nakkalbande are one- or two-room cinder-block structures. Residents have lived there for decades.

Nakkalbande is where I spent my Saturdays soon after moving to India in late 2004. I volunteered for a nonprofit called Stree Jagruti Samiti, the Society for Women’s Empowerment. Its leader was a middle-aged matriarch named Geeta Menon, who had a mischievous chuckle and a gleam in her eye that wouldn’t be brought down by the tired droop in her shoulders. For over fifteen years, she had worked as an activist, organizing the women and girls of several slum communities. She was known to storm into police stations with groups of women. They would demand that the officers take action against, say, a
corrupt rations dealer. (Rations shops in India are licensed to sell subsidized food and kerosene to households below the poverty line, but they often profit from sale of inventory to other retailers.)

At Menon’s suggestion, I taught a computer literacy class for girls. I didn’t speak any of the languages they spoke – Hindi, Kannada, or Tamil – so I recruited a college student to translate and assist me. On the first day, eight or nine teenage girls dressed in pastel
salwar kameez
gathered into a small, windowless building that was reserved for community activities. I brought a laptop and set it up under a framed picture of a blue-skinned Krishna playing his flute.

When my assistant and I told the girls they were going to learn how to use a computer, their eyes widened, and a collective shriek filled the room. Over several weeks, we showed them the basics of word processing, PowerPoint, spreadsheets, and other software. At first they gawked at simple things such as moving the cursor, using the touchpad, and clicking to cause action on the screen. Novelty, though, quickly gave way to familiarity. Soon they were fighting over who would get to draw next using a painting application. Like computer novices everywhere, they took delight in converting words into every conceivable color and font. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and I looked forward to the classes.

By the third or fourth session, though, we hit a wall in what they could learn. Everyone was able to type her name in English as well as in Kannada, but the girls weren’t interested in writing anything beyond that. PowerPoint became known as the software that allowed them to create fancy 3D text. And spreadsheets thoroughly bored everyone except for two girls who sensed something extraordinary in self-computing arrays of numbers. We contrived activities to both entertain and educate, but, in practice, it was hard to go beyond entertainment.

I began to understand why this was the case as I learned more about the girls’ personal lives. Their days were crammed with school and chores. They worked part-time as servants in middle-class homes. With so many adult responsibilities, they saw the computer class as a break from a life of constraints. Some would linger afterward to teach me folk games as a way to extend their freedom. No one mentioned any
serious hobbies, though, and the one thought of their future was about who would be arranged for them as husbands. Despite Menon’s best efforts, fourteen or fifteen wasn’t an unusual age for marriage. The girls expected to become housewives in short order, and few would continue school beyond eighth or ninth grade.

Originally, Menon and I had vague hopes that the computer classes would help the girls gain access to work other than as household servants. But even for entry-level positions, employers wanted a solid education first, white-collar soft skills second, and then only on top of that, computer literacy. With just one class per week – their parents didn’t allow more – we couldn’t have taught them more employable skills such as programming or data entry.

At the end of the course, we took the girls to visit a local Internet café, but little of lasting value came of the trip. Like many such spots in urban India, this was a dingy place with two or three old desktop computers running outdated versions of Windows. (Even as of 2013, Windows 98 was a common sight in Indian Internet cafés.) For about 10 rupees (roughly 20 cents), you can use an Internet-connected PC for an hour, but you get what you pay for. It can take half a minute, for example, to load the bare-bones Google home page. In formal studies later on, Nimmi Rangaswamy, a member of my research team, found that Internet café clientele is dominated by young men chatting, playing video games, and consuming pornography; many owners install private booths for the purpose.
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As a result, Indian families think of cybercafés as sleazy places. Women and girls aren’t encouraged to visit them.

Still, the exposure to computers did have some unexpected effects. The two girls who found spreadsheets fascinating vowed to stay in school for as long as they could, in spite of parental pressures to take on more chores. They recognized that they needed to know more in order to take advantage of the technology. But then, another girl dropped out of the class within a few weeks. She told me her parents didn’t want her to learn too much because that would raise her dowry. Families with sons expect dowries as something like a down payment for the costs of keeping a wife. The fear is that a more educated bride will have higher expectations and require more upkeep. (Apart from its patriarchal
conception, this traditional calculus doesn’t account for the possibility that an educated wife could bring in her own income, as happens more and more across India.)

I didn’t think of the computer course as a formal research project, so I didn’t keep detailed track of the outcomes. When I look back, though, I realize that the class foreshadowed what I’d soon find in my own research: the initial optimism that surrounds technology, the doubt as reality hits, the complexity of outcomes, and the unavoidable role of social forces.

The Ferocious Field of Technology and Society

Technology is powerful, but in India it became clear to me that throwing gadgets at social problems isn’t effective. When I came back to the United States, I sought to understand why.

As a computer scientist, my education included a lot of math and technology but little of the history or philosophy of my own field. This is a great flaw of most science and engineering curricula. We’re obsessed with what works today, and what might be tomorrow, but we learn little about what came before.

So at the University of California, Berkeley, I met with dozens of professors who had studied different aspects of technology and society. I spent hours tracking down dusty, bound volumes in the stacks of libraries across campus. And here is what I learned.

Theorists, despite many fine shades of distinction, fall roughly into four camps: technological utopians, technological skeptics, contextualists, and social determinists. These terms will be defined in a moment, but one thing that jumped out was that the scholars fought like Furies. For example, the economic historian Robert Heilbroner wrote, “That machines make history in some sense . . . is of course obvious.”
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This view is called technological determinism, because it implies that technology determines social outcomes. But if some find it obvious, it is nevertheless ridiculed by critics. Philosopher Andrew Feenberg responded with sarcastic sympathy, writing that “the implications of
determinism appear so obvious that it’s surprising to discover that [its premises do not] withstand close scrutiny.”
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Yet for all the debate, there is plenty of agreement, too. Utopians accept that there can be negative consequences of technology, and skeptics concede its benefits. What separates the four camps most is not facts but temperamental differences.

How to Spot a Utopian

In the
Star Trek
future, technological advances have liberated Earth from war, famine, illness, and conflict, at least among human beings. Thanks to matter replicators and dilithium crystals, food and energy are free. With nothing to fight over, peace and egalitarianism reign. (That’s why the series needs an ample supply of aliens as plot devices.) As Captain Jean-Luc Picard explains in the movie
First Contact
, “the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives.”
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That is to say, in a few more centuries, advanced technology makes economics itself obsolete. Instead, people are free to focus on greater ends: “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

Star Trek
is fiction, but its technological utopianism is very real. MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte clearly shares it. So does Google chairman Eric Schmidt. In
The New Digital Age
, he and coauthor Jared Cohen wrote, “The best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity.”
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And then there are technology cheerleaders like Clay Shirky, who shakes pom-poms for Team Digital in a book subtitled
How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators
.
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Many engineers and computer scientists also hold this view. A generation ago, when young people said they wanted to “change the world” or “make an impact,” they joined the Peace Corps. Now they move to Silicon Valley. They envision laying a foundation for Captain Picard’s greedless future.