SIf you look for a digital capitalist, you’ll find a technological determinist, someone who believes that technology drives history. These people see themselves as agents of what Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction.” They delight in “moving fast and breaking things,” as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used to say, until his PR people convinced him that this wasn’t a good idea, especially since it involved leaving taxpayers to pick up the broken pieces.
Technological determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know you’re thinking. And it feeds into a narrative of technological inevitabilitywhich says that new things will come, whether you like them or not. As the writer says LM Sacasas puts it this way“All claims of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for technology companies to secure their desired ends, minimize resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable, future.”
But for the inevitability narrative to translate into widespread deployment of a technology, politicians have to embrace it too. We’re seeing a lot of this right now with AI, and it’s not yet clear how that will play out in the long term. Some of the omens aren’t good, though. Think, for example, of the video from the film Rishi Sunak fawning about Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, or about Tony Blair’s recent management cheesy televised conversation with Demis Hassabis, the saintly co-founder of Google DeepMind.
How refreshing it is, then, to find an account of what happens when the deterministic myth collides with democratic reality. It is “Resisting technology inevitability: Google Wing’s delivery drones and the fight for our skies.” amazing academic article Coming soon in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society AThat is, a pukka diary. Written by Anna Zenz and Julia Powles, from the University of Western Australia’s Faculty of Law and the Technology and Policy Lab respectively, it recounts how a large technology company attempted to dominate a new market, with little regard for the social consequences, using a brilliant new technology: delivery drones. And how alert, resourceful and determined citizens managed to thwart the “experiment”.
The company in question is Wing, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Its mission is “to build delivery drones and work toward the day when these aircraft can deliver everything from consumer goods to emergency medicines – a new commercial operation that opens up universal access to the skies.” Australia is home to Google’s largest drone operation in terms of number of deliveries and customers served, a fact apparently celebrated by both state and federal governments, the latter leading the initiative.
Zenz and Powles argue that in persuading Australian politicians to allow it to offer (on an “experimental” basis, of course) a kind of aerial Deliveroo, Google made extensive use of the inevitability myth. Public officials who already believed that delivery drones were inevitable could see the advantages of riding the wave and offered passive or active support (and, of course, sought praise for being in favour of the “innovation”). The company then used the inevitability myth to seek “community acquiescence” by arguing that if citizens believed that delivery drones would inevitably arrive, they were more likely to remain silent or passively tolerant – stances that could be creatively interpreted as “acceptance”.
One of the Canberra suburbs chosen for a trial that began in July 2018 was Bonython. It didn’t go well from the start. Many residents were upset and distressed by drones suddenly appearing out of nowhere. They were outraged by the aircraft’s impact on the community, local wildlife and the environment. They resented unplanned landings, dropped payloads, drones flying close to vehicular traffic and birds attacking and forcing the devices to land.
In many other places, people would probably have just grumbled and shrugged. But Bonython turned out to be different. A group of professional residents (among them a retired aviation law expert) set up a Facebook page and a functioning website, published regular newsletters and knocked on doors. They lobbied federal and local MPs, contacted local, national and international media and bombarded local authorities with freedom of information requests.
And in due course it paid off. In August 2023, Wing quietly announced that it would cease operations in the Canberra area because it had, shall we say, “changed (its) operating model.” But crucially, the campaign triggered a parliamentary inquiry into drone delivery systems to look at (among other things): the decision to allow the trials in the first place; the economic impact of the technology being trialled; the extent of regulatory oversight of the technology at various levels of government; and the extent of any environmental impact of drone deliveries. In other words, an inquiry into why and how public officials had been misled by the myth of inevitability. Or, more bluntly, the sort of questions that government and regulators should always be asking when tech companies make up nonsense about “innovation,” “progress,” and the like.
The big takeaway, as Marshall McLuhan once observed in a different context, is that “there is absolutely nothing inevitable as long as there is a willingness to see what is happening.” Citizens can – and always should – challenge the myth of inevitability.
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What I’ve been reading
Piece of thought
There is a interesting essay in it New statesman by John Gray on one of the most enigmatic thinkers of the 20th century, Friedrich Hayek.
Turning the page
Feeling pessimistic? Henry Oliver suggests reading a book on This beautiful essay.
Worlds apart
The great science fiction writer Karl Schröder has a… Revealing blog post about thinking about the future.