Political Code

Reading: Twitter and Teargas Author: Zeynep Tufekci

During "Conversations" last Friday, Roopa Vaseduvan argued that it's in the interest of powerful business that we believe no one truly has say in what technologies are being implemented and how they will shape the world. Tech as a force of nature in and of itself. The engineers and designers who produce very the systems that shape our daily life often reduce themselves to apex consumers who can leverage the latest tools on the market for the masses lower on the tool-food-chain. Even CEOs see themselves as lacking agency. When everyone else is throwing themselves into the jaws of LLM AI craze, who has the choice not to? Some believe AI itself, once "it" achieves consciousness, will reward those who helped develop it and punish those who didn't. Under this view, we're all left doomed to repeatedly assimilate into a world subject to neverending cycles of disruption. We're all, conveniently to the status quo, doomed to feed the machine.

But Roopa also reminded us that "futures are not inevitable." While Sillicon Valley and Washington DC are often formulated as closed systems that can only be penetrated by outstanding men, no system is truly closed, and the idea that any meaningfully complex systems is impenetrable to anyone other than the next something-mogul is again, a convenient myth. Systems are made up by people. They are made up of people. When people refuse the convenient myths of inevitability and subvert the narrative, we can take it upon ourselves to shape the present and rewrite the future.

Roopa says we can rely on DIY punk culture to "pry open" systems and change them from within. I believe the influence of the general population over technology already is even more ubiquitous than might be apparent at first sight, and that we can increase our impact over the behavior of systems without needing to even "pry" anything open.

In Twitter and Teargas, Zeynep Tufecki recounts how "#" and "@" were organic innovations by the platform's users themselves. Much of the social media conventions were once scrappy DIY workarounds. When Twitter didn't have an ability to reshare content, people took it upon themselves to type "RT" (re-tweet) and pasted another user's handle and text. Users take advantage of affordances that are present even when they aren't signified.

Like Roopa, Tufecki makes the case that while technology and the deisgn decisions that unlerlie it have real, massive impact on how people communicate and interact, it's not a one-way street. People's behaviour directly shapes design of features. There is no digital dualism, and the assumption that tech completely alters human behavior is a fallacy that obfuscates a more complex but tangible relational landscape between technology and people that we can grip and manipulate.