Inquiry

Tech industry boosters regularly promise the transformative effects of their products and services—to mitigate climate change, automate menial work, reduce food insecurity, or expand democratic values. As we’ve been reminded again and again, technology is never neutral, and it alone cannot solve our problems. To what extent do technological developments reinforce and entrench existing inequalities, and how might they be leveraged to overcome them? Can technology be mobilized to surmount the inequalities it reinforces? The examples herein show practitioners taking a cautious, often ambivalent approach to technologies: deconstructing their constituent parts to show their flaws and biases; working them against the grain of their intended use for alternative outcomes; reintroducing play and indeterminacy into their programmatic functions; or leveraging techno-optimism in favour of do-it-together collectivity.