Coded Bias (2020)

Many thanks for sharing. I am not sure whether this is only about racial bias, but the issue is far deeper. Douglas Rushkoff makes a very strong case for biases at work in all technology in his book, “Program or be Programmed”. Here are some bits that stuck with me:

Rushkoff goes through ten "commands" that he claims represent one of the tendencies or “biases” of digital media. What is a bias? He gives the following examples:

"A bias is simply a leaning—a tendency to promote one set of behaviors over another. All media and all technologies have biases. It may be true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”; but guns are a technology more biased to killing than, say, clock radios. Televisions are biased toward people sitting still in couches and watching. Automobiles are biased toward motion, individuality, and living in the suburbs. Oral culture is biased toward communicating in person, while written culture is biased toward communication that doesn’t happen between people in the same time and place. Film photography and its expensive processes were biased toward scarcity, while digital photography is biased toward immediate and widespread distribution. Some cameras even upload photos to websites automatically, turning the click of the shutter into an act of global publishing. To most of us, though, that “click” still feels the same even though the results are very different. We can’t quite feel the biases shifting as we move from technology to technology, or task to task. Writing an email is not the same as writing a letter, and sending a message through a social networking service is not the same as writing an email. Each of the acts not only yields different results, but demands different mindsets and approaches from us. Just as we think and behave differently in different settings, we think and behave differently when operating different technology."

"We spend an hour or two of what used to be free time operating a dangerous two-ton machine and, on average, a full workday each week paying to own and maintain it. Throughout the twentieth century, we remained blissfully ignorant of the real biases of automotive transportation. We approached our cars as consumers, through ads, rather than as engineers or, better, civic planners. We gladly surrendered our public streetcars to private automobiles, unaware of the real expenses involved. We surrendered our highway policy to a former General Motors chief, who became secretary of defense primarily for the purpose of making public roads suitable for private cars and spending public money on a highway system. We surrendered city and town life for the commuting suburbs, unaware that the bias of the automobile was to separate home from work. As a result, we couldn’t see that our national landscape was being altered to manufacture dependence on the automobile. We also missed the possibility that these vehicles could make the earth’s atmosphere unfit for human life, or that we would one day be fighting wars primarily to maintain the flow of oil required to keep them running.

So considering the biases of a technology before and during its implementation may not be so trivial after all. In the case of digital technology, it is even more important than usual. The automobile determined a whole lot about how we’d get from place to place, as well as how we would reorganize our physical environment to promote its use. Digital technology doesn’t merely convey our bodies, but ourselves. Our screens are the windows through which we are experiencing, organizing, and interpreting the world in which we live. They are also the interfaces through which we express who we are and what we believe to everyone else. They are fast becoming the boundaries of our perceptual and conceptual apparatus; the edge between our nervous systems and everyone else’s, our understanding of the world and the world itself."

This last point is likely where my main interests lie. The biases he draws out from digital technology are:
time
place
choice
complexity
scale
identity
social
fact
openness, and
purpose.

It’s a fascinating topic.