‘Tech for good’ isn’t really a movement. It’s more of a posture – one that merely signals good intentions. While these good intentions are sometimes genuine, they’re often deeply insincere. This makes tech for good a useful phrase that allows users to greenwash an industry that has little interest in anything other than entrenching its own power and wealth.
Compare it to other actual movements. Whether it’s something broad, like sustainability, or more focused, like Black Lives Matter, movements are typically able to provide a clear vision of what they’re for and what they want the world to be like. Tech for good, however, has no real vision. This isn’t to say that movements can’t be made up of a coalition of ideals and ideologies, but they do need to be about working towards change in a specific domain. They need to be able to articulate that change and why it matters.
What is tech for good?
If tech for good does anything, it at least highlights the fact that the tech industry doesn’t always do good. It’s a subtle concession that things should be done differently, and a tacit recognition that there are many negative consequences to the dramatic social and economic effects of the industry.
However, just about every invocation of the idea fails to offer a clear solution to issues of job insecurity, surveillance, hate speech, and entrenched privilege. Indeed, it’s doomed to fail precisely because, by centering ‘tech’, it immediately assumes that these are problems that tech can solve.
This isn’t to say that every tech for good initiative is bad. There are many ways in which technology projects can be put to work in positive and transformative ways. Indeed, you might even say that many of the technologists who helped to lay the foundations of the internet as we know thought in precisely these terms. However, the concept of tech for good would have seemed weird to them: of course it’s for good, otherwise, what’s the point?
To a certain extent, perhaps technology’s capacity to affect change forces those in and around the industry to situate themselves as a force for good. This was what Raksha Muthukumar, a Google engineer, said to me: “I think we all have a general understanding that technology will shape our future and having a hand in that is extremely powerful. We make ourselves feel better by saying that the hand we’ll have in it is a positive one.”
I spoke to Muthukumar back in December after reading a piece she wrote the month previous for the Tech Workers Coalition newsletter. In it she described how she was “wooed” by the idea of tech for good, only to become cynical. “The material realities of capitalism in 21st century America weighed on my shoulders in the form of educational and medical bills… These realities are so real to so many of us and we’re left with a choice between bad and worse. To harm others, or to sacrifice myself?”
Less than a month later, Muthukumar would be one of more than 200 Google employees that launched the Alphabet Workers Union.
This instance of collective action is an inevitable result of substantial disillusion of the optimism of the industry. A company that implicitly made the alignment of tech and good seem normal with its “don’t be evil” had managed to pretty much fulfil just about every evil corporation trope. The question the Google union poses is this: is tech for good even possible when power agglomerates and rises to the top?
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The different ways the term ‘tech for good’ is used
Before going further, it’s worth looking at the different places in which the concept of ‘tech for good’ is deployed. Some of these include organizations and projects designed to support particular vulnerable or marginalized groups, or to improve public services, while others are more focused on empowering people with digital skills to improve accessibility and diversity in the industry.
Tech for good and venture capitalism
A recent report by ‘growth platform’ TechNation on tech for good in the UK demonstrates how widely the term is being applied. It attempts to pull together different strands of the UK tech industry; in doing so it suggests that there is a well-intentioned corner of the industry that demands recognition and praise.
Aside from whether this narrative even holds up, it’s worth noting the extent to which the report details the role venture capital plays in this world. This shouldn’t really be that surprising, but it is nevertheless a reminder that in spite of all the talk about doing things differently, the new world of tech for good looks a lot like the old one.
Even the most genuine tech for good initiatives are embedded in our existing exploitative economic system. In turn this means that not only do they replicate the same modes of thinking; they will also struggle to properly reckon with the issues they claim to to tackle.
A ‘bandaid’ over a larger problem
This is something that Muthukumar has considered in her time in the tech industry. “It took me a while to realize that doing good ‘in the system,’ so to speak, was feeling like a bandaid to a much larger problem” she says. This meant that things like diversity initiatives started to appear in a more cynical light. “It felt like the ultimate beneficiary of more women, PoC, and [other] minorities in tech were the companies, who now had a larger labor force and whose eventual goal is to have a market with more workers than jobs so they can start getting away with worse labor standards.
”It’s a way to keep us working for them!”
An alibi for the powerful
However, if tech for good was just a “bandaid” it probably wouldn’t be quite as nefarious as it really is. The worst uses of the phrase are an alibi for the industry as it faces more criticism from politicians and the public.
Take, for example, Emmanuel Macron’s Tech for Good Summit. Launched back in 2018 (when the techlash was really emerging as a major story), its aim seems to be to simply bring together big tech CEOs under some vague banner of positivity.
My challenge to tech leaders: #TechForGood pic.twitter.com/bghqH99FJ3
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) May 23, 2018
Here’s an overview that demonstrates that it’s as bad as it sounds:
Tech for Good is composed of five groups of 15 to 20 organizations, including large companies (tech and non-tech), NGOs, investment funds and startups. Over the past twelve months, the five groups developed new cross-company initiatives while delivering on the engagements taken by the more than 80 CEOs during the 2019 Summit, hosted by Macron on the eve of the 4th annual VivaTech conference in Paris, France. The common ambition of the Tech for Good Summit, VivaTech and the Tech for Good startup ecosystem is to increase collaboration of actors of all sizes around “for good” initiatives.
The emptiness of the initiative is underlined by the fact that this year a host of CEOs signed up to an unbinding pledge. Despite noises about taxation, skills, privacy, and other big tech talking points, it’s hard to disagree with Romain Dillet’s assessment: “Tech CEOs want to be treated like heads of state, while Macron wants to position himself as a tech-savvy president. It’s a win-win for them, and a waste of time for everyone else.”
Muthukumar is withering in her assessment of who ultimately benefits from the tech for good. It is, she says, “the usual beneficiaries of capitalism: the 1% class and their corporations. It’s a way to keep us working for them!”
“You have to approach it with an anti-capitalist framework and look at the big picture.”
Thinking beyond tech for good
The starting point for real change surely has to be rethinking exactly what good means. However, Muthukumar warns that this is incredibly challenging. “I don’t really think you can have these conversations meaningfully if you don’t ultimately believe that the current system of buying and selling everything is broken.”
The friction, she suggests, exists in the gap between the big picture and the detail. “You have to approach it with an anti-capitalist framework and look at the big picture. Small day-to-day decisions can reduce harm (‘do we keep this data for 3 years, or 7?’) but ultimately they’re subject to the bigger picture harm (‘data is profitable and sold to the highest bidder’).”
Moreover, given the endless photo opportunities, it’s unlikely that we’re going to see an end to institutions leveraging tech for good for their own ends. Governments are looking to self-styled innovators to help them solve immense problems that political and electoral realities appear to prevent them from solving, while those innovators are happy to take another slice of the pie. Tech for good is a useful phrase that allows this transfer of power to take place with little scrutiny.
According to Muthukumar, the solution lies not in getting the establishment to ‘do good’ as if we were simply asking for a morsel of ethics. Instead, the best thing government and industry leaders can do is return more power to those actually working in the system. In a sense, more democracy. “Industry and government leaders can support us through endorsing worker initiatives.”
Collective action and critical perspectives
A few months ago I saw a promoted tweet from Uber asking people to “help us create a nationwide work of art to thank our NHS heroes.” This was just over a month after the Proposition 22 vote had been confirmed. I’m not sure if this is strictly an example of ‘tech for good’, but the disconnect seemed to me to be in keeping with precisely the problems we find in tech for good initiatives.
And while it’s true that we’re talking about Uber’s presence in two very different parts of the world, it’s important to note that Uber knows this. It realises that this connection won’t cut through. it understands that the political and economic fights it continues to wage can be hidden by displays of civic solidarity.
We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be swindled by the rhetoric of progress and transformation, whether it’s found in asinine branding or barely useful products.
But asking for more awareness feels a little glib: it doesn’t necessarily help us decide how to act. While there’s no easy way to move beyond all this, collective action – like that of Muthukumar and her colleagues – seems like a good place to start. That way we can start to own and interrogate the tensions and conflicts in which we’re all caught.
Thanks to Raksha Muthukumar for taking the time to talk to me. She is a software engineer by day and community organizer by {night/evening/weekend/always}. She is passionate about building a tech future for the many, not just the few. Raksha currently organizes with Node Project, DSA Tech Action, and through freelance writing. Learn more about Raksha at raksha.gay.
She wanted to give a shout out to these organizations and people – all do great work in the field of tech activism and deserve your attention.
Organizations:
People: