Letters to a Young Technologist: Reclaiming symbolic power in tech

A short paper I wrote for my media studies class at Pomona College. Excuse the roughness as this was my first time grappling with the academic language surrounding these ideas, and the rough translation from paper to blog format -- there will be much more to come!

Sociologist John Thompson writes that there are four forms of power: economic, political, coercive, and symbolic. (1) The entrepreneurs and companies that make up the tech industry undoubtedly exercise great economic, political, and symbolic power. The possession of real power is core to the “technologist” identity: the difference between an engineer and a technologist is that the former “makes with the mind,” only designing technology, while the latter “works with the mind and with the hand” to realize technology into “tools to produce things,” writes Purdue Polytechnic Institute Dean Gary Bertoline. The economic power of the tech industry is obvious in the capital and labor bound up in its giants and startups alike. Its political power has also become clear in the last decade, for example Google becoming the second-biggest spender on D.C. lobbying in in 2012 (2) and Uber and Lyft having a major impact on “law, corporate practices and the very way our society thinks about work.” (3)

But the symbolic power of the tech industry, “the power of constructing reality” as defined by Bourdieu (4), is arguably its most distinctive. This is true in the sense that platforms like Facebook and Twitter have dramatically redefined the ways we connect and engage with each other, directly constructing our social realities. In less visible but even stronger ways, technologists powerfully shape popular beliefs about the drivers of positive progress, particularly in relation to the role of the market as opposed to political forces and institutions. Technologists frame themselves as disruptors of status quo businesses and institutions, improving people’s lives by ridding past inefficiencies and limitations, and in doing so they often see themselves as neutral and apolitical: “We need to separate the imperative to build…from ideology and politics,” Netscape founder and investor Marc Andreesen declared in the canonical essay “It’s Time to Build.” (5) At the extreme, tech figureheads have framed “technology” as not just independent of but diametrically opposed to any ideology but capitalist libertarianism. Palantir founder and investor Peter Thiel expressed this view clearly in “The Education of a Libertarian”, writing that “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” with the latter necessary for securing a “much better” rather than “much worse” future by creating “the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.” (6)

The essay collection Letters to a Young Technologist, written by a self-identified “group of young technologists”, confronts the shortcomings of this market-entrepreneurship-centric ideology and impels readers — other “young technologists” — to push back against the dominant symbolic power of the tech industry.

The definition of tech made by the first essay in the collection, “What is technology?” echoes Bertoline’s idea that the key to the technologist identity is that technologists don’t just abstractly design, but actively shape the world around them. Unlike Andreesen, though, Saffron Huang, the DeepMind researcher who authored the first essay, rejects that this “building” is neutral or non-ideological. Huang defines technology itself plainly as “tools, processes or systems that make something easier.” In contrast to the traditional view of technologists as simply finding solutions to the problems they are presented with, however, Huang points out that technologists wield power in determining both “what constitutes a problem” and, quoting Joseph Dunne, “what would count as a satisfactory, if or at least not entirely unacceptable, outcome to a particular case.” (7) As an example, Huang notes that while Facebook and Instagram aim to fulfill the same end of connecting people online, “Instagram makes people more visually aesthetic as a route to that” and thereby works to construct an “image-first” reality rather than being a neutral solution. (8) Similarly, the executives of Uber and Lyft were never simply bringing a neutral transportation solution to market. By putting their energy and resources behind their companies’ growth, these technologists implicitly brought about ideological shifts about not just what transportation can look like, but also what kinds of labor and employer relations should be acceptable and even celebrated.

The second essay, written by former OpenAI researcher and Copysmith.ai founder Jasmine Wang, identifies the “instrumentalizing worldview” that serves as the ideological foundation for technologists’ decision-making. This worldview is characterized by “the tendency to regard everything as a resource [for achieving some end goal],” (9) Wang writes, and compels technologists to make “fun” things “telic”: “books must be read with a note-taking system; exercise must be quantified and tracked; friendships are managed in personal CRMs; casual hangouts and dating apps are covert recruitment missions.” (10) The consequence of this ideological foundation is that technologists often focus only on immediate, quantifiable goals and “[sweep] hard questions under the rug.” (11) Optimizations for engagement on a social platform or ease of use on a delivery app are much easier (and more valued by technologists) than considering whether the relationships formed by the former are healthy, or whether the latter has a net positive impact on the community, Wang gives as examples. (12) Wang’s instrumentalizing worldview effectively describes Thiel’s argument that a free-market capitalist society is the end which technology aspires to and “politics” obstructs. By pointing to the ethical considerations that are completely lacking in such an approach, she rejects the tech industry’s ideological assertion that pure market entrepreneurship is the best driver of progress.

The solution that Wang and authors of subsequent essays in the collection propose is for technologists to claim their own symbolic power within tech and exercise it according to values beyond simply supporting the tech industry’s political and economic interests through instrumentalism. Huang and Maran Nelson, the founder of the Interact fellowship, advocate for a “rebooted” identity for “technologist” in their concluding essay. Their proposed new definition is a more or less explicit call to exercise symbolic power: “a technologist makes reason out of the messiness of the world, leverages their understanding to envision a different reality, and builds a pathway to make their vision happen.” (13) After acknowledging this power, technologists will be able to consciously take agency to break from the ideologies imposed on them and consider how they want to use the influence of the tech industry to construct reality for the better. As practical possibilities for this, Wang cites her personal imperative that “your physical body and mental health should not be instrumentalized in service of being useful to a startup mission, or even a life philosophy.” (14) In another essay in the collection, Anna Mitchell urges technologists to consider working for the U.S. government, taking up symbolic power to stretch tech ideology beyond its dominant free-market idolization and apply its positive powers in new ways. (15)

By connecting the ideologies underlying and reproduced by the tech industry to their practical individual and societal harms, Letters to a Young Technologist illustrates the importance of criticizing tech companies and technologists as producers of media with significant symbolic power over popular culture rather than detached economic and political power. Just as criticism of media like books and movies benefit the ecosystem rather than being oppositional, Letters also provides a model for constructive criticism of tech, full of practical advice for technologists hoping to do better than their purely instrumentalist predecessors. “As a general public, we can collectively hold technologists to a higher ethical standard, as their work has important human consequences for us all. We must begin to think of them as doing deeply human work,” Huang and Nelson conclude. (16)

Citations:

1. Nick Couldry, “Power” in Keywords for Media Studies (NYU Press, 2017)

2. Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold, “Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a master of Washington influence” (The Washington Post, 2014)

3. Sam Harnett, “For Over Eight Years, Uber and Lyft Have Denied Drivers Employee Protections. Here's How They Did It.” (KQED, 2020)

4. Couldry, “Power”

5. Marc Andreesen, “It’s Time to Build” (a16z.com, 2020)

6. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian” (Cato Unbound, 2009)

7. Saffron Huang, “What is Technology?” in Letters to a Young Technologist (letterstoayoungtechnologist.com, 2021)

8. Huang, "What is Technology?"

9. Jasmine Wang, “Value Beyond Instrumentalization” in Letters to a Young Technologist (letterstoayoungtechnologist.com, 2021)

10. Wang, “Value Beyond Instrumentalization”

11. Wang, “Value Beyond Instrumentalization”

12. Wang, “Value Beyond Instrumentalization”

13. Saffron Huang and Maran Nelson, “To be a Technologist is to be Human” in Letters to a Young Technologist (letterstoayoungtechnologist.com, 2021)

14. Wang, “Value Beyond Instrumentalization”

15. Anna Mitchell, “It’s Time to Govern” in Letters to a Young Technologist (letterstoayoungtechnologist.com, 2021)

16. Huang and Nelson, “To be a Technologist is to be Human”