Design is not a zero-sum economic game but an ambivalent cultural process that serves a multiplicity of values and social groups without necessarily sacrificing efficiency.
Andrew Feenburg. (2010). “Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom” in Between Reason and Experience.
… the relatively high profile of the WSIS has helped to redefine the internet policy agenda and create a greater awareness and understanding at many levels of the substantial breadth and magnitude of potential ICT4D impacts and of the key global issues of internet governance affecting attempts to spread as widely as possible the benefits tied to the internet’s use. The gain in understanding was highlighted by one experienced senior intentional official who commented that at the first Geneva event many people were not even sure what “the internet” meant and why it should be significant to them–let alone what a concept like “internet governance” signifies.
W. H. Dutton and M. Peltu. (2010). “The new politics of the internet: Multi-stakeholder policy-making and the internet technocracy,” in A. Chadwick and P. N. Howard (Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics. New York: Routledge.
[Computer specialists] are at once the most unmanageable and the most poorly managed specialism in our society. Actors and artists pale by comparison. Only pure mathematicians are as cantankerous, and it’s a calamity that so many of them get recruited by simplistic personnel men…[Managers should] refuse to embark on grandiose or unworthy schemes, and refuse to let their recalcitrant charges waste skill, time and money on the fashionable idiocies of our [computer] racket.
Herbert Grosch. (1966). “Programmers: The Industry’s Cosa Nostra,” Datamation 12(10): 202.
[The programmer type is] often egocentric, slightly neurotic, and he borders upon a mild schizophrenia. The incidence of beards, sandals, and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity are notably greater among this demographic group. Stories about programmers and their attitudes and particularities are legion, and do not bear repeating here.
Richard Brandon, “The Problem in Perspective.” In Proceedings of the 1968 23rd ACM National Conference, 332-334. New York: ACM Press, 1968.
It is important to note that the SDC approach did not attempt to solve its programmer personnel problem by reducing the number of programmers it required. On the contrary, the SDC software factory strategy (or as detractors dismissively referred to it, the “Mongolian Horde” approach to software development) probably demanded more programmers than was otherwise necessary. But the programmers that SDC was interested in were not the idiosyncratic “black artists” that most employers were desperately in search of. SDC still expected to hire and train large numbers of programmers, yet it hoped that these programmers would be much easier to identify and recruit. Most of its trainees had little or no experience with computers; in fact, many managers at SDC preferred it that way.
Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise
In one inquiry it was found that a successful team of computer specialists included an ex-farmer, a former tabulating machine operator, an ex-key punch operator, a girl who had done secretarial work, a musician and a graduate in mathematics. That last was considered the least competent.
Hans Albert Rhee, Office Automation in a Social Perspective, 1968
… there is never a single, ideal type towards which any given technology will inevitably evolve. Specific technologies are developed to solve specific problems, for specific users, in specific times and places. How certain problems get defined as being more in need of a solution, which users are considered more important to design for, what other technological systems need to be provided or accounted for, who has the power to set certain technical and economic priorities–these are fundamentally social considerations that deeply influence the process of technological development.
Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.
If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form.
It is not for innocent people to justify why the state should not spy on them.
The problem … was that the surveillance technology sold to Iran in 2008 is standard “lawful intercept” functionality required by law in Europe, so that police can track criminals. Unfortunately, with the same technology in the hands of a regime that defines “crime” broadly to include political dissent and “blasphemy,” the result is an efficient antidissident surveillance machine.
Excited Pixels