Here’s a hypothesis I’ve been mulling over as I’ve been absorbing the news these last few weeks and months:
It’s time to re-frame Tech & Society as a field, especially a field within philanthropy. We need a different starting point, a different perspective. We need to center society, and specifically power dynamics.
So let’s use Society & Tech or Society, Tech & Power — as working titles until that sticks or something else takes its place.
Importantly, though, this is not about branding. I think we need to seriously re-examine how we have looked at this. Historically, it has been about the impact of tech on society. And historically, that made sense.
But now that tech is in many ways one of the most powerful and at the same time most horizontal force shaping society, we need to de-center tech in order to move forward:
- Rather than accepting that tech happens to society, we need to put societal needs first, and then examine how we want and allow tech to play into that.
- Big tech platforms have aligned themselves politically with the MAGA movement/US government (which for now are interchangeable, even though I hope and expect these two terms will diverge again soon) in very unusual ways. Whatever happens now in this space will be inherently political to a degree that it has not in the past.
- Where financial, political and attentional power intersect the way they do here, things are seriously wrong. So we need to look at power dynamics very critically, and work backwards from there.
Many foundations and philanthropies have been taking tech critical positions that point in this direction already. Others have been operating under the assumption that things are a little more removed from the political sphere.
It appears to me that we need to acknowledge that we live in a very different world today than we did even a year or two ago, and act accordingly.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and learn how you and your organization are thinking about this?
