There’s a growing discrepancy between our reliance on technological systems and our understanding of them. Given the complexity of the industrial and digital processes surrounding us, this is entirely understandable. However, in my view, delegating understanding is never a good thing, and it’s best not to be blind to the inner workings of processes we interact with on a daily basis. Furthermore, by resolving to only be a passive consumer of technological goods means, in some ways, foregoing the ability to alter or manipulate the technological tools we use. Good writing about technology, it seems, is one of the missing pieces in this puzzle, without which, we’re destined to continue walking blind in the modern maze of systems and gadgets.

On August 13th, I organized a conversation about the need for greater technological literacy with two thoughtful writers, Nadia Asparouhova and Danny Crichton. The full conversation transcript is available to read at the link above. Below, I've reproduced my introduction to the discussion.

Introduction: It’s pretty obvious that the world is very much powered by technology and technological designs. The thing that’s different and interesting about this today is that most of these designs, whether they are industrial processes, whether there are devices, the software we use — the inner workings of them are hidden, abstracted or literally invisible to the human eye.

Like if we think about the circuit logic in an iPhone, this is electron level stuff. So we can’t even see it with our own eyes if we wanted to. All of computer engineering – really anything digital, is built on abstractions. So it’s much more difficult to see technologically and to intuit about the technologies that we use in our daily lives today than it was in the past.

This is the first passage from the book The Elements of Computing Systems, which is a book about how computers work. So it begins,

Once upon a time, every computer specialist had a gestalt understanding of how computers worked. The overall interactions among hardware, software, compilers, and the operating system were simple and transparent enough to produce a coherent picture of the computer’s operations. As modern computer technologies have become increasingly more complex, this clarity is all but lost: the most fundamental ideas and techniques in computer science—the very essence of the field—are now hidden under many layers of obscure interfaces and proprietary implementations. An inevitable consequence of this complexity has been specialization, leading to computer science curricula of many courses, each covering a single aspect of the field. We wrote this book because we felt that many computer science students are missing the forest for the trees.”

So there’s a sense in which maybe we’re all kind of missing the forest for the trees in some way. I wrote, as part of this residency, three theses based on these ideas, and those were:

1. I think, technological literacy, like understanding the scientific, physical, mathematical concepts behind technological designs, will be increasingly important to retain agency in the world. So you can imagine, for example, economic or financial literacy is really important to how every responsible adult navigates the modern world. And so there’s a claim to be made, or my claim is that going forward, having technological literacy is going to be very important to be able to orient yourself in the world.

2. Okay, second thing is all technological advancements create new problems. 

3. And the third is that the role of public writers should be to articulate those problems, and promote greater technological literacy through their writing.

So basically, what Nadia and Danny are doing really well. The other problem is, increasingly, it seems like there’s fewer and fewer voices, institutions and publications that are telling stories about technology in these new ways, which is something I hope to dive into in our conversation today. 

What I think is most lacking from the discourse, is highlighted in following quote from the social critic, Paul Goodman, who says,

Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.

I think that, in general, going forward, there should be more of an identity created between technology and culture. 

Technology is crucial in determining resource allocation, our habits, how we do things. I also think that technology is just a matter of design. It’s a design with a lot of flexibility in the same way that an artwork is a design. And it’s a reflection of a particular way of doing things. But there might be multiple expressions of that way of doing things. And so that’s something that I also think is missing. 

The last thing is something that Maran Nelson, the founder of Interact pointed out to me, which is that if we accept that technology is art, we know that within the ecosystem of art, there’s also an ecosystem of art critics that comment on the art. That’s not really the case for technology, there’s not really a culture or an ecosystem of critics like that. Is that something that should change?