Class 2 Reflection

“Colonial relationships may have dissolved, and yet the history of global dynamics of power, wealth, economic strength, and political influence shape contemporary cultural encounters. For example, lower cost labor and mineral extraction in Asia and Africa tacitly undergirds the development of cheaper, faster, and smaller computers used and sold globally.” (Irani et al., 2010, p. 1311)

I liked this week's readings focus on the role of larger economic/social forces in shaping the development of computing technologies.

The IT boom in India has its roots in catering to the needs/desires of the capitalists in the developed economies as a means to maximize their profits by outsourcing the business operations to developing regions for cheap labor. This, I believe, is the fundamental impetus that drove the rise of Business Process Outsourcing centers (BPOs) in the developing regions across the world, which are now mostly called as Global Capability Centers (GCC) (to be more politically correct, I guess). As I am writing this, a data worker in Walmart GCC, Chennai, IN is probably fixing/optimizing the inventory data of the mega Walmart center in Ithaca, US (a shopping center that they might never visit) -- only to be replaced by AI sooner once it gets good at doing the same work cheaper. Or may be they have been laid off already.

The onset of the software boom created an illusion of ever-growing prosperity, albeit for a small section of the computer-class workers, while these economic relationships are rooted in the history of colonialism and global dynamics of power. It made it seem like the wealth will keep getting transferred from the wealthy economies to the poor ones. The only requirement was to be enterprising and learn to work with computers. But in reality, it was the capitalists in the wealthy economies sharing a very small slice of their pie to the capitalists in poorer economies in order to make ten more much bigger pies with the cost of labor saved by not paying fair wages to the workers in their own country. The affordances of the information technologies made it feasible as non-material and cognitive labor could be easily displaced to anywhere on earth as long there is internet. On the other hand, it is the same affordances of the information technologies that masked the economic and physical realities of the majority of the working class from its computer-class elites. Mobile and computer technologies have created information bubbles through platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Reddit. As people spend more time on digital computing technologies, this has continued to create a dissonance between physical realities shaped by economic/power structures and people’s perception of reality. This is particularly visible in developing economies. A corporate employee in Bangalore may be celebrating their accomplishments or envying a colleague’s LinkedIn profile, which then shapes their aspirations and actions. They try to succeed within a small corporate economic system that is itself shaped by larger global forces. At the same time, the city around them may be deteriorating, as global corporations with capital often have little incentive to invest in fixing public problems in the cities where their third-world workforce lives and works.

This has clear parallels with colonialism, where the labor of the colonized was exported to support development in the colonizer’s home, while the needs of the colonized were overlooked. In a similar way, computer-class elites fail to recognize these economic realities because of the same computing-driven information bubbles we have created. This also turns power and economic realities into cultural forces, echoing the argument by Irani et al. that these structures shape culture itself.

I believe what we need now is to revive the "Appropriate Technology" movement as described by Irani et al. where smaller technologies that accounted for local needs, infrastructures, skills, and materials are prioritized over large-scale engineering efforts. This would allow people to leverage the positive affordance of the technologies to aid the development of communities than aiding only the profit maximation of the wealthy companies. This supports Dombrowski et al.’s position that design is fundamentally about shaping social realities. Because progressive change does not emerge naturally, design approaches that focus on existing needs, dominant users, and current market demands often end up stabilizing existing inequalities and power hierarchies rather than challenging them.