Social media platforms, search engines, e-commerce platforms, blockchains, LLMs, online payment systems, on-demand transportation, content management systems, productivity tools, the best known of each of these are so pervasive that they could be more accurately called infrastructures instead of mere tools.
If these behave as infrastructures upon which all other services are built, it is not surprise that those who create the winner candidate of each of these races become so known.
And the all-encompassing reach of these infrastructures also reduces their accountability, if we follow some quite convincing lines of reasoning. This idea is becoming increasingly challenged, but it is easy to see how finding a perfect solution is so difficult. Thus, building the next great infrastructure which any free individual or organisation can use as a tool for their own self-selected aims still is the coveted golden fleece of tech. It is for sure an ambiguous kind of power and a great responsiblity, yet the point is that more than anything, nowadays and roughly since the ’90s the ‘great revolutionary tech tool’ is always a great enabler for the people.
The issue I have with this is not exactly that the owners of these infrastructures should be held more accountable for how they are being use (although I’m not at all against them being held to constant scrutiny and critique, and I also do think that the ‘blame the wielder, not the hammer’ is a very simplistic, dangerous argument). The issue I have is that the blinding glow that surrounds these infrastructures, all the talk about the next big thing and the benefits and dangers of technology, is eclipsing a less assuming type of technology.
What I’m referring to is smaller, more specific technologies that have this enabling quality of the aforementioned platforms but are transparent about their purposes, and that they are more concrete and less abstract than ‘connecting people’ or ‘becoming the town-square of the planet’. We have enough people building tools all the time. We have the possibility of reaching smaller audiences thanks to the long-tail effect of the internet. There could be a wider array of choice, sub-versions of general infrastructures that are designed to help people accomplish more concrete purposes. They could be more normalised in everyday discourse, in our ‘default’ perception of how we design our technological environment and our habits.
And very importantly: the creators and the users would not be off the hook. There would not be a fuzzy line and a large, confusing variety of opposing arguments that all make somewhat sense on whether it’s just a ‘tool’ and their creators should not be held accountable or the reverse.
Shouldn’t that be glorified? Creating incredible tools but transparent about concrete intentions, and giving power to those users who also are specific about their intentions? Instead of trying to be as general as possible to achieve economies of scale, market captures, network effects, or enough competition to be swallowed by the big general infrastructure for a hefty reward?
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