Are software developers political? Or should they be?
5 Comments Published by tobias.escher February 24th, 2010 in *OIINEWS, code, political participation, web 2.0So there is this nice guy Jeff Gilfelt, a software developer from Reading, who has made some headlines with his iPhone/Android application called ASBOromoter which gives you simple access to government data on the number of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders that were handed out and other anti-social stuff in the area you happen to be with your mobile phone.
From the material available the app looks great and it is also a nice example of what stuff citizen can do when government data is publicly available as Jeff used datasets from the recently started data.gov.uk portal. The remarkable point I want to highlight is shown in the video below when Jeff was asked by Conrad Quilty-Harper if there is a political point to his app:
The answer is a passionate “No“. Can you believe it?
Now I was not totally surprised because some years ago I wrote my MA thesis on “Political Motives of Developers for Collaboration on GNU/Linux“. While I found that a majority of the developers in my sample did actually attribute a political relevance (whatever it might be) to their coding of GNU/Linux, it was also clear from my research and that of others, that most programmers are motivated by the fun of coding. The Free Software community of GNU/Linux might be a bit of an exception given its founding principles but it is certainly not totally defamatory to expect the bunch of Web developers for gadgets like the iPhone to be less principled.
Is there something wrong with this? On the danger of over-generalising a bit too much I would argue yes. A tool like the ASBOrometer which makes transparent how screwed up your area is – this is more than just a funny app because it shows where the government has failed its citizens. Now it won’t come as much of a surprise to most inhabitants of these areas but the app gives you simple and quick access to actual numbers and compare your situation with that of others. This might well be what triggers some people to stop accepting their fate and get up to do something about being let down by society. As much as I hate to refer to the Sun to state a point coverage of the ASBOrometer in broadsheets like these certainly emphasise that is has struck a cord with people – also underscored by the fact that within two days it achieved over 80,000 downloads. Finally, lets not forget the economic dimension (and you don’t have to be a Marxist to know that little could be more political than this) as the newspapers rightly point out that this could have a huge impact on house prices in these areas.
Of course in my opinion all this makes this app all the better but I believe it is important that the people putting stuff like this together have some idea of its potential relevance. Ideally they might have an aim for this as well (I mean one relevant for the public good, not just fun for themselves) but hey, you can’t change the world every day. But the naivety with which software developer go about their work at my best of times amazes me but at other times just outright scares me.
As it says in the Spiderman comics:
In a world heavily shaped by information and its free flow in the form of bits and bytes, people with computing skills are a small elite, able to manipulate this flow and determine its outcomes. There are many examples in which our current technology vanguards are making use of their skills with the aim to create some benefits to citizens such as mySociety in the UK or Sunlight in the US to name just a few. But we need much more of this.
All of this comes back to the old debate about the ethics of science and to what degree scientists (as just one example of an expert elite) are responsible for what they do – a debate wonderfully illustrated in Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists. Of course the ASBOborometer is no atomic bomb and I’m not in any way suggesting programming should not be fun or Jeff has anything but good (or no) intentions. But I really think it is time that even software developers understand that no tool is neutral and start to take responsibility for their creation – or at least try to understand its relevance. Because code is law, code is political!
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About
Since October 2006 I am both a DPhil student as well as a research assistant at the Oxford Internet Institute and here I share with the accidental reader my musings on different aspects of the Internet and society. Feel free to comment or simply ignore :-)
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Tobias Escher
Oxford Internet Institute
1 St. Giles
Oxford OX1 3JS
firstname.lastname@oii.ox.ac.uk
+44 (0)1865 287210
Hey Tobias,
Thanks for pointing to the video with Jeff. This whole topic of what motivates open data developers is something I’m exploring for my thesis on the OII Masters (http://www.practicalparticipation.co.uk/odi/). Would love to chat about it and get your insights more if you’re around 1 St Giles or Banbury Road anytime soon…
Tim
Tobias,
You seem to be confusing information with interpretation.
For example,
“A tool like the ASBOrometer which makes transparent how screwed up your area is – this is more than just a funny app because it shows where the government has failed its citizens.”
You assume that the government is responsible for the behaviour of its citizens and interpret the ASBO data as an indication of failure. Having worked in the public sector in Newham (as you would put it: the most screwed up area in the UK) and drawing on personal experience I can vouch for the excellence, dedication, professionalism and hard work of government workers in that location. Ultimately, the situation is far more complex than that implied by the remark quoted above.
As a software developer I think you also make a further inaccurate claim:
“But I really think it is time that even software developers understand that no tool is neutral and start to take responsibility for their creation – or at least try to understand its relevance.”
Of course you have an MA thesis that demonstrates open-source developers mainly do it for “fun”, but it *doesn’t* follow that developers fail to understand the wider political and social ramifications of their work. It is merely an indication of what they told you was their motivation for starting such work.
That we (software developers) have been licking our lips in delight at the open data recently published by the government is, to my eyes, an indication that the wider developer community does understand our creation’s “relevance”. In what way is holding politicians and the government to account and discovering interesting, new and important means of engaging the wider technology using public with such data *not* understanding that “no tool is neutral”?
Apologies for the bluntness,
N.
P.S. “Please add the following two numbers 1 0 (ANTI-SPAM measure)” seems broken. Unless I’m mistaken, 1 0 = 1. I reloaded the page, here’s hoping I get 6 8 correct…
Thx for this post. Intriguing to ask though is the question: “what do developers mean by political?” And what is meant by “political” in this article? I am not surprised that when developers (or scientists) are asked if their work is political, they respond negatively as the usual connotation of “political” through media channels is either affiliation with party politics (representative politics) or protest politics (politics of issue or identity). I think what you article gestures toward is a different meaning of the concept of the “political,” and one that is found in political theory itself, of a “political” without representation (see, for example the work of Rancière). In this sense such software as above is certainly political, insofar as it shifts the ground upon which “politics” takes place. One could generalise to say that the political effect of technological or scientific work is to change the fundamental axioms of ensuing systems of politics by changing their systems of representation, distribution, perception (for example, just as Darwin’s theory of evolution changed world perceptions of the human, it changed systems of political representation in complicated ways, contributing to both crude social darwinism & movements of social equality based upon evolutionary principles). There is another way to ask the question of the political, however, and that would be to analyse the way in which software developers are very much part of a global network of such cognitive labour (labour primarily of technological – cognitive means), and that their general characteristic is that of precarious labour (overtime & underpaid labour without permanent guarantees or benefits). In this sense, such software is political as it expresses the frustrations of cognitive labour in respect to precarity (among other things, such as surveillance, gov’t databases, and the specific content this software analyses). For more on this perspective, see the work of Virno, Marazzi, Negri (check my blog, I delve into this latter explicitly). cheers, thanks for the post — most useful / tobias.
late but hopefully not too late: Thanks for your comments and here some replies
@Tim: Hope to meet you soon!
@ntoll: Criticism is always welcome. Thanks for highlighting the great work civil servants do but I disagree with your conclusion. I am happy to see and hear that there are many civil servants that work passionate and hard but this does not automatically mean that the system in which they function does itself work as intended. When I write government has failed its citizens, I mean e.g. that it failed to provide education and equal opportunities to the young people in those areas which makes it just so much more likely for them to turn into someone who might get an ASBO.
To your second point about software developers: First of all I guess both of us are over-generalising as of course one cannot talk of software developers as if they were all the same. I very much welcome your suggestion that most software developers do in fact understand what their work can do but this cannot deny the very fact I was writing about, that this guy in the video would not see this point. Of course this might be a question of what one understands as political as tV discussed in his comment.
@tV: You are perfectly right that the definition of what is or is not “political” is crucial but I did not go into this as I felt this is just too much for a post. You outline several possible interpretations and I would see my understanding as broad but not quite as broad as you suggest in some of them.
I can’t speak for the majority of software developers out there, but for myself I can say that, yes, I do have awareness of the potential political impact that my work has, and during my career I have actively elected not work for companies and organisations that I had moral concerns about. In recent years, I’ve turned down overtures from a UK company that works closely with the US national security agencies (because of the gross human right abuses that the US have been responsible for since 911). I also turned down a job I’d applied for an been offered with the UK’s very own SIS, despite coming right the way through and passing their selection and developed vetting process (which took some 9 months to complete). I turned down the SIS role, because although I’d believed when I applied that our intelligence services weren’t complicit in torture in the same way that the Americans had been during the preceding ten years, it was starting to become obvious from reports in the press about cases like Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed’s disgraceful torture that sadly our services were involved in such things. Since I turned down the role, the British Government have settled several cases in relation to UK agencies’ complicity in torture out of court, so all in all I feel that I did the right thing.
It’d have been interesting to work for SIS, I’m quite sure, and I perhaps could have convinced myself that I could have acted as a positive influence within an organisation that seems to have lost its way a little. Deep down, though, I knew that would have just been so much empty rationalising. There’d always have been a nagging little part of my conscience that would have told me that by even being there and accepting a role offered by an organisation that was behaving in a questionable way, I was part of the problem. The fact of the matter is, even in organisations where technical workers aren’t directly involved in front line activities themselves, by being there at all we are lending our skills and abilities to whatever greater efforts the organisations that employ us are engaged in. As recent cases like Wikileaks have shown, technology plays a huge part in the activities of most organisation, private and public sectors alike. We can therefore have a bigger impact than we might think, for good or for bad, in the places where we choose to ply our trade.