the right to refuse

This is a response to Zoe Scaman’s recent piece, “The Right to be Wrong”. It is meant as a “yes, and” riff rather than a “no, but” riposte—and I should note that, while I’ve been tempted to write similar things countless times in the last few years, I have stepped up to respond to Scaman because I respect her honesty and nuance, which lead me to believe she might be more willing than most to acknowledge some of the points I want to make.

Scaman describes the last decade or so of her career as being characterised by the following of threads: always asking similar questions, looking for positive and emancipatory possibilities in the technological novelty du jour, only to see those possibilities eclipsed by hype, speculation and grift. Whether it be NFTs, the metaverse, “AI”, “the word [becomes] radioactive. The question finds somewhere else to go.”

This is how it always works, she tells us, and, well—no shit! I’m sure someone must have theorised the propensity of investor capitalism to hype-driven cycles of boom and bust, but let’s leave the economics aside for now. The issue at hand for Scaman is predominantly discursive, namely that “we don’t separate the implementation from the question”: when the hypetrain goes over a cliff, we make a mental black mark against “metaverse” (or whatever it may be) and then go the full Nelson Muntz every time someone mentions it again; some babies are plausibly being lost to this process of knee-jerk bathwater disposal.

I won’t deny that unrealised good ideas might be blocked by this sort of discursive dynamic—though I would note that it’s an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and amusingly counter to the normal (yet completely fantastic) narrative of technology diffusion, in which good ideas will always win in the long run because [markets]. But it seems to me that this is also a very basic, well-established social subroutine of human beings—an evolved habit by which the repetition of ideas already demonstrated to be stupid or destructive might be avoided. Did that habit emerge in a period when our languages and societies were notably less complex than they are today? It seems likely! Does that mean we’re likely to be able to switch it off easily, now we can see where it might have some second-order shortcomings? Signs point to ‘nope’.

Nonetheless, let’s also set aside the oddly joyless arguments of evo-psych, and look at a more immediate reason for why people “don’t separate the implementation from the question”: that some of us, perhaps even most of us, have lost the luxury of doing so.

Because these things come thicker and faster every year, sucking up investment and political attention, wiping out whole categories of work (or at least promising to do so) and leaving only wreckage in their wake, and if it’s not you that got wiped out this time round, then it was almost certainly someone you know, and anyway there’ll be something along next week that has you in its sights. We’ve stopped separating the implementation from the question for much the same reason that B F Skinner’s rats presumably stopped separating their lever-strewn mazes from his theories of behaviour. “It’ll work next time, when we’ve ironed out the kinks” likely sounds pretty good when you’re spinning lazily in a boardroom Aeron; it hits a bit different when you’re stood in the dole queue.

Maybe there’s another thread here, one which might be woven in with the ones you’re already following. There are two sides to the concept of “creative destruction”; you might want to consider that the nay-sayers have been more exposed to the back half of it than the front. Put another way: there’s an emotional component to this whole thing. That doesn’t excuse people being arseholes, of course, whichever side of the fence they’re on! But if you’re looking for ways to make the world a better place, the dissatisfaction and backlash of significant numbers of people has got to be a useful signal, no?

I can’t speak for everyone, but I know for a fact that some people critiquing “AI” (and various other implementations-as-questions, whether current or historical or forthcoming) have also been following a thread—sometimes for decades at a time—along which the newest answer is always seemingly different, but at the same time always the same: “what if more tech?” This is a thread in which, furthermore, the problem to which the implementation is being directed is almost always itself a consequence of some earlier suck-it-and-see implementation gone awry—and a thread in which Lucy has pulled away that bloody football so many times that we’ve come to the conclusion she’s playing a different game entirely.

We can probably agree that doxxing culture has made life shittier for almost everyone, modulo the inevitable uneven distributions due to pre-existing inequalities. I hope we can also agree that no side of any extant binary—be it left vs. right, be it techies vs. luddites—has any historical or operational monopoly on it. We can definitely agree that it would nice if people were less shitty to to one another on the internet.

(I’m not so sure we can agree that this problem is fixable by technological means, for reasons already explained.)

I think we can also agree that, as Scaman notes, the genuine grifters deserve the scrutiny, but that they really don’t much suffer from critical gotchas, precisely because they don’t actually care what anyone thinks of them once the cheque has cleared. However, I’m not so sure this failure can be laid at the feet of gotcha culture, and for exactly that same reason: the grifters don’t care what we refusenik critics have to say, much as we might want to convince ourselves otherwise.

Because somehow, nonetheless, the grifters end up back in the boardroom, pitching the next big thing; somehow, they keep getting second, third, n-th chances. This is definitely not the fault of the critical voices, even though it’s probably fair to say we’ve done little to prevent it. How could we? After all, you may have noticed that we’re not in the boardroom at the pitch meetings. (The invites keep going astray, perhaps; you know how it is with email these days!) Maybe if those of you who are in those rooms exercised just a little more caution and scepticism early on, we grouches would have fewer opportunities to play Cassandra downstream?

And I have to tell you: if you feel like the tech-sceptical discourse is in the driving seat right now, I really don’t know what planet you’re living on. For those of us on the critical side, it feels like being stuck at a house party where the hosts have been playing nosebleed EDM for weeks on end, and are currently discussing just how much heavier to make the EDM they’re going to play next. “Just go to a different party,” you might well respond—but the thing is, there is no other party, no other club, no other empty building with functional utilities that would allow you to plug in so much as an old Tandy hi-fi.

If you’re tired of being stuck in here with us and our complaints, well—just imagine how we feel!

But that’s the thing, isn’t it: we’re all stuck here at this same party together, and we’re slowly starting to realise that a fire in the basement will eventually fill the whole building with smoke, and that shifty guys left uninterrupted while they pick pockets on the dancefloor will eventually start working their way through the coats we threw in the bedroom. We don’t entirely agree on what a good party looks like, let alone how to improve the one currently ongoing, but we’re all following our threads, asking our questions, getting it wrong—and, with the exception of the aforementioned grifters, we’re all doing so for what we believe to be the general good.

Again, I cannot speak for others, but I am willing to try still harder at giving tech optimists the discursive benefit of the doubt; I hope that they in return might consider extending luddites like myself something of the same sympathy. There should indeed be a right to be wrong, just as there should be a right to hold individuals and industries alike accountable for patterns of being wrong—a right to nay-say, a right to refuse.

These rights are mutually necessary and complementary; a world that had either one without the other would be broken beyond repair.