Ursula Franklin—technology thinker, physicist, metallurgist, Quaker, and committed pacifist—is one of the people whose work I return to the most when things are bad.
-
Ursula Franklin—technology thinker, physicist, metallurgist, Quaker, and committed pacifist—is one of the people whose work I return to the most when things are bad.
I *tried* to write about her great short checklist for making decisions about technology and I ended up writing a whole post about just the first item, which the real foundational one.
Ursula's list
Ursula Franklin is one of my all-time favorite thinkers about both the obvious and obscured parts of our technological world.
wreckage/salvage (www.wrecka.ge)
"The viability of technology, like democracy, depends in the end on the practice of justice…"
-
(I also meant to post this yesterday, but a kid-virus intervened. It's better for the delay.)
-
@kissane thank you for this piece, and I hope your kid is ok!
-
@kissane "There’s no way to reduce fear through means that make the burden on others greater" is indeed an uncompromising position. As an engineer who has been trained to think in terms of tradeoffs, it's one I'm not yet convinced of. Do you have any pointers within her great volume of work that can get me convinced faster?
No worries if not. This is interesting stuff, I will likely poke my way through it regardless.
-
@kissane great essay.
"Franklin’s insistence on putting the realities of the most vulnerable at the center of decision-making is maybe the most radical part of her technology thinking—more radical when she was alive, less radical-seeming for a few years when artifacts like Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice emerged, and now an idea under concerted and overwhelming fire."
Yeah really. Not sure if you've seen Afsenah Rigot's Can We Build Tech That Is Not Oppressive? but it's very much in alignment with Franklin's point about groundeing work il understanding of fears and the conditions that produce them.
"This deep understanding of criminalization is not only for lawyers, human rights experts, or historians, it is vital for technologists too. The details of how highly marginalized communities are criminalized are the key to how we can build robust and even scalable tech that is not oppressive. This is how Design From the Margins truly works.
Fear and dehumanization of communities who are othered pave the way for abusive technological advancement. These groups are placed in protection black holes and become testing grounds for this tech. They face the biggest threats from states and power regardless of who is in office: from migrants at borders and incarcerated people in prisons, to apartheid systems. Once these approaches have been tested on those living in the margins, it is then expanded to other segments of the population."
-
T [email protected] shared this topic
-
@kissane yes yes yes
-
@jdp23 I had not seen this, thank you! My media diet this week has been—a mess.
-
@twifkak I’d start with The Real World of Technology. I included two points in the post about this as well, bc there are always trade-offs—she’s talking about working out which things we refuse to trade.
The bit toward the end about the negotiable and the non/negotiable is crucial here, and somewhere in the post I talked about using an accurate sense of the needs of the most vulnerable to draw boundaries for trade-offs. (Which is to say, shifting terror to someone else isn’t a fix.)
-
@sakhavi Thank you! And she’s doing great
️ -
U [email protected] shared this topic
