Whatever the case, people indeed like to write about India. And so it was with two recent books that I read — Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (2019), by Lilly Irani, and Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology (2015), by Kentaro Toyama. Beyond choosing India as their geographic context of choice, both authors examine various “development by design” projects that were in vogue from the late ’90s until recently, purportedly to discredit widely held myths about “technological solutionism”. They also rely heavily on first-person accounts, from very different methodological perspectives - Lilly relies heavily on field notes and ethnographic observations, while Kentaro provides a more “managerial” perspective.

Beyond these similarities, Lilly and Kentaro arrive at some very different conclusions about the role of human agency in development, despite both superficially being ardent critics of technological approaches to solving development problems. In reading these books, I found that I did not agree with either of them. I think there is something fundamentally different about how they and I look at the world, and there is some value in teasing apart what that is. So in this essay, I propose to look at the arguments in each of their books, to compare and contrast their perspectives, and to provide my own contrasting views where appropriate¹.

In Chasing Innovation, Lilly interrogates her experience working at a design consultancy in Delhi over an 11-month period, sharing many examples of how the development discourse at that time was heavily influenced by tropes like entrepreneurialism and user-centered design, imported through the efforts of global (although really “American”) business thought leaders like McKinsey, Ideo, and Stanford. She is well-positioned to offer this discourse, given her prior background in the heart of Silicon Valley at such institutions as Google and Stanford, and the access those credentials provided her to observe and write about the inner workings of the Indian design/development scene in that period.

She connects this ethnographic work with a historical analysis of the development of the “entrepreneurial citizen” in India post the 1990s trade liberalization. She points to a range of policy and cultural measures that reinforced and valorized this mode of citizenship in India, including preferred immigration programs, new investment vehicles, and changed intellectual property protections, situated in the context of a general decline in state capacity and services. These trends manifested in the education sector through an increased emphasis on things like “design thinking” and “interdisciplinarity”, in contrast to the more traditional focus on science, math, and engineering.

In reading these early chapters, I found myself largely agreeing with Lilly’s critiques. The change in Indian imaginaries was palpable throughout the turn of the millennium². I also experienced these shifts when I was working in India in the early 2000s. There was great excitement amidst the “middle class” that Lilly so frequently refers to about these increased entrepreneurial and educational opportunities, as well as the access to consumer products and luxuries that trade liberalization provided. In the development sector, this translated into a plethora of “market-led” approaches to solving fundamental capacity problems (including microfinance, a pyramid scheme that I am embarrassed to say that even I contributed to³).

Lilly is right to point out the political nature of this choice, and the fact that many “others” were excluded from this narrative, or, as in the case of microfinance, included on exploitative and unequal terms. She is also right that it represented a clear shift in the Indian state, in its planning and central coordination of development initiatives. This market-led approach was unlikely to unwind all of India’s historical injustices, achieve sustainable development, or build India’s state capacity, a project that had seemingly been abandoned in favor of neoliberal approaches, no doubt influenced by multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.

However, in her critique, she barely discusses the role of these global institutions in this transformation, who forced these decisions, not only in India but around the world, by influencing global flows of capital, and altering the political and economic foundations of literally dozens, if not hundreds, of countries. Nor does she lend her critical eye to the American peddlers of easy solutions, the Stanfords (Lilly’s alma mater), the IDEOs, the McKinseys of the world, who so often provided the managerial and design “expertise” that facilitated the transition into neoliberal institutions and policies. Were Western actors not complicit in these decisions and strategies? Were they not the “model” for the path that India was following?

Instead, her target is “elite” Indian men (and women), whom she repeatedly caricatures to advance her politically fashionable but ultimately short-sighted and orientalist critique. For example, Professor Anil Gupta, a man who has tirelessly worked for decades in the service of rural innovation in India, under multiple political administrations, becomes a Gandhian who “served the Modi government as second-in-command of the National Innovation Foundation”. This is equivalent to saying someone who worked at NSF worked for Donald Trump, during his administration⁴.

In a similar vein, Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel laureate, poet, and staunch anti-militarist, becomes a “nationalist from the landowning classes”. And so on for a range of indigenous intellectual giants and modern luminaries, ranging from Sam Pitroda to Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi, all the way down to local educational activists like Brij Kothari. For Lilly, only Harvard-based international development “experts”, like Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (of the “randomista” cult) could understand the true nature of informal capital in India, unlike the “kurta-wearing”, elite dregs of Indian society.

One wonders why she focuses her critique only on Indians, and her caricatured notions of them, and not on any of the Western actors who were certainly influential in these shifts? Is it more fashionable and convenient to point out flaws in cultures other than one’s own? Was Lilly afraid of alienating groups like the “D-School” at Stanford, or “The Design Lab” at UCSD, of which she is a proud member, which are no doubt influenced (and funded) by some of these same actors? I guess it is always easier to critique something when you have nothing to lose by doing so.

And how did Brij, and Sam, and Prof. Gupta, and all of these pesky middle-class Indians get these high-minded ideals? According to Lilly:

Those I met at design studios, hackathons, and development workshops sometimes spoke of “the bias to action” — a temporal ethos that valorized the production of venturesome experiment and derided longer deliberation, political demand-making, or the extended work of meaningful political inclusion. This “bias to action” was familiar to me from my time at Google and Stanford; its ethos deflected the work of care with the adage “ask for forgiveness, rather than permission.” The bias to action was popular across Silicon Valley.

The “bias to action” had to be imported to India from Silicon Valley? Had she ever read the Bhagavad Gita, the seminal text of the Hindu philosophical tradition? In quoting Aurobindo, Lilly says that “(t)he Gita does not teach the disinterested performance of duties but the following of the divine life.” When she wrote this, did she understand the Gita, what it is saying, and how central it is to so much of Hindu spiritual life? Did she know how influential it must have been to many of her targets, how it would have affected their actions and perspectives? After all, many of her quoted Indian targets refer to it in some way or another; several (Aurobindo, Gandhi, Tagore) of them having written translations of and commentaries on it.

The Gita’s core message is a call to action, to the disinterested fulfillment of one’s duties⁵. This is the principle of dharma, of one’s moral duty to perform selfless acts in the service of higher civilizational ends. That is why, on the battlefield at Kurukshetra, Krishna reassures Arjuna when he is disgusted at the prospect of killing some of his closest family members and most cherished heroes, by explaining Arjuna’s responsibility to conduct war in fulfillment of his moral duty as a Kshatriya⁶.

The Mahabharata includes many stories about caste and caste-related duties, while at other points questioning those beliefs, reflecting the complex relationship between the structure of social groups (like the state or corporation), and the unequal power relationships that those structures create. Marx, and his intellectual descendants (including most significantly Lenin) all confronted the challenge of organizing society without reifying traditional hierarchies of class, culture, and expertise. Their experiences show that it is not easy to organize human social structures under a “flat” social structure, and that the state, like any other bureaucratic structure, is not immune to elite capture, and may be even more prone to it.

In this sense, couldn’t the rise of the “entrepreneurial citizen” be considered an improvement on India’s past, where the ability to aspire was narrowly limited to specific castes and groups? Where one’s aspiration and duties were not limited by one’s hereditary position in society? Or, was there some egalitarian golden age in India that I might have missed? Professor Gupta is one of the people who has arguably done the most worldwide to advance the entrepreneurial interests of everyday people, including from a variety of castes and indigenous tribal groups, and in the protection of their intellectual property rights in the face of exploitative global arrangements like TRIPS, and against large corporate interests, from both India and the West. Lilly acknowledges the importance of these protections, even as she neglects Professor Gupta’s pioneering work on these topics⁷.

At one point, she does imagine technological solutions that could impact the lives of average Indians, such as “photographic and digitized paper,” “interactive voice-response phone systems, rural kiosks, or SMS-based systems.” Unfortunately, the boutique design consultancy where she worked managed to develop only a simple web-based prototype. Maybe if she had looked a bit deeper, beyond the hackathons and design sprints where she seems to have spent most of her time, she would have seen that many others were already working on all of these things — including myself, and many other researchers from the ICTD ecosystem.

Of course, for Lilly, both good ideas and bad have to be imported from the West. Only Western intellectuals like her can be the great “explainers” who can help us come to our senses. She claims not to treat her subjects as “cultural dupes”, but in the end, she does just that. It certainly seems like a great oversight to ignore how the “bias to action” is nothing more than Krishna’s advice to Arjuna, repackaged for yet another time in Indian history. Perhaps if she had this cultural knowledge, she could have written a book like Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, an apologia for the unequal and hierarchical nature of Western society, as well as a testament to its successes. Instead, she wrote yet another orientalist book filled with innuendo that speaks to an audience with a very limited understanding of Indian culture and history.

Kentaro’s book Geek Heresy carries a very different message. While it critiques some of the same technological ambitions and initiatives that Lilly’s does, it comes to a vastly different conclusion about the importance of individual human action. While Lilly’s book valorizes state capacity and institutional development; Kentaro’s examples celebrate individuals that possess the “heart, mind, and will” to surmount the wicked and thorny problems on the path to sustainable development, those that heed the “call to action”, as it were.

The first half of his book is an expansive reflection, filled with numerous examples, on the idea that technology does not have agency on its own; that it can only manifest public and social good when it is supported by a person and institution with the right intent, something he calls the “law of amplification”. To support this claim, he documents a number of examples where technology, or other kinds of “packaged” interventions, do not scale beyond the initial pilot application, and that the reason for this is variances in individual and institutional capacity⁸.

Of course, this is true; having a hammer does not make one a good carpenter — the very definition of technology is something that extends human capabilities through the application of procedural and/or material supports. Thus, the “law of amplification” is a tautology. That said, it serves a useful and timely antidote to those who think there are “technological fixes” to all manner of problems — from climate change to inequality, to democratic governance.

In part two of his book Kentaro lists a set of positive examples of people who had the vision and wherewithal to use technology and other means to solve wicked and thorny problems. Kentaro’s case studies all consist of extraordinarily charismatic individual human actors, including several from his own research group at MSR India, often from the same “middle class” groups that Lilly maligns (with the notable exception of his taxi driver in Bangalore, in classic Thomas Friedman fashion).

Kentaro’s book is patronizing in how it deals with the everyday Indians who are the targets of the benevolence of these charitable do-gooders. According to him, “beneficiaries, too, need heart, mind, and will. Farmers must have some desire to improve their own lives (intention), basic agricultural knowledge and the ability to pick up new practices (discernment), and the willingness to expend effort to learn (self-control).” Wow, if only farmers knew that the solution to the agrarian crisis was a self-help book and a dream! How many lives could have been saved for the lack of the right “heart, mind, and will”!

Kentaro’s favorite example in the book is Rikin Gandhi, “a dreamer whose chiseled facial features belied a methodical intensity”, a description that could be pulled from the Mahabharata itself. Rikin had wanted to be an astronaut, but was derailed by a problem with his eyesight, so instead, he travels to rural India, to work and live with Indian farmers to understand their problems and needs, and to design solutions appropriate for them. The result is a grassroots system to create videos about agricultural (and other) topics, featuring local actors and expertise, that are then screened by volunteers in other villages to inform them about beneficial farming practices and other useful knowledge. This project became Digital Green, a non-profit organization that has received tens of millions of dollars from international philanthropic organizations like USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Kentaro paints Rikin’s as the quintessential Indian story, with its near allegorical depiction of human will as manifested in the body of a “slim boy”. Unfortunately, he doesn’t mention that the original visionary behind this system for asynchronous delivery of video content was a Chinese-American computer scientist named Randy Wang, who had previously been denied tenure at Princeton. Working with an educational activist named Urvashi Sahni, he had implemented a system in Lucknow, India to deliver educational videos to children from both slums and rural villages. Rikin learned about this approach, and the socio-technical systems needed to support it, by working with Randy in Lucknow. Only later did he join Kentaro’s lab at MSR India, and adapt his ideas to agriculture, working with a NGO called the Green Foundation, which became the inspiration for the name “Digital Green”⁹.

While Kentaro mentions this intellectual lineage in a short footnote that foregrounds MSR’s support of Digital StudyHall, he says nothing about Randy, his relationship to Rikin, and the deep connection that Digital Green had to Randy’s vision (rumor has it that there was some personal animosity between Kentaro and Randy, although that is just hearsay). I guess the story of a failed Chinese-American systems professor living on a diet of beef jerky in one of the poorest regions of North India did not fit Kentaro’s narrative of the handsome Greek hero, sent down to liberate the huddled masses. Nothing personal against Rikin- I think he is a wonderfully intelligent and capable human being who has had an outsized impact both in India and around the world. But he also benefited from the work of so many before, including Randy, who mentored him directly.

Kentaro also neglects to mention the fact that his personal connections to Bill Gates, and more specifically to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is what allowed Rikin to raise the millions of dollars needed to fund this enterprise. Since then, these connections have only multiplied, with many other large and influential multilateral donors to Digital Green’s work, and its numerous forms and guises over the years. Kentaro says that “technology amplifies preexisting differences in wealth and achievement”. But maybe those differences just matter by themselves, with or without the amplification provided by technology? Maybe it is not just “heart, mind and will” that led to all these great successes? Maybe it is not just who you are that leads to success, but also who you know?

In the end, there is little room for for Indian culture and values in either of these narratives; for Lilly, the “call to action” is yet another Western import by way of Ideo and McKinsey, and while Kentaro mentions the “Hindu ethic to work uncomplainingly at the task at hand”, it is only to say that Weber might have written a similar book had he spent more time in India. They do not relate that these kinds of moral imperatives may come from a much deeper place in the Indian collective psyche.

Even more, both of these books make the assumption that the problem of correct action is solved; that it is always clear what any of us should (or should not be) doing, and that the world consists of heroes (like Rikin) and villains (like any of the Indian elites that Lilly critiques), who are doing it all “right” or “wrong”, respectively¹¹. In this way, both of the books take the form of classic tales of good and evil, like the Ramayana, the other Indian epic, that is quite clear (for right or wrong) in its position on moral issues¹².

So, in the words of Lenin, “What is to be done?” The short answer is that nobody knows, including Lenin, Lilly, Kentaro, and least of all, me! What I do know is that there has to be a space between the hubris of agency, and the denial of it, because that is where all of human life exists —the idea that is so eloquently explained in the Gita. This is the balance and humility that I tried to seek in my own life and work; unfortunately, there is too little of either to be found in either of these books.

I close by quoting a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, as translated by Debal Deb:

Lo and behold — the ants! Those wee thin red creatures are the ants, called Formica in Latin. I am a Myrmica, descendant of the great family of Myrmicinae; I feel much amused to watch those ants.

They are so tiny, and moreover, I watch them from a considerable height…. only a little guesswork sufficed me to have understood everything about them… I will write a treatise on them in Myrmicine language, and will give seminars, too.

I feel great pity for the ants though, when I see them. And I do feel a great urge to do them some good. I even would if I could, for some time abandon the civilized Myrmicine society and live… among the ants in their colony… heck, to that extent am I prepared to sacrifice.

They develop more and more, we eat more and more sugar — only such an arrangement can maintain peace, law, and order. Or else, there are chances of hell breaking loose. We are so careful, because we bear an immense onus of responsibility, you see.

What if the whole race of ants becomes extinct due to a want of sugar and an excess of law and order? Then of course we shall have to go elsewhere to spread development. For we, Myrmicines, are highly developed, by virtue of our elongated legs.

— —

[1] To provide some background as to what qualifies me to offer my opinions, I was one of the people that introduced Kentaro to ICTD. I organized a weekly discussion seminar at Microsoft at Redmond, that served as a background and primer for his forays into the area. I was the first intern that MSR India ever hired, and in exchange, I organized a field visit for Kentaro to one of my field sites that I believe was one of Kentaro’s first experiences in rural India. With Lilly, my interaction was more at arm’s length, but I did introduce her to one of the case studies she documents and critiques at length in her book — the Honey Bee Network, and its founder Professor Anil K. Gupta, with whom I worked for two years. I also have independent and first-hand knowledge of a lot of the contexts and institutions in both of their books.

[2] Joyojeet Pal does a great job capturing some of these shifts in some of his early papers on the Indian education sector.

[3] Although, in my defense, my work was with self-help groups, or SHGs, which encourage local autonomy and internal savings rather than institutional dependency and indebtedness.

[4] I was there when the NIF was founded, under the Bajpayee administration, and which continued to receive support under the subsequent UPA government. The primary advocate for NIF was R.A. Mashelkar at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the kind of public sector institution that Lilly yearns for in her critique. Mashelkar is a legendary pioneer in advancing scientific and technical research in India, someone who could be compared to J.C.R. Licklider in the USA.

[5] I am not contesting Aurobindo’s interpretation, because the Gita is a synthesis of a number of philosophical schools. But I do believe that what I am explaining here is the most conventional interpretation of it.

[6] Kshatriyas, along with Brahmins, have traditionally been the two “highest” castes in Indian society. Much of Indian history, including in the Mahabharata, can be understood as cycles of competition and collusion between these groups.

[7] She does, however, make time to note that Professor Gupta often wore a kurta, suggesting that this was some kind of performative act, and not the daily attire of more than one billion people. Of course, for Lilly, even authenticity must be an imported quality.

[8] An observation that he attributes to Peter Henry Rossi, and his “Iron Law of Evaluation”.

[9] Similarly, Digital StudyHall takes its name from Urvashi’s school, simply called StudyHall. I know a lot about this project because several of my students, as well as my cousin, worked there.

[10] Hegel crudely dismissed the Gita, likely because it presaged his ideas by almost two thousand years, unlike his rival Schopenhauer, who considered the Upanishads among the greatest philosophical achievements of mankind.

[11] This is a common trope nowadays in the HCI and AI “ethics” communities, who characterize technologists as evildoers who are damaging the very fabric of our society, only held in check by a team of benevolent do-gooders who only possess the moral clarity to identify injustice wherever they see it.

[12] The Mahabharata (of which the Gita is a part) is full of episodes loaded with ambiguity, where the “right” choice is unclear, and often dependent on context and perspective. This kind of subjective ambiguity is something that at least Lilly should understand, even from the Western tradition, with her background in Science and Technology Studies (STS), an area that Kentaro glibly dismisses as a “cottage industry”.

Here I sit, on the curb, in front of my office, waiting for a friend. From where I sit, down the road and across the East River, rises a tower of fading white smoke. It looks remarkably like a ghost.

It was an unconscionable act, an act of incredible hate and violence, that gave rise to this ghost, and gave fall to its predecessors. The loss of two great buildings. The loss of beauty. The loss of many human beings.

When I first saw it happen, I wanted to cry. Now I think I’ve developed a mental block about what happened. I can’t seriously think about it. That is why I have so much respect and admiration to the men and women of the rescue operation, of the NYPD and the fire department and even the politicians, who brave that reality every day.

That said, the political repercussions of this act and its response are going to be immense, and we must think about them. This is the defining moment of post cold-war politics, this will set the tone for the coming world geopolitical era. At this point we must think about the various international political processes that this act was caused by, and what new situation will be brought about, depending on the actions taken now. Contrary to what we hear from politicians and on the news, this is not a simple battle of ‘Good vs. Evil’, a battle against a vile enemy that hates us and everything we stand for. This is in fact a complex political situation, and has been for years, and deserves the attention of every citizen. We have to think very cooly and rationally about this transition and our role in it, both as a world and as individuals.

I speak not of nations, but of only the world and the individual, because that is all that matters anymore. The age of fiefdoms and villages is over. We are too interconnected as a world now — economically, socially and politically — to think of anything other than ourselves as individuals and the world we live in. Any other distinction seems just naively artificial. This act proves that.

There is reason to be worried. Frankly, the knee jerk reaction of violence by the American public and its leaders — tinged throughout the nation with outright xenophobia and racism — is almost more troubling than the attacks themselves.

The sequence of political events that brought this situation about seem coldly ironic. Assuming from the news reports that Osama bin Laden was at least partially responsible for the acts last week, it would be useful to look at his history, and that of those accused of harboring him, Afghanistan’s Taliban.

Osama bin Laden is the wealthy son of a Saudi industrialist, who became an Islamic militant after fighting and supporting a civil war in Afghanistan, a war that was the direct result of a previous civil war fought by US supported rebel mujahideen against a Soviet backed leftist government. The Taliban (and bin Laden) were among the rebel groups that were funded, trained and supported by the American CIA in their battle against the Soviet backed (and later occupied) Afghani government.

After the defeat of the Soviets, and another lengthy civil war, the conservative Taliban emerged as the strongest of the rebel mujahideen groups, and established ultra right-wing Islamic fundamentalist rule over much of Afghanistan. Currently they are reported to be harboring Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden, the purported leader of a network called al Qaeda, a group that has been allegedly coordinating terrorist activities against the United States for the last ten years.

Besides the anger over America’s support for Israel shared by all Islamic fundamentalists, al Qaeda’s main point of rational policy conflict with the United States has been the presence of the American military in Saudi Arabia since America’s involvement in the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia is home to Islam’s holiest shrines, and bin Laden and other fundamentalists consider it an affront that infidel troops are occupying the holy land. bin Laden has been against US military intervention since the beginning of the Gulf War in 1990, and was even more incensed when US troops failed to leave the holy land within a reasonable time after the war. Angry that the Saudi royalty was being too inviting to America and it’s interests, bin Laden squabbled with the Saudi government and was soon forced to leave, first to Sudan, and eventually after US pressure forced him out there, to the shelter of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

bin Laden has allegedly issued a fatwa, or decree, calling on all Muslims to kill Americans. bin Laden’s group has been accused of involvement in numerous terrorist acts against the US, including the 1993 WTC bombings, bombings of US military bases in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of the Sudanese and Tanzanian embassies in 1998 and the bombing of the USS Cole off of the coast of Yemen in 2000. America has retaliated several times, including cruise missile bombings of suspected terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, as well as of a pharmaceutical plant accused of producing chemical weapons in the Sudan.

One thing to note about this history is that as often as you see the hand of bin Laden, or al Qaeda, or anyone else involved with this, you also see U.S. foreign policy’s hand quite a bit. Since the Cold War, during which the U.S. used various political, financial and military means, both overt and covert, to support various so-called governments and insurgencies in the battle against Soviet influence, in many cases the US has continued this policy of support and intervention, where and when it would benefit America’s military and economic position in the world. This role can clearly be seen in the sequence of events that brought about the emergence of both bin Laden and the Taliban.

While the gross violence of last week’s act is clearly appalling and indefensible, to be completely fair, bin Laden’s political position vis-a-vis the Saudi government, and its American supporters, isn’t completely indefensible. The Saudi royalty has proven to be very inept at managing the nation’s economy, leading one to wonder why such an oil-rich nation is so heavily in debt. This mismanagement comes at a crucial time for Saudi Arabia, as now it is imperative for all Middle Eastern oil producing nations to manage their wealth properly. The oil economy isn’t going to last forever — at most another 50 years until oil reserves run out and alternative sources of energy are found. If this oil wealth isn’t used to build an alternative infrastructure and economy in the meantime, soon the people of these nations will find themselves living in a desert with no sustainable economy or sources of income, like the people of Afghanistan. I don’t think any nation would like to find themselves in the hopeless predicament of such poor, war-torn nations.

It is bin Laden and al Qaeda’s position that such weak, greedy, shortsighted governments such as Saudi Arabia’s are supported by American aid and given stability by American military presence, supporting leaders who are sacrificing the good of the people for personal wealth and power. It is in America’s economic interest to maintain favorable governments in the Middle East as a reliable source of relatively cheap oil, so that it has to sacrifice less of its resources in the time before the oil-based economy ends and new sources of energy are found. But is it in the Saudi’s interests? What will they do in 50 years?

America has pursued personal interests in foreign policy regarding internal politics of foreign nations many times before — all throughout Latin America, Indonesia, even in Afghanistan itself. The sad thing is that this often works to the extreme detriment of the people of these nations themselves, which often seems to be a relatively minor concern in American foreign policy. The example of Afghanistan is perfect — as the United States and the Soviet Union played out a power struggle in the mountains of Afghanistan over twenty years ago, did they every consider the fate of the Afghan people? That they were embroiling the nation in a decades-long civil war that would leave the nation a virtual pile of rubble? That they were diverting so many of the resources, both financial and human, of an already poor nation towards mutual annihilation? That would leave its people so hardened to extreme violence and war so that people sleep with automatic machine guns, so that actions such as last week seem somehow morally and religiously defensible? Was this in the best interest of the Afghan people? Of the Vietnamese people? Of the El Salvadorian people? Of the Cambodian people? Of the Indonesian people? Of the Saudi people? Was it even in the best interest of American people?

Thinking of this, I am reminded of a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, speaking of the characteristics of the “demoniac” mindset, intent on achieving as much worldly gain as possible…

“Giving themselves up to insatiable desire, full of hypocrisy, excessive pride and arrogance, holding wrong views through delusion, they act with impure resolves” — BG, CH16, V10

In my opinion, this is a pretty decent description of American foreign policy throughout the late 20th Century. And with our planned responses to this current act, we are in danger of extending it into the 21st. Numerous times we have either overtly or covertly become involved in the internal politics of independent, sovereign nations with other than philanthropic interests, violating the idea of ‘self-determination’ as set down by the Marshall Plan after WWII. Intent on world domination, first against the Soviets, and now against our own insatiable consumer desires, we expand our influence over the world, influence which we use to advance our own economic interests.

Is there anything wrong with this? The prevailing doctrine of capitalism would say not. If America has the financial (and military) might to expand its dominion and pad it’s pockets, why should it not, even if it is at the expense of other nations and peoples? That is the fundamental tenet of capitalism, that in business all is fair if it means making more money.

But the events of last week seem to teach us otherwise. They should teach us that we all live in one world, that we are inseparable from each other, that the plight of one people is inseparable from the plunder of another. It is a small world now — economically, militarily, politically, socially — and we should realize that the whole world is interconnected, in ways we can’t even imagine. We should be smart enough to realize this now, that the inexorable law of Karma still holds, that what goes around comes around. Did we really think when we were helping reduce nations like Vietnam and Afghanistan to rubble and chaos, that we ourselves would be immune to this? Why is it so shocking that the smoke and rubble is on American soil now? We have been laying smoke and rubble across the world, directly and indirectly, for a long time now… And we seem intent on continuing.

The rhetoric coming from Washington, especially from some high level Pentagon officials such as Secretary of Defense John Rumsfeld, is worrying. Some people in the White House and Pentagon seem intent on expanding this war of retaliation quickly, to encompass all of the Middle East, to topple unfriendly governments and movements in Iraq and Palestine, to once again meddle in the affairs of other nations to our own interest. (Secretary of State Colin Powell seems to be a notable exception to this, advocating a limited financial, diplomatic and tactical operation to pinpoint only the offenders themselves.)

In fact this is exactly what people like bin Laden want, to unite the Middle East against American influence, once and for all forcing an all out conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and American domination, the only two options seemingly open to the people of this troubled region. And as any ordinary Afghani or Iraqi will tell you, neither is particularly inviting, but given the choice, most would likely rather side with Allah over the American capitalist devil. As one Afghani grocer said this week, “I do not like Taliban or Osama bin Laden, but I will gladly fight the American devil to the death with them.”

If Washington has its way, American foreign policy will continue the status quo and ignore world opinion and fight the war it sees fit, the war that best appeases the fanatics at home and scatters American influence and missiles over as wide an area as possible. However, this can’t go on for long, as every force has within it the seeds of its own demise. How long can the huge economic imbalances in the world go on, how long can countries like Afghanistan be made to suffer like this? The discontent and moral vacuum left behind can only lead to more and more acts like last week, more and more such disasters, until someone finally learns the lesson, if theres anyone left to take notes.

The quicker we learn, the better. The sooner America realizes the fundamental unity of the World, the interconnectedness of every individual, the sooner it can start playing its part in it. Acting not like a ‘global policeman’, but more like an ordinary ‘global citizen’, working within world organizations in a fair and impartial way for everyone’s benefit. Making decisions for the good of the world, rather than for those that are lucky enough to live within its borders.

We live in the greatest country in the world, in the closest thing to a true meritocracy that the world has ever seen. It is about time we expand this meritocracy outside of our borders and embrace the whole world within it, so that everyone can taste its riches. We should act like the proud role model we could be, rather than the big fat bully we now are. We should allow nations to settle their internal disputes according to their own dynamics, according to their own resources, according to what is best for them, without adding our finger to the pie and taking a lick. Then we will learn that what is best for the world is best for us, because in the end we are just one small part of it.

Living in 2001, it was a different epoch — our government was running a surplus, new economic opportunities (like the Internet) abounded, and while the first “dot-com” bubble had just burst, there was still a general feeling of opportunity in society- an optimism that if you worked hard enough, amazing results could be obtained.

Then September 11th happened… I had just returned from India, from my first experiences in ICTD, determined to convert my preliminary experiences with SRISTI and the Honeybee network into some kind of reasonable academic trajectory. I was young and hopeful and optimistic — I honestly believed that technology could help the world. I wasn’t exactly sure how, but I thought that we could make a difference. This was before Facebook, and Twitter, and Insta, but not before Google and Yahoo — a brief interregnum when the motto “Do No Evil” still had some meaning.

And then, the buildings. But that wasn’t what changed everything for me. What changed everything for me was how we reacted. The xenophobia, anger and violence that characterizes our society raised its ugly head in rage, and proceeded to “bunker bomb”an already destroyed society into a continued state of shrapnel-shrouded misery.

This response befuddled me. The 9/11 attacks were not conducted by a powerful state actor capable of conducting international war in anything but the most primitive ways. The specific strategy employed by the attackers was easily thwarted through increased security and protocols, as has been shown by experience. Then why immediately respond with disproportionate violence?

Everyone talks about Iraq, but nobody talks about Afghanistan, about Vietnam, about the Congo and Bengal. It didn’t have to be like this. People have lived with kindness and generosity, with composure and balance, with measured and principled applications of dangerous ideas like debt, violence, money and self-interest.

For the West, even at its most self-critical, all of this evil can be summed up in one word — Capital. As if capital operates on its own accord, directing people to lie, rape, pillage and steal to further their own interests, and all in the hopes of achieving a better and more productive society. This is the biggest lie we have all been told — that the answer somehow lies outside of us.

I do love Marx. His analysis of historical materialism, deep and profound as a response to the idealists, is descriptive of the Western way of life that has influenced the entire world. But, maybe, it is not the only way to live? Anthropological evidence suggests that humans have also been able to organize society in other ways, ways that do not make a “science” out of the worst impulses of humankind.

For Western society has shown itself to be characterized by greed, revenge, selfishness and the worst impulses that human nature has to offer. Our social sciences (including a segment of the Marxist tradition) have made a parlor game out of studying these motivations and building “models” that predict how and whether any of these worst excesses should be mitigated. Is this the best we can imagine, moments of cold reflection, bathed in the blood of destruction and pain?

This civilization (of which its science is just a part) has ruined and created hell on Earth for literally billions of people. Why isn’t the entire epistemological foundation of this society (including Marx) being held to account — all of us who are either a part of this society, or complicit with it in one way or another?

There was a time when our knowledge and ideologies had normative value. That they were useful not only for predicting human behavior, but directing it. If we assume the worst impulses out of people, is it surprising that our policies, institutions and empirical outcomes reflect that basic assumption?

How can science remove itself from this “superstructure”? How can we become an agent of change in the world, rather than a mere reflection of it, or its legitimizer and executor of power? Who could have played that role in 1968, 2001, 2003, and since then?

How much difference twenty years makes. It makes you shudder to think about 2040, if the last twenty years have been any general indication of trend. We need working institutions to stem the tide, and somehow I suspect that “data science” is not going to be an adequate response to the crisis. The technical and infrastructural advances that such advances can bring are only useful in the context of working institutions with normative intent.

In the modern context, are there any institutions that we can truly believe in? Ask yourself — if it came down to it, and all of the scaffolding of modern society came to an end, no power, no food, no Internet, no telephone — who would you turn to? Who would you believe in? The Senate? The President? The US Army? Google, NextDoor, and your local neighborhood watch committee?

I have made my career peddling hope like this to young people, rural farmers and myriad others. But have any of you seen that arc actually turn? The trope of hope is less and less convincing, to young people especially. Every time I launch into this soliloquy, I can now see their eyes rolling and the whispers beginning.

After all, what does anyone who was born after 2001 (or even 1974) know about hope? Have we given them anything really to hope for, beyond the Internet, self-driving cars and trips to Mars for the rich? What faith can they have in our world’s economic and political institutions, when they see the rampant destruction and inequality that they have left in their wake? Who or what are they supposed to believe in, exactly?

The tacit implication is that hope usually consists of technocratic and/or bureaucratic solutions to the worlds’ problems. That young people must rise up and join the same failed institutions of the past, and somehow reform them, or at least ameliorate their worst excesses. They must “Code for America”, or engage in X for “development”, or start “B corps” and social enterprises that mitigate corporate excess through a steadfast commitment to values and deliberative governance.

However, what exactly have these failed institutions done in their lifetimes to justify any such enthusiasm or loyalty? When surrounded by corrupt, racist, classist, and destructive institutions, or inefficient and apathetic ones, often with a demonstrated track record of moral and organizational failings. Where are these young people supposed to go to “be the change they wish to see in the world”? How do they find others to work with, and how do they support themselves collectively on the margins of an unjust and unequal society?

No doubt thousands (if not millions) around the world are following various kinds of revolutionary paths. But it is not easy, and it is not for everyone, and I think everyone would rest a bit easier knowing these two facts. After all, why should all young people be responsible for cleaning up the messes their parents and grandparents made? Isn’t there another option besides sacrificing yourself to the machine, or making yourself an instrument of it?

Surely, there is. And yet, even in the most critical of theory, the exhortation remains the same. Hope! We can create a better world if we try together! In any sophisticated contemporary essay on hope or liberation, it might end with Chiapas or Syria or Occupy (or all 3), about feminist and anarchist collectives living in jungles or deserts or in the metropole, somehow managing to squeak out an existence either at the margins of the world or in the midst of it.

This potent and heady mix combines in a predictable way with the protestant work ethic upon which this country was based. Hope must be strenuous, hope must involve hard work and sacrifice. Either you book a ticket to a far off place, or you buy a tent and camp out in your local public square, or you start a social enterprise — but the grind remains the same. Suffering is hope, hope is suffering.

Are we having fun yet? Before we sacrifice together, shouldn’t we laugh together? Isn’t collective love and exuberance the most radical and revolutionary act that you can engage in? There was a reason that the “law and order” campaign instituted by Mayor Giuliani after September 11th included a renewed emphasis on enforcing cabaret laws on the cities bars and clubs. Where there is dancing, there is joy, and where there is joy, there is love, and there is nothing more dangerous to power.

So, let them dance, I say. If it truly is the end of the world, we should party like it. Instead of a green new deal, can we have an underground dance club? Instead of solar panels and electric cars, a kick ass house party? But we have to be careful not to drop the spot to everyone. Because the best parties exist in a kind of moral ether — not legal, but not quite illegal either. Not yet the thing that everyone is doing, but just the right bodies in shared convalescence.

Parties are about more than consumption, or subsumption. Or, more accurately, subsumption and consumption of the right things, at the right times, in the right ways. Because, in the end, we are our rituals (“activity patterns”), and the ones we have now aren’t cutting it. Netflix and chill? Is that our motto for liberation, or just another way to forget the pain?

When I first started working in ICTD (right after y2k), the future of the world still looked bright. We were living at “The End of History”, a moment of opportunity where anything seemed possible, especially with the help of information technology. There was a widespread belief that we could transform the world for the better, through a combination of elegant technological solutions combined with the right “partners” in the real world. We were born after Vietnam, growing up after the fall of the USSR, a generation that fundamentally did not understand how power operated in the world or how true violence could manifest.

In this vainglorious interregnum, an almost mythical set of beliefs emerged. Now that we had won, there was still time to save the world. Carbon Credits would protect the climate, Fair Trade would ensure a fair share to producers, Community Health Workers would deliver a variety of social services, and Microcredit would be there to allocate capital to even the smallest of capitalists. Huge infrastructures (enabled by satellite, mobile and wireless technologies) were developed to support and monitor these activities. My research group, along others in ICTD, played a role in developing these infrastructures and the commercial and open source technologies upon which they were built.

In the midst of all this euphoria, the Towers fell. I questioned the response, and how the work we were doing in ICTD was intimately connected to the conflict and violence that was to follow. I was approached several times by large aid agencies in Afghanistan to work on or advise ongoing projects. I was struck by their top-down approach, the hubris with which these administrators considered how to approach the design and implementation of these infrastructures. The people themselves did not matter, as long as they were counted and heard. In many cases, those doing the counting and hearing mattered even less than those being counted and heard.

This was not only true in Afghanistan. So many development projects only did lip service to the goals for which they were supposedly constituted. Much more important was the discipline and monitoring. Fair Trade was a perfect example. When I worked with a coffee cooperative in the remote mountains of Guatemala, farmers hated these multiplying social justice certifications, each implemented by a different aid or non-profit entity seeking to make the value chain more fair, sustainable, equitable. What they actually did was just increase the effort required (paperwork, eventually “innovated” into mobile and web forms) for compliance, with minimal impact on the price or value actually received by farmers. When we built a system that focused on improving the internal procedures at these cooperatives, we were ignored by those same aid agencies. Because it was always about power and control.

Now, with the fall of Kabul, it is impossible to sustain these myths any longer. When President Biden explicitly declared nation building was not part of the American agenda in Afghanistan, he disenfranchised thousands (if not millions) of people who had actively participated in the “development” agenda there. What of their lives, their aspirations and their ideas and visions for the future? Biden decided (or revealed) that they were never part of the real agenda in Afghanistan; that it was all window dressing for an intervention that was based on our own narrow self-interest and realpolitik.

The betrayal was consummated when the USA left thousands on the tarmac in Kabul. Who will work in ICTD now, when you can’t even travel between countries? Aid budgets were already declining before the pandemic, and have been slashed since. Who will believe that “development” is a real agenda for countries, when they can’t even comply with pledges of vaccines , or agree on solutions to climate change? Nation states seem increasingly panicked about climate disaster, and protecting their own borders and citizens (with some racialized exceptions, of course). Aid and humanitarian assistance agendas, where they still exist, are even more transparently connected to geopolitics, especially when they involve technology. The emperor has no clothes.

The villain in Afghanistan is being portrayed as Ashraf Ghani. I met his son Tarek several times when he was a development economics Ph.D. student at Berkeley. He was actively involved in RCTs and other development interventions both in Afghanistan and elsewhere, including some collaborations with people in ICTD. In many ways, he was like an ICTD researcher, including in where he decided to live — not there. If one had the choice, who would choose to live in Afghanistan, when presented with other alternatives? Surely only those with the most noble aspirations, or the very basest. But even these characterizations are a matter of perspective.

I miss India every day. I remember the day I decided that I would not stay there; that I would come back to the United States, continue graduate school, and hopefully become an academic. I remember my mother, in tears, sitting in an apartment in Ahmedabad, saying “how can you choose to stay in this dusty city?” I remember the feeling of betrayal I had when I told my business partner, Vijay, and all of the other collaborators with whom I had lived and worked. Most of all, I remember the euphoric feeling of actually living and working there, in the service of an optimistic agenda, with a people that you considered your own. Who would not want those feelings for themselves? But are they enough to sacrifice your life and future? Clearly not for Tarek, or for his father, or for me. And, in the end, the future is made by those who choose to stay.

So, what are we, as a subfield, to do, now that we have been abandoned by history? What is to be done, if not “development”? The claimants have rapidly adapted their vocabulary, shouting “Sustainability! Resilience! Adaptation!” But what do these words even mean in the absence of multilateral cooperation, through the decline of global institutions, and of expert authority in general? What is the shared vision of the future, of the good life, that unites us? Is there even any such thing? What institution would implement it, even if there was? Is there life after development?

These questions have occupied my thoughts for a while, even more urgently after the pandemic and all that has happened after. As many people know, I have not been directly involved in much ICTD work recently. Instead, I chose to invest more time and energy in the local, working with diverse networks of local actors that share collocated physical, social and economic contexts. Universities can help sustain these local knowledge ecosystems, along with libraries, and cooperative extension. The alternative is the failure of knowledge ecosystems altogether, which is a result we are seeing with the response to the pandemic in the USA and other countries.

I have also been reading (and teaching) things that I wish I would have had access to as an undergraduate or graduate student studying technology, that would helped me understand these issues better, before I wasted twenty years of my life chasing the mythical goose that laid the golden eggs. Unfortunately, the development discourse, given its deep association with the Weberian nation state, leaves little room for critical theory, or for highly contextualized and situated actions. We must seek other frameworks to provide ethical and methodological guidance as we navigate this tenuous bridge.

But focusing on the local (and the theoretical) is not enough. The questions that face us as a society are daunting. Technology certainly has some role to play — as a connector, a liberator or a cage. As we watch the fall of Kabul, and those masses gathered at the airport, we are reminded of our obligations to those very real people on the other side of the world, and how our actions in this country can have dramatic (and disastrous) consequences for them. Can we attend to the local, while retaining some global sense of progress and development? Who has the right to form this sense, to create this shared vision of the future? Whose Reality Counts? Whose Development? These are fundamental questions that we face as we approach the post-pandemic and post-development landscape. I hope we can make some (any?) progress on them.

Sometimes to build something new you have to destroy what exists. We learned what should have been this obvious fact of existence through our collaboration with a group of middle school students that we enlisted in a civic design project. The students were nominally tasked with designing new spaces for inter-cultural communication and public reflection on the small island our university campus shares with a small residential community in the middle of one of the most capitalized urban landscapes in the modern world. Why did it take a group of young middle schoolers to help us as design researchers recognize the significance of destruction as a design move? How can we use this experience to inform our discussion of politics in design, where the interesting question is not whether a design has politics or not, but what politics a specific design proposal does manifest (in this case, the destruction of an artifact), and how such acts can help surface the underlying tensions within a society or community? These are some of the questions that we probe in reflecting on this episode from the perspective of design.

The context for our story is Roosevelt Island — a narrow strip of land situated in the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens in New York City. This island is home to a small residential community of around 12,000 people, along with Cornell Tech, a graduate campus of Cornell University focused on applied sciences and technology, where we both work. While Roosevelt Island was originally designed as a mixed income community, as with many urban contexts, it has experienced significant demographic and material change in the last twenty years. This includes not only the construction of our campus, but of several residential buildings on the north and south end of the island catering to more upscale and “professional” residents. These changes have generated a decidedly mixed reaction from longer-term residents, who are an eclectic mix of older adults, international diplomats, subsidized housing residents and a significant disabled population.

We discussed some of the history of this community, and how several of our collaborations were and are shaping its emerging relationship with the new campus in an earlier workshop paper. In this short piece, we reflect on a specific interaction that occurred during the course of a participatory design workshop that we conducted with middle school youth. This workshop was the result of a several months long collaboration with a social studies teacher from the island middle school. In the collaboration, we used the method of oral history to investigate the meaning of home from an intergenerational context, by having students interview their parents or other family or community members about what the word “home” meant to them. Sharing these oral histories in class and on a website created rich opportunities for social and intercultural learning within this diverse urban classroom, which included students with parents from more than a dozen home countries.

At the end of this collaboration, we invited some of the students to participate in a summer internship with us on campus building on the observations from this project to design better civic spaces on the island for intercultural and community dialog. We wanted the students to use their observations from the oral history project to design new spaces that support the kind of intergroup learning they all had experienced in class. Instead, with one exception, the students all started to design various kinds of entertainment, shopping and recreational complexes. While this in and of itself was not surprising, a particular aspect of one design did stand out.

One of the groups had proposed destroying the Octagon, a luxury residential building at the north end of the island, to make room for one such multi-use youth attraction. This was where one of the students (the one that had proposed designing a new intercultural learning center) lived, and also where one of us (the professor) lived at the time. When we reminded the students that their task was to build something new, and that there was plenty of other space for their sprawling complex to be located (like on a floating barge in the middle of the river), they agreed that this was a possibility, but persisted in their demand that the Octagon be destroyed.

When pressed on why this was so important to them, the students criticized the building’s “really rich” and “exclusive” vibe, adding that it took up way too much space (including the pool / garden complex in the back and the tennis course in the front). In addition, many diplomats and other international workers lived in the complex, who did not have to pay their own rent because their embassies or missions paid it on their behalf. In short, the Octagon represented everything they didn’t like about the island — privatized allocation of space, socio-economic inequality and a cultural divide between the high income foreign diplomats and other kinds of residents.

Why were we initially so shocked by this proposal, when it was the one that generated the most discussion, and surfaced important underlying tensions within the community? Our reaction was nothing compared to what happened when the students presented their ideas for feedback at a session with members of the local senior center. These residents, many of whom represented this international community on the island, or were long-time local residents active in the historical society and other civic groups, reacted antagonistically when presented with this idea of destroying the Octagon. One of them responded that if we should destroy anything, we should start with/on our own campus!

What lessons are there to be learned from this tense, often confrontational and seemingly chaotic civic encounter? How does “Design for Provocation” actually manifest in real-world social contexts, with their multiple agendas and real conflicts around land use, resource allocation and intercultural dialogue? These are some of the questions that we reflect upon in a forthcoming article that discusses this project and its outcomes in greater detail. In this shorter piece, we’d like to use the remaining space we have to reflect on the implications of this incident for the practice of design.

Savvy youth easily see through the redundancy, performativity and fundamental apathy underlying most participatory civic engagement initiatives. The stark inequalities and bewildering absurdities of the modern state are only too well apparent to them. They realize (maybe better than any of us) that the future presents itself as a set of compromises and zero sum games, where more highly capitalized and better resourced segments of the population (who are usually older demographically) can and will continue to receive more and more of the ecological and economic pie.

What are youth to do in the face of such daunting odds? How can they respond to the stacked deck they have been handed? Of course, by destroying what exists! The history of resistance movements includes such groups as the Luddites, who destroyed machinery as a way of safeguarding the expertise and dignity of working class professions, the Black Bloc, who use nonviolent physical destruction as a way of protesting social and economic injustice, and Punk Rock, which crystallized working class angst through the violation of musical norms around performance and expertise. Youth have often been active members of these movements, if not the leaders of them.

Of course, destruction is also implicit in design. Every time we develop a new application, device, building, monument, infrastructure, and so on, we are displacing something (or someone) that existed before it. This displacement has real and material consequences, often as significant as the ones created by the “design” itself. There is a growing feminist movement that is advocating for our refusal to participate in racist, extractive and socially and environmentally harmful data regimes. We believe that in addition to saying “no” to furthering these harms, we can make intelligent decisions about destroying some of those wasteful, malevolent, unequal systems that already exist. This may be especially important in the coming decades, given the decaying nature of so many of our public institutions and infrastructure, and our need to support degrowth and rewilding initiatives.

Then, given both the practical importance and rhetorical power of destruction in design, why is it so invisible? To us, this is an important theoretical question, answering which can help us fundamentally discern what design is and can be in the future. Maybe even more important though is to ask the question of what we lose when we ignore the pedagogical and rhetorical power of destruction in design. Over our many years of working with youth, we have rarely seen them as engaged or with as much agency as when they felt that they had the ability to not only make new things, but also to make informed decisions about what is to be removed. As design practice continues to confront the many complicated, ambiguous and daunting challenges that we face as a society, the right to destroy needs to be recognized as a part of its collective arsenal.

This is why Dourish’s argument about “Implications for Design” is so dangerous and wrong. If one takes a broad view of design in HCI and its multiple relationships to practice (and practitioners!), I simply do not understand how the lack of direct implication can be perceived positively in terms of research contribution. Surely, not all design implications are about directly influencing the final material product. Some influence methodology, others influence our political and moral choices, and others may open our minds about new places and contexts where HCI is or should or shouldn’t be happening, and by whom! But all of these are still implications! After all, when the very field that you hope to be influencing is called design, what is the point of proselytizing that one should not be overly concerned about implications for it?

In reflecting on this piece almost fifteen years later, one must acknowledge the time and context of his argument. Given the unreflective discussion in HCI at the time, and the pace of technological development, it was certainly reasonable to put on the brakes and ask what the purpose of it all was. My concern is with the impact that it has on the field, and how it equips us for the surely more radical steps that are needed ahead.

For most of his paper, Dourish is actually arguing against implications for designers — trained experts who are professionally employed to produce mass market designs for consumption. Why the distinction between elite, professional designers, and the many other people who do design as part of their everyday lives? Why do designers so often exist outside of these contexts, so that everything they see is “out there”? Maybe the right question to ask is why designers are in here? And, even more fundamentally, why is there this continual focus on the “user” in the first place? After all, isn’t the “user interface” just like the “market”, in that it is actually an interface between production and consumption?

When Dourish rightly asks what is the source of our legitimacy as HCI practitioners, he ignores the fact that our status is a direct result of our relationship to the entire capitalist hegemonic project. After all, as HCI researchers or practitioners, our large salaries and teams and all the usual perks have to come from somewhere. The most important question that we must always ask ourselves is “for whom do we really work?”. When Dourish says that “our discussion emphasizes that HCI (or user-centered design) is not a space apart”, methinks that the lady doth protest too much! Who are we really fooling when we ignore that the entire HCI, Design, UX, etc. industries are subservient to the professional-managerial class that is the very instrument of worker control by capital? We are the tools of the tools!

By ignoring class in his analysis, Dourish misses the entire reason why consumer design exists as a professional material practice in the first place. Design is about sublimating the desires of the masses, and it trades in commodifying these to reform the masses as consumers, with differentiated needs that must be met by an equivalent number of “innovative” products. Class is why design exists! Fundamentally, if there was no class, there would be no design, at least not how we now know it.

In a Marxist system, design would focus on the worker, and not just of the office/PMC variety. The proletariat themselves might take over the design process (sometimes with hilarious outcomes). In a more anarchist version, we might focus on small groups engaged in mutual aid and cooperative production. Regardless of the alternative political economy, one would assume though that if the working class was in charge of design, we would focus on production and not consumption. If we centered workers (and other marginalized populations) in the design process, we might find that most inquiries, ethnographic or otherwise, do have implications, just not ones that are commodifiable for mass consumption.

In fact, many of Dourish’s examples focus on some form of consumption, whether in Trinidad, Australia, or elsewhere. Workers are absent from his analysis. Capitalism is assumed as a tacit background, and to his paper’s implications as well! This is why we need ethnographers to mediate between the world and the interest of corporations — because their needs and values are not aligned, nor will they ever be. By denying the need for implications, all Dourish is doing is introducing ethnography and ethnographers — two elite and closely guarded titles, as yet more barriers that regular people have to overcome before they can engage with the processes of technological production.

Regardless of Dourish’s intent, the impact is clear. By devaluing the notion of Implications for Design, Dourish’s paper has helped to create a generation of HCI researchers (especially of the critical variety) who believe that there is little value in doing work that has direct design implications. While certainly there is room in the academy for such things, is HCI, at least as a part of the Computing and Information Science discipline within which it so often resides, really the right place for this kind of ambiguous work? If the value framework of our field is not oriented around having impact on material technical practice, what exactly is it oriented around?

Every field needs a coherent framework of value within which to operate. Value allows us to assign importance to different kinds of work and their results. This kind of value coherence is actually much more important to interdisciplinary inquiry than agreement at the level of method, epistemology or domain of inquiry. Without agreeing on what is important, there is very little way of making collective progress (as our current political / epidemiological situation so aptly demonstrates).

As a field grows, it is very easy to lose this value coherence (if we ever had it in the first place). Computer and Information Science is certainly one field that has faced such growing pains. Ideals of mathematical purity, operational efficiency and the robustness and elegance of novel systems and interfaces have all at various times and for various people been the criteria for research excellence. In the face of this kind of value confusion, and with the increased commercialization of our field, it is easy to adopt the criteria of the market (entrepreneurialism, venture capitalism, consumer adoption, etc.), especially when there isn’t a coherent alternative. This is a path that many business and engineering schools have taken.

I believe that this is what Dourish is actually arguing against — the commodification of ethnographic research and insights towards narrowly consumerist aims. But by framing his critique as one of implications, I believe he effectively disempowers exactly those who need to be encouraged, and denies what could and should make Computer and Information Science and related areas unique as a disciplinary thrust. There are many other disciplines that try to study and influence human society and behavior. As the use of computing technologies increases in society, one can expect more people in these fields to study computational phenomena and practices. The unique differentiating factor that HCI affords is this connection to material practice — through our institutional position on campus, the students we educate and the kind of research projects that we engage in.

What if we took Dourish’s assertion that the true purpose of HCI was to “nurture and sustain human dignity and flourishing” seriously? Shouldn’t making cool new technologies and infrastructure and helping others to do so be at the very top of it? With all of Dourish’s focus on methodology, why does he ignore the one that has always been central to HCI’s particular approach to design — prototyping? Of course it is a pragmatic question to ask why protest and reform movements are always playing “defense” in this way, but as academic researchers I think we have a broader palette of potential stances we can take in our relation to the dominant power structures and their retrograde movements.

Regardless of how you position yourself, making things always comes with risks. I have learned that it is easy for your work to be co-opted by ideologies and institutions that do not align with your values and beliefs. There are many efforts, educational, policy and otherwise, to help technologists and technology students better understand these and other kinds of risks, and to develop practices and dispositions that can counteract some of the negative pressures created by these institutions, and the capitalist, racist, patriarchal and exclusionary systems they represent.

For several years, I have taught a class called Revolutionary Technologies (or RevTech) to CS, IS, MBA and OR graduate students at Cornell Tech. RevTech connects political economy and critical theory to design and technology, to help students understand the broader context within which these processes operate. In this class, we read a range of deeply theoretical texts — including Marx and Engels, but also Adam Smith, Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Catherine Mackinnon, Lucy Suchman, and a range of others. This class is important because it asks students to critique not only particular methods or technologies, but the entire system of political economy within which those ideas exist.

The first half of the course is based on an introductory sociology sequence taught by Michael Burawoy at UC Berkeley. What is different about my version is the deep connection to technical practice, drawing from my own disciplinary knowledge and experience as a Computer Scientist. It turns out that many of the very best social theorists also wrote about technology and its relation to social change, often with direct implications ! Applying their insights has been revolutionary for me and my students in terms of understanding the world and our position within it. Implications (including actual designs and prototypes) are the most concrete ways for these students to manifest their nascent theoretical ideas. I regularly come across former students (including MBAs!) who tell me that they found this kind of reflection relevant across a number of real world design situations and contexts. It has also been helpful in my life for me in making sense of some of my own failures, as well as in directing my future efforts.

Implications for design have been key to this learning, including my own. For one thing, this is how RevTech is differentiated from anything else they can get on campus (frankly, at Cornell Tech, that’s not that hard anyway). But even more importantly, without implications, how do you enact the fundamental methodology of iterative improvement? Implications are a concrete reification of a design idea that makes it easier for others (perhaps with less academic knowledge) to respond — this is the whole basis for the practice of prototyping within HCI. My own theoretical and empirical knowledge has been increased dramatically from moving around in the world and actually trying things out — whether or not those things worked as intended (spoiler alert: often they haven’t). In fact, if I hadn’t done and tried all the things that I have, there would be no RevTech at all. As Marx and the STS tradition that he partially inspired demonstrates, the evolution of academic disciplines is itself a discursive realm.

Seen in this way, the drive for implications has been key to making my teaching and research impactful, as well as that of others in our field. Our students are often pragmatic and solution-oriented. They need concrete domains within which to operate. Design and engineering is the medium through which they manifest their ideas in material form. When you give them theory and data without application, you lose a large fraction of their interest, not because either of you are wrong, but because you lose an opportunity to meet them where they are. There is a deeper (and, in my opinion, more profound) question about how to sustain this motivation and interest when the entire political and economic system is driven by values that are antithetical to the ones that you believe in, but that is a different question with a different set of implications (including those of the design variety!)

In conclusion, I believe there is little room in HCI for theorization (ethnographically-based or otherwise) that has little to no direct implication for technical practice. I have seen design faculty candidates in HCI shot down time and again, because while they may be popular among critical design researchers, they did not meet the criteria for impact that is core to at least our adjacent (and often, dominating) disciplinary environments. I think it would actually be easier for an anarchist or marxist who built an actual system to get a tenure track job in a mainstream CS department, than someone who does the kind of work Dourish recommends doing in this paper (its an interesting thought experiment at least!). As critical researchers, we do our students a disservice by downplaying the importance of design implications, which are the currency of the realm in CS and also for some IS HCI faculty positions.

For me, this is a feature, and not a bug. Being critical doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to an impotent line of inquiry — in fact, as Marx reminds us, it demands the very opposite. If artifacts have politics, then politics must also concern itself with the design of those artifacts. As Dourish’s own students have so aptly demonstrated, the best kind of critical work not only has implications, but often direct impact as well. By divorcing the methods and domain of our study from our intended field of application, we do a disservice to ourselves, to our students, and to our potential role, both within the academy, as well as within the broader society. As we work towards imagining a more radical and critical HCI, we must also recognize that design is fundamentally about its implications, and that is why there should always be implications for design.

(Thanks to James Landay and my students Ian Arawjo and Samar Sabie for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay.)

Date of Publication: 4/15/2001

It was a cool, breezy evening in northern Maharashtra. As we sat scattered amongst the buildings encircling the village centre, our meeting was moving at full speed. Professor Gupta, had managed to power the operation by rigging our laptop and projector to some wires diverted from the overhead light fixture, and now he was amazing the audience with a demonstration of our multi-media database, chock full of examples of creative and talented people working at the grassroots level.

The school children in the front of the audience looked on entranced as Professor showed them video after video of innovators, healers, and artisans — a collection of people across India displaying creativity and initiative at the grassroots level, as well as their inventions and achievements. A three-wheeled tractor, an efficient and effective weed sprayer, a noted livestock healer — everyone seemed to be very excited to see the great potential possible amongst the rural masses of India, the things their fellow villagers in other parts of India had been able to accomplish through their own creativity and determination.

During the course of the meeting Professor Gupta explained to the gathered villagers about all kinds of experiments and success stories taking place in other villages across India. Experiments in organic farming, in novel and useful farm implements, in herbal pesticides, in traditional veterinary medicine, and some of the great results of these experiments. Outstanding yields, commercialization of local ideas, national recognition and honor, these were just some of the kinds of successes he talked about, ample proof of the benefits of taking innovative approaches to your problems.

He also talked about the great riches present in our traditional and local knowledge systems, and the danger of forgetting this great source of information in the coming years. He emphasized the urgent necessity of maintaining our traditional knowledge of local bio-diversity, and of our traditional practices, medical or otherwise, to stem this ‘knowledge erosion’. This confluence of stirring and convincing ideas, in front of a video backdrop of examples of successful local projects and workers, made a compelling point and kept the audience spellbound throughout the meeting.

This meeting occurred during our stop-over in the Maharashtra village of Dalwat, near the Gujarat border, during SRISTI’s semi-annual Shodhyatra journey. Twice each year Professor Gupta and the rest of the SRISTI team packs up it’s entire operation and sets out on a ten day quest through the farmlands and forests of India — seeking to expand and recognize outstanding individuals within the Honey Bee Network of grassroots innovators, volunteers and supporters. Walking from village to village, conducting local meetings, honoring local people displaying outstanding creativity and knowledge about local bio-diversity, this is SRISTI’s way of maintaining it’s solid connection with the grassroots communities of India. Staying in local villages, seeing people’s ideas and accomplishments first hand, it is a great way to stay in touch with our vision.

During our latest Shodhyatra we conducted a mobile exposition of the newest version of Knownet-GRIN, a multimedia, multi-lingual catalogue of local innovations, innovators, artisans, healers and other outstanding people working at the grassroots level. This initiative’s aim is to create a digitally linked system where grassroots innovators from across India can share ideas, technologies and support — in effect setting up a nationwide (and eventually worldwide) community of creative people working on novel solutions to local problems and displaying outstanding knowledge and initiative at the grassroots level.

Through this system such people will be able to meet, talk, support each other’s ideas, and also achieve contact with the “mainstream” establishment — exchanging feedback with scientists and other experts, discussing marketing and distributing their ideas with entrepreneurs, investors and financial experts. In effect de-marginalizing one of the greatest sources of human natural resource in the world — outstanding people working at the grassroots level.

During our last Shodhyatra, we lugged a laptop and projector along with us and at certain meetings we demonstrated our current working prototype, getting users ‘ opinions and recommendations about the interface. We tried to gauge what features would be useful and what would not, as well as how well they could understand the functionality and the interface of our system.

These kinds of field trials are the most fertile sources of ideas for our development staff — seeing their work in action, it’s successes and failures, refines our ideas about the project and the design of the software, and are invaluable in the realistic development of the project.

This meeting in Dalwat was a particularly fruitful meeting. Professor gave a full demonstration of the database, after which some local children came and tried their hand at using the system, our staff taking notes about their insights, to aid in the evolution of our design and ideas.

The full meeting lasted over three hours, on top of the demonstration we had a general meeting where local farmers exchanged views and ideas with some farmers that had accompanied our yatra from Gujarat, we had a small skit emphasizing the importance of traditional knowledge and organic farming, and we took time to honor some locally outstanding workers scouted by our field staff. We also honored some local children that demonstrated the best knowledge about the local biodiversity of the area. One young boy was able to demonstrate knowledge about 394 local plants, as well as their uses! Even more gratifying was that he committed to learning about another 300 plants in time for our next visit. Truly outstanding…

After the meeting, our whole team was sitting around the fire with some people from the village, drinking tea like a cadre of well-fed cats. We were tired from a long day’s walking and talking, and were feeling smugly satisfied with the success of the day’s meetings. Just then, the village sarpanch sidled sheepishly up to our little circle, and queried…

“Sirs, we really enjoyed your meeting, it was great. We really, really enjoyed it. Especially the movie. But please excuse me for asking, but I feel I must ask. Why have you come here? Why are you in our village? Would you like to sell something?”

To say the least, this brought us a little back down to earth from our smug demeanor. To correct his misconception, one of our farmers from Gujarat and one or two of our staff preceded to sit with the sarpanch for another two or three hours, talking into the wee hours of the night, until finally he understood the full extent of our goals, of our vision. After this he was so convinced and enthusiastic that he guaranteed an audience of 5,000 for our next visit.

What is the lesson here? Why did we have a hard time getting our point across? Well, first of all, there was a language barrier of sorts. Most of our staff is from Gujarat, and most of the meeting was conducted in Gujarati and Hindi. The local language in bordering Maharashtra state is Marathi, so this created somewhat of a communication problem. This idea of language barrier is an important one, especially in a diverse country like India, and it is one we seek to address in our software, by providing as much information as possible in local language. Obviously this adds to the complexity of our development effort, but we think it is worth it. Without this feature it is very likely our system would be useless in most of the country.

But I think another issue is the ideological barrier. Many of the sources of our ideas and initiatives are framed conceptually within the confines of academia or similar institutions, in think tanks, universities and government offices around the world. Applying these ideas in the local context often meets with confusion or misunderstanding. Ideas that seemed so clear within the analytic and intellectual framework of a development conference or a project proposal often seem out of place or skewed within the simple day to day life of a village, where the philosophy of life can be quite different. The beat of village life is very different from that of many of our own lives, and to achieve any understanding or synergy with it I think one must adjust their own cadence a little.

This is why activities like the Shodhyatra are so important to us at SRISTI. It gives us a chance to slow our lives a little, to achieve some common understanding of life with the people and institutions that we are trying to serve. These types of activities continually refocus our efforts, and give added energy and direction to our project. Hopefully, by maintaining this strong link with the people and institutions we are trying to serve, we will achieve a truly useful system that will actually make a positive difference in the society we are trying to serve. That is our first and foremost goal, and this is just one way we are trying to stay focused to it.

It was made all the more real because these people are my friends, and because their lives are being put in immediate risk without any consideration of their lives or value, nor any opportunity for them or any of their loved ones to speak out on their own behalf. And speak OUT they would have. These are amazing artists, performers, thinkers; in them I found my true ideological brethren, dudes who stand up for each other and who spit fire into the abyss even when they know that it is all fucked.

It has been many years since I have felt as much a part of a group as I do of Open Doors. Not a leader of a group — part of one. Since the first day I met them, they have welcomed me with open arms into their group — not with any expectation of material gain, but with a sense of solidarity and friendship and neighborliness that has provided me and my family with a true sense of community on this island. When I had a small dispute with the local government last year over the closure of a soccer field, they were the ones that really had my back, supporting me and checking in with me about how it was going even months later. We ate together, drank together, chilled together. These were the people that I stopped and chatted with on my way in and out of my apartment -my closest friends in a real day to day sense.

Now, one of them is already dead of COVID-19, and the others are living in a squalid public nursing home that has hastily been converted to COVID-19 triage use amongst so many other sick, and wounded bodies, being cared for by imported health care workers brought here on false pretense, with little to no training, inadequate PPE, and quarantine practices that amount to shuffling known and suspected COVID-19 patients around a dilapidated building in a dystopian game of whack-a-mole. How many more of them will die? I keep saying zero and hoping and praying that is true but I’m not sure how much longer I can believe it.

It is made all the more real because these guys were on such an amazing trajectory before this ridiculous virus interrupted their flow. They had written and performed a play, and were in discussions to convert it to a movie. They had written and published a beautiful anthology of poetry. They were involved in youth education and outreach, filmmaking, music, beats, photography, graphic design — an eclectic group of artists living in unusual (and, to be honest, unfortunate) circumstances drawing on their life experiences to make amazing art, who had found each other and banded together to truly live their best life. And now this. To say that it is heartbreaking is an understatement of emotion.

Even after we all survive the next few months (I pray we all will!), will I even see any of them for the next 12–18 months outside of Zoom calls? When will Coler come out of lockdown and quarantine? Will we ever be able to go inside and do our programs again? When will it be safe for the guys to come outside, to even move around their own facility freely? To hang out in the library, in their clubhouse, to use their equipment and to create art? Will anyone even care that they are locked down and confined to these “wings”, these men many of whom have their own experiences of other kinds of “lock down” and all of the associated trauma that it brings? How will they be after this?

It is made all the more real because some of the patients at Coler lived at Goldwater Hospital, a facility that was also considered “empty” when it was knocked down to make room for Cornell Tech, the institution for which I now work. Many of the students and faculty at Cornell Tech still think that the land where the campus stands was empty before, or that Goldwater was empty, or that nothing of value was displaced there. Goldwater was the largest long-term acute care hospital complex in the world, intended for poor and low income people who had no other place to go. It was a national leader in providing long-term care for people who needed ventilators, providing almost 2000 total beds of capacity. How many more New Yorkers would have survived if Goldwater still existed? How many of my friends at Coler? Would they have been able to move freely if there were more space and resources available to them? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

People lived their lives at Goldwater, making art and friendships and memories, finding solace together within the bowels of a decaying public institution cast adrift in the middle of the East River, amidst cherry blossoms and river views, and all of the other things that make this island a wonderful place to live and work for all of us. The guys loved coming to campus to collaborate with me and my wife on so many different projects, even when (or maybe because) they had previously lived at Goldwater. At times like this, I reflect on the kindness, benevolence and solidarity of these men — to welcome us as one of their own while carrying their own intimate and painful personal memories of this history.

As technologists, we often take for granted the “blank slate” that we are given to begin our work. Our visions may not always be radical and new, but they always displace something. I’ve come to realize over time that nothing is ever “empty”, there is always something that came before, that if we care to look, there is extreme beauty in every corner of our Earth, but also that we can also crush it if we aren’t looking. This is the real reason to “look” — not to replace what we see with “better” products and services, but to approach the world with humility, with a level of respect and appreciation for what we already have in this world, and the things that matter to all of us within it.

(This essay is dedicated to all the patients at Coler and to my friends the Open Doors Reality Poets).

For the first time in a long time, the stark cleavages that could only be seen by theorists (and of course the marginalized themselves) are readily visible to anyone that cares to look. Who gets access to a Coronavirus test? When the time comes, who will get the ventilator? Who gets to stay, who can come back, and who has nowhere to go? Who can confine themselves within a walled garden at some resort enclave, taking glamour shots while their dogs swim in the pool? Who is able to escape to a bunker on acres of land in some remote red state or island? Who are the health care workers getting sprayed in the face with spit and blood with shoddy gauze masks that they’ve been wearing all day? And who is forced to ride public transportation so that the rest of us simply have enough food to eat?

These are questions of profound importance now not only for the lives of the poor, black, brown, mis-gendered and recently arrived; but for every single citizen of the country and the world. People (if they have not been made too stupid already) should be realizing for themselves the importance of things like equitable access, of public infrastructure, of an intelligent allocation of resources, and of planning ahead —in other words, things that social theorists have been talking about for a very long time.

What new possibilities will this kind of broad public realization create, if it is not shouted down by partisan bickering and finger-pointing? Even the orange-man-in-charge seems to have realized that responding to this crisis is going to require new ways to distribute resources to people and industries. But why should those resources go towards failed, backwards-looking industries like cruise ships and airplanes? Towards piecemeal approaches to supporting human capital like giving everyone just enough money to buy an extra TV or laptop for all the quarantining they will be doing? I think not.

One of the more amazing things to observe over the last few days has been the extent to which multiple industries (including academia, and broadcast media to an extent, just as two examples that I’m at least somewhat familiar with) have transitioned to a mostly online model of working within a period of a less than a week. While this transition has been anything but seamless, and with all the usual caveats about accessibility (some of which I will address later), in some sense we have made more progress towards realizing the virtual office (if not Douglas Engelbart’s more ambitious vision of augmenting collective human intelligence) than we ever did over the cumulative prior 40-odd years.

The implications of this are nothing short of profound. First of all, why haven’t we be doing this all along? Sure, while online videoconferencing is nowhere near ideal for doing things like building trust and rapport, it does remove many geographic, logistical and operational barriers to collaboration, potentially allowing entire industries to run at a fraction of the operational cost. No more redeyes to London, hotel room rewards programs and overpriced appetizers in seedy bars. The climate change benefits are impossible to calculate based on the cascade of effects this might have. Of course, we might still choose to travel for leisure, but it might only be as part of publicly sponsored programs that are allocated equitably across all citizens (one flight per year per person? fixed mile quota?).

One might argue that this overlooks and neglects those jobs that require physical presence and/or manual labor. Of course it does, but over time we should be seeing less of these kinds of jobs that need to be done (but never zero), and more that people might even choose to do voluntarily (like being a park ranger, an opera singer, or one of David Graeber’s caring classes). Allocating more resources and prestige to both of these kinds of positions and their occupants is something that we can do with all of the freed up capital from the reduced travel and infrastructure costs.

Of course, there is always the question of access. But, and to my main point, why aren’t the Internet and all its fundamental applications and services considered global public infrastructure? Or, put another way, why should only the rich and powerful be able to Zoom with their friends and family? Now that we can recognize the almost unlimited importance of something as simple as reliable videoconferencing, surely we can realize that other services like search, social networking, file storage and data management should also be in the public realm, widely accessible to end users at minimal (ideally zero) cost without being surveilled. (Of course, it goes without saying that we need the underlying telecommunications infrastructure to be public and widely accessible as well, but at this point that policy recommendation is already well-established.)

With apologies to my software engineering and programming languages friends, one area that is still problematic is the ability for an average human being to develop their own interactive computational artifacts (much less data-driven ones). One particularly embarrassing example was when the President of the United States spent the better part of one of the most important press conferences in American history talking about how one of the world’s largest companies was allocating literally thousands of engineers to develop what turned out to be a poorly designed web form. But there were some more insidious cases as well — for example, doctors sharing knowledge and evidence using only the crudest forms of communications and data sharing tools (e.g. WhatsApp). Innovations like wikis and discussion groups are now decades old, but languish in some kind of strange interstitial limbo of inactivity, as if we had foreclosed on them simply because we couldn’t monetize them at the same scale as some of these other, shall we say, more “consumptive” services.

But, at this point I believe that the era of innovation in core areas like Internet services and applications is receding. The Internet is a reliable and robust communications infrastructure that serves over half of the world’s people. Core applications like search, file storage, social networking, videoconferencing and data management are based on well-established paradigms that are likely to see only incremental advances at this point. It is time to make this infrastructure public and shared on a scale that humanity has never before attempted — by putting all intellectual property related to these domains into a shared public portfolio, creating a global governance infrastructure on the scale of the IMF or World Bank (but with a vastly more egalitarian model of participation, perhaps even something like a platform cooperative), using newly printed government assets to acquire these businesses at what are surely bargain prices on the open market, and implementing standards and APIs that both allow these services to seamlessly interoperate with one another, as well as with any third party applications or services that are built upon them.

The latter efforts in particular are also likely to create a large number of jobs across the technology sector in the short term, from research, to design, to policy, to implementation. If the government is going to act like an investor, it should act like an intelligent one, and invest in infrastructure and services that are likely provide jobs to the maximum number of people. It doesn’t look like that is going to be in airlines and cruise ships (which are both, in my experience, simply horrible qualitative experiences that we do mostly because others are doing them as well). The government should be investing in the kinds of infrastructure that can enable all kinds of businesses — including small ones —to survive and flourish in what will certainly be an increasingly online-mediated world, accelerated in as yet untold ways by this drawn-out dystopian global culture shock.

As Computer and Information Scientists, this is our opportunity to think bigger from a policy perspective. It is our infrastructure and technology that can see us through not only this crisis — but the larger climate change one as well. But that can happen only if we put it in the right hands. We have taken our cues from conservative economists and policy wonks for long enough. We have to recognize that there are other sources of inspiration in the academy, and that some of those ideas may better serve us better as we navigate what is ahead. In short, it is time for our field to develop a broader and deeper social consciousness, so that we are better informed in our efforts to do what is in the best interest of our shared world.

Addendum: I have been thinking a bit more about this, and about specifically what functions / services should be included in this public infrastructure. I do believe that identity/authentication, messaging, file/data management and videoconferencing do need to be a part of the core no matter what. Search is a bit less clear — after all, we do have the successful (and nostalgic) yellow/white pages example to draw upon. The only reason Search is a much bigger business now is because of the centralized/ing nature of so many of the underlying businesses and services. So perhaps there is some argument for moving it to the public realm. Maps are another interesting case. Anyway, I clearly need to find time to write more about this. Stay tuned for another post soon!