I recently attended two distinct events, in two distinct locations, that provided an insightful contrast into varying views of technology and its relationship to politics, governance, and collective challenges.  Over the last several days and weeks, I've found myself returning to the contexts that these events framed for addressing certain core issues of governance, and the relationship of governance, writ large, to technological transformation.

Perhaps I should begin by saying that both events were quite interesting, largely due to the caliber of the people involved (which in both cases was very high) and to the energy and desire available to tackle difficult problems.  In that sense, both events were refreshing and free from some of the typical dourness usually associated with the work of governments and governance.

That said, both revealed serious flaws -- perhaps not in the events themselves, but in the approaches that we have conceived for relating governments, technological innovations, and organizational transformations.

In order for my thoughts to make sense, it seems necessary to first outline a few concepts through which to better frame these observations.

The first is to define the concept of "technology", as I intend to use the term in an expansive sense, and here I will rely on the work of Wiebe E Bijker.  Bijker proposes that we frame technology discussions by disambiguating and distinguishing between different layers of meaning for the the term "technology".  He proposes three which I will explain as follows:

1. In its most common usage, technology applies to a set of of physical artifacts or "widgets" such as cell phones, cars, or web pages.  
2. At the next level, it includes a set of processes and activities that are human, and that refer to the design, production, and use of "widgets" in a system.  
3. Lastly, and closest to to the original Greek use of the term, it can be defined as a type of "knowledge"  or to use a definition from dictionary.com "the sum of the ways in which social groups provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization." 

Distinguishing between these definitions of technology causes enough confusion of its own. Discussions about objects vs. people and processes vs. knowledge and evolution of technological concepts cross several layers of abstraction, from the specific to the procedural to the structural and are, in other words, concerned with "things", "systems", and "framings".  Yet, these distinctions alone are insufficient for discussing the impact of technology in a holistic manner because while they acknowledge technology's social context, they do so without providing an evaluative narrative.  In order to fill this gap, we need to consider how we think about "The Nature of Technology" more fundamentally. 

Two Models

There are two prevailing narratives of how technology develops in a society and, by extension, how it relates to the prerogatives of government.  Let these be called "technological determinism" and "technology as a social system".

The first is the dominant narrative, and views the development of technology either through the lens of a "great inventor" theory -- whereby the evolution of technology is the result of geniuses slugging away in relative isolation creating new and novel things -- or as a type of natural phenomena with its own internal logic on its own evolutionary path, separate from politics, society, and other external pressures.

There is tremendous romantic appeal to this idea, and its phrased in interesting ways.  In this world technology isn't evil or good per say, its the users of it that are. Intentionality and eventuality, are at best very loosely coupled, and technological products are seen as a type of species in a darwinistic competition for "fitness" that, due to its own internal logic, is separate from maters of policy, politics, and social interactions.

In this model governments and especially democracies are confronted by what Bijker calls an "expert problem"  and he outlines three questions as examples of such: "How can experts be recognized by non experts? How can non experts trust the mechanisms that are supposed to safeguard the quality of experts? How can experts communicate their esoteric knowledge to non-experts?"

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex...Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." 

Dwight D Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961

These questions lead to the adoption all sorts of approaches. To answer the first we do such things as build institutions that validate expertise, design tests that verify intelligence quotas, and erect filtering systems based on competition, and yet somehow we cant avoid that the "best and the brightest" can be catastrophically wrong.  For the second we adopt things like CMMI, define standards of quality like ISO 9000, build entire disciplines to understand validation and verification, and yet we see continuous failures, often prodded on by the very mechanisms meant to safeguard. For the last question, we geeks throw our hands up in the air and read Dilbert.

The additional problem with the deterministic view of technology, is that we surrender agency. The process seems so mysterious, so rapid that it feels like a monster that controls us and that we feed, and that might at some point rebel against us.  This is often the story movies like "The Matrix", "Terminator" and the positronic work of Asimov and "I, Robot" tell.  But its not only the stuff of fiction. Donald Mackenzie, writing in his book Inventing Accuracy: a Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance wrote:

"In our bleakest moments the nuclear world has seemed to be a technological juggernaut out of control, following its own course independent of human needs and wishes".  

This feeling, of inevitable, deterministic doom lead to the invention of an entire engineering paradigm to safeguard systems.  It was the work at RAND and of Albert Wholstetter that gave us the notion of "fail safe" systems, which with a few exceptions like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Valdez etc..

Yet now,  again, we are confronted by this technologically deterministic catastrophe, shackled by systems we don't understand let alone manage and control.  They create spaces and conditions for flash trading, banking collapse, carbon emissions, acid oceans, melting ice caps, holes and opportunities for identity theft and massive fraud. Collapse in the Diamond sense of the word, feels closer than ever, and the failures of our technologies provide plenty of evidence to hold that view.

Our technological arrangements from this perspective, are the source of our impending doom.--- or the source of our impending salvation!  The same type of thinking, but in the positive, leads us to hope for that next great invention, on its on course, the zero emission automobile, the solar powered city, the bio surveillance system that manages to prevent a pandemic from spreading, that next vaccine, the perfect drone that kills only those who deserve it, the genetically engineered oil eating bacteria that grows into a delicious disease free kosher pig that can be deployed after a spill and then feed the hungry of the Niger Delta, or even more fancifully, the social software that perfects democracy and mass coordination.

Technological determinism pits our utopian and dystopian models against each other, in a race led by experts to which the rest of the population is largely irrelevant (so why even bother keeping up one might ask?). From a political perspective, it renders the non-expert citizenry impotent.

Its also just wrong.

We do know that technology is socially shaped, and that the second view of "technology as a social system" better explains the clumsy interplay of how "social groups provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization."  It has lead to an entire discipline of the "sociology of scientific knowledge" and to rethinking the philosophy of science arguably beginning with Kuhn, and being further explored by the likes of Latour, Lakatosh and Feyerabend amongst others (many with competing views which I won't get into here). The reasons for the success of any given technology is not based in the intrinsic properties of technology, but in social variables, in the interplay between what we can perceive as possible, what we value, and what we are party to creating within a context and a set of circumstances.  Brian Arthur calls this process the "combinatorial evolution" of technology.

I guess this is what bothered me about Gov 2.0.  Despite its energy and the caliber of the people there, all of which I found refreshing and valuable, there was a missing part of reflexive introspection (or at best it came out only during rare moments) about the nature of technology and its relationship to questions of governance. Government as a tech platform may be a good idea, but its not an idea free from needing to address what it might mean to become as Bimber in Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power, calls a "post bureaucratic society" or dealing with the tricky issues of accountability and contract in a maze of private and public interests played out in the cloud. Eisenhower's warning seems long forgotten.

Geneva by contrast, is all about institution building.  Sometimes you get the feeling there, that things would just be so much better if all communiqués were by decree and official carrier (perhaps even on horseback).  Unlike at Gov 2.0, Geneva conversation revolves around  deep considerations of law, legitimacy, governance and the mechanisms by which to deliver it.  But in Geneva there is either an oblivion, or a willing dismissal of the rapid changing elements that affect how societies (and in the face of global challenges that stretch beyond the broken frameworks of methodological nationalism based in sovereignty as its grounding principle) and humanity, ought, and I will use the phrase again, "provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization." 

Nowhere is this more clear than in the debate about global climate change, and the stresses it reveals about global equity and justice (and here I am referring to Sen's view of justice in the tradition of Smith, as opposed to the view of justice as defined by Hobbes, Kant and Rawls - which again I won't get into here). For Geneva, the focus is on getting governance right, independent of technology, unable to break free of its bureaucratic framing and the long legacy of political and philosophical thought that underpins it and its view of the nature of governance. In Geneva, the point of departure seems to be a social construction, and the preservation of social constructions, no matter how far they are from reality.

I am convinced there needs to be a middle way and a new thinking.  It was ironic, for example that at Gov 2.0, so much focused on things that can easily be transnational, there was a US only perspective (which for things like pandemics is an impossibility), a nationalist limitation on an open world creating a global commons that can distribute innovations beyond national borders. It was also strange to see Big Gov contractors "in the 2.0 club" on stage validated as moving forward 2.0 ideas, as it seemed this implied changes in the nature of governance and technology can be made without any real shifts in the existing relationships between government institutions and their contractors. At the same time, projects like Rapid SMS, sponsored by UNICEF, which constitute innovative approaches for real generative capacity, are more easily recognized and gain broad support at Gov 2.0 (I would argue) than in the operational centers of Geneva. And models of understanding, like those from Hal Varian,

and Sandy Pentland, represent the kind of groundbreaking innovations that need to be thought about in new governance contexts.

So somewhere in between, a technologically deterministic model of the world and governance, and an outdated institution driven by social consensus view about government, their needs to be a conversation.  It might take a "precautionary principle" approach about technological adoption and scientific problems, and it requires a deep critique of our current models of governance, and our current ideas about technological progress.  Both these events, held that promise, but both also revealed that the issues that trap our current thinking lie deeper than the surface.