🖼️ The Primer

Frameworks, themes, and daily actions - oh my!

The Primer is a special issue that consists of:

• 🖼️ The frameworks and concepts from past essays, which are organized nicely into themes.

• 📚Each theme connects to the original Untangled posts and provides further resources if you want to dive in deeper.

• ✔️With each theme, I will also recommend a daily action for you to try in real life, to make these ideas more practical.

There are now 13 themes in total - enjoy!

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☝️ Theme one: technologies and social systems like gender, race, and power are entangled. I’m nothing if not on-brand!

In ‘Crypto is not decentralized,’ I argued that technical decentralization doesn’t do anything to decentralize power. I drew on the work of Angela Walch to illustrate that power concentrates in intermediaries, voting and governance, token ownership, coordinated decision-making, computing power, and in informal authority.

Though technically decentralized, certain nodes can still hold more voting power.

Then in ‘What’s the deal with DAOs?’ I drew upon ‘The Paradox of Meritocracy’ by Emilio Castilla and Stephen Benard to show that removing formal organizational structures doesn’t actually level the proverbial playing field — it only leads to informal structures and hierarchies based on race and gender.

Both of these examples showcase how technical systems cannot be easily separated from social ones. In fact, we separate the two to our detriment. Our assumption that technologies act on society only hides power and existing structural inequities. This obviously is very useful for some, but damaging to many.

Want more examples of this? In Trust me, I’m a smart contract I discuss how Web2 companies (like AirBnB) rely upon a reputation-based trust which is shaped by existing social relations and prejudices. Or, if you have an extra 30 minutes and want to dive into the ways gender, power, and technology shape one another, listen to Os Keyes on The Good Robot podcast.

Daily Action: Reject the premise that data and technology are ‘objective’ or ‘neutral.’ Ask instead, in what ways are data and technology entangled in social systems?

👬 Theme two: technologies have narratives that shape or hide the societal impact of those technologies.

In ‘Technology for … what exactly?’ I drew upon the work of Virginia Eubanks to show that narratives of fraud are used to justify the use of surveillance technologies on poor people even when the evidence isn’t there. In ‘Tokenizing Creators’ I argued that associating social tokens with the narrative frames of “ownership” and “empowerment” will only mask a much more likely impact: that tokens will turn creators into stocks.

In the creator stock market, $UNTGL is a real up-and-comer, $GAGA is down off the Oscar snub, $BRON and the Lakers are likely to miss the playoffs, while $BRENE (Brene Brown) is ... dominating, like usual.

We use narratives to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. The frames we select — ”fraud,” “empowerment,” etc. — make certain elements of a narrative salient, and hide or downplay others. Frames aren’t neutral — indeed, they’re often intentionally created and marketed. This is why they’re extremely powerful. Ya know how we say “climate change” rather than “global warming?” That was a strategic choice. In tacitly adopting a frame, we’re aligning ourselves with a set of interests, values, and politics, often without knowing it.

Still not satiated? Well, if you have the patience for traversing the wonkiest explanation of the power of frames, embedded in a dense text, check out Robert Entman’s paper, ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.’ Or just head over to the Untangled Archives and see what narrative frames pop out. For me, it’s ‘connection’ and ‘decentralization’. What stands out for you?

Daily Action: As you read about new technologies, identify the narrative frame used to characterize the technology, and then interrogate it — how does the frame obfuscate power? What values are implicit in the frame? Whose interests might it launder?

🍨 Theme three: the legitimization of narrators who are experts in technology, and not the social systems that the technology is entangled with — and how this reaffirms or exacerbates the status quo.

In ‘Let’s imagine an alternative metaverse,’ I showed that all of the frames meant to describe the metaverse either accepted or entrenched the status quo. If we ever want to challenge the status quo, we need to assess the system from the perspective of those excluded from it or harmed by it as a result of their social locations. Here, I drew upon the work of Sandra Harding, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Andre Brock, and groups like the DISCO Network.

What the different framings of the metaverse really mean…

Then in ‘Venture capitalists are the new narrators of crypto’, I argued that VCs are unreliable narrators because they subscribe to a techno-determinist mindset — or one that sees technological change as determinative of social change. We need different narrators. I highlighted the philosophy of Afrofuturism which suggests that what needs reimagining are the social systems that shape and are shaped by technology.

Going further: Who we select to help us understand the future is ultimately about power in the present — it’s about whose experience, expertise, and epistemology gets to decide what problems matter and how we understand them. If you want to take the next step in reimagining sociotechnical systems, check out this talk, The New Jim Code: Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society by Ruha Benjamin.

Daily Action: The next time you read an article about technology, ask whose perspective and expertise is being privileged, and whose is being sidelined? Who is quoted and who is not? Who has credentials next to their name and what are they? It’s possible a lot of stuff you read would benefit from someone else’s perspective — e.g. not someone whose expertise lies only in technology; or perhaps not a white guy like me.