Tech for... what, exactly?
How ‘tech for good’ launders the expertise, interests, and beliefs of technologists.
Hi there, and welcome back to Untangled. Last month I wrote about why decentralized finance or ‘DeFi’ is a normal accident waiting to happen and then interviewed law professor Hilary Allen about the systemic risks of DeFi to the real economy. It’s not, not terrifying.
This month I decided to write about a phrase that has always driven me a bit bonkers: “tech for good.” If you like it — or the hilarious images of unamused 15-year-old me, included, ironically, for my own amusement — please share it.
A few of you emailed to say that you’d like an audio version of each essay. So I put one together - let me know what you think.
Now on to the show.
What if I told you that the key to unlocking universal basic income was your biometric information? Sam Altman, the founder of WorldCoin, has proposed that this is the only way.
The apparent mission of WorldCoin is to distribute cryptocurrency to everyone in the world. To achieve this, the company intends to use an orb loaded with cameras and sensors which scan our eyes, faces, and bodies — and then turn that information into a unique identifier, or an ‘Irishash’. They’ve already done this with 450,000 people across 24 countries.
You might be wondering what biometrics have to do with UBI. Well, WorldCoin will argue that proving ‘human uniqueness’ while preserving privacy is an unresolved technical problem and that it’s critical to ensuring that every person has “not claimed their free share of WorldCoin already.” So the data capture part might be less about UBI, and more about fraud prevention. As WorldCoin CEO Alex Blania put it, “our goal is to use the data for the sole purpose of developing our algorithms to minimize fraud and enhance user privacy.”
WorldCoin’s focus on fraud and fairness might sound reasonable, as if unlocking UBI is impossible without first confronting fraud — but it’s not. Rather, it’s a turbocharged example of a ‘tech for good’ mindset and approach that frames the problem in such a way that launders the interests, expertise, and beliefs of technologists.
‘Tech for good’ has a long history, which Sean Johnston, author of Techno Fixers: Origins and Implications of Technological Faith, shorthands this way:
“The wonder of the technological fix is that it became orthodox and so widely shared during the past century. It translated passive popular confidences into active manipulations by zealous engineers. A key nuance, seldom explicit, was the intentionality of wise designers aiming to create technologies to achieve social ends. In distinct flavours, trust in technological fixes was echoed by utopian writers, popular media, and consumer culture. Our attraction to technological solutions for the problems of daily life is a key feature of contemporary lifestyles and dreams of the future.”
Scholars and advocates are starting to interrogate the rhetoric of progress in ‘crypto for good’ projects. ‘For good’ is problematic because it’s self-justifying. How can I question or critique the technology if it’s ‘for good’? But more importantly, nine times out of ten ‘for good’ leads to the definition of a problem that requires a technology solution. It becomes a trojan horse for scaling the technology, and the interests and beliefs of its creators. But whose expertise and worldview get to shape how we understand what is ‘good’, and in turn, what problem we need to solve to get there?
If we analyze WorldCoin through this lens, and if, for the sake of argument, we assume that UBI is worth pursuing, the key questions become:
Is fraud, and therefore the necessity to prove ‘human uniqueness’, a binding constraint to achieving UBI?
If not, why the Orb?
The answer to the first question is, in a word, no. Fraud has never actually been a big problem in social-safety net or cash transfer programs. The frame has always surpassed the facts. Take SNAP, the U.S. government’s food stamp program. When polled, 60 percent of people assumed that it was “very or somewhat common for people to lie and/or misrepresent their eligibility to receive SNAP.” In reality, fraud accounted for 0.9% of benefit dollars. In Medicaid, it is health care providers, and not those in need of the program, who commit the majority of fraud. When it comes to soliciting unemployment insurance, outright fraud hovers at roughly 3 percent. The evidence varies by country and context but in essence, fraud isn’t as big of a problem as we imagine it to be. Take India — the Aadhaar ID program was premised on rooting out identity fraud but researchers have argued that “there has never been much evidence of large-scale identity fraud in India’s welfare programs.”
Nevertheless, the frame persists. Why? Well, ‘root out fraud,’ ‘eliminate waste,’ and ‘ensure fairness’ has historically been used to justify other ends, like surveilling poor people. In Automating Inequality: How High Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, Virginia Eubanks tells the story this way:
“program administrators and data scientists push high-tech tools that promise to help more people, more humanely, while promoting efficiency, identifying fraud, and containing costs. The digital poorhouse is framed as a way to rationalize and streamline benefits, but the real goal is what it has always been: to profile, police, and punish the poor.”
In the U.S. context, Eubanks shows how the construction of the “digital poor house” has always been predicated on “race-and-class based stereotypes” where program participants are “sneaky and prone to fraudulent claims” and that “their burdensome use of public resources must be repeatedly discouraged.”
If ‘fraud’ isn’t critical to unlocking UBI yet it persists as a frame, what work is it doing in the context of WorldCoin? Whether intentional or not, ‘fraud’ is justifying the scale of the Orb hardware device and, in turn, laundering the interests and beliefs of those behind the project. The Irishhash produced by this Orb doesn’t unlock UBI, but it may actually solve two key problems vexing crypto: users and authentication. As part of their reporting for this excellent piece on WorldCoin’s rollout, Eileen Guo and Adi Renaldi interviewed Blania, who said that WorldCoin would be the “fastest” and “biggest onboarding into crypto and Web3” to date. If the broader ecosystem of crypto is to grow and mature it needs users, and in many parts of the world, that means proactive enrollment.
Moreover, crypto hasn’t solved the problem of so-called “Sybil attacks,” which is when one entity creates and controls multiple pseudonymous accounts to essentially take control of the network. WorldCoin is an attempt to prove human uniqueness in a pseudonymous world and become a kind of “universal authentication method for a whole new generation of the Internet.” So, to the extent the Orb functions as it’s supposed to — which Guo and Renaldi show, isn’t always the case — it’s solving a technical problem within crypto that has nothing to do with UBI.
Over the last ten years, we’ve seen cascades of technological systems causing harm. And yet, we cannot shake the worldview that frames societal problems as something that can be solved with technology. Eubanks offers us a different lens. She suggests that before we jump to a technological conclusion, we first answer these questions.
Does the tool increase the self-determination and agency of the poor?
Would the tool be tolerated if it was targeted at non-poor people?
Eubanks’ questions are great. I might add a few more:
What problem does the tool purport to solve and who defined that problem?
How does the way they frame the problem shape our understanding of it?
What might the one framing the problem gain from solving it?
When pushed to answer why an Orb was critical to giving cryptocurrency to everyone, Blania replied, “We didn’t want to build hardware devices — we didn’t want to build a biometric device, even. It’s just the only solution we found.” By their own admission, this is not the technology they intended to produce. They are not excited by orb-shaped hardware or collecting biometrics; they simply found a solution to a problem that was defined by them, and only them.
Thank you to Georgia Iacovou, my editor.