There is no IT department for society

Are our implicit assumptions about the "big tech experts in the sky" holding us back from reclaiming control over technology and data systems?

Over the past year, I’ve had dozens if not hundreds of conversations about data justice with friends, family, and organizers, some of whom have no interest in technology, many of whom have an actively negative attitude about it.

In fact there’s been so much resistance, I’ve been working on a mental map — asking myself, what are the assumptions we’re carrying that are blocking us from active participation in conversations about how technology is being used? What keeps us from exploring and speculating about the possibilities when the status quo is so obviously harming us directly?

As I’ve written about before, the just data future I am trying to help people imagine is a localized, contextualized one where data serves our relationships to each other and all living beings. The just data future is rich with autonomy and agency for people to control access to their personal and community data for any variety of uses that serve themselves and their neighbors.

But in that future, people who currently feel like outsiders in conversations about data politics have to become insiders. Our neighbors, who we might think of as completely apathetic about technology in society, have to start seeing themselves in it. Which means that we, who are trying to imagine better futures for technology and data, have to change the way we’re introducing those conversations.

When I was an open government practitioner and civic tech advocate, I heard people who were leading public consultations around government data say many times: “The best conversations we have about data happen when data isn’t even being mentioned.” It’s a truism I always loved, because it felt like often-buttoned-up public servants were letting their guard down to hear people talk about what really mattered to them.

Yet, when I talk to grassroots organizers, I also hear them devalue their own insights about what data and technology are doing in our society. They assume that they’re too uninformed, untechnical, or unrigorous to have actionable opinions about how our data should be managed and used. I think this pattern reveals a true limiting belief — a basic, widespread assumption that is holding back community participation in data and technology governance.

People have been taught to assume that technologists are the only ones with the power or expertise to shift our relationship to data and technology.

I call this phenomenon the “IT Department Model of Society” because it reminds me of a mindset I’ve seen in government and corporate settings, where the first response to any technical challenge is to “call IT.” Because so many of us have learned about technology in corporate or institutional contexts, we’ve taken this idea and applied it to our lives.

We’ve accepted the notion that there’s an elite team of experts, probably in Silicon Valley or otherwise somewhere far, far away, who are the ultimate deciders about what privacy protections we deserve and how our data should be used.

As a result, many of us innately defer to the leadership of people who we identify as more “technical,” even though we are the ones building community infrastructure for future generations, or otherwise thinking deeply about how to sustain our communities through empire collapse.

For example, many organizers know that social media platforms both work for us and against us. We know that they help us connect to our communities in a late-stage capitalist, datafied world, but that they also surveil us and limit our abilities to control which stories reach the mainstream. Despite this, it feels like we have to work with the apps that we’re given, handed down from the powers that be.

Meanwhile, alternative platforms do exist and tech workers are actively agitating for protective shifts in how mainstream platforms are governed. Yet I’ve observed that grassroots movements often don’t reach for solidarity with tech labor or Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movements, for reasons I don’t totally understand. I think it’s the IT Department Model of Society in action.

We’ve internalized the idea that the fight for free and open technology exists in some IT department far away from us and our communities, and are left with the prevailing attitude that the IT nerds will fight it out. But when we fail to deconstruct that mental formation, we exile ourselves from conversations about the tech that comes next.

The tech industry benefits from our mental separation around issues of data and technology governance by fighting us in silos.

Intersectional social justice movements for a healthy environment, food access for all, immigrant rights, land back, dignity and belonging of people with disabilities, queer liberation, and more, work in lock step through acknowledging the unified power of oppressive systems to affect all of these areas. The tech industry is an increasingly core part of that system, underpinning and hardcoding systems that work against every part of our social justice movements.

But when we don’t integrate data (or technology) justice into our liberation frameworks, it’s as if we’re saying that the fight for free and open technology belongs to “technically educated” people and not to all of us.

I first learned to recognize this phenomenon in institutional settings. When I worked on government innovation programs, it was a widely known fact that the single biggest barrier to coordination of effective digital government operations is a centralized model of information management that overly relies on a single IT or “innovation team” to make all decisions on behalf of a changing, moving organizational body.

The best government data programs put those responsible for data systems close to frontline public servants — the people who interact with residents every day and understand on an intuitive level how communities are doing and what they need. That’s because a data system is a connecting force that drives collaboration when it’s being used responsibly to better understand a changing world, and it requires peoples’ trust and participation to be useful.

Gaining the trust and participation of people who are busy attending to people’s foremost needs is a hard thing to do. Many technologists don’t take the time to explain or articulate what decisions are being made in the inner workings of the data system, and how they might matter to people on the frontlines.

At the same time, organizers and any people who do community work spend a tremendous amount of time and energy understanding their neighbors’ needs and learning how to meet them. For them to feel “outside” of conversations about the infrastructure that powers our society is nothing less than a consequence of a tech culture built on gatekeeping and elitism.

The tech industry has sold us the lie of technology as a quick fix or convenience so that they could gatekeep governance and control.

For the average technology user or person on the street, interactions with technology are centered around convenience. The tech industry’s rise to power under capitalism was based on the promise that you as a consumer would never have to look into the gears to understand how your new speaking tablet or magic wand was working.

Simplicity and seamlessness were guiding principles for Steve Jobs’ design of the iPhone. He said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,” an ethos that Jobs acolytes interpret to mean that “Design should make technology invisible.” Twenty years later, we’re still reeling from the instruction to unbox the product, use it daily, and never really think about it again.

I see the fruits of the tech industry’s design-control in all kinds of micro-interactions. Last year, some organizers asked me to give a workshop about Palantir when the news broke about their contract with ICE. I gave them a rundown of the talk I wanted to give — about the history of “big data”, the lag in global data privacy regulations, and the culture of mass data extraction that allowed Palantir to come to power.

They said, that sounds interesting, but can you just give people a list of ten things they can do tonight to not be tracked by Palantir? I was sort of shocked.

I couldn’t think of what to say at the moment so I said I’d think about it, and about a month later I realized: When has anyone ever learned about a systemic issue affecting our society and been able to take ten easy steps to fix it before bedtime? Or on a more poignant note, why are people not understanding that data abuse is a systemic issue?

I realized, our approach to fighting back against the tech industry has been entirely shaped by our relationship to technology in general. Even those of us who are critical of hegemonic systems are still viewing it as a problem belonging in some other societal “department”, where the 2.0 will be rolled out to us after it’s fully baked.

We’re so behind in our understanding of technology’s history and sociopolitical context that in the back of many of our minds, as rigorous and passionate about justice as we may be, we are still looking for the bug fix, version upgrade, or privacy feature that we can switch off in the app settings to make the current situation better.

It’s not like people haven’t tried. Open source technology movements exist to democratize technology for more open participation and other societal benefits. But the work of building technology actually does have a high skill-barrier to entry — the reason for sectioning it off in the first place. The problem is conflating the expertise needed to build the tools we need with the wider, more common expertise needed to determine positive social uses for them.

Data justice is an accessible entry point for people to get involved.

Accessibility is key. It has become a uniting principle throughout my work to expand the definitions and practices around data justice. In fact, I believe we can lean on the core principles of disability justice to ensure that we are building technologies that really make space for everyone, for example prioritizing leadership of the most impacted, recognizing wholeness, interdependence, and collective access, among others.

Data justice and disability justice are mutually reinforcing, because both require an attention to working from the margins in — to centering the creativity and guidance of people who exist outside of able-bodied/minded normativity in order to find solutions that exceed our status quo.

Data justice itself is also connected directly to our ability to use data to care for ourselves and each other, which is an essential part of interdependence. We need the power to use our data to solve the problems we actually see and feel in our communities, meaning that we need to fight our way into the decision-making conversations around how data systems and technologies are built.

One thing I repeat all the time: You don’t have to be a “data person” to understand the politics and power around data, or imagine how it could help address your problems. We are expert enough in our own lives. But without tearing apart the hierarchies of knowledge that keep us outside of conversations about data and technology governance, we miss the opportunity to build with our collective expertise.

Expecting the participation of people who are directly impacted to shape the actual direction of technology development or data use is part of breaking down the mentality that the “IT department” knows best.

We have to be vigilant against gatekeeping and realize that the IT Department Model of Society handed down to us by the tech industry is not working. Tech pertains to everyone. Data belongs to everyone. If we reinforce barriers between the makers of the tech and its users by saying only some people should be involved in its shaping, we are allowing the tech industry to gain power from our reluctance to learn and grow together.

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LINKED THINKING

• Unlocking Cisnormativity: Trans Justice is Tech Justice - Mozilla Foundation panel conversation with Veronyka Gimenes, Dia K., Elijah McKinnon, Alex Hanna, and Sasha Costanza-Chock

• Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need - Sasha Costanza-Chock talk at the Conference 2023

• Who’s in Charge? Information Technology and Disability Justice in the United States - Amelia Gibson and Rua Williams field review report published by the Social Science Research Council