ASK QUESTIONS
for groups
This tactic is in capital letters because it is probably the most important thing to do in conversations about computer use. When you zoom out and look at the current arc of conversations about computer use, it can be summarized as making it seem that the way we use computers in the future is inevitable. This power, this sense of future inevitability, quickly becomes an idea about what the future itself looks like.
In order to refuse this sense of inevitability about computer use, which is a feeling, not a reality, it is necessary to use tactics that refuse the story. And there are few better tools at our disposal, conversationally and culturally, than the question. The power of the question. Expanding this into older cultural terms and ideas, questions are also a mechanism to push back against dominant ideas of what progress looks like. Critically, questions are also vital to refusing the idea of solutionism and in some cases, scientism - the idea that life and our world and all that we do are problems looking for solutions, or that the only way to know things is through the hard sciences. Sometimes the most powerful thing to do when stopping the acceleration of a troubling trend is doing nothing, buying time to act with intention. Questions are specific tools that do not require immediate action. They are a full action in themselves, and an action that borrows time and puts it back on our side to create space.
The curious part about engaging with power and capital is that time may be a more available and accessible tactical lever than money. The two are of course deeply related, but there is more flexibility in each of our lives to reassign our time, which manifests in our attention and energy, than there may be to do the same with capital.
When exploring the potential of computer use, it is enough to have a list full of questions that don't have answers. We don't have to have answers to all of the questions and consequences that flow from the use of computers, but those proposing, funding, and supporting their use certainly do. This is part of power shifting, reassigning responsibility for ideas to those that are accelerating their uptake.
Questions help us push back from the reactive stance of feeling pressure to be educated, literate, and enthusiastic about adoption and training of computer use to a powerful stance of needing good answers as to why we should be spending time changing our lives and norms to suit someone else's business plans or operational preferences. Needing good answers, whether we seek them or write them, is a basic step to making an informed decision, which is also a necessary part of acting in a consensual manner.
Questions also open the space to think about alternatives.
People that have thought a lot about computers and society have long detailed the tactic of questions. One of Ursula Franklin's key questions was how do we undo this decision if we need to? One of Ruha Benjamin's questions is how much more data do we need to solve this problem? (which oftentimes is zero). Ivan Illich asked whether the use of new technology supports good interpersonal relationships, an idea he described as conviviality.
Questions have been successful parts of campaigns to force political accountability for policy from elected representatives, more thoughtful operational procedures for the implementation of technical standards, and most importantly, the development of a sense of togetherness and solidarity between people that have similar concerns or doubts, but were scared to share them with each other.
When you orient conversations about computer use around questions, you shift culture and open space for many other conversations. Questions are sufficient tools unto themselves, and they can stop you from inadvertently spending your time doing other people's work. Society has become a sort of research and development ground for computer products where the work of the questions become our problems. It is rational and scientific to reorganize this program, and it is necessary to refuse to take part on terms we did not set.
If the questions have good answers, or the benefits are clear and impactful, then they help support thoughtful computer use. Asking questions is prelude to not only refusal, but also support and uptake, and the acceleration of beneficial uses, where they exist. The need to slow things down with questions is to reorient agency and intention, not to be against well-understood and beneficial use. Asking questions is a way to build support for futures that are intentional.
When you host meetings or conversations, include starter questions on your agendas, and encourage questions as outcomes. Practice saying I don't know as a group, and make it fun to think about how you might know more. In this way, questions help you implement the strategies that are about expanding the people involved in conversations, and helping bring older stories and outcomes to light, and also to remind us that few situations are as new or novel as they might seem.