author's note and welcome
I didn’t mean to know about computers. I didn’t study them in school, though I enjoyed using the clackety-clack keys in grade nine keyboarding class. “Keyboarding” - what typing was called in the 1990s - is the closest thing to any computer course I’ve ever taken.
Despite my lack of formal training in computing, I’ve worked with computers for over twenty years. I’ve provided tech support, helped create software programs, managed advertising for a computing website, worked at a start-up, wrote a tech column, had a failed start-up, worked at a global tech company, taught people how to use software, worked on hobby tech projects, researched the governance of technology, and shaped computer-related policies and laws through advocacy.
A major theme I saw throughout these years, and see to this day, is how mysterious and inaccessible computers are made out to be. I don't like this. I don't like it because it strips people of confidence, power, and agency. This is why I work and speak and write, it's why I consult and advise and advocate - all with one goal in mind: to reduce that mystique so we can exert our power and authority when making decisions about if and how we use computers. When we do that, we can see that the way out of here is making our politics less about computers and more about each other.
There are social and political implications to allowing a very tiny set of people to continue making computers loom so large in our ideas about the future. Computers are currently over-sized in our imaginations. A lot of what we’re told about computers – and the role they could play in our futures, either isn’t true, or isn’t what many of us want. Both of those stories matter, and the second one matters the most. There isn't a right or wrong about computers, but there is a whole lot of what do we want to use them for, and how.
I have been asked time and again what we can learn from failed technology ideas and projects of the past. The only answer I can give with confidence is that we must ask more questions about what we’re doing with computers and technology. We don’t need to have the answers, but we absolutely must ask more questions.
We can feel our increasing use of computers having an impact on us - personally, professionally, and how we exist as a society. But it doesn’t feel clear how, or even if, we can change it. We absolutely can change these feelings and our actions. Part of this work is getting our heads around the current stakes of the situation and learning more about the technological realities that we’re all mired in, whether we like them or not. We also need to know that less computer is an option, particularly in response to climate change and geopolitics.
In many cases, the computer, or the tech industry, has become the stand-in object for the source of our fears and of our joys. Convenience is a powerful pleasure – it has come alive in new ways with computers. And capital will always seek efficiencies, a computer specialty. In these contexts, the computer has become both the nightmare villain and the savior of the future. It’s neither.
There is a lot of thinking and writing on the topic of computers that suggest there are ways to design and develop computers to be more human, more safe, more responsible, more ethical. The inconvenient reality, however, is that if a society is sick, its computer culture will be sick too. That’s where we are today. There’s no way to have a healthy computer culture running through a profoundly messed up society.
It’s been about thirty years since the internet went mainstream. I’ve had the luxury (?) of working with computers for most of those years, in addition to having a career as a facilitator where I helped run public meetings, mostly in cities. Through all of this, I’ve been able to see some of the patterns of how power and people and computers come together, and how we might intervene in these patterns.
This handbook is for people who agree that talking about how we use computers more is a good idea. I’ve had conversations about computer issues with my dental hygienist (hi Natalia), my friends and family (lots of them with my kids in particular), with bank tellers and teachers, parents and community organizers, politicians and anarchists. The thing that connects all these different conversations and contexts is a shared desire to refuse that the computer culture we live with today is inevitable.
But to live differently, we must be willing to push back on the idea that a good life is all about convenience. This may be the most difficult and revolutionary shift required in the years ahead. Convenience is not an easy culture to refuse, especially when we live in a world where we’re various mixes of financially poor, time poor, sick, disabled, and tired. Pushing back on computerized society as it works today means protecting more space to be inefficient together. This is also an important thread that ties into the idea of democracy. Democracy is inefficiency. Relationships are inefficient. Love is inefficient.
Convenience and efficiency as cultural priorities have played a big role in delivering us to where we stand now in terms of how we use computers. A malformed idea of what progress means. Bigger and older political systems than computer networks have been encouraging us to forget how to live well together for a long time already. But thinking more intentionally about computers doesn’t mean refusing them wholesale (less computer, not no computer), nor does it mean traveling back in time (if we’re genuinely applying technology for the common good, yes, good, go).
The point of this handbook – less computer – is to to confirm a lot of what we already know instinctively about computers and computer culture, and to make it clearer and easier for us to put it into action in our lives. In specific places – in writing, in conversation, at your workplace, at your child’s school, and beyond.
This handbook is about reconsidering what it means for computers to “work”. Work for who?