The STEM-ification of Society: A Response to "Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem"
A recent article from The Atlantic caught my attention — something increasingly difficult with my fried dopamine receptors.
The author, Ian Bogost, is a video game designer and academic at Washington University in St. Louis. His experience in university administration, particularly in relation to computer science departments, is equally insightful and troubling. Bogost notes that enrollment in computer science courses at some of America’s most prestigious universities has ballooned. At Stanford and MIT, the number of students who graduate with computer science degrees every year has doubled in the previous decade.
This is something which I experienced at my undergraduate institution — Swarthmore College — as well. Competition for slots in introduction to computer science were doled out in a lottery every year.
Some schools, like Cornell University and MIT, have created colleges of computing which allows students to remain hyper-focused on the field of computer science without having to take courses outside of these colleges. Bogost asserts that universities should require students to take more classes outside of computation and mathematics — that this would make more well-rounded and thoughtful stewards of the field.
Bogost states that these days “culture moves through computation”. As a video game designer and professor of computer science and engineering, it is understandable that Bogost holds this view. But is this what we want?
As a student and proponent of humanities education, computer science and the fields it enables - modern day econometrics, finance, and more — are at the heart of societies most pressing problems: data colonialism, alienation, and financialization.
In their ground-breaking article Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject, sociologists Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry unpack the way in which data reconfigures the human experience and human relations. Mejias and Couldry posit that data, like oil or water, is a resource which can be extracted. How data differs from other natural resources is that it is at the center of our lives as humans navigating the modern world. The authors write:
Data colonialism combines the predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing
Historically and in the present day, colonial powers reconfigure societies which they rule to meet specific goals. The graphic below (source) from the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows how colonial railroads built under British occupation had a profound and lasting effect on Kenya’s economic geography.
Colonial railroads were built with the sole goal of extraction: bringing natural resources from the resource-rich interior of the country to a port for extraction, in this case the city of Mombasa. Through economic domination, society was completely reconfigured for resource extraction. The methods of data appropriation in society today are not as overt; however, they too have resulted in the reconfiguration of our society and economy.
To extract our data, society must first be transformed in a way to make data itself a natural resource. Couldry and Mejias state that the availability of data has to be constructed “through an elaborate means of marketization”. The natural resource which results from our use of modern day technology is transformed through the social quantification sector, the companies which transform our data into usable tools. The reach of these entities knows no boundaries — every click on Facebook and Google, every second of video watched on YouTube, and every like on Instagram is appropriated from the user to feed the algorithm which drives the internal logic of these platforms. ChatGPT for example, is trained on data extracted from and generated by people like you and me.
These companies obfuscate the appropriation of the data we create through complicated terms of service agreements — which theoretically would take on average take 76 work days to read every year. If you do not accept the terms of these agreements, the functionality of applications you use everyday is severely limited.
In this way, social interactions through these platforms has become an ipso facto factor of production under data capitalism. The new logic of a post-Marxian techno-capitalism is an economic process which transforms life processes — in this case interaction through technology and social networks — into commodities. Data colonialism opens a new frontier for Marxian labor alienation: the way in which labor, in this case our contribution to these platforms, distances us from our humanity. The outcome of these extractive processes is a platform which flips the relation between technology and user on its head - through product placements and gamification, technology begins to use you.
Data has become king. Financial institutions, technology companies, and governments utilize increasingly complex algorithms which in turn require increasingly immense sources of data to make decisions which have vast repercussions for our daily lives. Financial markets rise and fall and policy is written based off complex processes of data extraction. When our lives are expropriated, flattened, and slotted into databases, can we trust that our humanity is well-represented when making these decisions?
For this reason, I must reject Bogost’s assertion that computer scientists require a more well-rounded education to be stewards for the field. The problem is not computer science itself, rather the internal logic of datafication it advocates. A computer scientist working at Palantir with a high proficiency in a foreign language and an ethics course on their transcript will not stop using facial recognition technology to perpetuate racist policing practices.
Some of the richest and most powerful people today got their starts in technology. Beginning in the 1970s, computational science was inextricably tied to the military industrial complex. Tech billionaires may be individually eccentric, but their interests were always connected to American militarism. They have wielded their vast influence to fundamentally reshape society to benefit their project of data colonialism and financialization.
Bogost, to his credit, raises an alarm — technology moves quickly, but it can also be reckless: “Someone [may] ask you to solve a problem, and you solve it without asking if it’s a problem worth solving.” In China, the highest decision-making bodies have been on a mission to solve problems with technology without interrogating the possible outcomes.
The PRC is an interesting case study in what happens when you let engineers and computer scientists run a society. The highest organs of power in the PRC are dominated by engineers. The STEM-ification of society in China has had some horrific consequences.
Data collection - through super apps such as WeChat (微信) and the worlds most formidable surveillance network complete with facial recognition technology, enable problematic predictive policing practices and the holding up to one million Uyghur muslims in political education camps. The flattening of the human experience into discrete data points can be seen in the architecture of the often misunderstood social credit system.
When I lived in Beijing, billboards at crosswalks like the one shown below (source) would name and shame citizens who were photographed jaywalking, displaying the last digits of their resident identify card number (居民身份证) and even their address.
China, to its credit, does benefit from an increasingly safe society. Officials estimate that the country experiences a homicide rate 1/10th of the global average.
Some readers may believe that these tradeoffs are worth it. In China, I was able to leave my computer at my table in a cafe without fear of it being taken because I knew every square inch of that cafe was in the view of cameras.
These tradeoffs, however, require nuanced discussions and center around our agency as citizens existing in our respective societies. What cannot happen is our forced enrollment in a modern day colonial apparatus which considers our daily existence - payment for groceries, riding the metro, digital connections with friends and loved ones — as a resource to be exploited.
Further reading:
The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism - Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff
Speculative Policing - Rivke Jaffe
