ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Digital Cassandras: A Prehistory of the Techlash

• In Event: CTRL ALT SHIFT. Expériences, Knowledge, Activism, Methods - 3

English Abstract

This paper looks at the history of practitioners within tech who functioned as "Cassandras" for our current moment. In other words, people and organizations who saw coming many of the pressing problems with powerful high technology infrastructures that we are grappling with today. This research explores how a small but significant set of people and organizations used their privilege within the tech industry to try to identify, publicize, and mitigate these growing problems before they became as overwhelming as they are currently. From the tech activist group Computer People for Peace, to the Black IBM Workers' alliance, to Wired magazine writer Paulina Borsook, many groups and people called out the consolidation of power in the hands of big tech, and drew explicit links to the impacts that this was going to have on democratic governance, civil rights, and society as a whole. This paper investigates their insights and the solutions they offered, drawing attention to new “old” solutions as well as showing that patterns of pushback have remained remarkably constant over the past half century.

Author

• Mar Hicks, University of Virginia