Making Participatory Tech Futures More Probable Together

How do we change the course of technology to meet the interests of the many rather than those of the few? This is the question the Crafting Participatory Tech Futures initiative seeks to answer. This post presents some of the insights from the upcoming report on the workshops, which you are invited to review in the coming weeks.

By Ismael Kherroubi Garcia, Mary Lang, Rasa Bocyte and Kathryn Carter

Earlier this year, we invited diverse collectives to imagine what the future(s) of technology could look like. Our Crafting Participatory Tech Futures (CPTF) workshop was held on four separate occasions, led by a rotating team of facilitators who held space for open dialogues to evolve organically between attendees. All involved became co-investigators of imagined futures where tech and society advance within planetary boundaries.

Across 300 sticky notes and countless conversations, the 70 participants who were involved described their thoughts on the systems that must change, and the social interventions we must lead, to make better tech futures more probable. From the growing community surrounding the CPTF initiative, 16 of us (so far!) have taken the helm to produce accessible and nuanced outputs inspired by workshop findings.

What does a better tech future look like?

The ideal role technology plays in the future really depends on who you ask, and any attempt to articulate one universally acceptable future should be treated with suspicion. In fact, with these workshops, we embrace that many futures are still possible and we invite their plurality to emerge. By fostering organic conversations, the workshops invited participants to engage in collective world building and stretch our imaginations towards the future—10, 50 and 150 years from now. Some workshop participants imagined how local communities might have the ability and resources to build technologies that respond to their own needs. Others suggested new approaches to running tech companies that prioritize social impacts over profits, speculating about a world with no lobbying and with new governance approaches, such as cooperatives, or fully participatory sovereign AI wealth funds. Others still wondered whether the future of technology should reflect certain natural phenomena—such as the turning of the seasons, and the information channels formed by mycelium, the underground network connecting the forest.

This diversity of thought has made the analysis of participants’ reflections challenging but extraordinarily rewarding. While many distinct, sometimes contradicting or overlapping futures were collectively imagined, we do not aim to synthesize them. Rather we observed four areas in which we must intervene to make any preferred future more likely. Below, we provide a sneak preview of the four areas, or what we are currently calling mechanisms of change.

Innovation

Workshop participants envisaged innovations built around the needs of people and nature. They described this as fundamentally different to current innovation ecosystems that incentivize profit-seeking over social impact. In their preferred futures, innovations aren’t designed, developed and deployed by an elite few. Rather, technological innovations solve the problems as experienced by local communities. Bringing about better tech futures means changing what technologies matter and who decides. Their argument was that this more holistic understanding of innovation as a process involving diverse perspectives would lend itself to more participatory and thoughtful innovation life-cycles. The result would be slower approaches to innovation but not as envisaged by reactionary, fear-driven calls to “pause AI.” Indeed, workshop participants were envisaging forward-looking, sustainable approaches to innovation that is built on careful, well-documented, collective choices. In practice, among other things, the resulting technologies would favour small-scale solutions to targeted problems, echoing the decades’-old appropriate technology movement.

Education

The technologies we rely on today have emerged out of institutionalized knowledge and learning systems that prioritize measurable, quantifiable, describable forms of knowledge. Bringing about better tech futures means valuing diverse ways of knowing. Workshop participants envisaged learning as a process that takes place both within and beyond the institutional boundaries of schools, colleges and universities. Education would be embodied and enabled by everyday interactions. In practice, workshop participants described a shift away from what Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire calls the banking model of education, whereby teachers unilaterally deposit information in students just for it to be regurgitated in exams. In its place. workshop participants speculated about the potential for educational systems and their technologies to frame embodied knowledge and lived experience as learning opportunities. This is in line with Freire’s critical pedagogy, whereby teachers understand that their students’ knowledge is valuable, and that the process of exchanging information is political.

Narratives

The way we think and talk about technology must be freed from the dominant vision of uncritical technological advances and adoption at all costs. Workshop participants suggested that narratives (plural! We need many!) about technology should be localized, nuanced and accurate rather than fear- and profit-driven. Bringing about better tech futures means promoting sociotechnical understandings of technological life cycles and innovations. In practice, this means de-centering technologies. As one workshop participant described an ideal future, it is “a world where it is still possible to pause and sit with the slow, steady march of human and non-human life and thought.” The narrative of slowness emerged in opposition to the cries for speed and scalability emanating from Silicon Valley today. In the preferred futures where thought and dialogue can take place more slowly, harmony—not homogeneity—may be formed between a plurality of experiences and perspectives.

Governance

Wealth and power beget wealth and power. Their concentrations are the result of hegemonic governance systems and practices. To break the cycle, workshop participants described governance interventions that would distribute decision-making processes both in innovation life-cycles and policy-making. At a government level, one specific call was for “universal basic services,” meaning free access to certain services, such as health, education, food and housing. More speculatively, we are working on how such services might be funded by a sovereign wealth fund that is funded by the surplus value of Big Tech companies, and governed by diverse publics. Such governance practices One upshot of more community-led governance practices is a legal ecosystem that protects consumers and gives them clear channels for recourse. Another is the involvement of diverse communities in the standardization of certain tech governance practices, such as impact assessments.

What Comes Next?

The final analysis of workshop findings will result in both a report and zine, and you're invited to contribute to the report. Help us craft participatory tech futures by participating in the evolution of our creations. If you care about the trajectory of tech, we want to hear from you!

By completing this form, you can review our report from the 2nd to the 20th of November. During this time, you’ll be free to edit the report document with suggestions for the final version. Where contributions are incorporated, you’ll be acknowledged as a co-author.

To receive updates and future invitations to shape the CPTF initiative, subscribe at RAI Futures.