What Are Technologies of Care?
Designing software for belonging not fear
We are not going to diversify, implicit bias train, or tech-fix our way out of the racist status quo. Rather, viral justice requires each of us to demand that the money normally invested in policing be reinvested in what we actually need to sustain us: mental health services, better education, better healthcare, homes.
— Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), pg. 87
We want a different internet and we desperately want to believe it is possible. We want a different internet and we will make it so. So be it1. But in order to see to it, it can’t just be about the code. We must radically and collectively re-imagine the software development process. We must transition away from centering the final product and toward centering the practice. Through prioritizing care inside the practice of engineering software or tending to software or seeding software or gardening software, we get to engage in what Fred Moten calls study2, what Katherine McKittrick calls black method3, what Ruha Benjamin calls plotting4, what Christina Sharpe calls wake work5. What can software developers dreamers learn from black studies? What can black studies learn from the aesthetics of software?
I dream of software modeled after the cooperatives remembered in Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard. If the form is inspired by interdependence, is the function a technology of care? Inspired by the technologies of care outlined in Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, I imagine the next generation of software functioning as mutual aid apps that help us deliver groceries to disabled kin, collaborate with us to ride share with our elderly to take them to doctor’s appointments, time sharing apps that help us distribute the labor of childcare, and booking software collectively owned by a cooperative of braiders. I don’t know about you but, I'm more interested in the software that connects the driver to the elderly and pays them a living wage while providing ownership in the platform itself. I’m less interested in the software that makes the car driverless. I’m more interested in the software that deepens belonging instead of isolation. I’m most interested in technologies of care, understanding they may or may not have anything to do with software and the organizing framework inside which it is developed.
If I sound idealistic, it’s because I absolutely am. And if you’re squinting your eyes in suspicion while reading this, please know I’m doing the same thing while writing it. Am I speculating that it is possible to address the failings of racial capitalism and neoliberalist policies with yet more software? Absolutely not, we will not innovate our way out of white supremacy. I am idealistic, but not too much. As a software engineer I often find myself dreaming in code (both literally and figuratively). I believe this is the fine line idealism that has plagued other eager, idealistic engineers of the past — at the keyboard, drinking the false belief that we can change the world for the better with code alone. I don’t blame them, I blame us as teachers. It is our job to present nuance inside of every skill and concept we teach. A curriculum devoid of politics is still a political curriculum.
It’s true. Software reshapes our relationships to each other, our ideas, local ecosystems and the world. This is it’s power and probably why I’m so obsessed with it. But when the values, commitments and measurements of success are squarely rooted in profit, attention mining, increased surveillance capacities, sowing isolation, time on app and other software metrics of success rooted in the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy6 we continue to end up with the same results: A culture of anti-blackness, women, femmes and gender expansive folks feeling unsafe on the platform and disabled folks feeling abandoned.
What new values and commitments do we want to seed the next generation of software inside of? How do we want to collectively tend to this soil? No, software will not solve racism, sexism, ableism and classism — only plain ol’ revolution7 will do that — but given the fact that software has made all these -isms exponentially worse, I do wonder how building technologies of care might be a salve in the meantime. A fractal expanding toward belonging, not fear.
Reflection Question(s)
How would you define technologies of care? What are your favorite example(s) of technologies of care? (code and/or non-code based) Please let me know in the comments between today and tomorrow and I’ll read and respond to your comment in the upcoming podcast episode on Wednesday. <3
If you are curious about learning how to build technologies of care for the web using HTML, CSS and JavaScript book a free, no obligation discovery call with me where we will talk about how coding might fit into your creative/care practice.
Until next time,
I want to invite you to:
Check out and share last week’s podcast episode on Interdisciplinary Permission where I respond to the comments/reflections left by paris who writes audio-visual.journal and Dinah Stinson.
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With care,
Ayana
“So be it! See to it!” — Octavia E. Butler, notes on writing, "I shall be a bestselling writer..." 1988. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. © Estate of Octavia E. Butler.
“Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.” — Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, pg. 110
“This is a way of living, and an analytical frame, that is curious and sustained by wonder (the desire to know). This is a method that demands openness and is unsatisfied with questions that result in descriptive-data-induced answers. Black studies and anticolonial thought offer methodological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study. Curiosity is attentive. Black method is therefore not continuously and absolutely undisciplined (invariably without precision, invariably undone). Black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever. The practice of bringing together multiple texts, stories, songs, and places involves the difficult work of thinking and learning across many sites, and thus coming to know, generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas.” — Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (2020), pg. 5
“Plotting, like learning, is about “invention and re-invention…the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other,” says Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Your plot, too, doesn’t have to mean committing to only one thing. Whether digging deep or sowing seeds far and wide, plotting is about questioning the scripts you’ve been handed and scheming with others to do and be otherwise for the collective good of all.” — Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), pg. 23-24
“If, as I have so far suggested, we think the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of its meanings (the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness) and we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. In short, I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery.” — Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, pg. 17-18
“Whether or not design-speak sets out to colonize human activity, it is enacting a monopoly over creative thought and praxis. Maybe what we must demand is not liberatory designs but just plain old liberation. Too retro, perhaps? And that is part of the issue — by adding “design” to our vision of social change we rebrand it, upgrading social change from “mere” liberation to something out of the box, “disrupting” the status quo. But why? As Vinsel queries, “would Design Thinking have helped Rosa Parks ‘design’ the Montgomery Bus Boycott?” It is not simply that design thinking wrongly claims newness, but in doing so it erases the insights and agency of those who are discounted because they are not designers, capitalizing on the demand for novelty across numerous fields of action and coaxing everyone who dons the cloak of design into being seen and heard through the dominant aesthetic of innovation.” — Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019)
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