Tuesday’s midterm results seem to suggest that most Americans have gotten tired of big tech companies pinning us up against the bathroom wall and taking turns punching us in the stomach. That’s one read at least - in this metaphor, the teachers are also punching us, and the groundskeeper is killing all the plants on purpose, and the school is on fire. It’s a low bar, but still, I think a lot of us would enjoy taking a shit undisturbed for once.
Predicting what is going to happen next is not what I’m here for, not the kind of skills I’m trying to cultivate. I have always identified with the Ghost of Christmas Present - I am here to show the beauty and possibilities of right now. Upheaval and uncertainty is my home turf. Plus I don’t have to be at Andy Yen’s house until Christmas Eve, so I’ve got some time to speculate.
First off - Design is political. It is now and always has been, and any attempt to avoid or downplay the persuasive qualities of our work is incompetence at best, deceit at worst. Right now, we find ourselves standing on a fault line that is going to continue to put creative tech workers on two different sides of a widening gap, though which side we’ll end up on isn’t completely clear right now.
At the very center of the rupture, we have a burning magma core of oligarchy - a handful of elites making mass-scale decisions because of the consolidation of wealth and power. The flavor of this particular oligarchy is technology. Like the robber barons of the last Gilded Age, they control an emergent resource that powers the productivity and the (first physical, now digital) transportation needs of citizens. It stands to reason that people don’t hate ‘technology’ today anymore than someone living in 1890 hated combustible engines. The anger is at the people profiting, and the decisions they’re making with that power.
Not all large tech companies are evil, but the term “Big Tech” has become the pseudonym for the ones that are:
- Amassing huge amounts of capital and power, by
- Monopolizing a particular segment of our digital lives, and
- Abusing our rights in order to accomplish 1 & 2 - most commonly through data collection and mass surveillance.
Point #3 is a nuanced, invisible power - no one feels their data being collected, though we can see the result through targeted ads. We see the cost of streaming going up even while ads get longer and our favorite content disappears. This is all ethereal, but data centers - that's a tangible thing to focus ire on, and, as we saw this week, vote against. It’s given multiple generations, tech-savvy or not, a noun to start this conversation with, a way to draw a side, to give actual shape and form to the opposition.
And right now - I say this as the Ghost of Technology Present - right now, creative tech workers are standing directly over the opening fissure. We talk about how much we hate AI, how our jobs feel meaningless now that all we do is babysit an agent. But we do it - we agree to work faster, create worse work, building tiny innocent components that are used to construct the systems that pollute our planet, minds, and culture.
Now, let's pause for a moment.
I imagine some of you are reading this, scoffing at how idealistic and privileged I sound, how condescending I'm being to folks stuck in the thick of it. Well, one of the reasons I'm so adamant about choosing the right side now, is because I didn't in the past. This involved, but was not limited to:
- Doing work for big pharma that was later publicly embroiled in scandal,
- Not standing up for a gay coworker when she was being unfairly targeted by senior staff, and
- Implementing dark patterns for an eComm site (A Christian Bookstore!) because I was told to.
The offenses varied, but the cause was always the same - I risked losing my job if I didn't comply. So I kept working. I am now a middle-aged white man, privileged enough to start a company built on top of the decades of accumulated capital (both financial and social). And still, I can name the people and the products hurt by my complicity.
A decade ago, these were casualties on the way to our glorious tech utopia - maybe that's why I let myself occasionally leave a soldier behind. You always find excuses in retrospect. In 2013, there wasn't much of a resistance to look towards, and we were all just trying to be helpful. Technology was increasing in its usefulness at a rapid pace, and while there were folks who didn't want to keep up with all of it, none of them were being threatened with "being left behind".
But this time, the warning is coming loud and clear. Your neighbors don't want the data center that powers the way you do your work. They don't want you funding the tools that build surveillance and oppression, and they certainly don't want you to help build them. They don't want to think about whether the Dior ad was AI after all, they don't want to dig through settings to keep their watch from recording their conversations, and they don't want to know what percentage chance of extinction we're at this week.
So, back to that fissure we're standing on. I can’t see the future, but I sense - with the compound wisdom of many present days past - that the gap will be wider tomorrow. And wider still the day after that. This is the time, and this is the warning - I would pay attention to where you're placing your feet.
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I VOTED (Spider Crab Version)
This year marks the first time that we’ve seen AI-Generated “I Voted” stickers. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that they should be made the traditional way - by emotionally-unstable teenagers:
This is the work of 14-year-old Hudson Rowan, who went viral in 2022 for his incredibly accurate drawing of what voting in 2022 felt like. I think about this sticker every election, and hope that someday I find someone aggregating the best examples of this particular medium. I mean, look at the weak-ass competition:
It wouldn’t be unusual if this is the first time you’ve thought about the ‘design’ of the I Voted sticker. They fall into a nearly-invisible subgenre of document accompaniment, washed in the patriotic pastiche of July 4th napkins from Party City. This is to say, I don’t “expect” anything from the sticker. All things considered, an AI-Generated design isn’t all that offensive to my taste; it barely moves the needle.
But this. This is the kind of shit that reminds you that anything can be a canvas. Our world is full of benign and forgettable bureaucratic ornamentation, from bland stock photos on your city’s website to generic murals assigned to the bare concrete walls of the decaying downtown. What would it look like to get Hudson to collab on the bus stop benches? Not like in the “let’s get a local artist to collaborate with the committee that decides” NO, I want to hand Hudson a shovel and tumbler of wet concrete and see what he comes up with. Maybe you wouldn’t get the most ergonomic solution, but you can bet there wouldn’t be a little ridge every two feet to keep the unhoused from sleeping on it.
Take this bit from the NPR article linked above:
Ashley Dittus, the commissioner of the Ulster County Board of Elections, was floored.
"I will never forget when I saw it," she said. "I instantly smiled and I had to show it to other people. I just couldn't keep it to myself."
That is what design can provide to our civic institutions. When’s the last time your local government showed you something you “just couldn’t keep to yourself”? It’s not an unreasonable request - in fact, it might be one of the most important things we can ask of the people we’ve chosen to represent us.
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