6. Isaacson, W., 2011. Steve Jobs. Simon & Schuster.

Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs provides the other half of the story by showing how he made these ideas into two products that changed the world, the Apple Mac and iPhone.

7. Gleick, J., 2021. The Information. Vintage.

Gleick's book dives into communication and information theory, the opposite side of the computational coin.

#### References

Barroso, L. A., Clidaras, J., & Hölzle, U. (2013). The datacenter as a computer: An introduction to the design of warehouse-scale machines (Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture) (2nd ed.). Morgan & Claypool.

Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence. Oxford University Press.

Gleick, J. (2021). The information. Vintage.

Hey, T., Tansley, S., Tolle, K., & Gray, J. (Eds.). (2009). The fourth paradigm: Data-intensive scientific discovery. Microsoft Research.

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# The Digital Revolution in a Historical Perspective

Misha Glenny

Abstract The coincidence and interaction between political and technological revolutions have resulted in epoch-changing social, political, and economic developments on three occasions over the past 500 years: the Renaissance and Reformation with the invention of print and weapons technology, the French and American revolutions with the industrial revolution, and the collapse of communism with the information revolution. Each boast their specific attributes but follow a pattern which can assist us in understanding the implications of today's technologies for our social and political structures.

#### 1 Introduction

In this chapter, we shall argue that the course of the information revolution since the late 1970s exerted a critical influence and in turn was influenced by the political revolutions that took place in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991.

One central consequence of this interplay between technology and politics has been a fundamental re-ordering of the global geopolitical architecture, which is already underway but whose outcome remains uncertain.

The United States is actively resisting the loss of its power to East Asia and China in particular. We are in the moment identified by Antonio Gramsci where "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new is struggling to be born: in this interregnum, the most varied morbid phenomena occur" (Gramsci, 2014).

The speed with which technological innovation has provoked dramatic social change since the mid-1980s is unprecedented. However, the coincidence of political and technological revolutions, leading to a shift in political and economic tectonic plates is not. In the modern history of Europe, we have seen similar processes twice before.

M. Glenny (✉)

Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
The first saw Europe emerge from the medieval period at the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation and lasted approximately 150 years until the mid-seventeenth century by which time northern Europe, in particular the Netherlands and Sweden, had largely eclipsed the political primacy that Spain had enjoyed at the beginning of the period.

The second began in the two decades before the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and again culminated roughly one and a half centuries later in 1945. It was during the second half of this second process that Germany, the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union also assumed decisive roles in both the geopolitical and technological revolutions, ultimately leading to an end to Europe's domination of the world after nearly five centuries.

Technological developments in these three periods led to social changes that are broadly comparable with one another, albeit refracted through very different cultural prisms.

In both these cases, the fusion of political change and technological progress culminated in mass violence on a scale never previously witnessed in human history. Both periods contain valuable lessons for our understanding of the interaction between politics and technology that we are currently experiencing.

But while we will highlight the underlying similarities, we will also alert the reader to what explains the qualitative difference between them that ensures how the continuing fallout from political upheaval and information technology will remain unpredictable, in particular the issue of scale that is at the heart of the contemporary interaction between politics and technology.

# 2 Renaissance, Reformation, Printing, and Ships, 1440–1648

The single most important technological development that explains the revolutionary changes of the early sixteenth century was the invention half a century earlier in the 1440s of movable print by Gutenberg and his associates. Until this point, the manufacture and distribution of books were limited to the Church hierarchy, the aristocracy, and some members of the growing merchant class. The overwhelming majority of Europeans were illiterate. Until the printing press, the Church had used its domination of education to control the circulation of books and their contents, compellingly described in Umberto Eco's masterpiece, The Name of the Rose. This was a central pillar of Rome's ideological hegemony over Western Christendom.

In the 60 years that followed, printing presses were established all over Europe, churning out books at a remarkable rate so that by the end of the fifteenth century, some 35,000 editions amounting to 15–20 million copies at the very lowest estimate were circulating around Europe. But even these figures were dwarfed in the first 50 years of the sixteenth century (Febvre and Martin, 1976). Literacy rates rose, although it is worth remembering that the consumption of books and pamphlets remained an elite activity.

Courtly romances were one of the most popular genres, but there was also a sharp growth in instruction books, which helped expand merchant and banking activity between northern and southern Europe. Among the most enthusiastic to engage with the literary boom were religious scholars who began re-interpreting biblical texts and the philosophical and historical works of antiquity. Together, they became known as the humanists of whom Erasmus of Rotterdam was the most celebrated.

As a movement, humanism did not set out to challenge the authority of the Church. Indeed, scholars like Erasmus actively avoided any association with ideas that explicitly questioned Church authority. But to some groups of clerics, monks, and princes, especially in the German territories of the Holy Roman Empire, humanism provided an implicit ideological framework for questioning Rome's monopoly on power. Secular and religious critics of the Church initially focused less on topics relating to dogma and more on the practical issue of corruption, which was the primary fiscal and political driver of papal power.

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther gave full expression to this discontent when he nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg, a town in Saxony. Three months after this event, the Theses had been printed and distributed so that Erasmus, the towering figure in European intellectual life until Luther's rise, had not only read them; he had even sent a copy to his great friend in London, Sir Thomas More. Within 3 years, scholars, clerics, merchants, and courts across Europe were discussing Luther's criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope had declared his arguments to be heretical, a judgment which previously would have immediately consigned the perpetrator to ignominy and almost invariably death.

Just over a century earlier, that very fate had befallen Jan Hus, the Czech religious reformer. The Council of Constance proclaimed him a heretic in 1415 and ordered him burned at the stake for good measure. Hus's death, however, did not deflate the movement inspired by his radical sermons, which railed against the corruption of the Church of Rome and demanded far-reaching reforms. But critically, the Hussite Rebellion never expanded beyond the relatively small Czech-speaking population of Bohemia and Moravia.

In April 1521, a century after Hus's martyrdom, Rome and the recently elected Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, summoned Luther to the Diet of Worms to defend himself against the charge of heresy, prefacing a possible death sentence.

In contrast to the arraignment of Hus at the Council of Constance, a much broader spectrum of Europe's public followed the proceedings and outcome of Worms in the form of pamphlets, which were quickly reprinted across the continent. The Council did indeed confirm Luther's heresy.

Luther survived, thanks to the printing press. In contrast to Hus, his cause was adopted by powerful political instances around Europe who knew of his case, thanks to the new technology. By the time Luther's printer friends were churning out translations of the Theses and his other works in German, a book could become a bestseller across Europe within 2 months, which explains why Erasmus was able to alert Thomas More so soon after Luther had attached his Theses to the church door.

A hundred years earlier, this method of disseminating his ideas was unavailable to Hus. In addition, Hus's message was communicated in Czech. His movement was intertwined with an early expression of national consciousness that intentionally excluded the many German speakers in Bohemia and Moravia. It was spread by word of mouth but only among those who could understand the language. There was no possibility of translating it—it was an overwhelmingly oral message.

Once printing was invented, not only was Luther able to record and distribute his ideas, but he could do it in the German vernacular, thanks to the economies of scale, which even the early production of printed books enabled. He wrote in both Latin and German, but before long, printed editions of his book had appeared in French, English, Italian, and even Czech.

Fully aware of the power of this new technology, Luther collaborated with his neighbor in Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach the Elder. Cranach is renowned as the great portraitist of Luther, but he also owned a printing press and was a bookseller. Cranach quickly grasped the importance of adapting print to include images as well as words. The social impact of the image was immense as for the first time, this could reach much of the population who were illiterate. The propaganda machine that the two men fashioned turned Luther not only into one of the mostread individuals in the sixteenth century but one of the most recognizable as well. This marked the beginning of celebrity.

Among those inclined to adopt Luther's teachings were several German princes in the patchwork quilt of territories that made up the Holy Roman Empire, along with large parts of the aristocracy and merchant classes in Denmark, Sweden, and England. Included among them was Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, Luther's home territory who defied both Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, by offering Luther sanctuary so he could escape the death penalty.

With adherents of the new Protestant faith proliferating across Europe, pressure was growing on secular authorities either to adopt or to confront the new religion. Several German princes changed confession in a direct challenge to their overlord, Charles V. The reformed faith was also making inroads in three north European countries, England, Sweden, and Denmark. By 1934, all three had renounced their allegiance to Rome. This was the first time that heresy had conquered entire countries—dissent was for the first time wedded to the power of the state.

For those who experienced or encouraged it, the polarization of European society during this period was every bit as remarkable and pervasive as the polarization we have witnessed since the advent of social media combined with the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 to create a wholly new and divided dynamic in politics across the globe. Furthermore, the underlying emotional drive of identity politics with which we struggle today would have been immediately recognizable to those who experienced Europe being torn apart during the long sixteenth century.

People adhered to identities of confession, language, perceived nationality, and class. Conspiracy theories proliferated, and as early as the 1520s, there was an upsurge in individuals and their followers predicting the imminent end of the world. In protestant countries, the thesis of the Pope as anti-Christ spread like wildfire. Among Protestants, anything perceived as detrimental to one's daily activities often attracted the pejorative description "papal."

In response, the Catholic Church announced the Counter-Reformation at the Council of Trent in 1545. In areas under the control of the Habsburgs, communities that had adopted the reform faith were forcibly reconverted, a process which included the murder of thousands. Successive Holy Roman emperors bolstered the activities of the Inquisition, an early form of religious police.

In the first 60 years of the printing press, less heralded technological innovations in maritime and weapons technology had an indirect but nonetheless important relationship with the politics of Lutheranism. These engineering advances may not have had the same long-term impact as the coming of the printed book, but they should not be underestimated. Combined with the growth of Protestantism among north European countries, especially in the Netherlands, they were influential in shifting the locus of political power in Europe from the Mediterranean to the North Sea over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In the second half of the fifteenth century, shipwrights started to experiment combining lateen (triangular) and square sails. Not only did this provide sailing vessels with increased power, but by harnessing wind currents more effectively, European ships were able to cease navigating via coastal landscapes and were now able to engage in regular transoceanic travel.

The extraordinary wealth of the New World, which started filling the coffers of the Habsburg kings of Spain, proved a double-edged sword. Poorly managed, it triggered a century-long period of inflation, which, certainly at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was an unknown phenomenon. So while the continent as a whole became richer and more prosperous, prices and wages kept rising, but nobody understood why. What many did observe, however, was how the growing prosperity was unevenly distributed.

This first wave of globalization brought with it increased threats to maritime trade from rival states and from privateers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, navies began experimenting with the deployment of large bronze siege guns on the bottom deck of their newly mobile warships. Although the Spaniards were able to put to sea large armadas for their Atlantic crossings, the design of their ships was informed primarily by the sailing conditions on the Mediterranean which, on the whole, were relatively benign.

By contrast, the Danes, Swedes, Dutch, English, and members of the Hanseatic League had a tradition of shipbuilding, which they were forced to adapt to the much more unstable North and Baltic seas. This meant the ship's body rose higher out of the sea, enabling it to carry more guns without putting the ship out of kilter. From the 1580s, Spain's extraordinary maritime prowess was eroded in a series of humiliating defeats by northern powers, notably England and the Dutch Republic.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, the technological advances in printing, ship design, and weapons wrought huge changes on European society. But it took roughly a century for the most far-reaching of changes to become evident—a fundamental realignment in economic power from the Mediterranean to the North Sea.

The Dutch Golden Age had begun at the same time as to the north the Swedish military was developing into what would eventually prove the decisive protestant force in the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). In the meanwhile, Dutch and English mercantilism, based on the revolutionary structure of the joint-stock company, was emerging in anticipation of the following century when first Dutch then British naval power would dominate the world's oceans.

Protestantism leant itself to more flexible systems of governance and the economy in all three northern European great powers of the seventeenth century, enabling them to exploit advances in maritime technology more quickly and more effectively than the Mediterranean rivals like Spain and Portugal. By the end of the Thirty Years' War, Spain had lost its primacy in world politics forever. This issue of governance and how to exploit technology most effectively is critical to all three periods under review.

# 3 The French Revolution, Steam Power, and the Industrial Revolution, 1769–1945

Toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the revolution in steam power encouraged the spread of mass industrial processes at the same time as decisive political revolutions broke out in America and France. As with the Reformation, the industrial revolution led not merely to rapid changes in people's lived experience but also to a change in the tectonics of geopolitics over the period of a century and a half. Military and political power moved away from western Europe first to Germany and then across the Atlantic to the United States and eastward toward first Japan and then the Soviet Union, a Eurasian state. Just as Spain never recovered its leading position in the world after the Thirty Years' War, Europe would never regain it after World War II.

In 1600, Europeans believed in witchcraft and werewolves. They thought that "Circe really did turn Odysseus's crew into pigs...[and that] mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw...that it is possible to turn base metal into gold...[that] the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil... [t]hat the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours." They had "heard mention of Copernicus, but do not imagine that he intended his sun-centered model of the cosmos to be taken literally" (Wootton, 2015).

A 130 years later, Voltaire wrote that England was leading the world in social culture. The country was unrecognizable. "An Englishman has looked through a telescope and a microscope; he owns a pendulum clock and a stick barometer...He does not know anyone who believes in witches and werewolves, magic, alchemy or astrology; he thinks the Odyssey is fiction, not fact...Like all people in Protestant countries, he believes that the Earth goes around the sun. He knows that the rainbow is produced by refracted light and that comets have no significance for our lives on earth...He believes that science is going to transform the world" (Wootton, 2015).

Some exceptional minds had understood this much earlier. In 1611, John Donne, the English poet, scholar, and cleric, announced that Galileo's recent discoveries represented a "new philosophy," which "calls all in doubt." A crucial consequence of the split in Western Christianity was the critical reassessment of the Roman Catholic's fundamental doctrine about the universe and the earth's centrality therein. In the second half of the sixteenth century, astronomers were the demolition experts who started dismantling the House of God built on clerical dogma before constructing a replacement temple out of a new, infinitely more flexible material: empirical observation. A century after Donne, people were still reluctant to give voice to atheism, but ever greater numbers were privately questioning the existence of God.

This first phase of the scientific revolution stretched out over a 150 years, during which time Europe (and Britain in particular) grew pregnant with the transformative possibility of material growth and prosperity. To ensure a successful birth, all the continent needed were some breakthroughs in engineering so that scientific knowledge could be put to practical uses.

In 1769, James Watt's steam engine superseded the older but cumbersome Newcomen engine and, in the process, acted as midwife to the modern infant that soon grew into the strapping adolescent of the industrial revolution. Until this point, manufacturing was constrained by the limits of human and animal power. Just as the printing press had unleashed the dissemination of knowledge on a scale beyond anything in history, steam increased productive capacity to a hitherto unimaginable degree.

Over the next 50 years, the transformation of Britain, England and Scotland in particular, was breathtaking. "Where previously, an amelioration of the conditions of existence, hence of survival, and an increase in economic opportunity had always been followed by a rise in population that eventually consumed the gains achieved," writes David Landes in his landmark study, The Unbound Prometheus, "now for the first time in history, both the economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a continuing flow of investment and technological innovation, a flow that lifted beyond visible limits the ceiling of Malthus's positive checks. The Industrial Revolution thereby opened a new age of promise. It also transformed the balance of political power, within nations, between nations, and between civilizations; revolutionized the social order; and as much changed man's way of thinking as his way of doing" (Landes, 1969).

Britain enjoyed several advantages that together ensured other European countries lagged behind its industrial development by as much as 50 years. Britain had achieved naval superiority over France with its victory in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), the first conflict which took place on more than two continents. This enabled London to rapidly expand its overseas empire, whose resources would prove invaluable in its economic advance during the nineteenth century.

This combined with significant progress in the productive process of iron and steel, fueled by Britain's large coal industry. The result was an extraordinary proliferation of the machine tools, which lay at the heart of Britain's expanding manufacturing base.

Most political power had been in the hands of the bourgeoisie in Scotland and England for over a century since the revolution of 1688 had created Europe's first constitutional monarchy. Britain's landed aristocracy and gentry still looked down at "traders and manufacturers," but the latter ignored the social disdain in which they were held as their wealth quickly outstripped that of their supposed social superiors.

By contrast with the entrepreneurial dynamism of Britain, the absolutism that dominated the giant empires of continental Europe and France was hindering reform and economic progress. France offered Britain serious competition in technological and scientific research, but its sclerotic politics meant French entrepreneurs faced much greater difficulties in applying that research to the economy.

Britain had suffered one major setback in its colonial possessions when America's revolutionary army won the war of 1776. However, defeat did not lead to revolution at home in Britain but consolidation. And it was not long before the 13 newly liberated colonies across the Atlantic were arguing among themselves and struggling to create coherent political structures.

Inspired in part by the successful anti-British insurrection in America, the masses of France rose against Bourbon absolutism in 1789. In the short term, the revolutionary chaos widened the developing technological and economic advantage, which Britain enjoyed over France. But politically, the event was an extraordinary harbinger of what would develop into a decisive break in European politics. Just as British technology and engineering introduced the age of mass production and consumption, France ushered in the era of mass politics.

Napoleon seized the opportunity which the revolutionary chaos presented to reorganize French society. Most importantly, he introduced the levée en masse, the mass mobilization of the male population into the army. The new emperor had begun the process of persuading all classes, and not just the aristocracy, that they should be invested in the French state and its military aims.

While Napoleon instilled a new mass patriotism in France, the factories that sprung up all over Britain, producing everything from clothes to ceramics to clocks, created an entire new class—the proletariat. Some early capitalists in Britain came from religious communities such as the Quakers or the Methodists. They regarded all workers as part of a community to be nourished and cherished. Many others, however, were ruthlessly venal: the less money one invested in workers, the bigger the returns on capital investment. In various forms, these new social relations would determine the politics and governance of the Western world for the next two centuries.

The bulk of the population exchanged a life of subsistence farming for the grindingly monotonous and dangerous work of the factory. Among the artisan classes, the rise of the factory provoked a backlash against the new technology enabling mass production techniques. The Luddites in England and the Weaver Uprising in Silesia, immortalized in Gerhard Hauptmann's drama, Die Weber, are powerful reminders of this.

As liberal capitalism consolidated itself across the nineteenth century, it also fashioned a new political construct that emerged first in Europe and then the world the nation state. It has dominated ever since.

The nation state was critical in the deployment of the countless new technologies developed in the nineteenth century. The unification of so many fragmented political entities, notably the German and the Italian lands, steadily dismantled bureaucratic obstacles to growth, such as internal tariff systems.

Two technological developments spurred on the modernization and centralization of the nascent nation states. In 1825, the first rail line was opened between Stockton and Darlington in England's northeast. For 4000 years, travel had been limited to the speed of horses. Within 75 years of Stevenson's rocket making that inaugural journey, rail lines criss-crossed huge stretches of the world, enabling people and goods to travel over vast distances at undreamt of speeds.

On August 16, 1858, Britain's Queen Victoria sent a message to the authorities in New York. It arrived from London in a matter of seconds, thanks to the massive telegraph cable laid across the Atlantic Ocean by two ships, meeting in the middle. Before this moment, messages across this distance were conveyed over months. "Since the discovery of Columbus," wrote the London Times, "nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity." 1

These advances in transport and communication magnified the explosion of scientific activity across the Western world and a concomitant expansion of the secondary and tertiary education sectors. The French Revolution, the German Romantic Movement, and the enormous progress made in natural sciences during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also led to significant changes in the structure and purpose of universities, especially in some parts of Germany, Britain, and the United States. An especially fruitful collaboration emerged between scholars in Germany and Britain, which drove many of the advances in engineering and manufacturing.2

The positive consequences of the industrial revolution and the emergence of the nation state were remarkable. Human longevity suddenly shoots upward. In 1870, the mean life expectancy around the world was 32. Even in the region with the longest average life span, Europe, it was still under 40. These figures had been broadly consistent for several centuries. Just a hundred years later in 1970, the figure for Europe, the Americas, and Asia was over 70 years old, and even in the world's most challenged region, Africa, it was already over 50.

But this period was subject to the Manichean duality of technological advance, which characterized the preceding epoch and would go on to define our era.

Much of the British Empire's early success was due to it enjoying easy and cheap access to the resources that its colonies provided. As other European nations and the United States joined in the global scramble for the wealth that the Americas, Africa, and Asia provided, the violence visited by humans on other humans reached heights

<sup>1</sup> Quoted in (Zweig, 1943). Zweig's telling of the laying of the first transatlantic cable is the most evocative and insightful text.

<sup>2</sup> Peter Watson rediscovered the central importance of British-German intellectual exchange that was so important to both countries' rise in the first half of the nineteenth century in (Watson, 2010).

previously unscaled even though a considerable intellectual and literary industry presented the enslavement and annihilation of tens of millions as "progress."

More ominously, each major power boasted at least one major arms manufacturer, and by the 1860s, Le Creuset, Skoda, Krupp, and Vickers were eagerly recruiting the growing number of graduates specializing in physics and chemistry. From the period of the American Civil War, 1862–1865, to the Balkan Wars, 1912–1913, these companies would use conflicts as a showcase to highlight the efficacy of their weapons. Not only were the advances in weapons and communications technology able to inflict greater casualties than ever before, but as military strategy developed in the twentieth century, they used the extraordinary range first of artillery and then airpower to target civilians on a massive scale (Glenny, 2013).

The murder and attempted murder of entire civilian populations had already begun in the nineteenth century across the United States and Europe, in preparation for the industrial killings of the twentieth century. In 1914, European nations finally applied their remarkable know-how to extermination. The violence culminated in the atrocities of World War II before the single most destructive act in history, the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki causing the deaths of roughly 200,000 people in an instant. The event took place just 176 years after Watt unveiled his steam engine.  On one occasion, the Cuban missile crisis in 1963, we came close to nuclear war. Since the 1950s, the extinction of the human species (not to mention the rest of life on earth) is not just a theoretical but a practical possibility.

The end of World War II confirmed the demise of European primacy as the United States and Russia assumed leadership and domination over the divided continent where the technological and political revolutions had begun four centuries earlier. Just as the twentieth century would have been entirely unrecognizable to the men and women alive during the Renaissance and would doubtless have filled them full of wonder, so would the commanders in the Thirty Years' War have gawped at the extent of the death and destruction that modernity unleashed. This points to a fundamental difference between the first great rush of modernity, from 1492 to 1648, and the second great rush from the 1760s to 1945: scale.

# 4 The Collapse of Communism and Information Technology, 1973–2023

The current manifestation of political and technological revolutions followed by polarization, economic transformation, rising inequality, and geopolitical shift has its roots in the 1970s. As the quote from Gramsci in the introduction implies, this process is still far from reaching its conclusion. The speed and nature of technological innovation in the last 50 years means that it is hard to predict how this will conclude, although the primary geopolitical struggle between the United States and China is clearly well underway.

We must begin the examination of this period in 1973 when the United States and Saudi Arabia struck a deal to end the oil crisis that had dominated events that year. This deal resulted in the US banking system becoming awash with so-called petrodollars. Unable to lend to domestic clients battling with stagflation, the banks started lending to foreign states as proposed and facilitated by the then head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. In Eastern Europe, four countries assumed huge dollar-denominated debts: Poland, Hungary, Romania and, outside the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia.

These debts fell due in the early 1980s at a point when US and British interest rates had hit a historic high of over 16%, meaning the payments of these already vulnerable economies became unsustainably onerous. As well as causing a major political crisis in Poland that led to the formation of the independent trades union, Solidarity, and then a military coup in December 1981, it also accentuated Poland's extreme dependency on energy supplies from the Soviet Union, which it paid for at roughly one-third of the world market price.

The Soviet Union's ability to subsidize the energy requirements of not just Poland but all East European states was dependent on high world oil prices and the efficient extraction of the Western Siberian oil fields, which it had started to exploit in the late 1970s (Perovic and Kempin, 2014).

As oil prices collapsed in the mid-80s, the Soviet Union sought to import Western technology, notably its advanced micro-processing capacity, to keep its oil industry competitive. The Western Siberian oil fields were among the most difficult in the world to exploit, and Soviet technology suffered constant failures, requiring ever greater investment from an economy that was struggling to survive.

Cold War logic had led the West to place stringent controls on the export of its most advanced technology affecting two sectors in particular—energy and the military.

Western restrictions on technology with military applications also threatened to deliver a knockout blow to Soviet attempts to maintain parity in the Cold War. The United States was now fitting its short-, medium-, and long-range missiles with systems guided by computer and laser technology in place of the previous analogue ones. As early as 1983, during the so-called Euromissiles crisis, leading members of the Soviet military were warning the Communist Party leadership that advances in micro-processing techniques were resulting in an exponential growth in the effectiveness of American weapons over their Soviet equivalent (Miller, 2022).

Such profoundly significant technological breakthroughs in information technology in the United States preceded the revolutionary drama of 1989 just like it had in 1517 and 1789. In March 1986, we reported from the 27th Soviet Party Congress for New Scientist magazine. Mikhail Gorbachev had already launched his new policies of perestroika (reform) and glasnost (transparency). At this extraordinary event, Gorbachev and his prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, made it clear where the Party most urgently needed to inject some perestroika and glasnost—into science, in particular computer technology and robotics for industrial and military applications. By this time, there were some 10,000 computers in the Soviet Union. The United States, by contrast, boasted 1.3 million mainframes and minicomputers. Put simply, they could not maintain parity in technological capacity and innovation (something that the Chinese watched extremely closely at the time, adjusting their research, development, and deployment models accordingly). Especially when combined with a rigid regime of censorship, the statist model was incapable of maintaining parity in an industry in which research was driven not only by the immediate requirements of the military but equally by the voracious desire of consumer markets.

As a consequence, the Soviet Union's lag in military and industrial capability was already visible and unbridgeable. As if to underline just how serious Soviet technological backwardness was, a month after the 27th Party Congress, a safety test at a plant just south of the Pripyat marshes triggered an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, and Chernobyl's Reactor 4 exploded.

Soviet socialism was reaching the end as a system that could compete with the West. If mountains of external debt killed communism in Poland and Hungary, tech killed the Soviet Union.

The rapid advance of computer technology since the 1980s not only hastened the end of the Soviet Empire. It has wrought changes unlike any other technological innovation in history because it has insinuated itself into and often created total dependency on almost every aspect of human social and economic interaction. But during the 1990s, few people were willing or interested in questioning the unquestioning embrace of the technology.

That long Decade of Delusion came to an end in 2008.

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, it took a full 14 months before Austria's Creditanstalt became the first major casualty of the shenanigans on Wall Street. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, it was just 4 days before almost every major bank around the world was staring into the abyss of global financial meltdown and collapse.

Technology was critical both to the intrinsic financial crisis and the speed with which it spread from New York across the world. The heart of the Crash? Credit Default Swaps and Collateral Mortgage Obligations, the sub-prime securitization vehicles that had enabled banks to leverage debt way beyond their ability to repay it. Banks "had begun to apply pure mathematical theories to evaluate credit risk and estimate credit risk premiums to be required." The models of such "quants" who have wielded so much influence over modern banking are often "worse than useless" (Murphy, 2008). Quants are financial analysts who use math, coding, and finance skills to help companies make business and investment decisions. For example, some quants work on the buy-side of an investment bank, helping these large companies increase profits with automated trading algorithms.

No single financial institution had the least oversight into exactly how much debt they were carrying. They were unable to tame the monster once unleashed, and money just started flowing automatically out of banks across the world without anyone having to press a button.

As we saw in the previous section, the industrial revolution created a new class structure with the emergence of the industrial proletariat and a capitalist class who derived value from the labor of the proletariat. The digital revolution largely dispenses with that model by replacing value from labor with value from data, often freely handed over by their generators, i.e., consumers. Leviathan corporations, such as Google and Facebook, have grown at astonishing rates over the past two decades. Deriving value from data rather than labor means the capital investment can record returns at a much higher rate. In this fundamental shift in the nature of production driven by technology, the importance of the human is diminished, weakening her leverage in social relations as the digitalization of so much of our life means she has no choice but to continue producing data that is processed and exploited by the corporations.3 Combined with the burgeoning influence of AI, this is rapidly posing the question as to what if any labor function humans will have in the near future.

#### 5 Conclusions

A central challenge at the current juncture of the human journey is that many of the technologies rightly credited for our material progress are also based on disintegration and reduction of the individual: breaking us down into data sets of DNA, revealed preferences in digital search histories, biometrics, financial data, etc. The quest for utility, efficiency, and convenience at global scale necessarily reduces us to data points. Trillion-dollar industries are committed to this proposition.

The idea of the individual—literally a being that cannot or should not be divided—is one of integration and wholeness, yet it is the subject of ferocious division and subdivision in the name of progress (the market) and security (the state). In a sense, modernity constantly puts our integrity in jeopardy.

As individuals, we should not be divided, but we also need to be connected beyond ourselves: we need relationships to find meaning and to thrive. What ultimately changes people's lives are relationships. As sentient beings, we need associative relationships to thrive—in families, as friends, as citizens, and as co-workers—we need the right scale to live as humans in full.

Technology allows us to adapt and extend ourselves beyond the constraints of body and place. Communications technology stretches the realm of our senses globally. This elasticity has been central to progress. Yet the question remains how far beyond the inherent limitations of being human can we meaningfully extend without losing touch with who we are. The answer is certainly not fixed and may vary across individuals and societies and time. However, it does not follow that there are no limits.

But in the past 30 years, our world has become more connected than ever before, and yet we face an epidemic of loneliness, alienation, and stress-related illnesses. Our cluttered, frenetic, upgraded lives feel increasingly out of control. Our machines are supposed to work for us, but often, we appear to be working for our machines.

<sup>3</sup> See Tarnoff, B. From Manchester to Barcelona (https://logicmag.io/nature/from-manchester-tobarcelona/).

Technological triumphs have created new challenges, pushing some fundamental things out of joint, particularly in the less tangible realms of culture, character, and spirit. Finding our balance and keeping our sanity will become ever more difficult as our lives become "bigger."

Technological change is full of consequences, intended and unintended, expected and unexpected, good and bad, invidious and insidious, to which humans must adapt. Reflecting on the course of the twentieth century, the Russian poet Pasternak wrote somewhat ominously of "the consequences of consequences." This insight has never seemed more important and has propelled us to ask some fundamental questions about how we will adapt ourselves and our lifestyles to the effects of our radically new setting, a world defined by promising and powerful technologies nuclear, genomic, and digital—that are capable of disaggregating, disintegrating, and also reintegrating or remaking many aspects of the world as we know it.

The challenges will proliferate. We are at the beginning of a world in which artificial intelligence in various forms will determine the direction of our lives in an even more profound way. While the positive possibilities in terms of human health and welfare are considerable, the negative consequences are potentially hair-raising. Just as printing, sails, and gunpowder led to greater global wealth, it also encouraged violent polarization; just as the industrial revolution led to an extraordinary increase in longevity and the atomic bomb, so will AI offer the human race great protection and massive destruction simultaneously but at a greatly enhanced scale than during either of the previous two revolutions.

Already AI generative programs like GPT4 are capable of writing sophisticated malware, and increasingly cybersecurity is relying on AI and machine-to-machine learning. Human oversight of complex systems is receding, a fundamental danger in itself. Meanwhile, for those with political influence, the temptation to make use of truly Orwellian surveillance techniques is a dark temptation as China's Social Credit System and states' increasingly ubiquitous deployment of invasive spyware have demonstrated all too effectively.

The geopolitical trajectory is already clear. China is striving to displace the United States as the number one power economically and politically. Tech and tech-related industries, such as the extraction and processing of critical raw materials, are at the very heart of this struggle. The United States is fighting hard to maintain its position of supremacy (made more difficult by the polarization in a democratic society that social media have greatly encouraged).

The big question that this pattern that echoes the Reformation and the industrial revolution poses concerns its violent culmination, that is, the precedents of the Thirty Years' War and the two world wars of the twentieth century. Leaving so-called black swan events aside, political leadership will play a big role in the outcome. Since the turn of the millennium, both China and the United States have increasingly characterized their economic competition as a cultural one. The United States fashions this as a struggle between democratic capitalism against an autocratic version, while China presents its system as better equipped to manage long-term problems than the caprice of American democratic structures. Both arguments have their weaknesses, arguably the most fundamental being that unless these two systems cooperate along with all other countries in the world, then at least one of the several threats to existence (we are no longer just confronted with possible nuclear war but the climate crisis, pandemics, and the uncontrolled spread of AI) is likely to find a way of becoming a reality.

In that respect, the experience of the last two decades does not bode well. But humans have extracted themselves from some sticky situations before. Now, we must wait and see if AI and other technologies will help us, or hinder us.

#### Discussion Questions for Students and Their Teachers

#### Learning Resources for Students

1. Tarnoff, B. From Manchester to Barcelona. https://logicmag.io/nature/frommanchester-to-barcelona/

This key text reveals why the digital economy as it emerged in the United States has led to a concentration of political and economic power around a few corporate entities that is much greater than even during the so-called robber baron period of capital accumulation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Essential reading.

2. Barbier, F. (2016) Gutenberg's Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity. Cantab: Polity Press

Not the greatest stylist, but Barbier's book is rich in detail about Gutenberg and the printing press's relationship first with Germany and then France and Italy. It identifies the key areas and the variegated speed with which print impacted on modern European thought.

3. Febvre, L. and Martin H-J. (1976) The Coming of the Book. London: New Left Books.

This path-breaking work by two French scholars was the first to detail how the printing press and subsequent rise of the book began to reshape the economic landscape of late medieval Europe before preparing the social ground that Luther would later exploit.

The best single volume history of the Dutch Republic, which explains how technology, economic innovation, and novel political forms combine to enable this very small country to eclipse the trading power of Spain.

Wilson's magnum opus is one of several masterful accounts of this incredibly complex period of European history, but we recommend it because he is particularly good at identifying how technology impacted the nature of warfare and increased its destructive power to levels hitherto never seen.

8. Wooton, D. (2015) The Invention of Science. London: Allen Lane.

This superb account of the lead up to the steam revolution is especially useful for bridging the period between the Renaissance and the industrial revolution in examining technological change. Essential reading on the interplay between technology and politics.

9. Landes, D. S. (1969) The Unbound Prometheus. Cantab: Cambridge University Press.

The definitive work on the industrial revolution in Britain and Europe. It is especially strong at documenting the interplay between innovation, politics, and social and economic change in Great Britain.

10. Wheeler, T. From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future. Washington: Brookings Institution Press

A useful overview of the three revolutions. It is good on the immediate social impact of technological change but less detailed on some issues such as political polarization. Probably the best primer on the subject.

## References

Febvre, L., & Martin, H.-J. (1976). The coming of the book (p. 186). New Left Books.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# The Social Responsibilities of Scientists and Technologists in the Digital Age

Hans Akkermans

Abstract What responsibilities do digital scientists and professionals have in serving society and the public, beyond doing "purely" "fundamental" scientific, technological, or academic inquiry alone? Now that "the digital" has become pervasive in society, even in normal people's lives, these are pressing questions that call for answers. They go beyond individual ethical considerations or professional codes of conduct, as society-systemic aspects heavily come into play. We explore some of the complex historical and contemporary relationships between technology and society as a way to formulate useful insights for digital ethics and governance of digital technologies today.

#### 1 Introduction

Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing the power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. We scientists who unleashed this immense power have an overwhelming responsibility in this world life-anddeath struggle to harness the atom for the benefit of mankind and not for humanity's destruction.

Albert Einstein, as quoted in Nathan and Norden (1960, Chapter XII)

In these strong words, Albert Einstein formulated the need for taking social responsibility by scientists. Digital science and technology are certainly very different from atomic science, but through the ongoing digital transformation of many sectors of society and government, their societal impacts are no less vast, deep, and fundamental. And in part they are unknown, unclear, or still hidden in the (near) future. In line with the Digital Humanism Manifesto (DIGHUM, 2019, 2023; this

H. Akkermans (✉)

AKMC, Koedijk, The Netherlands

University for Development Studies UDS, Tamale, Ghana e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Volume, Chapter by Hannes Werthner), this calls for a critical rethinking of the social responsibilities of scientists and technologists in today's Digital Age.

This chapter undertakes to do so from a historical perspective. We first discuss the science, technology, and social responsibility issues of scientists and technologists as they historically appeared in the Atomic Age—roughly from 1938, with the discovery of nuclear fission and the possibility of the atomic bomb, to the 1980s, when the Cold War gradually came to a (temporary) end. We summarize the discussions on the social responsibility of scientists and engineers that raged at previous times, and we show that many of them still hold relevance today in the Digital Age.

Subsequently, we briefly survey in this chapter the many and diverse societal impacts by the ongoing digital transformation today, using the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an organizing framework. The upshot is that digital technology development and research has major societal impacts, both good and bad ones, and as a consequence, there undeniably exists a social responsibility of scientists and technologists, if only because we all are also citizens of the globally connected world we have helped create. The discussions on these issues in the Digital Age are not fully new but build on, among others, the Atomic Age discussions. There are some clear historical parallels here, for example, regarding data openness versus data secrecy policies. Scientists and technologists can be a beneficial force for betterment of society, but it does require critical thinking, societal engagement, and actively taking responsibility.

# 2 On the Social Responsibilities of Scientists in the Atomic Age

Einstein wrote the above in 1946, sometimes called Year 1 of the Atomic Age. The fateful consequences and the global danger of the development of the atomic bomb became increasingly clear and undeniable. The United Nations (UN) were in their formative years, and hopes were placed upon the UN that it could maintain international peace and prevent a future war. Einstein wrote in his capacity as chair of the newly formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. It is the opening paragraph of a telegram that was widely reprinted in the press, for example, the New York Times of May 25, 1946. Many meetings, publications, and media events followed (see, e.g., Fig. 1), almost on a daily basis, whereby the urgency of the matter was summarized as One World or None!

Many scientists were drawn into becoming active in societal issues due to the big human and moral shock that the detonation of the atomic bomb created. That shock was famously expressed, much later in an interview in 1965, by Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA, by reference to the Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Fig. 1 The world-famous "Doomsday Clock" as it first appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in June 1947. Source, including an interesting background article on its design by Martyl Langsdorf, is available at https:// thebulletin.org/2013/04/ science-art-and-the-legacyof-martyl/. Used with permission of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Regarding Einstein, it seems that he personally viewed taking social responsibility as a scientist as something rather self-evident and obvious. But that was not necessarily a mainstream view among his fellow physicists, as many severely struggled with these issues (including Robert Oppenheimer), and many were influenced and even terrorized by the Cold War political pressures that made them highly vulnerable to speak their minds freely.

One prominent figure addressing these issues in speaking and writing was Bertrand Russell, the analytic philosopher in particular of mathematics and formal logic. He was involved in the United Kingdom's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), who is the originator of the ban-the-bomb sign that acquired worldwide fame as the peace symbol (Fig. 2). It is worth quoting Bertrand Russell at length on the issue of the social responsibility of the scientist (Russell, 1960):

Science, ever since it first existed, has had important effects in matters that lie outside the purview of pure science. Men of science have differed as to their responsibility for such effects. Some have said that the function of the scientist in society is to supply knowledge, and that he need not concern himself with the use to which this knowledge is put. I do not think that this view is tenable, especially in our age. The scientist is also a citizen; and citizens who have any special skill have a public duty to see, as far as they can, that their skill is utilized in accordance with the public interest.

Fig. 2 The internationally famous peace symbol (CND, UK, 1958). For the symbol and its history, see Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, https://cnduk. org/the-symbol/.

On affecting public opinion, Russell writes: "Modern democracy and modern methods of publicity have made the problem of affecting public opinion quite different from what it used to be. The knowledge that the public possesses on any important issue is derived from vast and powerful organizations: the press, radio, and, above all, television. The knowledge that governments possess is more limited. They are too busy to search out the facts for themselves, and consequently they know only what their underlings think good for them unless there is such a powerful movement in a different sense that politicians cannot ignore it. Facts which ought to guide the decisions of statesmen—for instance, as to the possible lethal qualities of fallout—do not acquire their due importance if they remain buried in scientific journals. They acquire their due importance only when they become known to so many voters that they affect the course of the elections."

We recall that these lines were written long ago, in the 1950s, a time of mass breakthrough of television. Now in the Digital Age, it appears there is a new stage, in which technologies such as social media, fake news, deepfakes, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have exacerbated the problems of providing sound information to the public (DIGHUM, 2023; this Volume, Chapter by Peter Knees and Julia Neidhardt, and Chapter by Ricardo Baeza-Yates).

As a further line of action, Bertrand Russell says that scientists "can suggest and urge in many ways the value of those branches of science of which the important practical uses are beneficial and not harmful. Consider what might be done if the money at present spent on armaments were spent on increasing and distributing the food supply of the world and diminishing the population pressure."

And Russell ends with: "As the world becomes more technically unified, life in an ivory tower becomes increasingly impossible. (...) We have it in our power to make a good world; and, therefore, with whatever labor and risk, we must make it" (Russell, 1960; the article is the text of an address delivered on September 24, 1959, in London at a meeting of British scientists convened by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, cf. Fig. 2).

Many other noted scientists also spoke and wrote on these matters, for example, the philosopher of science, Karl Popper. In a talk he delivered in 1968 at the International Congress of Philosophy in Vienna, special session on "Science and Ethics," he proposed to create a form of a modern Hippocratic Oath for scientists. Popper furthermore points out a role for multidisciplinary scientific research regarding societal impacts: "The problem of the unintended consequences of our actions, consequences which are not only unintended but often very difficult to foresee, is the fundamental problem of the social scientist. Since the natural scientist has become inextricably involved in the application of science, he, too, should consider it one of his special responsibilities to foresee as far as possible the unintended consequences of his work and to draw attention, from the very beginning, to those we should strive to avoid" (Popper, 1971).

Einstein relentlessly continued his societal activities until his death. One week before he died (on April 18, 1955), he signed what became known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. It was published on July 9, 1955, and it was signed, apart from Einstein and Russell, by several prominent Nobel Prize winning figures such as Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the husband of Irène Curie and son-in-law of Marie Skłodowska-Curie. One of its main points was to call for a congress to be convened by "scientists of the world and the general public" urging "governments of the world (...) to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them." Famously, the Manifesto said, "Remember your humanity and forget the rest."

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto call to action did have effect. It led to a series of international conferences from 1957 onward, known as the Pugwash Conferences. A leading organizing figure here was Joseph Rotblat, a nuclear physicist from Poland. A major result was to bring together leading scholars from many countries so as to discuss ways to temper the arms race. Highly importantly, Pugwash served as one of the very few lines of open communication between the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. These Pugwash Conferences turned out to be influential in their impact on policy. They are credited, according to Holcomb B. Noble in the New York Times in an obituary of Joseph Rotblat on September 02, 2005, with laying the groundwork for the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Joseph Rotblat and Pugwash received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1995.

Rotblat's personal story is both moving and illuminating (Veys, 2013), in particular if we view it from the angle of the social responsibilities of scientists and technologists. A small part of his personal history he revealed in an article many years later in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Rotblat, 1985). Rotblat was a nuclear physicist working on inelastic scattering of neutrons against heavy nuclei (his PhD subject in 1950, Liverpool, UK), at first in the Radiological Laboratory in Warsaw, Poland, in 1938/1939. Late 1938, in Otto Hahn's laboratory in Berlin, Germany, experimental phenomena were observed that were (but only later) interpreted as evidence of nuclear fission of uranium, with excess production of neutrons. It was Lise Meitner (previously collaborating with Otto Hahn in Berlin but then fled to Sweden) who with Otto Frisch (from the institute of Niels Bohr, Copenhagen, Denmark) supplied the correct interpretation of the Berlin experiments and other measurements. Thus, they discovered the nuclear fission of uranium as a result of neutron capture as a new nuclear reaction (Meitner & Frisch, 1939).

The potential consequences and societal impacts were immediately and extensively discussed internationally and openly in a variety of scientific journals, including scientists from Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Britain, and United States, among others. This open scientific international discussion on the societal impacts of nuclear reaction physics remarkably happened over scarcely a year in 1938–1939 and ended when Hitler invaded Poland. In anachronistic terms, one might say that the discussion on the societal impacts of nuclear reactions went viral. For example, an article by S. Flügge from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Chemie in Berlin was published on June 9, 1939, in German (translated title: Can the energy content of atomic nuclei be made technologically useful?) that already pointed at the possibility of the atomic bomb as well as potential civil uses of nuclear energy (Flügge, 1939). These discussions were picked up by many scientists in many countries including Joseph Rotblat, and of course many scientists (including Albert Einstein) were alerted to the danger of a Hitler atomic bomb. Rotblat writes in reference to Lise Meitner's discovery (Rotblat, 1985): "From this discovery it was a fairly simple intellectual exercise to envisage a divergent chain reaction with a vast release of energy. The logical sequel was that if this energy were released in a very short time it would result in an explosion of unprecedented power."

Joseph Rotblat then moved from Poland to the United Kingdom to the group of James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron. He subsequently joined the US Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in order to fight the possibility that Hitler would create an atomic bomb and use it before the United States and allies did. However, it became clear in 1944 that Hitler-Germany dropped the atomic bomb program and would not be able to produce one. That changed the whole picture, opening up the question why the atomic bomb was needed in the first place.

According to Rotblat (1985), at a dinner at James Chadwick's house (Rotblat's Manhattan Project boss at the time), General Leslie Groves, who was the US military lead in charge of the atomic bomb Manhattan Project, told him in March 1944: "You realize, of course, that the whole purpose of this project is to subdue our main enemy, the Russians." This came as a great personal shock to Joseph Rotblat as he describes it, having a commitment that Hitler would not get the atomic bomb first. He therefore decided to leave the Manhattan atomic bomb project, and in fact he was the first and only one to do so. Apart from his personal story and dilemmas, Rotblat's (1985) article is full of information on how other Los Alamos physicists were looking at this and tried to deal with the ensuing dilemmas. Joseph Rotblat and Pugwash received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

#### 3 Fast Forward to the Digital Age

# 3.1 General Elements of the Social Responsibility of Scientists and Technologists

Regrettably, the Atomic Age is not just simply history as current geopolitics show, although in the foreground today is the Digital Age. This is a clearly different era in terms of societal issues we have to deal with (DIGHUM, 2019). However, there are some pertinent general insights to be gained if we condense and summarize the vast historical writings on the social responsibilities of scientists and technologists.

First of all, scientists and technologists are citizens—like everyone. Citizenship community, local, national, regional, global—comes with a moral obligation to strive for the benefit of humankind. There is no way to escape this responsibility even when some attempt to hide in the ivory tower.

Second, scientists and technologists possess extensive and special knowledge in their field of expertise. This expert knowledge brings with it a different position in the public societal debate, also as seen in the public eye. This different knowledge position brings in many cases a position of some influence and, hence, responsibility—wanted or not. Accordingly, there is a responsibility to share this knowledge with society properly and in fitting ways. There are many different avenues open for scientists and technologists to do so:

Admittedly, the challenges of the Digital Age are very different from those of the Atomic Age. It is encouraging however that worldwide, there is considerable activity among scientists, technologists, and writers from many different corners along the abovementioned lines (a)–(d). It is currently scattered, but nevertheless, it is there and should be brought better to daylight (which is obviously also a purpose of the present volume). There is, one might say, already a serious society-oriented digital scholarship-with-citizenship.

# 3.2 Societal Impacts of Digital Technologies and the Sustainable Development Goals

In order to get a more general picture of the societal impacts and ethical issues associated with today's digital technologies, let us take the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a starting point and framework.

The SDGs were adopted by the United Nations in 2015, and they formulate goals for betterment of the world to be achieved by 2030 (United Nations, n.d.; see Fig. 3). These goals cover many areas and issues of society and the planet, and they reflect the widest possible international consensus on values and goals for the benefit of humanity.

The following brief highlights of the mentioned digital scholarship-with-citizenship just scratch the surface and are incomplete, but they are indicative (for more, see the Learning Resources and References at the end of this chapter).

It is widely agreed that digital technologies bring important (potential) benefits to society. They increase the possibilities and ease for people to communicate with each other, to connect to each other in various ways, and this so at a historically unprecedented global scale and speed. So, digital technologies have the potential to be significant as enablers to important and shared human values and activities. But according to many recent critical studies, they also come with (sometimes unexpected) societal impacts that are harmful to many common people in the world and that are currently not properly managed, controlled, or governed. A few examples from recent literature follow below.

Fig. 3 The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Inequalities and Bias SDG-5 and SDG-10, respectively, refer to gender equality and reducing inequalities in society. There are now many carefully researched studies that detail how digital technologies such as search engines, algorithms, and AIs embody important biases to the effect that they perpetuate or even enlarge racial and other prejudices and so reinforce racism (Noble, 2018). One of the many examples Safiyah Noble gives is Google's search engine producing images of black people tagged as "gorillas." Virginia Eubanks (2017) discusses a long list of cases showing how forms of automated decision-making and algorithmic governance go terribly wrong in ways that make lives of especially already poor and disadvantaged people even more miserable. As an example, the state of Indiana, USA, denied in 3 years 1 million applications for healthcare, food stamps, and financial benefits, because a new computer system interpreted any application mistake as "failure to cooperate."

A related horror story comes from the Netherlands. Under the pretense of fraud detection and prevention, the Dutch tax authorities for many years implemented a very harsh and disproportional system of payback and big financial penalties of child care allowances upon the slightest suspicion of fraud. The Dutch tax authorities literally chased people using various systems in ways that were downright discriminatory (non-Dutch-sounding family names, a second nationality, etc. labeled as "fraud-risk" factors). They also did what boils down to ethnic profiling and violated privacy rules. Small administrative errors by citizens were taken as evidence for fraud (save the complexity of Dutch legislation already for Dutch residents; it is noted that people with an immigration background often have a limited command of the Dutch language and are therefore more prone to make such "administrative" mistakes). The effects were devastating. Tens of thousands of people were unjustly and without any real basis accused of fraud and subsequently severely harmed. Many ended up in serious financial debt and lost jobs and/or homes, marriages broke up, and mental health problems occurred. An estimated 70,000 children were the victims of this; even families were broken up, and an estimated 1675 or even more children were removed from their homes and taken out of the custody of their parents. As Hadwick and Lan (2021) conclude: "The Dutch childcare allowance scandal or toeslagen affaire unveiled the ways in which the Dutch tax administration made use of artificial intelligence algorithms to discriminate against and violate the rights of welfare recipients." In June 2020, the Dutch then-PM Mark Rutte was, certainly not wholeheartedly, forced to admit that there is "institutional racism" in the Netherlands. Quite a many politicians prefer to link this to the colonial past only [as it is or seems to be over and done with (?!)] but attempt to avoid looking at the digital present.

Meredith Broussard (2023) makes two important general points here. First, such grave issues are not "glitches," accidental, regrettable but minor mistakes that can be easily corrected. They are inherent and systemic. Second, there is what she calls "technochauvinism," the belief that human problems can be solved by technological solutions alone, for example, that computer systems are better, faster, and more neutral in decision-making than humans. This naïve belief in digital systems leads to a tendency of authorities to "outsource," so to speak, decision-making to digital systems, thus abdicating their own responsibility for decisions. In addition, digital systems also functioned (as in the Dutch case) as stone-walling automated decisions, as they were used like a Chinese wall shielding authorities from citizens to appeal or ask explanations or proof. In other words, digital systems were (and are) used to make authorities immune for citizens contesting authority decisions.

This technochauvinist belief is furthermore used to sell all kinds of technopromises so as to capture billions of taxpayer money (even including space travel and other sci-fi scenarios) but is not based on relevant digital knowledge. There is a role here for socially responsible scientists and technology to investigate and educate a wider public on how digital technologies really work in society.

Decent Work and Economic Growth The United Nations SDG-8 focuses on decent work and economic growth. Terms such as "digital systems," "computing," and "automation" give the impression that it is computers and machines that do the work. However, Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri (2019), Sarah Roberts (2019), and Kate Crawford (2021) all point out that there is an enormous human workforce to keep the digital world running (see also in this volume chapters on Work in a New World). But it is work that is hardly visible, very fragmented, and hardly organized, often working under bad conditions, with poor pay and financial security as contract workers. Roberts (2019) studied the monotonic, repetitive, stressful, and even psychologically harmful work of content moderators (estimated at 100,000 globally), hidden behind the screens of commercial social media, by interviewing many in different countries. Gray and Suri (2019) call this invisible digital work "ghost work" and speak of a growing "global underclass" without labor protection laws and health and other employee benefits and with often below-minimum pay. If we liken the world to a zoo, it is no exaggeration to say that humans are fed in large numbers to the digital platform machines. One wonders about the decency of the big tech platforms to achieve in their own realm SDG-8 goals on decent work.

War and Peace: Data Secrecy Versus Openness Perhaps surprisingly, an analysis of SDG-16, Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions unavoidably leads us into the consideration of (big) data management policies. Alex Wellerstein (2021) analyzes in his Restricted Data the data secrecy versus openness debates, arguments, and policies in the Atomic Age in painstaking detail. All in all, scientists were generally in favor of (international) openness, both before and during World War II and during the Cold War. Einstein is one of many examples here, and he wrote many times on it. As another example, Robert Oppenheimer also strongly leaned toward openness, and this made him a political target in the anti-communist "un-American" frenzy in the 1950s (an aspect also portrayed at length in Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer).

Wellerstein (2021) points out, in his concluding chapter, that data secrecy was and is not just confined to the nuclear domain but was much more encompassing. He also discusses how it extends to the present day and (among others) hereby refers to the current developments in AI. In the Atomic Age, the route was from openness (see above in this chapter, in the years just before World War II) to data secrecy in the Cold War period. We see a parallel here in the Digital Age. For example, the company that calls itself "OpenAI" with its generative AI tools (ChatGPT) has recently gone, in a rather sudden conversion from ideologically open to practically closed, the route from openness to full data-algorithm opaqueness and secrecy, apparently (as suggested by press reports and interviews) for commercial competition as well as (military) government funding reasons.

Concentration, weaponization, and militarization of AI and other digital research seem to be currently going on much more generally, with increasing data and algorithm secrecy, in analogy to the 1950s nuclear secrecy. We see now only snippets of this, but they come fragmentarily but consistently to the surface in news and investigative journalism reports about, for example, AI-supported drones in the Ukraine war. Such developments are certainly not going uncontested, as shown in recent years by the strong Google employee protests against military contracts and by worldwide AI researchers' petitions against AI autonomous weapons (initiated by well-known Australian AI researcher Toby Walsh). Whatever your personal position is, proper data management policies do come very close to and are often normal part of professional and academic duties of digital researchers in industry, academia, and government. So, in line with Bertrand Russel's arguments outlined above, there is a clear and present unavoidability of societal responsibility of digital scientists, researchers, and technologists.

Natural Resources, Energy, and Climate Action SDG-12 is about responsible consumption and production, and SDG-13 is on climate action. In her Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford (2021) argues that "AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications." She then documents at length what she calls the "planetary costs" of digital technologies, in terms of the mining and extraction of many rare natural resources, such as rare-earth elements, the ensuing environmental damage, and the enormous energy hunger of digital computing.

As Crawford says: "Minerals are the backbone of AI, but its lifeblood is still electrical energy. Advanced computation is rarely considered in terms of carbon footprints, fossil fuels, and pollution; metaphors like 'the cloud' imply something floating and delicate within a natural, green industry. (...)" As Tung-Hui Hu writes in A Prehistory of the Cloud, "The cloud is a resource-intensive, extractive technology that converts water and electricity into computational power, leaving a sizable amount of environmental damage that it then displaces from sight. Addressing this energy-intensive infrastructure has become a major concern." She also refers to studies concluding that running a single large language model produces a carbon footprint equivalent to 125 round-trip flights from New York (Crawford, 2021, p.41–42). With the current developments in AI such as ChatGPT, this can only increase (cf. also Bender et al., 2021). One might summarize this as big data, bigger data, biggest footprint!

In sum, the digital society is not at all limited to the digital realm. It has a very big spillover to "normal" society with which it is more and more integrating. This process has disruptive and ungoverned societal effects that are not, or not necessarily, beneficial to humankind at large. There is a clear societal responsibility of digital scientists and technologists here concerning how we deal with this.

# 4 Governance, Public Values, and Fairness in Digital Ecosystems

We have seen above, admittedly very sketchy and incomplete, that digital technologies have societal impacts on many different aspects and sectors of society. But there is a further impact that systemically affects society as a whole, and that may be viewed under the rubric of SDG-16, Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, and also SDG-9, Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure.

From the many public discussions, studies, and writings on the digital society, we can see two big society-systemic trends that are a cause for concern. One is more economic, the other more political, but the two are heavily intertwined:

These two developments are not independent, witness alone the fact that the whims of a single billionaire may decide who is to speak or not on public affairs in digital social media or what content is allowed or not. Digital technologies and the associated concentration of big resources in a few hands are "a clear and present danger" to democracy and, more generally, human values and freedoms in a shared public world (DIGHUM, 2023). This constitutes a form of weaponization of digital technologies that has the effect of a cluster bomb tearing a shared public world apart.

So a key question on the table is the democratic governance of technology (Feenberg, 2017; Siddarth et al., 2021; this volume, chapter by George Metakides and chapter by Marc Rotenberg). Jairam et al. (2021) usefully make a distinction between a technology and how it is governed or controlled, pointing out that the technology level and its governance level can have very different characteristics. For example, the big tech platforms rely on network "decentralized" technologies, but the governance level is in contrast strongly centralized and even monopolistic (Wieringa & Gordijn, 2023; this volume, chapter by Allison Stanger).

Innovation in digital technologies is today usually described in terms of digital innovation ecosystems in which a variety of parties and stakeholders participate (for a brief overview, see Akkermans et al., 2022) in both competitive and collaborative relationships. A natural question arising from the metaphor of ecosystems is how such multiparty innovation ecosystems can be kept sustainable, fair, and equitable with respect to all parties involved.

This is a governance question but a very complex one. It is not easy to give a positive definition of what is "fair" or "just." On the other hand, there are many situations where it is clear that something is unfair or unjust, and a wide consensus exists about that (see, e.g., the SDG-related discussion of digital impacts in Sect. 3.2). Moreover, there are a number of basic ideas, principles, and desiderata regarding the governance of digital ecosystems that are recurring over and over again in the literature, although their formulations and arrangements vary widely (see, e.g., Siddarth et al., 2021; Jairam et al., 2021; this volume, chapter by Julian Nida-Rümelin; chapter by Guglielmo Tamburrini; chapter by Erich Prem; and chapter by Anna Bon); below we follow the paraphrasing by Akkermans et al. (2022).

governance is defined as consensus-oriented because it aims to achieve a broad community consensus. In order to reach this wide consensus, a firm mediation structure, without any bias toward participants, should be in place.

(g) Accountability. Accountability is defined as responsibility or answerability for one's actions. Decision-makers, whether internal or external, are responsible for those who are affected by their actions or decisions. These decision-makers are morally or legally bound to clarify and be answerable for the implications and selected actions made on behalf of the community.

Such basic ideas and principles provide some of the groundwork for policymaking and design for fairness of digital ecosystems and their societal and democratic governance (see also in this volume chapter by Clara Neppel).

#### 5 Conclusions

Scientists and technologists do have a social responsibility. This derives from two general factors. The first is (global) citizenship. The second is their position of knowledge and expertise in matters of science and technology and the ensuing position and influence in the public debate.

That a social responsibility exists does not tell us much about how it is to be exercised. This is very varied, as the stories regarding both the Atomic Age and Digital Age show. There are many avenues that are possible and important, in what we have called above scholarship-cum-citizenship, including education (also with respect to the general public and policy makers), research (into impacts and also unintended consequences), application (pushing for beneficial applications and counteracting harmful ones), or knowledge-based contributions to policymaking.

Already a very cursory analysis in the framework of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, as we have carried out in this chapter, reveals that the societal impacts of digital technologies are wide and affect many aspects of society. An important observation here is that many of these are of a society-systemic nature and thus go beyond the individual level of ethics and ethical behavior.

The related social responsibilities are likewise wide and multifaceted and may even seem overwhelming. As an antidote of sorts, there is this call-to-action quote, widely circulating on the Internet and often attributed to Albert Einstein: "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."

Even if this is true, we do well to keep in mind the wise words of Otto Neurath (1921), a founder of the Vienna Circle. They were written in 1921 and became known as Neurath's boat:

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood, the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.

#### Discussion Questions for Students and Their Teachers

#### Learning Resources for Students

A deep interdisciplinary study on how different forms of power emerge from social networks, how this shapes a complex globalization in a—also digitally globally connected world, and the challenges it poses for a democratic politics

3. Rogers, E. M. (2003) Diffusion of Innovations. 5th edn. New York, NY, USA: Simon and Schuster.

The classic book about the social network mechanisms that enable, accelerate, or impede the spread of technological innovations through society; many concepts and terms in common usage today in innovation policies (e.g., early adopter) come from this work.

4. Stanley, S. (2015) How Propaganda Works. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.

A wide-ranging political philosophy work on what propaganda is, how it operates historically as well as today, and how it shapes ideologies that damage liberal democracy and justice.

5. Woolley, S. (2023) Manufacturing Consensus – Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press.

A recent study, based on extensive international ethnographic research, of online and computational propaganda, its deceptive effects, and its manipulative workings, in and through today's digital social media.

#### References

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Digital Transformation Through the Lens of Intersectional Gender Research Challenges and Needs for Action

Claude Draude

Abstract In recent years, digital technology has been discussed both in its potential to promote or to demote gender equity. This field of tension, between empowerment and threat of amplifying inequalities, is explored in this contribution. Moreover, this chapter views digital humanism through the lens of intersectional gender research. After discussing the historic relation between gender and humanism, concepts and terminology of gender research and feminist theory are explained in more detail. Following this, the interaction of gender and technology is illustrated through examples. Finally, the lessons learned part contains suggestions and calls for action important for a more inclusive and equitable digital transformation.

#### 1 Introduction

Western feminism, women's liberation movements, and today's gender equity debates are undeniably linked to the notion of humanism. Although the role of women in society was debated among some of its contemporary thinkers, Enlightenment's guiding narrative of liberty and progress served as an ally for advancing women's rights (Ramazanoğlu & Holland, 2002; Lettow, 2017). Throughout history, including women in the concept of the human and human rights debates nevertheless had to be fought for. One of the most prominent documentations of this is the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen" by Olympe de Gouges dating back to 1791 in France. Among other progressive demands, her manifesto declared women as equals to men and worthy of the same rights. De Gouges requested equality in citizenship status—something the famous document of the French Revolution, the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the [Male] Citizen" from 1789, did not do (Cokely, 2018; Gouges & Fraisse, 2021). Scholars point out that the term man in the latter declaration refers to Western

C. Draude (✉)

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
society's Christian white man, a rather narrow term contradicting the universal character of the declaration (Taylor, 1999).

Hence, incremental for the first wave of feminism was to interrogate critically who the use of the terms man and human in the debates on universal human rights actually included. Consequently, first-wave feminists sought to expand the terminology to include women.1 Prominently, Simone de Beauvoir interrogated the relation between man, woman, and human in the The Second Sex which, first published in 1949 (de Beauvoir, 1949), became later foundational for secondwave feminism. For de Beauvoir, to be considered first and foremost human is liberating for women. The title of the two book volumes points at a central position of her work—women are defined and materialized as the other of man. One of the most quoted sentences of her work is "one is not born, but becomes a woman" (de Beauvoir, 2010, p. 283). This perspective that the category of woman is constructed along sociocultural contexts makes social change possible. Furthermore, solidarity between women because of the shared experience of subjugation is established, and ultimately the case for feminism as humanism is made (Johnson, 1993). Donna Haraway has prominently stated that, even considering their diversity, all modern, Western concepts of feminism are rooted in de Beauvoir's formative sentence (Haraway, 1991).

The relationship between the gender order, feminism, and humanism has never been straightforward, however. Just as the use of man for all humans is problematic in historical retrospection, so is woman as a unifying term and basis for political action. As early as in 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered her powerful speech "Ain'tIa woman?" at the Women's Rights Convention in Ohio. The speech challenged the exclusion of African American men and women in debates about legal rights during and after the US-American Civil War. Moreover, and historically significant, Truth brought together women's issues, the rights of Black women, in particular, and the fight against slavery (Truth, 1851). This challenged social justice movements that focused on either women's rights or racial justice.

Fast forwarding to third (and fourth) wave feminism—the concept of the universal human or woman has been criticized by political activists, artists, and scholars alike. People from diverse backgrounds, Black, Indigenous, and People, notably Women of Color, have brought attention to whose identity and lived experience is included or excluded in political struggles and in academic knowledge production alike (hooks, 1981; Hill Collins, 1990; Combahee River Collective, 2001; Green, 2007). Furthermore, the lack of recognizing other social categories, such as class (Acker, 2006) or disability (McRuer, 2006; Jenks, 2019), in relation to gender has

<sup>1</sup> Feminism as a political mass movement is generally described in three (or four) waves, differing in historical phases, geopolitical locations, participating actors, and political demands. Commonly, the first wave describes the suffragettes, the second wave the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the third wave acknowledges social constructivist perspectives on gender (since the 1980s), while the fourth wave (depending on perspective since the early 2000s or 2012) has been fueled by antifeminist backlash and the emancipatory role of technology and social media (Munro, 2013; Evans & Chamberlain, 2015).

been brought forward by various thinkers as well as the critique on the binary, heteronormative concept of gender itself (Stryker & Blackston, 2022; Muñoz, 1999).

This complicated history, the ambivalent legacy of the Enlightenment for liberation movements, is important to keep in mind when we speak about Digital Humanism today. In the following, the tension between humanism and feminism is made productive; we will explore how feminist theory and gender research can enrich debates on digital humanism. In addition, and as we will see further on, who is accounted for when talking about the human is highly topical in debates on digital transformation and also has concrete impact on development, use, and effects of digital technology.

# 2 Intersectional Gender Research, Feminist Theory, and Digital Technology

#### 2.1 Intersectional Gender Research

Gender studies is an interdisciplinary, broad research field with diverse roots in the social sciences and the humanities. Gender studies' common ground is an analytical approach to how gender as a social category is constructed and unfolds in interaction with societal, cultural, and political contexts. The question of how power is distributed, materialized, and mediated through gender, race, sexuality, class, citizenship, age, and ability is hereby central. To address multiple forms of belonging and to understand how these may result in differing forms of oppression, the concept of intersectionality was coined. Intersectionality is informed by Black, Indigenous, people of color (feminist) scholarship, activism, literature, and art (Lorde, 2001; hooks, 1981; Hill Collins, 1990; Snyder, 2014). Intersectionality interrogates the universal concept of the human (and woman) by asking who is really included and furthermore through examining limits and drawbacks to social categorization. Notably, American legal scholar and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw showed that existing anti-discrimination laws did not work for Black women since the laws did not recognize multiple causes of discrimination. Crenshaw used the image of a traffic intersection to illustrate that social categories, such as gender and race, do not exist separately but rather are interdependent in the way a person is socially positioned (Crenshaw, 1989).

In Sect. 2.3, we will come back to explore how gender and digital technology interact and how useful an intersectional perspective is for understanding the relation between structural inequalities and digital transformation.

#### 2.2 Feminist Theory and Epistemologies

Gender studies is informed by heterogeneous strands of feminist and critical theory. Importantly, feminist and critical race studies have analyzed the history of science demonstrating the failure to include marginalized people and perspectives. These fields demonstrate how scientific knowledge and the dynamics of intersectional gender relations intertwine, and they provide examples of how individuals deemed as the other may suffer harm (Schiebinger, 1989; Gowder, 2015; Zuberi & Silva, 2008).

Marginalized perspectives and people may mean exclusion from scientific inquiry, denial of epistemic authority, production of harmful theories, or stereotyping of the marginalized group or lack of acknowledging structural inequalities that affect the group (cf. Anderson, 2020). Ultimately, this can lead to biased knowledge and artifact production and hinder scientific and product innovation.

Feminist epistemologies allow us to analyze the role intersectional gender conceptions play in our ways of knowing. According to feminist theory, how and through which means knowledge is formed, and what counts as knowledge, is always situated and context-dependent.2 In this regard, situated knowledges is a central concept of feminist epistemologies; it allows one to reflect upon the position from where and by whom knowledge is formed and to acknowledge that all knowledge is partial and forms of knowledge manifold (Haraway, 1988). Two main aspects are noteworthy here. First, the partial perspective questions universal knowledge claims and instead offers what Haraway calls "objectivity as positioned rationality" (ibid., p. 590). Feminist standpoint theory has developed the concept of "strong objectivity" (Harding, 1986, 1992). Sandra Harding questions the proclaimed neutrality of scientific knowledge production and instead introduces reflexivity on the researcher's standpoint to address and counter possible social bias (ibid.). Second, it is this positioning that makes scientific and technological knowledge and artifact production accountable in the first place. In debates on digital humanism, calls for accountability of technology have gained a new urgency. Realizing accountability is indispensable for ethical, legal, and social aspects or implications in information technology (IT) and artificial intelligence (AI) research and development (Larsson et al., 2019).

<sup>2</sup> Tracing the construction of scientific knowledge in specific sociopolitical, cultural, and historic settings has been brought forward by the field of science and technology studies (STS), for example, through Bruno Latour's and Steve Woolgar's molecular biology laboratory studies (1979). Intersectional, postcolonial feminist scholars, however, have criticized the lack of recognizing the role social inequalities, marginalization, and power relations (locally and globally) play in STS, calling for a feminist or postcolonial corrective of the field (Harding, 1998, 2011; Haraway, 1997).

#### 2.3 How Gender and Technology Interact

Today, digital technology impacts all life domains, and therefore we need to take a closer look at what this means for social equity. The relationship between the intersectional gender order and technology is complex and multifaceted. We can identify three main perspectives on how to approach the topic: first, unequal participation in technology research, development, and distribution; second, technology's impact on how gender is shaped, lived, and experienced; and third, how technology itself is gendered, racialized, classed, etc. These perspectives are not independent but impact each other as we will see in the examples provided.

Unequal participation in the technological field is often the first issue that comes to mind when gender and technology are mentioned together. For Western countries and the Global North, gender and BIPOC3 inequality in IT research and development is a persisting challenge (Kapor Center and ASU CGEST, 2018; Charleston et al., 2014; Stoet & Geary, 2018). Also, access to digital technology is unfairly distributed—globally but also reflecting and amplifying social inequalities locally (Goedhart et al., 2019; Choi et al., 2022).

By taking up science and technology studies' (STS) understanding of the co-construction of society and technology (Bijker et al., 1987), feminist scholars have analyzed what this means for the gender order (Wajcman, 2000). Related to the topic of unequal participation, one important strand of work is making marginalized people, perspectives, and experiences visible. For example, the role of Black women scientists in computing has only lately received attention, prominently through the book (and film) Hidden Figures (Lee Shatterly, 2016).4 Furthermore, the manufacturing labor of hardware by people (women) of color under often problematic work conditions that makes digital transformation possible is hidden from users of technology (Nakamura, 2014).

Second, digital products and services in use strongly impact people's well-being. One example are menstrual cycle tracking apps that form a contested zone between gender, politics, healthcare, and the data economy. Noteworthy, menstruation tracking was not implemented in early health monitoring technology.5 Today, there is integration as well as stand-alone apps that could be used to promote research into menstrual health, provide a form of empowerment, and promote agency and

<sup>3</sup> BIPOC is short for Black, Indigenous, and people of color. This self-designation originated in US-American and Canadian activism and is also used to show solidarity between different communities of color.

<sup>4</sup>Hidden Figures tells the stories of Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan, who worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and later at the successor NASA in the USA. Another prominent example were Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman—who, as the original programmers of the first US-American electronic computer, have traditionally been little more than a footnote in the history of the ENIAC (Light, 1999). 5 Apple Health, for example, first launched in 2014 and only implemented menstruation tracking

after facing critique (Eveleth, 2015).

self-determination of a person's health status. On the other hand, self-tracking shapes the experience of menstruation as a process that needs to be monitored and controlled and should meet normalized patterns (Hohmann-Marriott, 2021). In addition, popular apps are built on business models that rely on extracting data, which leads to a lack of privacy, transparency, and possibility of intervening and control of data from the lay user: "To perform their explicit functions, menstrual apps collect massive amounts of highly personal data. This data creates vulnerability; for example, data can reveal nonconforming menstruators (i.e., transgender or with health conditions), or information can be used to flag suspected pregnancy or termination of pregnancy" (ibid.). Depending on the political context, this extraction and exploitation of sensitive health data can be really dangerous and deeply affect people's lives based on their gender, sexual identity, orientation, and choices.<sup>6</sup> Hence, calls for health app development that take sociopolitical context, unequal power relations, and values such as non-discrimination and self-determination into account are important, as are policy regulations (Fox & Epstein, 2020).

The outlined issues reach beyond the given examples. Shoshana Zuboff has prominently stated that the interplay between data-driven digital technology, big corporations, predominant business models, and lack of regulatory power has led to "the age of surveillance capitalism" (Zuboff, 2018).

Third, as we have noted before, questioning the neutrality of technology is central for science and technology studies. Feminist and postcolonial STS scholars have analyzed the role gender, race, age, and class play in technology design and found that services and products can promote inequalities (but could also serve to alleviate them) (Harding, 2011). In the 1990s, studies on domestic technology—such as the microwave oven, vacuum cleaning systems, or washing machines—showed how appliances are informed by gender roles and reinforce the gendered division of labor at home and in manufacturing (Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993; Cockburn & Fürst-Dilić, 1994). Today, smart home technology design should anticipate and counter misuse in the context of domestic abuse and partner violence (Leitão, 2019).

In recent years, worrisome examples have brought broader attention to ethical aspects of IT/AI design—particularly to machine learning technology, a subfield of AI. These data-driven systems can mirror social bias and lead to an amplification of social inequalities, among others, in domains like the job sector, health and social services, and the justice system (Eubanks, 2017; Wachter-Boettcher, 2017). Therefore, current AI systems vividly demonstrate how interwoven society and technology are. In recent years, researchers from technical and social disciplines have increasingly made an effort to address questions of fairness and social justice of AI (Binns, 2018; Mehrabi et al., 2021; Draude et al., 2022). Social bias leading to problematic gendered, racialized, classed effects of technology has been linked to multiple causes: to the quality of the training data, to constraints and limitations in

<sup>6</sup> Notably, in the USA, the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs Wade and the erosion of sexual and reproductive rights led to people deleting their menstrual health apps (Garamvolgyi, 2022).

algorithms and modeling, and to emergent bias through the context of use (Friedman & Nissenbaum, 1996; Draude et al., 2020).<sup>7</sup>

In simplified terms, machine learning technology automatically produces algorithms by training statistical models using existing datasets. As more data becomes available, they may even adapt their behavior. Machine learning systems are utilized to analyze vast amounts of data and predict future outcomes. This also means that these systems can inherit biases from the past datasets they are trained on.8

In a much-noted study, Bolukbasi et al. show how word embeddings may reinforce gender stereotypes.9 Furthermore, the authors provide a methodology on how to remove gender stereotypes while staying true to word meanings and associations (Bolukbasi et al., 2016). If algorithms are trained using datasets that contain in their majority gender-stereotypical attributions and a proximity between terms such as woman and nurse, but man and doctor, the software learns these attributions and reproduces them in the future. For the study, the authors analyzed an artificial neural network trained by Google, which used over 3 million words from Google News articles as its database. The aim was to derive language patterns which can be represented mathematically (as vectors in vector space). Some of the attributions placed as extremes with respect to feminine pronouns are "homemaker, nurse, receptionist, librarian, socialite, hairdresser, nanny, bookkeeper, stylist, housekeeper"; those with respect to male pronouns are "maestro, skipper, protégé, philosopher, captain, architect, financier, warrior, broadcaster, magician" (ibid., p. 4357). Following this, Bolukbasi et al. presented automatically generated analogies between different terms for review to Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdworkers.  Gender stereotypical she-he analogies included "sewing-carpentry, nurse-surgeon, blond-burly, cupcakes-pizza, lovely-brilliant, softball-baseball," etc., while gender appropriate she-he analogies were found in "queen-king, waitress-waiter, sister-brother, motherfather," etc. (ibid., p. 4357).

This example of word embeddings not only shows how technical development can perpetuate discrimination—the study also makes prevalent social bias visible in the first place and offers methods for debiasing. Because gender bias is presented as a mathematical model, mathematical methods can then also be used for alleviating

<sup>7</sup> For an in-depth discussion on bias and the Web, see the chapter by Baeza-Yates and Murgai.

<sup>8</sup> For an excellent introduction to machine learning, see the chapter by Heitzinger and Woltran.

<sup>9</sup> Word embedding is employed in text analysis in natural language processing and natural language generation. To be processable by computers, text must be represented in a numerical format first. Word embedding then allows to map words as real-valued numerical vectors as a conversion in vector space (Jiao & Zhang, 2021).

bias.10 The authors also point toward critique or potential drawbacks of such debiasing methods:

One perspective on bias in word embeddings is that it merely reflects bias in society, and therefore one should attempt to debias society rather than word embeddings. However, by reducing the bias in today's computer systems (or at least not amplifying the bias), which is increasingly reliant on word embeddings, in a small way debiased word embeddings can hopefully contribute to reducing gender bias in society. At the very least, machine learning should not be used to inadvertently amplify these biases, as we have seen can naturally happen. In specific applications, one might argue that gender biases in the embedding (e.g., computer programmer is closer to he) could capture useful statistics and that, in these special cases, the original biased embeddings could be used. However, given the potential risk of having machine learning algorithms that amplify gender stereotypes and discriminations, we recommend that we should err on the side of neutrality and use the debiased embeddings provided here as much as possible. (ibid, p. 4363)

As we have learned above, gender is one possible factor of social inequality. Further categories, such as race, class, disability, age, etc., intersect with gender. Already as a computer science student, Joy Buolamwini found out that facial recognition technology would not recognize her face. The technology, at the time, did not work for Black women—while in contrast, a white mask with no human features did work (Buolamwini, 2016). This shows how technology dehumanizes a person based on skin tone. In her study "Gender Shades," Buolamwini, together with Timnit Gebru, further analyzed commercial facial recognition technology. They found that women with dark skin or non-Western-classified facial features are most often misidentified. However, men with dark skin or non-Western-classified facial features are also more poorly identified than women with light skin (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018). Other studies have shown that visual data used in AI systems perpetuates cultural and ethnic stereotypes (Zou & Schiebinger, 2018).

These examples illustrate how the three perspectives we mentioned at the start of this section intertwine. It comes as no surprise that discriminatory effects of IT/AI have been brought to our attention often through studies done by Black women, people of color, and marginalized groups, in general. Unequal participation in the technical field can mean that problematic effects of digital technology only become noticed after deployment, and technology's impact on our gendered, racialized, classed, etc. realities is becoming ever greater as a result of digital transformation. The rise of AI demonstrates how inequity might become automated and amplified, if no intervening countermeasures are undertaken. In the following concluding part, we sum up our findings and furthermore learn about some strategies and approaches toward more equitable IT/AI design.

<sup>10</sup> Please note that the example provided deals with binary gender only. There is an increasing body of work on gender neutrality and nonbinary gender in word embeddings (e.g., Zhao et al., 2018; Dev et al., 2021).

#### 3 Conclusions

Against the historical background, we have learned that it is important to reflect upon the category of the human and to interrogate who is included and who is not. For a more just and equitable (digital) future—we can turn toward the rich scholarship of critical theory and methodology that centers marginalized perspectives, which allows us to enrich (Digital) Humanism. Elsewhere, we have made the claim that in IT/AI systems development, marginalized perspectives mostly get accounted for when we design for specific user groups, such as the elderly, people in care homes, or people with disabilities (Dankwa & Draude, 2021). A more inclusive digital transformation would mean to always center intersectional, diverse perspectives, people, and contexts and furthermore advance systemic and sociotechnical approaches to IT/AI development.

Returning to the examples from Sect. 2.3, it also would not be enough to counter bias in IT/AI systems through increased data extraction or better mathematical models. Even if we develop facial recognition technology that—from a technical perspective—functions for all people, its use still may heavily impact vulnerable groups. Especially, the heavy reliance on data creates a field of tension for social equity—on the one hand, biased or non-representation in datasets is problematic. Reliable data is needed for making discrimination visible, e.g., as grounds for affirmative action but also for IT/AI development. In many domains, lack of data leads to non-usable, inaccessible, and even dangerous services and products (Criado-Perez, 2019). On the other hand, increased data collection can be highly problematic, depending on the sociopolitical context. Visibility may expose vulnerable people or make them vulnerable in the first place. Categorization runs the risk of solidifying stereotypical assumptions about certain groups of people, and of course, classification systems also have problematic historical backgrounds (Bowker & Star, 1999).

In conclusion, we can sum up steps needed for a more just digital transformation. The first step is awareness that questions of power, inequality, and the affordances of diverse social groups and contexts matter throughout all phases of digital development and later usage. Furthermore, the societal challenges that come with pervasive digital technology can only be met through interdisciplinary exchange; particularly, fields with expertise on discrimination should be worked with. The second step is making the decision to actively design for social good. Various long-standing approaches that foster democratic values, participation, and self-determination in and through IT, such as participatory design (Bødker et al., 2021), value-centered design (Friedman & Hendry, 2019), and socio-technical design (Mumford, 2006), exist. Social justice, however, must first be acknowledged as an important value, actively pursued, and the corresponding expertise must be considered. Design frameworks that have social justice integrated as a core value already are antioppressive design (Smyth & Dimond, 2014) and design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Furthermore, AI technology—automated decision-making, recommendations, filtering, content generation—brings new challenges to fields such as human-computer interaction and information systems design. The third step concerns regulatory practices and policy making, which are incremental in making steps one and two possible as well as socio-technically sustainable (Palmiotto, 2023; European Commission, 2021).

#### Discussion Questions for Students and Their Teachers

Relate the following aspects to digital transformation in your field of research, work, or study.

1. Identity and intersectionality

When you talk about the human, who is considered, and who is not? How could an intersectional perspective broaden your view?

2. Knowledge production and methodology

Can you identify marginalized perspectives? Think about the in/visibility of people, areas of work, and non-human actors.

Do your methods, approaches, and tools need to change to be more inclusive? 3. Power and hierarchies

How do power dynamics materialize in your field, e.g., hierarchies between tech developer and lay user, expert, and non-expert but also structural inequalities in society?

Furthermore, which of the steps outlined in the conclusion (awareness raising, decision to design for social good, policy making) is most needed in your field? Find examples to illustrate your answers!

#### Learning Resources for Students

1. Bardzell, S. (2010) 'Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design', Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 1301–1310.

Bardzell introduces feminist theory and explores its meaning for interaction design. The paper contains examples from industrial design, architecture, and game design.

2. Irani, L., Vertesi, J., Dourish, P., Philip, K. and Grinter, R. E. (2010) 'Postcolonial computing', Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA, ACM, pp. 1311–1320.

This paper brings together human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, and postcolonial thinking to address theory and design issues in so-called designing for development debates in global contexts.

3. Spiel, K. (2021) '"Why Are They All Obsessed with Gender?"— (Non)Binary Navigations through Technological Infrastructures,' Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021. New York, NY, USA, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 478–494.

Excellent study on how gender is encoded in technological infrastructures. The paper explains gender theory and the co-construction of gender, interaction technology, and infrastructures.

4. Draude, C., Klumbyte, G., Lücking, P. and Treusch, P. (2020) 'Situated algorithms: a sociotechnical systemic approach to bias', Online Information Review, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 325–342.

This paper provides a deeper insight into the relation of algorithms, social bias, and sociotechnical systems design. It accounts for social inequalities in systems design through a proposed methodology.

5. Draude, C., Hornung, G. and Klumbytė, G. (2022) 'Mapping Data Justice as a Multidimensional Concept Through Feminist and Legal Perspectives', in Hepp, A., Jarke, J. and Kramp, L. (eds) New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies, Cham, Springer International Publishing, pp. 187–216.

This interdisciplinary paper interrogates data justice through the lenses of feminist and legal studies to reconfigure data justice as a multidimensional, interdisciplinary practice in IT design.

6. Draude, C. and Maaß, S. (2018) 'Making IT work: Integrating Gender Research in Computing Through a Process Model', Conference, Gender & IT: Proceedings: 14.-15.05.2018, Heilbronn. Heilbronn, Germany, 5/14/2018–5/15/2018. New York, New York, The Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, pp. 43–50. Website: www.gerd-model.com

The GERD model is a process model that allows to work with intersectional gender knowledge in IT systems design, development, and research.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Allison Stanger, Carlo Ghezzi, and Dmitri Katz for their time and effort necessary to review this chapter. I sincerely appreciate the valuable suggestions that helped improve the quality of the text.

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Roberts (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of critical menstruation studies: Monitoring menses: Design-based investigations of menstrual tracking applications (pp. 733–750).

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# No Digital Citizens Without Digital Humanism

Enrico Nardelli

Abstract Using a Digital Humanism viewpoint when teaching informatics is the key to face the challenges posed to our society by digital technologies. This is particularly relevant for education in school, where children are going to learn about the basic principles and concepts of the discipline. Considering the potential of digital machines and the advancement of the generative artificial intelligence systems, it is essential that school curricula are aimed at developing the proper attitude toward digital technologies since the early years. This means paying attention to both technical and social elements of the digital systems and preparing teachers for this challenge adequately.

#### 1 Introduction

Contemporary society is undergoing digital transformation, where those industrial machines that have been the most apparent effect of industrial revolution are becoming more and more digital, where production and services are increasingly under the control of fully digital machines, where social and personal relations are ever more mediated by digital infrastructures and devices.

Society is assisting to what we have called "the informatics revolution" (Nardelli, 2022b, p. 40), characterized by a new breed of machines (i.e., computers), radically different from the industrial machines, mere amplifiers of physical capabilities of human beings, challenging the primacy of mankind. Indeed, we use for computerbased systems the term cognitive machines (Nardelli, 2018), since they operate at a level that until now was the exclusive domain of people, while currently, as everybody is clearly seeing with their very recent examples in the form of generative artificial intelligence systems, they are able to produce data from other data with a level of competence, which appears to be at the same level of humans.

E. Nardelli (✉)

Dip. Matematica of Univ. Roma "Tor Vergata" & CINI Lab. "Informatica e Scuola", Roma, Italy

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
As a consequence of the industrial revolution, school curricula changed worldwide and added education in those scientific subjects (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), which now are part of the cultural background of all citizens, allowing them to participate in an informed way to social life and to take part in discussions regarding technological choices with at least a basic comprehension of which are the underlying scientific concepts. It is important to recall that school education on these subjects has focused on fundamental concepts and principles, while training on more operational aspects has been limited to those curricula aiming at entering the workforce right after the school, without continuing with tertiary education.

The same kind of change should happen now, as a consequence of the informatics revolution (Caspersen et al., 2019). However, while some countries all over the world have already started moving in this direction (e.g., United Kingdom has introduced a mandatory curriculum in computing since school year 2014–2015), the focus in the European Union has been limited until very recently on digital skills, that is, the operational level where people is able to use devices and programs without necessarily understanding the underlying scientific principles. Of course, this is an important capability for everybody, but forgetting about scientific education risks incurring in the situation the great Leonardo da Vinci already condemned in his A Treatise on Painting: "Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who drives a ship without using rudder or compass, who never can be certain where the ship is hailing."

However, focusing only on informatics education in school, while necessary, is not all we need. Forgetting to educate children also on how digital systems may affect social and personal relations risks would be a dramatic mistake. As the Digital Humanism manifesto has clearly stated, "Education on computer science/informatics and its societal impact must start as early as possible. Students should learn to combine information-technology skills with awareness of the ethical and societal issues at stake" (DigHum, 2019).

It is therefore highly crucial that students understand since the early years that any choice, since the very first ones regarding which elements to represent and how to represent them to the ones deciding the rules for the processing itself, "is the result of a human decision process and is therefore devoid of the absolute objectivity that too often is associated to algorithmic decision processes" (Nardelli, 2021, p.206).

#### 2 The Challenge: Cognitive Machines

The central point for informatics education in school is the understanding that cognitive machines operate on a purely logical and rational level where they compute data from other data, without any awareness of what they do or any comprehension of what they produce. When computers are used to automate decision processes, the consideration of what it means to be a human being is completely absent. Since in many cases there is not a single best way of making decisions, and even the same act of selecting which elements to base the decision on may affect the outcome, then the identification of the final synthesis among the many conflicting positions requires a full consideration of human nature and therefore the "embodied intelligence of people, not the incorporeal intelligence of cognitive machines" (Nardelli, 2021, p. 205). That is why school education regarding informatics has to run on the two legs of understanding its fundamental scientific principles and being aware of the breadth and width of impact of its technologies. We will see in the next section a European example of this approach, which might be of wider application.