Which “Public”? Whose “Interest”?
The public interest is itself difficult to pin down. But if we look at the kinds of examples written about in books about public interest technology, such as Power to the People, we see a clear pattern.
Simplified SNAP applications
Texting crisis lines
Addressing root causes of homeless
Implicit in the public
It seems to me that it casts a fairly narrow net, limiting the public interest to literally the issues and solutions that few people would oppose.
In seeking to expand our thinking about what it might mean to develop technology in the service of the public interest, I’m going to draw upon the work of Charles Lindblom.
The common denominator
The unobjectionable
A Lindblomian Vision of Democracy
Charles Lindblom used the metaphor of a busy crosswalk to exemplify his vision of democracy. Have you ever wondered how hundreds of people, all with divergent destinations, could navigate such chaos without all running into one another.
Collisions are avoided in the absence of something like air traffic control, because people pick up on subtle cues from their fellow pedestrians. People in a crosswalk aren’t in consensus about who should go where, but instead negotiate a kind of temporary and partial compromise that dissolves as they head their separate ways. Lindblom calls this “mutual adjustment” when it happens in the political world.
More to the point, Lindblom applies this vision of democracy in a classic paper, where he reimagines what the role of a policy analyst could look like, a vision where expertise works in a way that is complementary to the ongoing processes of collective political mutual adjustment. He makes fours proposals.
The place of the analyst
Public Interest → Thoughtful Partisanship
Feasible Solutions → Liberation from Impairments in Thought
Needs of Officials → Assistance to Ordinary Citizens
Recommendations → Tailored for Critical Needs
I think that public interest technology already focuses on assisting ordinary citizens and concretely addressing critical needs. It’s in the first two suggestions where we have a bit of work to do. What would it mean for public interest technologists to focus less on discovering the public interest and more on being thoughtful partisans? What does it mean to liberate citizens from impairments? I want to approach these questions by examining two different approaches to toxic chemical policy.
A Detour to Toxics Policy
The main federal approach to toxic chemical policy is the Toxics Substance Control Act.
TSCA: Searching for (Epistemological) Harmony in the Universe
While it does do a lot of good. It seems locked in a losing battle against tens of thousands of grandfathered chemicals, with new ones constantly arriving.
Actually establishing the risks of a chemical can take decades, and decades longer to establish that it poses an unreasonable risk and then limit or prohibit it in service of the “public interest.” In short:
“Public interest” analysis is wickedly hard
Massachusett’s Toxic Use Reduction Act takes a different tack.
Rather than try to establish a defensible scientific and economic case for limitations or prohibitions, scientists associated with the Toxics Use Reduction Institute literally work with firms to help them utilize green chemical approach and detoxify their workplaces without putting them out of business.
I think TURI accomplishes recommendations for democratic policy analysis in the world of chemical technology.
TURI
Thoughtfully partisan action absent consensus on the public good
Liberation from impaired thinking regarding detoxification
Rather than believe that a consensus position on a toxic chemical can be achieved, TURI scientists act as thoughtful partisans on behalf of a green chemical of the public interest. They do more than simply sniff out a feasible solution to toxic chemical dilemma, they help liberate firms from stale convergences of thought about the supposed incompatibility of business and detoxification.
The Scientific vs. the Self-Guiding Society
I think this is a powerful pivot in the notion of how to do democracy when it comes to science and technology. I want to return for a brief moment to Lindblom’s vision of democracy that he develops throughout his work, especially in his book Inquiry and Change.
Again, the key thing for Lindblom is the process of mutual adjustment between partisans, people between with often very different ideas of the good life and good society, with very different political volitions, with very different things that they wish to “will” into being in the world.
Part of this vision is avoiding the technocratic urge, the idea that the chaos of the world can and should be rationalized. It’s the idea that crosswalk needs someone in a central position to steer and guide the trajectories, a notion that presumes that a set of ideal public trajectories can be discovered and implemented.
“Democratization” → Deliberating?
Even deliberative models of democracy can fall prey to this urge, sometimes seeming to belief that if we connect technocratic steering to a body that does public discussion that we’ve achieved a democratic process.
Limits of “Government by Discussion”
But I think Lindblom would, rightly, disagree. The problem of technocracy isn’t simply its lack of representativeness but that it crowds out the fundamentally decentralized democratic process with an incompatible mindset, with the idea that we can find harmony in the universe, that an indisputable public interest is something that we mere mortals can discover. Instead, we need a different tack:
From search for the public good → Problem solving
The power of examples like TURI is that they exemplify a less technocratic of scientific approach to technology, instead showing the potential for what Lindblom called the “self-guided society,” approaches to politics than help bring new modes of collective action into being. So,…
“The fundamental, lasting, ever-present, long-term requirement for good problem solving is…to create—not to discover, but to create—opportunities for collective action that did not exist before”
“They might believe…in the possibility that they…could find harmony in the universe, each person potentially no longer in conflict with others, the intellect consequently capable of discovering ‘correct’ solutions”
I think a productive future for public interest technology lies in explicitly targeting Lindblom’s first two recommendations for democratic policy analysis, technologies that can undergird thoughtful partisanship and help liberate people from the impairments of thought that can stifle collective action.
Technologies that facilitate and advance disagreement
Technologies to help public sector workers/citizens better grasp and navigate that disagreement
In a sense, an expansion of UX
A public-sector UX project already involves doing these steps. A hypothetical project to improve a government form is a success only insofar as it addresses the divergent needs and volitions of the citizens filling out the form, the front-line workers processing it, the array of workers concerned with reporting, data security, and database management, not to mention the politicians and administrators who need to deliver on political promises. A more expansive notion of public interest technology just means expanding this vision beyond single instances and applying it to public administration more generally.
What exactly might that look like. Let’s look at the problem of housing. The city of Albuquerque, to take one example, has struggled to alter its zoning to address what is clear to nearly everyone to be a housing affordability crisis.
An Example: Housing
These struggles make sense, given how council members and others generally hear back from citizens.
Main Public Feedback
But I think that this is…
Not exactly what democracy looks like
This is what democracy looks like when all the mutual adjustment that could and should have happened never materialized.
How might battles over housing proceed if public administrators, aided by 21st century technologies, had an understanding of the geography of dissent that is as complex and nuanced as the zoning maps that they create. Where are the staunchest opponents? Where are the potential constituents? Where might housing experiments best happen? Where should they best direct their energies in the effort to foster pockets of collective action that (if successful) might free many of us from inherited ideas about the supposed incompatibility of certain forms of housing with one another or the good life and the good society?
No doubt there’s much more that needs dealt with in this vision. There are some partisans who have a disproportionate influence, while others have been chronically excluded. But I hope for a world in which public interest technology empowers public administrators to more productively and democratically work through, or even avoid, the spiral of polarization that condemns many public problems to remaining chronically unsolved.
Comments?
Copy of the talk: https://rpubs.com/profdotson/1340904