Encountering Innovation, Countering Innovation

Text Exploration

In this text, Lilly Irani, associate professor of communication and science studies at UC San Diego, argues that a scholarly study of innovation can’t effectively occur from the outside-in without reinforcing the generally accepted view of innovation as a creation of new technology that will help people advance (along with the accepted views of who the people are that will be advanced, and what advancement means.) She uses three case studies to describe why this accepted view is problematic and shouldn’t be reinforced, and then calls on researchers to diminish the normalized view of innovation. This can be done by studying innovation with people typically trivialized by technology, and working “in solidarity” with them to push against existing views of innovation.

At the core of Irani’s argument is the idea that innovation, as a word and concept, has become so synonymous with and entangled with oppression and political injustices that it is impossible to understand it with any degree of neutrality as anything other than a tool of power.

Her first case study examines the way “technology as good citizenship” has become so implicit in the way local governments engage with it that they don’t question negative implications of technology projects in a community. Cameras in San Diego, ostensibly to be used for supporting open-source hacking projects, became tools for law enforcement, yet politicians did not anticipate or question how these technologies might become used outside of the scope of their intention.

Her second case study describes her own experiences being elevated to an influential role in identifying negative consequences of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk services. She realized that, after ten years, there was little of consequence to show for her work. Simply identifying the problems in a scholarly and evidence-driven manner had no material impact because those impacted by the technology were not afforded equal influence.

Irani’s last case study calls attention to two additional examples of technology intertwined with politics to act as a tool of oppression. In the 1980s, technologists in Brazil attempted to duplicate the Apple computer, yet Apple as a corporate interest was able to argue for policy-driven limitations on these efforts; similarly, in the 2000s, Indian engineering explorations were limited by World Trade Organization policies intended to suppress infringements on intellectual property, supporting the interests of large corporations at the expense of potential benefit to citizens of developing countries. And as far back as the Cold War, governments were controlling access to modern engineering change by literally dumping computers into the ocean, rather than finding ways for them to benefit citizens.

Irani threads these stories together to argue that it is impossible to effectively study innovation without unintentionally affirming that technology offers only positive societal benefits, and so researchers should not try; instead, they should work from an assumption that technology is a form of political and corporate driven oppression, and should research with (and to some extent, for) those oppressed.

Irani writes that it is not for academics to solve the problems highlighted, but yet simultaneously argues for countering innovation as it stands in opposition to justice and liberation. While she makes clear that this countering should “not supersede other forms [of] non-expert, accountable, situated knowledge,” the argument is still made that innovation, if it is anything, is bad. It’s unclear, then, how this work in solidarity “counts” as scholarly research as compared to activism. However, this lack of clarity exemplifies Irani’s argument: there cannot be any form of objectivity in researching innovation, as it has been so perversely intertwined with forms of oppression. Her conclusion is that we should view innovation as a tool of power, and our scholarly work should push against it.