Stripping Ideology from Fact Link to heading
Your Computer is on Fire wants to dismantle and replace how social scientists talk about computational systems, social media platforms, digital privacy, and other sociotechnical issues, as well as how we understand their research on these subjects. To allow civil society, government, and corporations to continue avoiding and ignoring social science research is, as Thomas Mullaney states, “simply too dangerous”. The editors of this sixteen-part collection of essays are Thomas Mullaney (Stanford), Mar Hicks (Illinois Institute of Technology), Kavita Philip (University of California, Irvine), and Benjamin Peters (University of Tulsa).
Spanning topics like machine learning, cloud computing, programming language development, labor markets, and others, the essays in this volume aim to serve less as a detailed technical primer and more as a challenge to a significant misconception about each topic. The content is technical and meticulously researched, so it is deliberately educational in that respect; however, each essay pursues its subject with the primary goal of stripping ideology from fact.
The Time for Equivocation Is Over Link to heading
“Too often, we hedge our bets and use formulations like “can be thought of as,” or “is analogous to,” or “is comparable to,” and so forth—formulations that leave readers wondering: Does this author really mean what they say, or are they merely proposing a “way of seeing”? We are in a position to make urgent and reasonable demands of ourselves, our elected officials, and our most decidedly unelected industry leaders whose actions (and inactions) in large part define the lives we lead. The time for equivocation is over.
The introductory essay poignantly sets the tone for the collection. There is no question for Mullaney about the imminent and problematic consequences caused over the last twenty years by advances in computational systems and their haphazard incorporation into society. However, Mullaney appears resigned to the fact that if the input from social scientists fails to gain purchase more with the public, there is not much hope. The main issues he points to are the monopoly corporations have over public narratives regarding technology, its social consequences, and technology regulation, as well as the need for public policy oriented social scientists to better communicate their research to the public.