 Ki ora, ko hori grova toku ingoa, no te fanganu iatara hau, no te waiponamu toku whanu, ko Peritania te iwi, Ngati Pākia. Thanks for coming to this kind of odd sounding talk. It's really about the way people talk about technology and what that means. I'm just going to move over here because I'm going to use my notes a bit as I tend to go off on tangents if I don't and I won't stick to time. So this is a topic that's fascinated me for quite a long time. My undergrad was in communications. I've done marketing for a tech company. I spent three years at Auckland Museum and the digital team and I've been to this conference a few times as well as many others which have got me thinking about the sort of rhetoric around technology. And I recently completed a master of design. The past three months after that I've been at Lightning Lab GovTech which is like an accelerator program that applies lean methodologies and to Nali government problems. So that's kind of where I'm coming from with this talk. So yeah, this presentation is about the stories we tell around technology, but it's less about these kind of specific stories or like the hot takes. It's more kind of about the underlying narratives that form our beliefs and frame how we think about and use tech, specifically in English-speaking Western contexts. This is a ridiculous huge topic for 25 minutes and what I'm actually presenting is really a bastardised version of like a small section of my master's thesis which was all about critiquing and creating narratives around emerging technologies. And it's been quite a hard exercise cutting it down so I hope it makes sense and I'll try to leave some time for questions at the end for anything I didn't explain so well. So I'm going to start by looking at the dominant Silicon Valley story of technology and why that matters and how that's really starting to fall apart. And then I'm kind of going to be finishing by really asking you some questions as well about what this might mean for the glam sector. Also during this talk when I say technology or tech, I'm really talking about emerging digital technologies and how they integrate both into older tech and our life. So kind of all the stuff up here. So why are we looking at the Silicon Valley story? This is a quote from Dr Jesper Winston Shaw who's a great communications researcher from here in New Zealand. And it's important that we look at these dominant stories because understanding these narratives is key to helping create the conditions for people to see a new or maybe less dominant story. So what is the Silicon Valley story? Acknowledging there are lots of other ways to think about tech. I'm looking there because it's the physical or at least the ideological home of the people who make, fund and design dominant technology platforms. So and you'll probably all recognise this and you'll see it and you'll know that there's stuff wrong with it. But in the Silicon Valley story technological progress is inevitable, natural, apolitical and most of all it's good. Technology is seen as a value-neutral tool yet somewhat paradoxically, as Mark Zuckerberg once said, a force for good in democracy. The people who design and make technology have no ethical responsibilities for how it's used. They're simply codifying the existing world into an instrument or tool. Negative consequences such as job losses, unnecessary and temporary side effects of disruption and technology will of course solve all these problems in the steps toward a better world. And this is really exemplified in the singularity movement so the belief there is that there's this need to accelerate technological disruption and progress to the point where humans become kind of integrated with AI like the singularity creating these super-intelligent, near-immortal beings. And this is kind of the central character in this story, the anthropos, the ultimate self-creator who can use technology to solve all the world's problems. Now many commentators have described singularity as having kind of a theological hold on technology creators in Silicon Valley. Like there's this underlying belief that the world is knowable, that everything can be computed and made into an algorithm. And this quite like theological framing is echoed by others who argue that even outside of singularity thinking there's like this widely held faith that technology, tech companies and computation will solve all the world's problems. And these beliefs kind of form a cohesive narrative. Tech is a solution to all our problems because any tech tools and solutions are inherently neutral. Everything can be computed, so represented as numbers, algorithms, code. Which means that number one, technology is a solution to all our problems. You can kind of put it in a loop that just goes round like this and it kind of keeps, it becomes a coherent narrative. And Barrison Store describes that when you have a narrative like this it's difficult to dispute by pulling it apart because I quote, it's easier to reject a single piece of data than to change the entire story. New stories then are a necessary tool. So I'm going to focus on how the story is really crumbled. Specifically this part, tech is neutral because this is what really changed in 2016 and it shows how the Silicon Valley story is used and why the frames we have and the way we talk about tech really matters. Specifically there's this myth of platform neutrality, right? Platforms being social network or tech infrastructure. And this means that problems with technology are problems with the use and abuse of technology, not the platform itself. So if you ask a tech company to deal with issues like fake news, addictive services, hate speech, the response was well we're just a neutral platform, it's not up to us to control people or police what they say on our platforms. That would be of course restrictive freedom of speech, another great kind of American and Western ideal. Now these two events really put a dent in any idea that technology was neutral. It made that story really hard to believe. I'm not going to go into details because it's quite a well hold story like who's seen the great hack on Netflix. Yeah so quite a few people and I'm sure you've read articles about what's happened here. So basically many people came to blame Facebook and Cambridge Analytica for enabling and allowing undemocratic or manipulative actions through things like hyper targeted advertising and mining the data of their users. And obviously it wasn't just Facebook that single-handedly caused Brexit or got Trump elected. There's nationalism, populism has been on the rise due to a whole raft of things happening. But it's significant because what we saw is this kind of hands-off, it's not our fault, neutral approach of tech companies really just backfired on them. And now all these companies are kind of implicated in this worldwide undermining of democracy. So the world is flawed and fairly or not tech titans are increasingly being blamed. Tech giants and their technologies have been increasingly pulled into the middle of these highly politicised debates and all these perceptions of neutrality have just fallen down, crumbled. And that's quite a significant shift in that dominant narrative. And it's coming from all sides of political debate. This is a Republican senator. So are these platforms instruments of freedom or of control? Are they some kind of ideological weapon? And in the past few years we've seen so much criticism. We've seen inquiries from governments, citizens and the media from the European GDPR, the privacy legislation, to the likes of the Christchurch call. So, if Gini Morosnov kind of sums this up quite well, he says of all the myths that solidified American hegemony of the past three decades, the myth of technology proved the most potent. Missing if we'll stop there. Technology is a natural neutral force that can erase power and balances between countries. He goes on to say technology was not something that could be tinkered with or redirected. You could only adapt to it, just like you would adapt to the market. So this is probably an obvious statement for a lot of you here today. I know the sector is very well aware of these arguments. But we're seeing this become more obvious in sort of popular media and discussion about technology. There's this growing recognition that it matters who designs, owns, uses and tells these dominant stories about tech. And it really problematises this kind of neat loop. Like if you change this tech being political, you then start to ask other questions, things like the bias that you put in when you use deep learning all emerge. Who is technology the solution for in any given instance? And we're even seeing these questions being asked more publicly in Silicon Valley with Google and Amazon employees going on strikes based on they don't agree with the politics of what their companies are doing. And when something is this political, it's harder to have a single dominant frame for thinking. Obviously there are still big paradigm trends, but what we're seeing really is that there's no single story that can explain anything. No AI can compute everything. No tech company or nation state can control everything. So what happens when we think about tech and its political implications? This is a political compass tool. I don't know if anyone's done the online quiz and you can do some. It tells you where you sit on this quadrant, these two scales. And this was done by Venkatesh Rao. So he says technologies and media, media have messages. Large scale multiplayer social technologies have political and ideological messages. And this is just his perspective. I think it's interesting that you can look at these and you might think, well, where does IOT fit? And we saw this morning with Whare Hoare that it can be down there in that kind of libertarian left, do-it-yourself space. But also when we think about Internet of Things in terms of surveillance, then it can be up here, more in that top right corner. So I think these kind of formats, this quadrant format, is an interesting way of talking about where do things fit and where does our technology fit in this. And you can change those axes to be really anything you want. So what I'm about to show you next is a much more extreme, bazaar version of these quadrants. Hopefully you can read it at the back because it was quite interesting. Can you read that much at the back or should I read some stuff out? OK, I'll read a little bit out. So basically this quadrant is on the top it's got hyperhuman, then it's got unhuman. On these, the sexes, it's got acceleration and de-exhilaration. And up in hyperhuman, we have things like, so in hyperhuman and de-exhilaration, there's things like hypercommodified cocaine, capitalism. We move over this way, cybernetic sex slime transcendence. Down here we've got 100% urbanisation, some city AI topocracy. I don't even know how these words mean, like someone's obviously put a lot of thought into this and it reads a bit like a sci-fi, different plots of sci-fi books. And this was found through an artist called Joshua Centarella who writes about these kind of really detailed memes as part of his work. And the format is called 16 Futures. This is another one. And I'm showing you these partially because they're just really intense and interesting, but also because they show on one level this fragmentation of different futures in the dramatically different roles technology could play in those futures. So crypto, capitalist, pirate, vulcanisation. I really don't get a lot of it, but I think it's fascinating that someone sort of go on to do this. Down in the bottom here, we've got three... Oh, I can't even say that word. Transhumanism, Mormon Transhumanist Association. So it just shows all these extremes. And by playing with these extremities of time and of technology, what these coordinates really show is that choices about technology aren't just political, they're cosmological, they reflect beliefs about how the world works and what are places within the world and also where technology fits in. Because currently, technology is the ground. This is a quote from Yokohua who's a Chinese computer science and philosopher who argues that the problem today is that technology has become the ground of cultural development. So is it possible to resituate technology in the broader reality? He also says technology is not anthropologically universal. It is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there's no one single technology but rather multiple cosmotechnics. So what he means here is that our view of technology depends on the cosmology that we're in. You know, knowledge, beliefs, our interpretations, the practices of the society or our culture, how we think the world works, how we think the universe works. And his word, cosmotechnics, he describes as, quote, the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities. So bringing some ethics and morality into the technology and by technical activities he doesn't just mean the tech I've been talking about so far but a much broader definition. He includes like craft making and art making. So this capital T technology can become many technologies. We have to really refuse this capital T tech and start to think about not only politically different technologies but what might cosmologically different technologies look like which is really usually hard to say the least, especially from one place in the world. And Yokuhi does say that this is something that's going to take generations but we also know and has been mentioned there are already so many different knowledges in our world today. So there's places we can listen and learn, work alongside, speak nearby as Deb said this morning or maybe, and I speak especially as like a settler, can we just get out of the way and work to dismantle and disprove these dominant narratives and these dominant beliefs to make way for other beliefs and other cosmotechnics to come through. And I think we saw a really beautiful example of this kind of mahi yesterday working with cosmological differences and the presentation from MCA about working with John Maungill. I'm not sure I said that right. Because let's imagine what if we were to make some kind of anthology of news stories about new technologies. Many anthologies made by different people. What would these show about how technologies might fit into our lives, not just the ground and not just in terms of function or how they're used but what do they mean like morally or ethically? What's behind them? So let's say maybe each of these are a kind of fable or etiological stories that explain why things are the way they are. Now no single one of these stories would explain how everything works because as we've seen that's impossible and problematic. But with these fables, with these stories if we were to read them as a collection, reading many collections you'd get a sense of how people think the world works and how we situated technology within our world where we thought it fits. So in the year 2200 there might be some kind of library and whose digitisation was so good that it survived climate change, the archivist did a great job and it has a copy of these stories and maybe the cybernetics sixth slime we saw before can take its offspring to this library and read those stories to get a sense of the perceived wisdom of our time of the early 21st century. So what were the switches and thinkings? What were the lessons that we learnt? What were the sort of our changes in mind and beliefs? What are the morals of our technology stories? So back to 2019, nip of that, what are we learning today and what stories might GlamTech contribute to such an anthology? I'm not trying to say that Glam can save the world through telling stories. It's a job for many areas, many people but the sector has a lot to offer and this is really an open question to you all. I have a few hypotheses about how GlamTech is different and has a lot to offer. I also want to note at this point now we're kind of well away from my thesis research and more into just, yeah, hypothesising based on experience in other readings and thinking about what's happened here today. So I think Glam's really the... people here are really thoughtful and tactical about how we use technology. It gets really placed in context. Like I remember when I first started working at Auckland Museum, and Nils was in my team and he said it was like some sort of meeting. He's like, oh, actually you don't need to use technology in this space. And that kind of was like, what? But with a digital team, we have to say use technology because I'd come from the tech company and the whole basis of its existence is technology is the solution. You've got to use technology. And I think the sector's really like kind of wise in that regard. And museums, of course, know all about telling stories and the importance of who tells them, the methods used. The long-term thinking and the timeframes of the sector are really interesting as well. Like other sectors might have to think about quarters or the next three years of the election cycle or however long you've got left. Whereas here there's people thinking about, oh, 150 years in the past, like how are we going to keep archives safe into forever? There's just this scope of time that's quite different. And also the sector is kind of already merging, I guess, physical and digital matter. Like the sector already thinks about the material world. You know, like that's the bread and butter. And we're kind of surrounded by material objects in our workplaces. We think about what it means to move between digital and physical matter, both in terms of back-of-house digitisation efforts and online sharing and even in-gallery digital experiences. We're thinking about how things relate. And I know other sectors do these things in different parts. But I just really think the sector is really wise and a lot of the thinking about tech. So, yeah, I guess I reckon you should all share your wisdom outside the sector a lot more. Maybe you already do this. But maybe go to a conference or go to a meet-up and tell people about your projects, because they're really fascinating and I think show some different ways of thinking about how technology can work. So, I just want to finish quickly. I tried to make a kind of 16 futures for Glam Quadrant. Because I was going to make memes about, like, this conference and some of the thinking that was going on. But it felt kind of hard and it wasn't really that valuable. It wasn't adding. But I did try to kind of extrapolate some thinking into the 16 futures format. I realised you won't be able to read this at the back. And while I sort of show that up, I'll just maybe add a few caveats. This isn't like the cosmologically different future formats that we saw before. It's severely limited by my own worldview and imagination. And I found it really hard to think, well, what should the ends of the scale be? Was it better off being distributed and localised, accessible, inaccessible? What would be interesting would be to put, like, post-human at one end and human at the other, kind of like those other ones before did. And the other point I want to make with these is, or even plotting things or maybe just a simpler quadrant with just four different things. It's less about saying, no, we have to do this thing up here than saying, what's the mix of the different things we're doing and how can we kind of fit those along some sort of quadrant maybe? It's just kind of a tool for thinking with, rather than saying, this is right and that is wrong. And the other thing that I found hard was thinking of truly futuristic low-tech scenarios. Like, I found myself automatically associating high-tech with the future and I think that actually really reflects in a sense just how hard it can be to get away from these really pervasive ideas and beliefs about what technology should do. So I think it's a matter of thinking when you're making decisions or even doing exercises like this can help reveal, like, what are your deep-set beliefs lodged in the back of your head? Has that Silicon Valley story kind of snuck in? And is that influencing your thinking in some way? So I know this can feel like a really indulgent exercise, but it's kind of fun. And you can begin to see what your beliefs are, where the gaps are in your beliefs. Yeah, so I guess that's it. I'm going to try and end with a few questions, but just a few final points. Shout-out to Taina Hurtser, Sarah Powell, and Adam Moriarty, who all gave me some really helpful feedback and encouragement at various points of this presentation. My references are really unhelpful looks that you can't click from there, particularly on Twitter or through the Slack that Taina set up, Glam Folk. I'll be on there. I've got a longer explanation of that Silicon Valley stuff in my thesis. It's not too dense. Yeah, and that's really it. And if anyone was interested in, like, adding to this or contributing or making your own or, like, co-creating something, I think it could be a really interesting activity. Yeah, some of it, for instance, is Glam's knowledge-collecting cyborg species. Like, I was thinking about the CSI book of Kawa Talk and, you know, mixing that, using digital technology while you're looking at nature, or what if we were just to cyborg that scientist-glam thing? So, yeah, there's heaps of ways you can sort of just push stuff to the edge, which is kind of fine and reveals what you think. So, yeah, and share your wisdom. Share your Glam tech stories. Thanks, that's it. All the time for questions. Questions? Yeah. Any questions or suggestions? Got a couple of minutes. Thanks, that was a really great talk. There's a lot to think about. Really enjoyable. I wondered if you'd considered kind of going the other way. You were talking about going outwards. You know, and I'm thinking about technologies and I was thinking about one of the previous, one of those quadrants, and around things like face recognition. And, you know, we're starting to use that to kind of like democratise what's used currently in quite a creepy way. Yeah. And I wondered if you kind of touched on that stuff, going the other way, taking it back rather than it becoming monopolised by the creepy stuff. Yeah, I mean, yeah, and that's a great topic. And I think that's a great comment. And, yeah, I was trying to, I think it's something in here. You can see I've got a box up there and maybe that's kind of where that would fit and that blank box about something positive and high-check and a good use of that. And what does that look like? Like, I don't know the answer, but I guess that the opposite end I've got monetised collections on demand with armoured drone delivery. So, like... And again, I'm just randomly pulling in political stuff here. But, yeah, that's a great point. I think it's interesting because what would that be? Yeah, this is... I don't know, but it's a good question to be asking. And I did maybe... Is anyone else... I did start thinking a little bit about what... How might you kind of map things you're doing on maybe less dramatic quadrants? And what gaps would that expose? Who do you need to talk to? To, like, fill those gaps or push your thinking in a different direction? Where is your current thinking of tech sitting on these things? It doesn't even have to be about technology. Just... And again, it's kind of saying it's a continuum, not a binary, kind of like Anasuya and Adelaide were talking about yesterday. Yeah, so there's lots of different ways, but... Yeah, any... I think we have run out of time now. Thank you very much. Holiday was awesome. Thank you. Thanks.