Tech's New Vision: Using Technology to Redress Structural Inequalities

Wednesday - August 16 2023, 22:17 UTC - 1 year ago

Tech workers and industry leaders are advocating for more equitable industry practices, such as resistance to extractive practices and a desire to reduce structural inequalities. Xiaowei Wang, a technologist, author, and organizer based in Oakland, California, has launched a collaborative learning project called Collective Action School to empower tech workers and promote more labor organizing within the industry. Wang moved from China to Somerville, Massachusetts in 1990, and started questioning social norms early on.

For Silicon Valley venture capitalists and founders, any inconvenience big or small is a problem to be solved—even death itself. And a new genre of products and services known as "death tech," intended to help the bereaved and comfort the suffering, shows that the tech industry will try to address literally anything with an app.

Xiaowei Wang, a technologist, author, and organizer based in Oakland, California, finds that disturbing.

"It’s so gross to view people like that—to see situations and natural facts of life like dying as problems," Wang said during lunch and beers on the back patio of an Oakland brewery in late March. To research a forthcoming book on the use of tech in end-of-life care, Wang has trained as a "death doula" and will soon start working at a hospice.

This approach to exploring technology, grounded in its personal and political implications, exemplifies a wider vision for fellow tech workers and the industry at large—a desire that it grant more power and agency to those with diverse backgrounds, become more equitable instead of extractive, and aim to reduce structural inequalities rather than seeking to enrich shareholders.To realize this vision, Wang has launched a collaborative learning project called Collective Action School in which tech workers can begin to confront their own impact on the world. The hope is to promote more labor organizing within the industry and empower workers who may feel intimidated to challenge gigantic corporations.

Wang came to prominence as an editor at Logic magazine, an independent publication created in 2016 amid early Trump-era anxiety and concerns about the growing powers of technology. Dismissing utopian narratives of progress for prescient analysis of tech’s true role in widening inequity and concentrating political power, the founders—who also included Ben Tarnoff, Jim Fingal, Christa Hartsock, and Moira Weigel—vowed to stop having "stupid conversations about important things." (In January, it was relaunched as "the first Black, Asian, and Queer tech magazine," with Wang and J. Khadijah Abdurahman as co-editors.)At our lunch, Wang was joined by three former students who helped run that last session: Derrick Carr, a senior software engineer; Emily Chao, a former trust and safety engineer at Twitter; and Yindi Pei, a UX designer. All shared a desire to create something that could lead to more concrete change than existing corporate employee resource groups, which they say often seem constrained and limited. And while Big Tech may obsess over charismatic founders, Collective Action School runs in a collective fashion. "I enjoy operating under the radar," Wang said.

Wang, who uses the pronoun "they," moved from China to Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1990, at age four. Drawn to science and technology at a young age, they made friends in early online chat rooms and built rockets and studied oceanography at science camps. They also started questioning social norms early on; their mom tells of getting a call from the middle school principal, explaining that Wang had started a petition for a gender-inclusive class dress code.

"The person who did my [Middlesex Community College] double-major—art and technology and humanities—knew me as a long-haired, punk kid who was very angry," Wang told me with a laugh.