On People, Public Policy, and Technology

by Nick Charney

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My Venn diagram of interests has always put me at the confluence of people, public policy, and technology. Here's some of my latest thinking on all three.

On People

How we experience citizenship is changing. The modern state system -- and its corresponding economies -- are increasingly fluid and unreliable. That said, the trend seems to be towards greater diversification:

• education (e.g. public education system under pressure, proliferation of higher education and vocational pathways)
• culture (e.g. immigration and refugee resettlement)
• employment (e.g. rising precarity, 'gig economy')
• creation of physical goods (e.g. maker spaces, 3d printing)
• interests (e.g. ability to easily connect with peers around even the most niche subjects)
• information (e.g. the Internet, Google,)
• technology (e.g. drones, blockchain)

The trend towards diversification is ostensibly the macro level application of the 'long tail' argument advanced by Chris Anderson in the mid 2000s. This diversification can be positive, negative, or both, depending on your world view (See Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur and/or Clay Shirky's talk on Institutions vs Collaboration). Regardless, the impact of this diversification on our system of government are being felt in numerous ways:

• more ambiguous/tenuous links between education and employment (education)
• increasing public discourse on what constitutes our shared societal values (culture)
• increasing interest in basic annual income (employment)
• significant regulatory gaps (creation of physical goods, technology)
• potential for single issue issue, temporal, and often vociferous interest groups (interests)
• increase in content producers, decline of traditional journalism, 'fake news' (information)

The one notable exception seems to be urbanization, which is concentrating and therefore amplifying all of the above by ensuring that the issues manifest concurrently, in close proximity, and in high volume. The trend towards diversification is problematic for democratic systems (and their major actors) who have traditionally tried to broker compromises in the public interest wherever there are trade-offs.

However views on what is and isn't in the public interest is equally diversified and thus divisive. In other words there is a tension here that isn't necessarily new but is definitely cutting closer to the bone. This is likely part and parcel of the current interest and instinct towards electoral reform, an understanding that the system isn't well suited to represent niche (long tail) interests. An electoral system that doesn't reflect the broader diversification happening elsewhere in society is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with the broader zeitgeist and experience of citizens in all other facets of their lives.

The bottom line, the trend towards diversification is rubbing up against our centralized systems of government and ideas of governance because diversity provokes thought.

On Public Policy

By now we're all familiar with the narratives around the loss of the public service's traditional monopoly over information and the rise of new policy actors / intermediaries. Yes, how we inform, form, and deliver public policy is changing, (as are the policy domains' relative importance to one another), but in reality its probably not as complicated as everyone has been making it out to be.

Sure, information is more broadly accessible and the skill to turn that information into insight or influence is more widespread, however the net result is simple: more actors, armed with more data and information, advancing more arguments. This is in part due to the availability of information and skill but it is also amplified considerably by the increased impetus on things like public engagement and open government. In order to be both engaging and open one must be willing to sift through the cacophony of inputs and competing views and evidence. Truth be told we like to talk circles around this point in government but essentially what we are dealing with her is an increase in competing narratives or what is often referred to as multiple truths. Practically speaking this can lead a number of different things: better awareness of complexity and consequences, multiple viable options, paralysis by analysis, additional public scrutiny, faux outrage, etc. As an aside, we often conflate innovation and technology which puts policy makers on a path that given greater influence to the high tech-elite and privileges the application of technological solutions to problems even when those problems are not necessarily technical in nature but rather are rooted in our complex social and economic systems.

With respect to policy formulation, the co-creation of policy options and delivery options has been widely discussed as a goal -- sometimes with Utopian undertones, e.g. government as platform -- but when you strip it down to its core, co-creation is also about as close to government capture as government can possibly stand. At a minimum, citizens actively shaping a particular policy intervention, and contributing to its development, design, and fulfillment, then ultimately privileging from it as a user, ought to raise concerns. Interestingly many of the instruments and approaches that are currently en vogue in the policy innovation and experimentation ecosystem are built around closing the gap between government and it citizens but -- if my recent experience in program implementation is reflective of the larger ecosystem -- little of the innovation from the design phase (inform/form) actually survives delivery.

Delivery, is a beast unto itself. I've remarked before that it's a blind spot in Canada (See: Is Innovation in Service Delivery a Blind Spot in Canada), that innovation faces asymmetric scrutiny (See: Asymmetric Scrutiny, Superforecasting, and Public Policy), and that we can't rely on old delivery mechanisms to deliver innovative solutions (See: Innovation: Design Process of Street Fight?). Quite simply, standard operating procedures and new are anathema. Moreover, the innovation narrative at the centre is far too disconnected from the implementation reality at the periphery. There's not enough connectivity, there's not enough translation, and there's not a good enough understanding of the practical implications of innovation rhetoric at the coal face of implementation. Finally, we often reduce 'innovation' to 'digital', which leaves a whole lot of potential innovations in delivery out of sight out of mind (See: On Organizing Principles: Service or Delivery).

The bottom line, there's plenty of room for improving policy making (and service delivery) but a lack of consensus on what constitutes improvement.

On Technology

I've always had an interest in technology. I used to call local bulletin board systems with a 300 bps modem. improvements to technology over my life time so far have been incredible. Today technology is absolutely pervasive. Everything is connected. Omni-present sensors have created an internet of things. Data is big. Privacy is dead. And we live in filter bubbles that create echo-chambers than justify our world view and amplify our outrage (and self-righteousness).

Technology was supposed to solve many of our problems but in so doing its created a whole swath of new ones. I often joke that its essentially the wild west out there, but there is a kernel of truth to it as well. There's a lot of people out there who purport to have all the right answers when it comes to technology and technologies of the future. In general, I try not to trust anyone who comes with an answer when they ought to ask a question instead.

The bottom line, I'd rather be a thoughtful critic of technology rather than a blind booster of it.

Heritage Moments Had It Right

by Kent Aitken

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I had high hopes for a long deep dive of a post today, but got caught at a fascinating debate (and post-debate pub debate). So, for today:

In one minute, here's a Canadian innovation from 1980:

They had it right.

1. Understand and consider both old and new approaches.
2. The solution that's easiest for people to implement and maintain is often better.
3. What works beats what shines.

 

Impossible Conversations - To Save Everything, Click Here

by Kent Aitken

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The latest in our series of Public Policy, Political Economy, and Public Administration book discussions was To Save Everything, Click Here: the Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov. Piece by piece, Morozov takes on and highlights the limits and risks of technology-driven solutions: crowdsourcing, analytics, nudges, gamification, Open Government, big data, algorithmic threat detection, advanced sensors and the Internet of Things, tracking and measurement, and digital democracy.

On the other hand, let me paint the book club picture: a handful of our members had just taken Govlab’s Gov 3.0 course, subtitled Solving Public Problems with Technology. Nick has been providing some ongoing support to the cohort through his day job at the IOG and its emerging relationship with the Govlab, and his bio occasionally references his positioning “at the confluence of people, public policy, and technology.” For my part, I have official hackathon-related duties in my day job. Perhaps most tellingly, many of the books that Morozov takes to task are regularly referenced by book club members (some of which Nick specifically covered in his Monday Book Review series).

I think it would be fair to say that many of us have carved out our career competitive advantage in part by understanding and applying technology to government and knowledge work. So, Morozov challenges some very familiar ground, which made for an incredibly interesting read and discussion.

Francis Nolan-Poupart

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As Kent suggests, Morozov’s book fundamentally challenged my assumptions and deeply-held beliefs about the civic tech space. Yes, it’s that good, and if you are a public servant who sings the gospel of Open Government and the like, do yourself a favour and pick up this book.

The author’s self-avowed mission is to diagnose and demolish the twin ideologies of ‘solutionism’ and ‘Internet-centrism’, which he argues are increasingly placing our society’s freedom, and indeed the very things take make us human, at risk.  

First, a few definitions: ‘solutionism’ is the propensity to recast “all complex social situations either as neatly definite problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized”. Think of web platforms that track data on politicians’ attendance at votes or smart apps that track our energy consumption – more later on why those are in fact problematic.

‘Internet-centrism’, for its part, is a set of beliefs according to which the Web has a ‘real’, immutable nature – open, networked, collaborative – and that the principles of this ‘master technology’ should be applied to pretty much all other areas of life.

Morozov’s thesis, in its essence, is that we should quit letting the apparent power of the Web cloud our judgment on how we should ‘solve’ public problems (i.e., everything open, transparent, collaborative, etc.), and instead learn how to engage in narrow, empirically grounded arguments about the individual technologies that compose “the Internet”, in order to understand when they are and are not appropriate (spoiler alert: it’s usually the latter). After laying out this thesis, the book engages in just this kind of narrow analysis –dissecting many of the recent fads in the civic tech space, chapter by chapter, technology by technology. This is the meaty part of the book – the part where my heart sank as I realized just how little I had been thinking through the implications of these technologies as I acted as a gleeful cheerleader for them.

In the open data space, the book highlights how the accuracy of information can be diminished once made transparent because it is repackaged without context, as well as how the re-use of open data can harm individuals by disproportionately casting light on one aspect of their existence (e.g., the fact that they were wrongfully accused of a crime x number of years ago). On algorithmic decision-making, the author argues that customized feeds of information, whether it be the news stories or the books we read and are recommended, can cause us to lose important aspects of civic life such as literature that challenges us and common stories which we debate as a society. And the analysis goes on: as Kent mentioned, it includes the Quantified Self movement, Big Data, smart technologies, gamification, and more…

There are common themes that pop up again and again throughout Morozov’s critiques of these technologies. Many of these point to the causal factors that explain their rise.  Think of humans’ propensity to try and come up with “theories of everything”. Our use of questionable scholarship to justify new ideas – the book explains how the concepts of transaction costs and information cascades, which are iffy to begin with, are consistently misapplied. Particularly important for Morozov here is our misunderstanding of technology: how we place it ‘outside of society’, and how we give it its own logic (“this is what the Internet wants”).  Some of the other themes discussed have more to do with what is at stake. The fact that we need to preserve “moral environments” in society that allow us to debate what is important and what is not. Also present throughout is the fact that solutionist are often trying to fix “problems” that are virtues in disguise. On the application of technology to politics, for example, Morozov urges us to consider how some of these new tools could vacate behaviours we perceive as bad, such as occasional evasiveness and hypocrisy on the part of politicians, when they are in fact the very things that allow for democracy to thrive.

There’s so much I glossed over, just on epochialism, for instance. For now, I will simply reiterate where the main value of the book was for me: making me realize that I fully opted in to these ideologies and that as a result, I was advocating for some pretty dangerous things. Now, on the strength of Morozov’s argument, my own moral environment finds itself a bit shattered… but that’s okay. Time to rebuild it on a stronger foundation.

George Wenzel

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We often find ourselves unwittingly stuck in filter bubbles, where our beliefs are reinforced by what we read and who we talk to. We don’t know this is happening until those beliefs are challenged. That’s essentially what Morozov has done with To Save Everything: Click Here. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his arguments, but they made me rethink some of my assumptions - perhaps the true measure of any non-fiction book.

Kent Aitken

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Now, I find myself having read Francis’s kickoff and wondering what there is to add or debate. I think that’s a wonderful overview of the book, and I’ll just add my voice to one point both he and George make. I said that this book “was written in the language of the internet: that is, trolling.” I legitimately found myself wondering whether Morozov believed everything he was writing, or just having fun with it at times. Or just subscribing to the “What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence” maxim.

Some common themes: claiming victory on a debate with anecdotal evidence, bait-and-switching technological solutions with human-based ones in arguments, and rampant use of the “slippery slope” argument (many arguments rely heavily on “might”, “could”, “it’s conceivable”, etc.; i.e., “Who’s to say X won’t lead to Y”, where Y is bad). For any realm in which people are excited about technology’s role in problem-solving, Morovoz was happy to step up and point to real or imagined problems.

Or at least, suggest that we need to think deeper about moral and ethical issues, or recognize complexities of solutions. The last one being a practically bombproof point (also, easier to say than implement), but invariably good advice.

And yet, I want government types to read this book. As George said, it’s a way to get out of one’s filter bubble (even though I have no doubt I still read it with a bias). And Francis is right in that we need to rethink our priors. I still think that there’s much potential in technology, but it’s in the measured, level-headed application that we’ll actually solve problems, not in cheerleading and undue excitement.

Nick Charney

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Given that I barely made the deadline for review and that – as Kent said – Francis pretty much knocked the review out of the park, I will simply say that I too really enjoyed the book and highly recommend reading it. It gave me pause to think and reflect back on all the choices I’ve made along the way that I never even perceived as choices but rather as inevitabilities. The larger lesson policy makers can take from Morozov’s work, I think, is that the Internet and all that is built up on it doesn’t have a natural state (open) or given end (democratization), and that it is the byproduct of a series of choices people have made along the way.