Thread by @allafarce

I find I often hear two equally counterproductive arguments about technology's role with regard to complex social problems.

1. Tech can simply *solve* the problem

2. Tech isn't the point at all, and it's all [politics/culture change/some other "same as it's been" problem]

The reason these are equally counterproductive to me is that they're both equally reductive; they both simplify what we know to be hard, complex, never-fully-knowable-or-controllable problems to a singular root.

I find the conversations become much more fruitful when a different question is asked:

"Where inside the problem can inserting some technology (not present now) change the dynamics of that problem dramatically?"

AKA, where are there points of leverage for technology?

For example: if you see as a systems constraint that "the people who design services don't build them based on actual users' experiences"

...then injecting user testing with actual *videos* of people using it is something that is the insertion of tech, but in a power problem.

In Piven and Cloward's classic strategy to run a mass welfare enrollment campaign detailed in "The Weight of the Poor" they sought to get lots of eligible people to apply for benefits.

Tech (AdWords) can make that per-user cost ~$5.

That's leverage.

thenation.com/article/weight…

I know a tech co whose user base is ~1/4 of all enrollees in a public program.

That kind of aggregation was not cost-effectively possible before maybe the last 10 years.

Aggregating people who can take action is a *profound* lever for change.

Using APIs that became commodity-cheap in the last 10 years I can build a call center that scales arbitrarily, and which can layer *on top* of existing call centers.

When you can build tech layers that give users the "hacks" that only 1 in 1,000 figure out now, that's leverage.

Things like Glassdoor and Zillow have removed information asymmetries between individuals and orgs by using feedback loops newly available because of underlying technology shifts.

That's leverage.

(@kevinakwok calls the mechanism "data content loops")
kwokchain.com/2019/04/09/mak…

@kevinakwok The higher-order abstraction here is systems theory / complex adaptive systems.

Donella Meadows' "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" is really the best primer you can have on this.
donellameadows.org/archives/lever…

@kevinakwok So when I hear either derision of technology as a point of leverage, *or* blind worship of technology as a solution "res ipsa loquitur" (speaking for itself), it strikes me that either vantage point is incomplete.

@kevinakwok In the former case ("the tech doesn't really matter") I think there's a defeatism that the power dynamics of the system are not changeable. I believe history shows that these can change often suddenly.

In the latter ("tech will solve it") is really a severe lack of strategy.

@kevinakwok Another example that may be illustrative:

The policy wonk/think tank world operates by analyzing data to generate shared views of the world, and assessments of policy choices.

But data is often held inside govt.

Tech that generates novel data *outside* govt can be... big.

@kevinakwok Intuit — again towards ends I don't like and which I think are bad for society — exploited the fact that SEO/SEM was absolutely not a part of its regulatory agreement with the IRS.

Clearly tech was not a minor detail here.

propublica.org/article/turbot…

@kevinakwok Aside, there's a whole meta side to this that part of complex adaptive systems is the ideas and ideologies around them, and so changing how people construe them can change them.

That's a screed for another day but leads to a useful heuristic: "who benefits from my believing X?"