Legacies of Disruption
Originally at https://notes.shaunagm.net/post/183006225442/legacies-of-disruption
“Many scientists prefer not to think about politics, but the work that scientists do has always had political consequences, from the quiet tragedy of an understudied disease to the undeniable horror of a city destroyed in an instant.
This, too, is the situation of many technologists. We’d like to think our work apolitical, even as the counterexamples pile up: corporations and governments surveilling citizens, black-box algorithms that tell us what news to read and which people to trust, world leaders threatening nuclear war on Twitter.
Why do we shy away from the political nature of our work? What happens when politics can no longer be ignored? The history of the atomic bomb may provide some answers.“