MORE than 700 Google workers have signed their employer drops Dragonfly, what they call an 鈥渆ffort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance鈥�.
Such workers make companies stick to their publicised ethics and push for more robust ethical standards. Their moves are to be admired, as they help us all.
Advertisement
Other examples include some 4000 Google workers who raised the alarm last year over Project Maven, which offered access to a powerful AI to process drone surveillance and target people for killing. And workers at Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and Accenture called on their companies to stop providing services to government agencies that criminalise migrants, black and poor people.
Firms like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple carry our voices, record our memories and sculpt public attention. But only two kinds of people have a view into the effects of these black boxes 鈥� the complex digital systems that shape our lives.
鈥淭ech workers are coming together and refusing to build 鈥榓lgorithms of oppression鈥欌��
First, marginalised people, such as those living under drone strikes in the Middle East, communities targeted by predictive policing and trans people moving through body scanners, to name but a few. Second, tech workers, who know more from the inside on how the levers work and where companies are taking these technologies.
Google has now promised not to build weapons technologies or produce surveillance in violation of international norms. Tech workers are asking for the right to practise these same ethics, refusing to build what have been called 鈥溾��.
Individuals acting alone have little ethical agency. Only the demands of many thousands can translate an ethical judgement into a democratic reality. And it is resistance in many coordinated forms 鈥� refusal to build, work slowdowns, walkouts 鈥� that holds firms accountable to their proclaimed ethics.
Only through the solidarity between those who build these systems and those marginalised by them, and the broader support of the public, can we take democratic control of the technologies that shape our lives.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭he good fight鈥�
