Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

It is a shift with two main stages. The first is to acknowledge that technology’s shape, direction and impact are not preordained. Of course, technology builds on what has come before – new innovations layer and combine with those of earlier generations. But its path is not set. We are the ones who decide what we want from the tools we build. This is shown most clearly in the divergent ways technologies are used by different societies. Consider DDT, which was very helpful at killing mosquitos and slowing the spread of malaria, but also polluted food chains around the world. DDT was banned in the United States and United Kingdom. Yet for decades it was allowed in India, where preventing malaria was a priority – and so ecological damage was deemed an acceptable downside. Gig work tells a similar tale: in the UK, a rich country with a well-established formal labour market, gig-working platforms may be seen to unacceptably undermine workers’ rights and protections. In India or Nigeria, the same technologies may bring benefits, as these countries have a more informal work market based on day labour. In other words, it is our choices and our circumstances that determine how technology is actually used. As the historian Melvin Kranzberg put it: ‘The point is that the same technology can answer questions differently, depending on the context into which it is introduced and the problem it is designed to solve.’