- Hi.
This is also a note, which you'll probably be really
glad to hear since it is late in the day.
I wanna talk about inequality and HCI.
This is work I have done with my colleague, Hamid Ekbia,
at Indiana University.
There's a lot of ways of thinking about what
inequality looks like.
I picked out of many examples one representation
that I happen to really like.
This is a graph showing,
in that almost flat line on the bottom there,
wages since 2008, since sort of the crash,
and how they haven't really gone up.
If you look at the Dow Index and profits,
the wiggly lines, they are continuing to ascend.
This white space between these two,
is continuing to increase.
I think this explains a lot about what's happening
in our current presidential politics.
This is not going away, so this is a continuing condition
in which we are living.
I was, actually, kind of surprised a few years ago
when Thomas Piketty published his book,
"Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
and how we started, finally, having discussions
about inequality and growing disparities in the
United States and Europe, in particular,
in the mainstream media.
This has not gone away,
and I think this is a positive development.
I think it's something that we can pick up on here
in our community.
Income inequality is connected to many, many other problems.
In the U.S., not only do 40 million people,
in the richest country in history,
live under the poverty line,
but 2 million of them are incarcerated.
Our infrastructure is crumbling.
Students end up with crushing debt.
The thing, I think, that concerns me the most,
is that as wealth becomes concentrated in the hands
of a few, it becomes really, really difficult for us
to enact the kinds of things we heard in the other talks
where we can meaningful civil action.
So, if you look at what's actually happening
in local communities,
it's hard to stop practices like fracking.
It's hard to stop development on sensitive lands.
Courts are increasingly returning anti-union decisions.
So, this income inequality is not just about having
a bunch of poor people around, it's about disempowering
everybody who doesn't have a great deal of wealth.
Now, I think the problems are a little bit different
in Europe, and I asked a couple of my Swedish colleagues
if they could kind of generate this list for me,
'cause I didn't wanna do it myself since I'm not there.
Here's the list they sent back to me.
The things that Europeans worry about are,
now this is from a Swedish perspective,
refugees and immigration, terrorism, feelings of
insecurity, instability, the feeling that there's
unmanageable change happening, very high youth unemployment
in some countries, economic crises that are quite severe
in places like Greece and Portugal.
I was amazed that they sent back this quote about
beggars and child gangs.
They said, "In Sweden, we have a large number of Romanian
and Bulgarian beggars, EU Migrants, outside of
each grocery store, as well as elsewhere in the subway,
and so on, as well as North African, Alegeria, Morocco
gangs of street children living outside of society and
roaming central Stockholm and Gothenburg."
There's this sense that there's a change in the texture
of our daily lives.
I believe a lot of this has to do with this increasing
disparity of incomes.
Now, what does this have to do with HCI?
Here's some questions I think we could ask from a
political economy perspective.
Which class benefits from a technology?
We have critical studies.
We have feminist perspectives, and they're pretty
close to what I'm talking about,
but they don't really emphasize social class
as a key construct.
There's plenty of theory that does this,
so I'd like to see us, I know we already feel like
we're doing everything and the kitchen sink in HCI,
but I'm gonna suggest that we continue to go in
that direction, because we are kind of forming this
really new discipline.
It is informed by a lot of perspectives.
Technology underlies everything now.
So, I think we do need to bring in theories of social class,
and try to understand how they fit with design
and with technology.
I think there are a lot of research areas, topical areas,
we just haven't taken up.
Like I haven't really seen many studies of labor unions.
They're really, really important.
Of course, some people are doing this,
but it's kind of an underground sort of thing.
I don't see a lot of studies in our community
of the working poor.
What kinds of technologies would benefit them?
What kinds of economic arrangements for technologies
would benefit them?
I'd like to see research on alternative forms of capitalism,
assuming capitalism isn't going away any time soon.
The sort of "winner take all" capitalism that we have now,
is not necessarily the only version of capitalism
that we could have.
Why don't we look more at worker cooperatives at
benefits corporations?
I love these things as potentials because
the legal apparatus is already in place,
we have the theory, we have even some practice.
We could elevate these things and think about
designing technologies for these kinds of institutions
that do, I think, address some of the problems
in equality.
I think we should start to study distribution
as well as production.
We tend to focus on production, which is natural
because we're in a sort of engineering discipline,
but distribution is really important, as well.
Our current political economy tends to
distribute consumption, but hoards production.
We are, I think, really doing some interesting things
in this area in terms of recapturing production.
The whole Maker Movement, the whole DIY Movement
is about bringing production back to us.
How far we can go with this in terms of, sort of,
breaking the mediation with corporate entities,
I don't know.
But I think it's really interesting that
this community, in particular, is really looking at that.
That has to do with stuff.
I think food is also important.
There were a couple of really good sessions on food
at Chi this year and I was really excited
to see that.
I had a paper with some of my colleagues on
forms of alternative agriculture.
This is, let's produce our own food and think about,
how to not only distribute it more equitably,
but how to get the production back into our own hands.
Here's just a picture of polyculture in a community garden
in Urbana, Illinois.
Turns out that when you start, kind of, digging into
the food world, there's a lot of really interesting things
going on, and I would love to see Chi
take up these problems
even more than we have.
We can recover autonomy of food production
if we put our minds to it.
I think there's some interesting technologies
that are needed.
We're really working, I think, on recovering autonomy
of production of everyday goods.
Samantha McDonald, who's going to be a new graduate
student in my department at UCI,
has looked at how algae, hemp, compost,
and recycled plastics can be used to create
the filament for 3D printing.
This really pretty exciting, 'cause this is stuff
we can actually get our hands on.
I have a bunch of compost right at my house.
So, if I had a way to actually introduce this into
3D printing, I could recover at least some autonomy
of production of my everyday goods.
How am I doing on time?
I'm good?
I'm not, I'm out.
Okay, well there's a whole bunch of cool things
we could study and they're all in the paper.
Here are some of them.
(hearty laughter)
I wanna say one more thing.
Sometimes people find that idea of studying inequality
and all of these things I've just been talking about
as quite upsetting and marginalizing,
and this is gonna be my last slide,
but there is a wonderful paper that will provide
excellent therapy for you that I want to recommend.
It's by Bran Knowles and Elina Eriksson and it's called
"Deviant and guild-ridden:
Computing within psychological limit."
So, they've been thinking about some of these issues
as they have been studying, kind of, the radical
end of sustainability for a long time.
Okay, thank you.
(audience applause)
- [Facilitator] Time for one question.
- [Gene] Hi, thank you for this.
Gene Hardy, University of Michigan.
A lot of what you're talking about
with political economy kind of reminds me of the work
that David Hendry and some of his students at
University of Washington have been doing around
mobile devices and the homeless youth,
so how do you see connecting, kind of, political economy
and taking out of places like feministic CI and
value-sensitive design and kind of moving it forward
and centering it on class?
- Well, I think we need to become more cognizant
of the theories of social class that are already there.
I think most of us are, actually, a little bit on the
naive end about the theorizing that has been done.
I think the first thing is to just understand the theories.
Then, start to think about them and bring them into
our design practice.
I mean, it's a pretty commonsensical way to go about it.
But I think we've been sort of bracketing off social class
as something that we look at, and if we start to
bring it in, things like homelessness actually look
quite different.
So, that's the kind of movement that I'm hoping that
we will see.
- [Gene] Awesome, thank you.
- Yeah, thank you.
- [Facilitator] Yeah, I'm afraid I think that we're
out of time.
Let's (computer clanking on microphone) Bonnie.
(audience applause)