From Pessimism to Promise, page 1
From Pessimism to Promise
From Pessimism to Promise
Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech
Payal Arora
Foreword by Charles Hayes
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence systems or reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arora, Payal, author.
Title: From pessimism to promise : lessons from the global South on designing inclusive tech / Payal Arora ; foreword by Charles Hayes.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023050640 (print) | LCCN 2023050641 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262049306 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780262380133 (epub) | ISBN 9780262380126 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Internet users—Developing countries. | Internet—Social aspects—Developing countries. | Multiculturalism.
Classification: LCC HM851 .A7439 2024 (print) | LCC HM851 (ebook) | DDC 004.67/809724—dc23/eng/20240213
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023050640
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023050641
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d_r0
To my parents
Rachna and Ranjiv Arora
Contents
Foreword
Charles Hayes
Introduction
1 AI for Good, Bad, and Ugly
2 Algorithms of Aspiration
3 Digital Desire
4 Surveillance of Care
5 Green Design
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Charles Hayes
I have spent the past thirty years making a living by creatively solving other people’s problems. I have had the privilege of reimagining how people work, play, learn, and love. My work has taken me to baseball stadiums in the United States, online dating apps in China, schools in Latin America, and farms in Southeast Asia. In my role as managing director of Asia and global partner at IDEO, I’m constantly trying to make sense of the world around me and connect with others who can shine a light on what the future might bring. Payal Arora is at the top of my list when it comes to making sense of how to navigate many of these potential futures.
Payal and I spent the pandemic years debating and discussing where the world is heading and how we might do our part to shape it. Payal’s critical eye and tuned sensibilities have made an extraordinary contribution to my own worldview and given me courage to solve new problems with new perspectives. Her book The Next Billion Users and its related TED talk not only reinforced all that I had learned from working and living in China for fifteen years but also helped to guide me in my more recent work across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. This book is the necessary companion to the rigorous research and experience shared in The Next Billion Users and is for anyone interested in discovering why the Global South could shape our collective future in ways that could benefit us all.
One of the main challenges I encounter in conversations with Western executives leading global companies is the set of assumptions they make about markets in the Global South. Some see these markets strictly as sources of disproportionate growth given their scale and emerging middle class. Even more alarming are those executives who are waiting for these markets to “catch up” to the sophistication of the Western consumer. Rarer, though, is the executive who has realized the powerful contribution that the Global South can make to their innovation pipeline, their global purpose, or their expanded and pluralistic worldview, and almost absent are those leaders who know how to build thriving businesses that fully realize the market’s creative potential.
This book goes beyond simply highlighting how misunderstood the “world majority” is in the West. Excitingly, it shows us how many of our modern challenges might be best addressed by proactively including the Global South in our digitally powered global future. By infusing our algorithms with the aspirations of the majority world, we can shape a more optimistic future for us all.
However, this book is not a feel good, do good, symbolic appeal; it illustrates a rationally framed reality. The Global South, with its young and ambitious majority, approaches life with a “do more with less” mentality. I see this approach alive and well in Indonesia’s Ministry of Education where they have built a substantive design team, sourcing user experience designers from the high-tech sector who are rethinking digital learning services that will unlock Indonesia’s young population. I recently spent a week in Mexico City with IDEO’s strategic partner Colectivo23, a digital skills academy for Latin America, where we met a wide range of practitioners, students, and creators who are passionately developing the skills required to creatively drive Latin American economies forward. These are the places where intent and action have come together to create tremendous impact under extraordinary constraints.
But these kinds of solutions are not pervasive, nor a given. Payal describes the tensions that reside in trying to tackle some of our most systemic challenges. How can we use centralized control to distribute access to opportunity? Why can’t sustainable practices also stimulate growth? How could more global representation in our data deliver better digital outcomes for all? This book insightfully points out that we are trying to solve these challenges with technology when their root causes are fundamentally cultural.
Cultures Matter
Payal reminds us that culture is messy, contradictory, and not as binary as the algorithms we are so reliant on to increasingly run our world. Biases run deep, access to opportunity is restricted, and a culture of fear seems to have replaced the culture of care we all so desperately need.
We have arrived at that juncture where we must decide between the scarce world of efficiency or the abundant world of creativity. To put it differently, will we pursue a path of least resistance or a path of most resilience? By addressing some of the cultural assumptions we are making about the Global South, we will discover technological win-wins for people and the planet, for the digital and the physical, for the West and the “rest.”
During my fifteen years of living and working in China, I have spent a fair amount of time speaking to creative communities, teaching business and design students, and interviewing promising talent to work at IDEO. I have time and again been impressed with the depth of awareness and understanding of global design trends and solutions these young Chinese designers and strategists have. They are familiar with both successful China-based innovations, business models, and design solutions as well as the equivalent examples and benchmarks from the West, Southeast Asia and India, and Japan and South Korea. This is in stark contrast to most of the young Western designers who have taken what happens in Silicon Valley to be the one and only “global” frame of reference and who are not drawing from the abundant ideas that are emerging in the rest of the world.
As a designer and creative leader, I agree with the book’s framing of many of the challenges of our time as opportunities for responsible design. While highlighting what is problematic about Western tech’s current impact on the Global South, the book offers ways to design social solutions that can benefit all. From drones on African wildlife reserves to music sharing in the Middle East to pornography as education in India, this book provides context and direction for business leaders, digital creators, policymakers, and anyone else looking to realize a better future—a future that both benefits and is benefited by the Global South.
I often say that many tech solutions are answers in search of questions. This book brings us back to the questions that matter and shines a light on the practices that we might use to move forward.
Ask Different Questions
We need to move beyond the paradigm of designing for “good.” Whose good are we claiming? Morality-driven approaches are a misguided way of getting to the best outcomes. Payal proposes a shift from morality-driven to relational-driven design, where we take a step back and try to understand the deeper layers of cause and effect at play, typically of human origin. For instance, when trying to tackle the perpetual problem of the slaughter of endangered animals on African wildlife reserves, Payal questions the focus of investment on ineffective high-tech solutions for tracking animals instead of trying to understand the motivations behind the culture of poaching. Another example given in the book is how the blind censorship of pornography in its broadest definition fails to recognize how it is being used by young people as a surrogate for sex education. Why aren’t we thinking harder about how we could take something that has been weaponized to hurt people and transform it into a tool for empowerment, intimacy, and compassion?
The examples above highlight the importance of taking a critical look at the fundamental questions we should be asking rather than racing to solutions. What are the underlying causes and dynamics at play that may be leading to the problem at hand? I cannot think of a better example than in health care innovation. The tremendous scientific breakthroughs that have created modern Western medicine and medical practice have neglected to integrate the far older wisdom of preventative well-being that comes from traditional Chinese medicine, Indian meditation, or Indigenous ecocentrism. One of my favorite activities when hosting a Western executive from the health care industry in Asia is to get them up at the crack of dawn and spend two to three hours in a park somewhere in China. They will see how the elderly ensure their later years are spent thriving, from dancing sessions to laughing clubs to Tai Chi to community debates—in nature, with others, and actively appreciating the present.
For all of its progress and benefits, the Industrial Revolution also separated us from the earth, compartmentalized our work into measurable productivity units, and put us on a path of mechanized efficiency. Digitization should not accelerate this linear path toward optimization but rather provide a circular rhythm that includes our cultural and environmental roots. By designing solutions imbued with the Indigenous wisdom of ideas like frugality, collectivity, subsistence, and repair, we can deliver healing outcomes that sustain people and the planet. We must shift from the industrialist’s description of data as the new oil to the more careful cultivation of data as the nutrients that fuel a regenerative and thriving ecosystem of interconnected living.
Human Centered
I have long advocated for businesses and systems to be more customer centered and societally inclusive. We must think harder about what human-centered design means and what it must do. We need to celebrate the boldness of human ingenuity while appreciating the humility of being humane. A healthy world is one in which humans are not at the center but are thriving participants enabled by technology and grounded by nature. We must design for the tactile and the intimate, for the earthly and the cosmic, for the multicultural and the interconnected.
I am on board with Payal when she argues for expanding our view on how we design and whom we serve to include the Global South in order to tap into the ambitions and optimism of the world’s majority. This majority has proven time and again that it knows how to do more with less, generate solutions that improve our systems, and possibly steer us toward a renewed vitality in embracing sustainable growth.
Payal points out that it is a moral imperative to design with hope. Some say that designers are natural optimists. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been more excited to join the movement in designing what happens next, with the Global South front and center.
Introduction
I await backstage, wrapped in a giant woolen scarf. It is a cold September evening in Copenhagen. The 2019 Techfestival is set up like an open-air theater in the Meatpacking district, surrounded by tents with disc jockeys, hackers, demos, podcasters, and thought labs. There is a sizable crowd of ten thousand people registered to attend this three-day Techfest from all over the world.1 I am about to give a keynote on the next billion users (NBU) in the Global South, optimistic about the digital future. Before me, the inventor of the hashtag, Chris Messina, delivers his talk.
He publicly apologizes for his invention. Messina has embarked on a talk circuit of penance that includes his interview for Netflix’s globally acclaimed film The Social Dilemma, a dystopian docudrama that tells the story of how a group of tech elites controls the way “billions of us think, act, and live our lives.”2 The documentary warns us that the technology that connects us also controls, manipulates, polarizes, divides, and monetizes us. Messina echoes this in discussing the hashtag, dismayed by its viral toxicity. He promises to work on a solution to the problem: Frankenstein’s monster in need of taming. His motto of the day is, “You break it, you fix it.”
A friend of mine from New York called me right after she watched The Social Dilemma with her brother, anxious about tech. They felt helpless against what they learned about the constant surveillance of their everyday lives and wanted to know how to protect themselves from such digital control. My students in Rotterdam feel fatalistic about the prospect of having sovereignty over their data. Some peers at an artificial intelligence (AI) ethics workshop on good digital futures struggle to see the light as they lament how tech contributes to democratic decline. Policymakers are busy trying to break up, contain, regulate, or ban social media. There is melancholy in the air; as media scholar Geert Lovink puts it, “The mobile has come dangerously close to our psychic bone, to the point where the two can no longer be separated. If only my phone could gently weep.”3
While legitimate concerns drive these fears, we need to account equally for young people’s digital aspirations to ensure we do not inadvertently destroy that which they value the most—rare spaces for self-actualization. Anyone who has ventured outside the West will feel the contagious optimism from young people’s extraordinary hunger for being digital. These youths are full of enthusiasm and passion for life despite the tremendous sociopolitical challenges they face. This is survival in its fullest sense. Finding humor while at war has helped people cope for millennia. Sharing something beautiful from a place of ugliness sustains human dignity. Creating moments of joy, inspiration, and entertainment with digital media cultivates hope for the future. This dual perspective helps us reconcile the solidarities that come out of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements with current hashtag hating.
The West is suffering from pessimism paralysis—a negative bias toward all things digital—that can derail the drive to change the status quo. Negativity does not inspire change. Pessimism is for those who are privileged and can afford to live with despair. Imagine if Martin Luther King, Jr., started his speech by saying, “I have no dream.” It is not naive to be optimistic about our digital future. It is our moral imperative to design with hope.
Pessimism Paralysis
“How can billions get rid of something [social media] they do not even like, are addicted to, and do not know how to get rid of?” asks Geert Lovink, author of Stuck on the Platform.4 Lovink and I debated Zoom fatigue, doom scrolling, and other platform anxieties at the V2 Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam in fall 2022.5 Geert is a self-acknowledged media pessimist, a skeptic of all things digital. The digital platform is out to trap us, design is out to depress us, and the media is out to paralyze us, according to him. He is not alone in his bleak outlook on the digital future. On the contrary, his antiestablishment and dystopic stance is the norm among today’s intelligentsia.
Internet scholar Safiya Umoja Noble argues in her 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression that “algorithmic oppression is not just a glitch in the system but, rather, is fundamental to the operating system of the web.”6 Her discovery of this inscribed digital oppression began with an innocuous search in 2011. She googled “black girls” to look for activities for her nieces and got back hits like HotBlackPussy.com. The search triggered her to look deeper into the hidden values driving search engines. She argues that the platforms we use in our daily lives have oppression baked into their infrastructures.
Mainstream media agrees. The Los Angeles Review of Books recognizes that Google’s algorithms are “hard coded with white supremacy and misogyny.”7 Vogue supports the idea that our algorithmic systems are “predatory by design.”8 Data scientist and whistleblower Frances Haugen made algorithm a household term when she testified on Capitol Hill in 2021.9 She revealed how Meta intentionally boosts divisive content on users’ timelines to capture their attention and foster depression. Public anger toward these systems is commonplace. Today, you can easily buy “Fuck the algorithm” pins, buttons, and stickers on Amazon.
What happens when your reality does not cooperate with this narrative? I had a junior researcher come to me to share her struggle. She was looking into how young people were being oppressed by social media in Vietnam and encountered an unexpected problem. Her participants were enthusiastic users of Instagram and TikTok, becoming even more so during the pandemic. They related experiencing joy, pleasure, and support on these platforms. Her data would not fit the digital-oppression theory. When media outlets covered the internal reports leaked by Haugen, they chose to emphasize how Instagram makes US teens feel worse about themselves but neglected to share equally compelling evidence that this photo-sharing app makes twice as many young people feel better about themselves.10
