people most likely had some awareness of what was happening to Jews and other marginalized people during the Third Reich, information only officially flowed on a need-to-know basis, such that few individuals saw the whole picture.
This structure of work made it easier for each person to reduce their sense of moral culpability. For example, at Auschwitz the train operators could say that they were only transporting people from one location to the next. The doctors could say that they were only selecting those who were fit for work. The guards could say that they were simply keeping order within the camps. The operators of the gas chambers could say that they were only mechanistically undertaking their orders. This distribution not only reduced each individual’s sense of responsibility and accountability but it also disempowered any one person from having enough agency to effectively fight the system. Even if one person had the courage to stand up, there were plenty of additional people available to take their place. Beyond this fact, professional ambitions or fear of the repressive government likely kept many from speaking out.
However, during various FASPE site visits, we learned about many examples in which professional non-participation did not result in violent retribution or death but rather in reassignment to new roles or new tasks. For example, at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Center, we learned that doctors who refused to participate in the euthanasia program were most often simply assigned to practice elsewhere. While individual doctors who chose to refuse to cooperate with the T4 program could not have had sweeping effects on the efficacy of this Nazi program on their own, if many or all doctors refused to participate, this shift could have amounted to a substantial slowing of the process. The challenge for doctors in that context would have been identifying potential allies in resistance and determining concrete steps that they could have taken to be most effective.
Modern tech, while less obviously malevolent in its objectives, has similarities. For example, in companies with many software engineers, each individual engineer has limited power to dictate the company’s overall direction. On the flip side, each engineer also shoulders limited accountability for any negative outcomes, since they contribute only small pieces. It can be easy to feel impotent in the face of these enormously complex socio-technical systems. In this way, it becomes easy to fall prey to a fatalism about our ability to work for good within these systems. Is it better to stay in our roles to try to make changes from within, or are we better off leaving altogether? While there are moral advantages to each choice, having a groundswell of people who stay in their roles and continue to wrestle with these questions can be powerful. Holding onto hope for change amid seemingly immutable and unyielding systems is possibly one of the most subversive actions that we can take.
What gives me hope is that while the Holocaust and similar atrocities are almost always perpetrated collectively, they can also be resisted collectively. In the modern tech context, if we can identify how tech-induced marginalization or exploitation is perpetrated, perhaps we also have what we need to shift collective action in a different direction. This task will require us to identify what “social capital” we have access to, in other words, what the inherent value of our social networks is for effecting change in our professional settings30. Through strategies like those used in community organizing, we can begin to identify areas of mutual concern and to work towards maximizing the chance of positive change31. If we stop and reflect on where we might find allies, how we can best foster relationships with them, and how we can work together to reimagine new directions for our work, perhaps we can start to change the trajectory of tech wherever it is not applied toward positive ends. Some questions we can reflect on when considering how to best leverage our collective power include:
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people most likely had some awareness of what was happening to Jews and other marginalized people during the Third Reich, information only officially flowed on a need-to-know basis, such that few individuals saw the whole picture.
This structure of work made it easier for each person to reduce their sense of moral culpability. For example, at Auschwitz the train operators could say that they were only transporting people from one location to the next. The doctors could say that they were only selecting those who were fit for work. The guards could say that they were simply keeping order within the camps. The operators of the gas chambers could say that they were only mechanistically undertaking their orders. This distribution not only reduced each individual’s sense of responsibility and accountability but it also disempowered any one person from having enough agency to effectively fight the system. Even if one person had the courage to stand up, there were plenty of additional people available to take their place. Beyond this fact, professional ambitions or fear of the repressive government likely kept many from speaking out.
However, during various FASPE site visits, we learned about many examples in which professional non-participation did not result in violent retribution or death but rather in reassignment to new roles or new tasks. For example, at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Center, we learned that doctors who refused to participate in the euthanasia program were most often simply assigned to practice elsewhere. While individual doctors who chose to refuse to cooperate with the T4 program could not have had sweeping effects on the efficacy of this Nazi program on their own, if many or all doctors refused to participate, this shift could have amounted to a substantial slowing of the process. The challenge for doctors in that context would have been identifying potential allies in resistance and determining concrete steps that they could have taken to be most effective.
Modern tech, while less obviously malevolent in its objectives, has similarities. For example, in companies with many software engineers, each individual engineer has limited power to dictate the company’s overall direction. On the flip side, each engineer also shoulders limited accountability for any negative outcomes, since they contribute only small pieces. It can be easy to feel impotent in the face of these enormously complex socio-technical systems. In this way, it becomes easy to fall prey to a fatalism about our ability to work for good within these systems. Is it better to stay in our roles to try to make changes from within, or are we better off leaving altogether? While there are moral advantages to each choice, having a groundswell of people who stay in their roles and continue to wrestle with these questions can be powerful. Holding onto hope for change amid seemingly immutable and unyielding systems is possibly one of the most subversive actions that we can take.
What gives me hope is that while the Holocaust and similar atrocities are almost always perpetrated collectively, they can also be resisted collectively. In the modern tech context, if we can identify how tech-induced marginalization or exploitation is perpetrated, perhaps we also have what we need to shift collective action in a different direction. This task will require us to identify what “social capital” we have access to, in other words, what the inherent value of our social networks is for effecting change in our professional settings30. Through strategies like those used in community organizing, we can begin to identify areas of mutual concern and to work towards maximizing the chance of positive change31. If we stop and reflect on where we might find allies, how we can best foster relationships with them, and how we can work together to reimagine new directions for our work, perhaps we can start to change the trajectory of tech wherever it is not applied toward positive ends. Some questions we can reflect on when considering how to best leverage our collective power include: