Late in his speech “Beyond Vietnam” delivered to the Riverside Church in New York City in April, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes John F. Kennedy to say “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” In the same paragraph, King calls for a radical revolution of values on which he expounds on in the rest of his speech with paragraphs that start with “A true revolution of values will…” He concludes the paragraph by stating the oft-quoted idea that:
We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Our critical interpretive sociotechnical lens can help us begin to identify ways in which our machines and computers — our technical artifacts — can systematize and normalize profit and property priorities over people. Today, the tools needed to support community-based collaborative spaces will likely be digital. But the danger is that many of our tools have been developed based on problematic priorities if our goal is to support peaceful revolution. Instead, they often systematize injustices, as highlighted by Virginia Eubanks (also see her book, Digital Dead End) and Brendan Luyt, among others. We need a true revolution of values, and tools consistent with that revolution of values, if we are to achieve this goal. We need to work to develop everyone’s technology expertise in all forms as understood from within a critical interpretive sociotechnical lens. Our use of technology and engagement in community need to focus on social change that is both an participatory, action-oriented cycle to address immediate issues AND ALSO a work to develop community knowledge power. Our work doesn’t begin assuming we understand an issue or have the solution for that issue, but it begins with dialog rooted in love, faith, humility, mutual trust, and hope. It advances as we develop the skillsets needed to allow us to engage across difference in ways that preserve and prize the differences for their unique lenses–that is, pluralism. It recognizes our interdependence with humans and more-than-humans locally and across the globe, and stands with Dr. King when he says that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. And especially urgently, it fights an all-too-prevalent belief that technologies will somehow magically address our issues, and instead appreciates that issues are first and foremost socially grounded and in need of social solutions, some of which may be facilitated through appropriate technologies.
