One billion at risk
There is another pandemic hiding in the shadows of COVID-19: the economic recession and its impact on social precarity and poverty. As a result of the crisis, one in seven human beings, one billion people, could end up living in extreme poverty.
The pandemic has exposed a contradiction in modern society. We are more connected than ever – proven by the speed and truly global spread of the virus. But we are also deeply divided. The virus and responses to it have had a disproportionate impact on the most precarious social sectors, showing the structural dynamics of exclusion that shape the lives of millions. Our society's inability to guarantee basic rights to all, even the right to live, is being exposed.
The role of tech in society
Today’s connectedness, enforced by social distancing, has pushed the role of technology in every aspect of our lives to a new level.
The tech industry is now in a challenging space: trapped between the increasing politicization of technology, the still superficial social debate around its impact and the slow adaptation of appropriate legislation. Right now, the industry needs to enable and push forward this ethical debate, recognizing its responsibility in this historic moment.
End the myth
The first step is to end the myth of tech neutrality. We need to acknowledge that technology is caught between private economic interests and its social value. Some tech business models, for example, prioritize commodification of data or advertising revenue over the social value of their services – the sharing of knowledge, connecting people, etc. This tension is shared by almost every human activity in our modern society, and technology is not an exception.
The social impact of tech is deeper than we usually perceive and most of the time invisible to us. Let’s consider urban infrastructure: it determines social interactions in a city without us even noticing it – where we walk, where and how we gather. In the same way, digital architecture determines, increasingly, social interactions in our digital society. An example of this is the invisible influence of search engine algorithms, and social media algorithms, the results of which shape our understanding of the world.
In this moment of crisis, we believe that technology can play a fundamental role in overcoming the economic recession and reducing the systemic injustices that have been exposed. In order to accomplish this purpose, the tech industry and our whole society needs to address some fundamental challenges.
The rest of this article explores three challenges: access to technology as a social right, fostering the Social Economy of Open Knowledge and the democratization of the tech debate. We also give some examples of our work in these spaces.