I think we’ve slowly found ourselves in a place where the vast majority of people understand and talk about computers as something totally conceptual, bordering on magical thinking. The abstractions created through designed user experiences (which are great, and very important) have become so successful that they’ve totally insulated people from the very material reality of what software and digital services are.
Generously, you can say that this is a good thing, because computers and software are complicated, and it has proven unnecessary to understand anything about them to harness their benefits, so why shouldn’t that just be hidden away? More cynically, you might point out that as technology becomes instrumental to our lives, and grows to the point of defining whole economies, it’s extremely convenient for those companies that the general public has no understanding of the material meaning and impact of software and hardware design.
The keystone of this model of technology is surely the concept of “the cloud”. This is a spectacularly successful analogy, that has created a reality-warping intuition that “compute” is a liquid resource without any physical substrate, or at least not one you need to think about.
To oppose this, I think we need to start talking about computers “as if they were real”. We should not allow a conversation about AI investment to pass without highlighting the titanic data centres that “AI investment” actually refers to, and the enormous consumption of energy, water, land, minerals, manufacturing, shipping and maintenance that entails. Indeed, we should not allow any conversation about “the cloud” to pass without drawing attention to the real, physical resource consumption it corresponds to. Conversation about AI is already leading people to think about this, which is a great lever to open these ideas up further, because none of these concerns start or end with the invention of LLMs.
Connected to the theme of insisting on the materialism of software is equipping people with better mental models of what is “actually” happening when they use software. That is, rather than taking the very conceptual, idealistic world of ‘data’ and using it rhetorically to mask the physicality of the underlying computers, we do the opposite; we insist on a physical, materialistic picture of computers, and extend that language to the data as well, to speak clearly about where and when data is extracted by technology. I don’t know yet if this will fall under the same umbrella or grow into its own topic.
Footnotes
The turn of phrase “as if they were real” is a play of sorts on E.F. Schumacher’s “economics as if people mattered” - however, I will not pretend to have read that (yet!).