India is rapidly digitising. There are good things and bad, speed-bumps on the way and caveats to be mindful of. The weekly column Terminal focuses on all that is connected and is not – on digital issues, policy, ideas and themes dominating the conversation in India and the world.
People always ask me to recommend books that help understand technology and its impacts on society at large. While there is a large body of work out there, these books are not necessarily available in book shops around us.
So this week, I thought it would be good to recommend a few books that are must read to understand social effects, politics and the history of technology from authors across the world.
People who have been following developments in digitisation closely might know some of these books. For others who are trying to understand the landscape, these are good to start with. These books should help anyone looking to understand technology from multiple social perspectives.
The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution
Originally published as the The Long Revolution: The Birth and Growth of India’s IT Industry, by Dinesh C. Sharma for Harper Collins Publishers India in 2009, The Outsourcer is the title of the book’s republication under MIT Press.
Dinesh Sharma has documented the history of computerisation in India from the development of India’s first indigenous computer TIFRAC to the transformation of the IT industry after liberalisation during Y2K. This book gives all the details of early computer science developments in India from TIFR to IITs and the role played by various actors in the development cycle.
Sharma documented the role IBM played in early computerisation in India and how it has monopolised the sector and damaged India’s growth in the space. IBM’s exit vastly helped us as a country until it came back to open its offices again in India. While many believed George Fernandes was the reason IBM was kicked out of India after the Emergency, Sharma gives us the inside details of what actually transpired.
The Outsourcer is a must read on how early institutions in India like Electronics Commission of India and the National Informatics Centre were set up and the development path we chose from manufacturing calculators to computers. The role of the Electronics Commission and Ayyagari Sambasiva Rao in India’s computing revolution was the most interesting and important part for me.
Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
Steven Levy is very well known for his famous book Hackers:Heroes of the Computer Revolution that chronicled various actors in Silicon Valley.
Levy, a journalist who covered the early developments in Silicon Valley closely followed the rebels in technology too, the crypto anarchists and cypherpunks who liberated encryption from the hands of the government.
Crypto tells us the story of encryption and how Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman created the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, allowing us to communicate safely over the internet.
This is the fundamental algorithm that is used everywhere including the Signal app.
Beyond Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, it also documents the story of the RSA – the ‘Rivest Shamir and Adleman’ algorithm made by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman and several other rebels like Philip R. Zimmermann, Timothy C. May, Eric Huges and John Gilmore of Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Beyond the rebels who built encryption, it tells us how the government and its spy agencies function. Crypto looks into the National Security Agency and how it functioned in the United States. The NSA, tasked with signals intelligence or SIGINT to essentially spy on all communications of various nation states, heavily opposed the proliferation of cryptography, allowing other nation states to encrypt their communications and thus making SIGINT harder for them.
Cryptography was literally made part of the US Arms Control List to not allow it being exported outside the United States. The crypto rebels fought the NSA and the United States government to export encryption when the internet was spreading as part of globalisation efforts. They liberated cryptography from the control of a nation-state to people. This should help you understand the whole breaking the encryption fight with Whatsapp in India.
Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry
It’s firing season in global IT markets. With every big tech firm reducing its workforce to signal markets, they are placing the need of profitability of the market higher than the livelihoods of their employees.
This setup is not new and has been a consistent practice within the IT sector going back to the early days of globalisation. Xiang Biao, a Chinese origin anthropologist, ended up in Sydney, Hyderabad and villages of Andhra Pradesh, while pursuing his PhD at Oxford University. There, he studied labour markets in the IT sector.
His book Global “Body Shopping” is an ethnography of how body shops (IT consultancies) hire IT workers from India and help them get placed with clients based on projects across the world.
The book is an important anthropological analysis of Indian society in helping create the global IT industry. It documents how practices like dowry were employed to produce IT workers and how caste as a network helped IT workers migrate. According to some estimates, one in five persons who immigrated to different countries during Y2K was a Telugu individual, resulting in him to study the excessive production of IT workers from the region, predominantly the Kammas and Reddy caste groups who had the economic power to produce these IT workers as a family business and migrate.
Beyond the social analysis of this labour market, the book looks into the relation between IT workers, market and state and how this setup of body shops came up to subvert state regulations imposed on the market. At large, the book gives you a social understanding of IT markets and how they function from a labour perspective.
Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
For Kentaro Toyama, an award-winning computer scientist and assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, coming to India changed his views about technology, along with the discovery that pushing technology doesn’t change society.
It is rare to hear stories from the world of technology giants on how experiences of real-world failures of technology result in a better understanding of the social side of the story. Kentaro Toyama has had a decade of experimenting on projects in education, health and agriculture. In Geek Heresy he breaks down the technocratic orthodoxy by calling himself a “recovering technoholic.”
Along with stories from his experiences in India and other countries, Kentaro Toyama explains the role of technology in amplifying certain social effects in what he calls the “Law of Amplification” and conditions where it might be not visible.
Arguments between techno-utopians and cybersSkeptics are a common sight and the entire first half of his book provokes utopians while he presents different categories of people who either support or critique technology. The second part of the book deals with a way forward by putting people at the centre of technology by looking at social aspirations and their development instead of technology development.
This is a book you can recommend to your techno-utopian friends in Big Tech or the ‘breaking things fast’ guys who may not want to read the arguments of skeptics.
Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile
The use of technology to improve industrial production was not limited to capitalist societies.
Each society, like ours, tried to build different solutions to aid in their lives. One important experiment that took place in Chile was Project CyberSyn during Salvador Allende’s presidency.
Project CyberSyn was a decision support system to help manage and transform the Chilean national economy under Allende. Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a documentation of how technology and politics were intertwined and influenced each other during the implementation of CyberSyn by the British theorist and cybernetician Stafford Beer.
Allende wanted to achieve socialism through a democratic means until a US sponsored military coup led by Augusto Pinochet took over the country. Under this dictatorship, neoliberalism was born in 1970s Chile.
If one was to imagine alternatives to neoliberal imaginations of technological solutionism, Project CyberSyn offers us an alternative that was briefly experimented in Chile. The book looks into how Beer imagined both a centralised and decentralised cybernetic system that can be employed to have democratic decision making to ensure freedoms for individuals to participate in the setup.
This historical account of Project CyberSyn by Eden Medina details how political and technological factors influenced the project and is a must read for any Marxist out there trying to imagine a Marxist future of technological alternatives.
Technology and (Dis)Empowerment: A Call to Technologists
How to build technology to ensure people are empowered instead of being disempowered through technology is the question that is being driven across various technologists.
Aaditeshwar Seth, faculty at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, who runs a participatory media platform Gram Vaani has proposed some alternative approaches in the form of a call for technologists.
He invokes Marx’s concepts of humanism as a call for technologists to build technological platforms for social-good.
Throughout the book, different issues of technology production have been addressed like the issue of exploitation to ethics of technology production. While proposing methods to build for social good, the author explains the limits of technological design and how even with the right intent, social outcomes may fail to be achieved.
The book is packed with various case studies of technologies that can help one understand how technology production can be changed for social good with examples from the author’s personal experience in building Gram Vaani.
Beyond the ideas of technologies, it is about social participation where the author makes emphasis to ensure there is power based equality in our society with various models to map power relationships.
Srinivas Kodali is a researcher on digitisation and hacktivist.