Human Contexts and Ethics Toolkit

Table of contents

1. What is the HCE Toolkit?
2. About using the Toolkit
3. Tools

What is the HCE Toolkit?

A set of concepts and methods from Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and History selected to build understanding of the datafied world, helping students to identify where human power structures and value choices get built into technical work, and empowering them to discover how, when, and where they can responsibly and effectively intervene.

About using the Toolkit

Using the HCE Toolkit is a constructive project — it’s useful for offering ways forward (not just critiquing or dismantling what others think). It’s pedagogical and ethical aim is to together engage in responsibly making worlds with technologies. Try it on new cases, including in relation to other technologies.

Use of the Toolkit requires your life experiences, identities, values, devotions, frustrations…

Tools

• Theories that describe how technology and society relate.
• Elements of social life that undergo transformation and are salient in defining technological design, use, and forms of life in the datafied world.

Tool	Definition	Exemplary Cases	Guiding Questions
Agency	Agency is the ability or capacity to act or exert power. Technology informs the way in which people both perceive and exercise their capacity to exert some degree of control over the sociotechnical relations in which they are enmeshed.	Algorithmic decision-making (COMPAS, Gig economy laborers) Real-time interplay of human and mechanical agency (autonomous vehicles, pilots) Patients tracking their health through data apps and devices Google Walkout; unionization Disruptive innovation and the tech entrepreneur agent	How is human agency delegated to a technology? How does the delegation affect responsibility? What kinds of agency is amplified and what kind is constrained by the technology? In what ways? What kinds of social structures does the specific form of agency aim to challenge?
Classification	Implicit and explicit social organization of beings and knowledge into discrete categories governed by identifiable principles. Societies produce knowledge and do work (e.g. with technologies) by sorting, ordering, and classifying phenomena in the world. Classification systems inform social order and vice versa.	Air Quality Data Racial Classification in Apartheid South Africa Risk and vulnerability assessment algorithms (VI-SPDAT, AFST)	How does the technology depend upon classification in order to work? How does the technology classify? What/who does it classify? What are the categories of classification? What’s the process used to classify? (e.g. Does it count as the thing we’re interested in? Do we count it? How?) How were the categories determined/decided upon? By whom? With what purpose? Can they be revised?
Co-production	Technology and society are mutually constitutive, or, in other words, they depend on one another for the forms they assume: technology makes society what it is, and society makes technology what it is. Or, “Technology is co-produced with society.”	Ideas of privacy co-produced with social media platforms Statistical tools are co-produced with the formation of the nation-state Ethical codes are co-produced with professions Labor conditions in the datafied world are co-produced with technologies of surveillance	What technology is co-produced with what aspect of society? How does this co-production take place? What’s at stake in these two things being co-produced?
Identity / Positionality	Life-shaping and socially conditioned aspects of selfhood, such as gender, race, class, disability status, income, immigration status. Identity is not only about how you see yourself but also how society sees and treats you (positionality). Identity is co-produced with technology.	Disparate impact of algorithms on different identities (facial recognition technologies; predictive policing) Social media activism as a component in the civil rights struggle for the recognition and rights for people with particular identities Self-tracking technologies built around particular concept of identity (self-aware, efficient)	Which aspects of identity are shifting with technology? Which are staying the same? How does identity inform how people choose to interact with technologies? How do social identities regulate who has access to what technological and political resources?
Labor	The socially organized use of human bodies and lifetime to reproduce the material conditions of human life Asking about labor helps us look to sociotechnical processes of production, working conditions, and how labor is differentially valorized, exploited, and structured in various historical and sociotechnical contexts. Labor is also a social agent - “organized labor” can be a political force that shapes the conditions under which labor takes place	"Gig-economy" and platform-based labor Invisible labor Amazon warehouse Narratives of robotics and the automation of certain types of labor	Which aspects of labor are shifting with technology? Which are staying the same? How are forms of work and production structured in the datafied world? What is the relationship between work done by people and work done by machines? How are the rewards for work products allocated? With what consequences? What kind of labor is considered valuable and what kind is not? What role does technology play in this valorization?
Narratives	Stories in time that express and explain things that matter to people: who they are, how the world is, how things work, what needs to be done, what futures are possible, desirable, or inevitable. Technology shapes and is shaped by narratives that are at-large in society. Narratives can come to feel natural, but always need to be questioned.	None	What is the narrative? (Sometimes it seems so natural, it’s hard to see.) Whose story is it? Who’s spotlighted? Who has agency? What outcomes does it make seem natural? Desirable? Impossible? Where did it come from? What histories, institutions, and people contributed? How does it engage with your own identity and positionality? Does it feel natural to you? Does it leave you out? How about others? Does it reproduce a template? Do variations on a theme? Which ones? Who would agree with it easily? Who would have questions? Who would resist? What alternative narratives does it crowd out?
Performativity	The way that actions that describe the world (language, concepts, metaphors, models, classification systems, measurement systems, predictions, automated decision-making systems) can shape and even bring into being the very phenomena they set out to describe.	Racial classification systems Algorithmic Self Quetelet’s “Average Man” Performance rating/scoring systems Surveillance capitalism, A/B testing and behaviorism Predictive Policing (urban surveillance; Allegheny Family Screening Tool)	How does a classification system create and impose identities on individuals and populations? With what kinds of effects on their agency and well being? Whose agency or power does it serve? What are the mechanisms that make this knowledge productive? How does performativity enable knowledge to serve the aims of social control?
Power	The asymmetric capacity of an agent to structure or alter the behavior and decisions of other agents, populations, or systems. Technological (computational) power is intertwined with political power.	Robert Moses's Overpasses Population statistics, biopower, and eugenics Panopticon, Surveillance and predictive policing	How does the technology transform the status quo of power? How does it transform the balance of power? In whose favor? Is the power exerted in a more explicit or more covert way? How is technical power intertwined with political power in the case? What's the significance of this? Who is said to be empowered by the technology or technical event? What are the checks on the power? What mechanisms exist to challenge this power? Who can challenge it?
Representation	The way in which one thing is made to "stand for" another. Technologies create representations of people and of social/natural phenomena that do particular work in the world and acquire a life of their own, refiguring the identity and agency of the represented person/phenomena.	Pima Indian Diabetes Database Ownership of genetic information FSM and student protests against being treated as "information to be processed” Technologies of the census and political representation Measuring climate change and exercise of citizenship	How does data "stand for," "speak for" or "represent" a phenomenon in the world? What work goes into creating the representation? Whose work? Who creates the representation? With what goal? What makes this representation authoritative? What gives it power? How does the life of the representation relate to the life of the entity from which it was derived? How is the way in which the technology represents a person connected to forms of political representation?
Sociotechnical Systems	A system in which the actions of people and technologies are intertwined such that it’s not possible to just isolate the “technical part” and deal with on its own. Large and highly complex sociotechnical systems distribute risks and responsibilities widely and unevenly, and are difficult to regulate. When they fail it is often difficult or even impossible to identify a single human or mechanical cause.	Self-driving cars; nuclear power plants; airplanes; streetlights Risk society Social media platforms and the public sphere Internet-of-things, Smart city	How do humans interact with a particular technology? How is risk and responsibility distributed in a sociotechnical system? Whose agency is affected? How does a sociotechnical system come about and change over time? Through which pressures and mechanism?
Vulnerability	The condition of being exposed to others and to the risk of injury. Vulnerability is central to personhood and the human condition. It is part of every social relationship, and is at the heart of ethics. Vulnerability is differentially distributed in society: it varies by positionality (race, class, gender, immigration, disability…). Technology shapes who becomes vulnerable and how.	None	What kinds of data representations or classifications tend to make persons more or less vulnerable? Who is made vulnerable? How is vulnerability differentially distributed across society, across different identities/positionalities? How do data and other technologies shape how people become exposed and vulnerable? How does it affect who becomes vulnerable? To what kinds of harms does a particular technology or data representation make someone vulnerable?