Alexa can sing “Baby Shark” at a toddler’s babbled request. Siri can remind a harried CEO it is their mother’s birthday. Google can help compose an email in a different language. Technology makes users’ lives that much easier and that much more connected every day, while making the creators that much richer. The infrastructure of modern life is the ease and comfort of the world at a touch, but is the convenience worth a bottom line on humanity’s soul?
That’s the question Aden Van Noppen raises in a Dec. 31 article published in the Journal of Social Computing . Van Noppen, founder of Mobius, a California-based non-profit focused on creating a more responsible, compassionate and just tech sector, argues that technology companies and the people who staff them have a moral responsibility to acknowledge and rise to their roles as “spiritual caretakers”.
“We live in a world where Alexa is on the other end of suicidal pleas, vaccine misinformation spread on social media is killing tens of thousands of people, and technology is mediating many aspects of the human experience,” said Van Noppen, who served as the senior advisor to the White House’s chief technology officer during the last years of the Obama administration and completed a fellowship at Harvard Divinity School. “Technologists have become de-facto caretakers with the choice to treat our individual and collective well-being with care or with negligence. Unfortunately, caretaking is a role that computer science degrees don’t prepare us for, few business models optimize for, and algorithms can’t easily solve.”
Van Noppen defined spirituality as a state of mindful completeness and connection that exists separately from religious beliefs, although the two can be deeply intertwined. Caretaking traditions are often rooted in religions, which often take the form of ancient, large-scale institutions tasked with social guardianship and care, with modern contemporaries in therapists, social workers and more, she explained.
“In most cases, these caretakers draw on tradition, training and ritual that have been passed down for thousands of years,” Van Noppen said. “People in these roles deal with some of the most ineffable yet fundamental dimensions of the human experience, from our deepest grief to our greatest joy, and help us maintain a sense of connection to something larger than ourselves.”
The idea of caretaking appears in conflict with a Silicon Valley built — or at least renovated — on Mark Zuckerberg’s early motto of “Move fast and break things,” where short term profit and quick fixes are king.
“Seemingly minor design choices, such as the buzz of the phone with each new email or the infinite scroll that keeps us refreshing our feeds by swiping down, add up to a bigger picture with grave implications for our mental health and the health of our close relationships, civic fabric and even our planet,” Van Noppen said. “While we need a wide ecosystem of interventions to improve technology's impact on humanity and the planet, we will never build tech that reduces fear, loneliness and depression, brings us together instead of drives us apart, and enables the authentic connection we crave unless we broaden the frame. To cure what ails the tech sector, we also need to see the role of technologist through the lens of caretaking.”
Van Noppen’s proposal is the beginning of a solution, starting with the individual and recognizing that a creator’s ability to build technology with responsibility, wisdom and care is inextricably linked with their spiritual and emotional health. By instituting basic caretaking rituals, such as meditation and intentional pauses to consider consequences, individuals can gain a broader view of their work. But individual work is not enough to shift corporate goals from the quickest path to profit. To begin implementing long-lasting, influential change, technologists must also create an empowered seat at the table for those with the expertise and orientation needed to care for our spiritual and emotional well-being, Van Noppen said.
“The two interventions I offer here are by no means a complete solution. Meaningfully addressing the harms of technology requires an ecosystem of interventions, including regulation, employee and consumer movements, values-oriented business models, empowered ethics teams inside companies, and addressing the toxicity of the underlying systems that gave rise to them in the first place,” Van Noppen said. “But all of these efforts will not create technology that is worthy of the human spirit — technology that shifts us from greed to generosity, from anxiety to ease, that heals us and brings us together — unless we broaden the frame. If adopted as part of a larger system of changes, these interventions could help mitigate the harms of technology, and perhaps even lead to more technology that brings out the best in humanity.”
A faculty fellowship from the Vanderbilt University Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities supported this work.
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About Journal of Social Computing
Journal of Social Computing (JSC) is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal which aims to publish high-quality, original research that pushes the boundaries of thinking, findings, and designs at the dynamic interface of social interaction and computation. This will include research in （1） computational social science —the use of computation to learn from the explosion of social data becoming available today; (2) complex social systems or the analysis of how dynamic, evolving social collectives constitute emergent computers to solve their own problems; and (3) human computer interaction whereby machines and persons recursively combine to generate unique knowledge and collective intelligence, or the intersection of these areas. The editorial board welcomes research from fields ranging across the social sciences, computer and information sciences, physics and ecology, communications and linguistics, and, indeed, any field or approach that can challenge and advance our understanding of the interface and integration of computation and social life. We seek to take risks, avoid boredom and court failure on the path to transformative new paradigms, insights, and possibilities . The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms, methodologies and applications.
About Tsinghua University Press
Established in 1980, belonging to Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University Press (TUP) is a leading comprehensive higher education and professional publisher in China. Committed to building a top-level global cultural brand, after 41 years of development, TUP has established an outstanding managerial system and enterprise structure, and delivered multimedia and multi-dimensional publications covering books, audio, video, electronic products, journals and digital publications. In addition, TUP actively carries out its strategic transformation from educational publishing to content development and service for teaching & learning and was named First-class National Publisher for achieving remarkable results.
Journal of Social Computing
Creating Technology Worthy of the Human Spirit
31-Dec-2021