Welcome to Public Tech. Whether You Like It or Not……

Last week, I witnessed a fascinating exchange on Twitter. “Thank goodness that Twitter wasn’t around during the Second World War,” one commentator (and former colleague) opined. “Imagine having the Normandy Landings or the Battle for Stalingrad second-guessed by an army of ‘Twitter Generals’, safe and sound behind their mobile screens.”

I immediately thought of the President of the US who claimed: “I know more than the generals…” upon being appointed to office. 

Well apparently, he now knows more than doctors. He has a ‘feeling’ that the anti-malarial drug chloroquine could be an effective treatment for COVId-19; in direct contradiction to the advice of the country’s top immunologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Mr Trump is merely reflecting a wider reality; the qualities and criteria for opining on a subject – even a technical or scientific one – have less to do with qualifications than reach.

I call it the ‘Di Maio effect’ after Italy’s erstwhile interior minister who anticipated the publication of any report or investigation into the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, to accuse Autostrade per l’Italia (the private organisation charged with maintaining transport infrastructure) of negligence. No reference was made to the original design (from 1967) and whether it was adequate for the speed, nature and volume of traffic 50 years later. Neither was any reference made to scientific or architectural reports highlighting material faults in the bridge a year before the tragedy.

On what basis was Di Maio able to make such assertions; what exactly are his architectural, engineering, or geological qualifications? He graduated from the University of ‘Twitter’, of course (451,000 followers); formerly known as the University of Life. Di Maio boasts no formal qualifications or documented expertise. He didn’t even graduate from university, despite studying first engineering and subsequently law. So, in effect, someone with fewer credentials than an engineering intern is able to identify the causes of a structural collapse of one of Italy’s most iconic bridges, even before any inquiry has even started! He may be proved right, of course, but the point I’m highlighting is that, today, credibility and influence is not necessarily a function of qualifications in the conventional sense, but of reach.

Technology is particularly susceptible to the ‘Di Maio-effect’; everyone has an opinion on certain Chinese networking equipment’s security flaws, or Twitter’s encryption standards, or whether Google’s algorithm favours the Democrats . . . . .

It wasn’t always this way. Until 2010, technology was a privileged, closed discussion, by and for qualified experts. Despite the fact that technologies such as 64bit architecture and voice over IP had the potential to disrupt both established businesses and society, public debate on technology was notable by its absence.

Intel and Microsoft enjoyed a near-monopoly on the desktop; an architecture that transformed the nature of the workplace, flattening hierarchies and rendering the typing pool obsolete.

But such issues formed part of no public conversations, no political debate; no one, beyond a ‘qualified few’, took an interest; specialist trade/technology media flourished. The technology debate was entirely a niche subject.

By 2015, the emergence of broadband and, especially mobile connectivity transformed the technology debate into a public one.

Issues such as data privacy, broadband access, data security, infrastructure availability, data centre locations, the monopoly power of tech conglomerates, cyberbullying, alternative currencies, disruptive business models, intellectual property as a national asset, hardware as a national security issue . . . . form part people’s daily conversations.

Informed or otherwise, such conversations are also shaping the political debate, regulation and Government policy. This is the essence of ‘public tech’; technology has become a genuinely societal issue.  

In technology terms, the ‘Twitter Generals’ are here to stay, and technologists who dismiss ‘non-qualified’ dissent as irrelevant are missing the point. As Dr. Anthony Fauci would attest; at the last count, Mr Trump’s Twitter following was 100 times larger than that of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the organization that the good Doctor leads.