How critical can we expect computer users to be? (Part 1)
I've been reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) this week, in which Pollan investigates the way in which food is produced in America. Arguing that much of this food is produced in brutal industrial settings that are good for neither farmers nor animals nor the people who eat them, he calls on his readers to take a deeper interest in the way food is produced, and to look for qualities beyond the lowest price. The fastest way to end factory farming, he suggests, might be to require that feedlots and slaughterhouses be built with transparent walls because no one would want to eat anything from a factory farm after seeing what goes on there.
This doesn't have much to do with computing, but I nonetheless saw some parallels with what I ended up calling "critical computing" around the beginning of the year. Just as Pollan calls for eaters to better understand the origins and qualities of the food they are eating, I called for computer users better understand their relationship with the technology they use.
The obvious problem with all this, of course, is that we each have a limited amount of time and resources to apply to improving this understanding. Perhaps it's all well and good for me, an experienced software developer, to customise my computing devices to meet my exact needs, but what about someone who doesn't have a degree in computer engineering and twenty years' experience with the things? Thinking about Pollan's call for me to take a comparable interest in the food I eat put me in a better position to answer a question of this sort.
Obviously I must have some interest in the preparation of food to have picked up Pollan's book in the first place. I cook my own food and I've grown a few herbs in pots on my balcony, but I have no plans to take up farming or to slaughter my own meat. When I think about following Pollan's suggestion, I think: how on Earth am I going to find out so much about what I eat, let alone take action on it from the highly urbanised locale in which I live?
Pollan goes to quite some effort to procure the food that he does, far beyond what I think almost anyone would find practical on a day-to-day basis, and I'm sure he himself would be among the first to acknowledge that there's no immediate prospect for a food chain free of factory farms and other industrial baddies. But that doesn't mean that the whole exercise is hopeless: eaters can make a decision to choose factory-free food whenever it is available — even if it costs a bit more — and eaters can put in a modest effort to seek out food-conscious farmers instead of uncaring industrial food conglomerates. And with continual modest effort, perhaps farmers and eaters (and maybe even conglomerates) can improve the food production system over time.
A comparable pursuit of understanding of computing would probably look very different — computers can't be made other than in factories, for a start, and they have no "natural" lifestyle bequeathed to them by evolution — but perhaps it's reasonable to ask for a comparable level of effort and continual improvement.
