ABSTRACT
The perennial dilemma of technological ‘advance’ is a tension between neoliberal efficiency and economic growth, and social, psychological, and environmental wellbeing. Despite apparently oppositional values, these priorities are complementary because each needs the other, in different ways, with destructive consequences when strategies lack consideration of both. Visibilizing dilemmas of technological advance across contexts and scales highlights the need for continual revision of plans and space for negotiation in designs that efficiently should deliver inclusion, wellbeing broadly construed, and deliberative processes sensitive to different perspectives. Yet digital technologies have been enlisted in automated governance, which robs subjects of agency and critical thought and methodologically is based on decontextualized correlations that ignore uneven power relations governing on-the-ground relations. Normalization crystallizes processes so they seem natural, without need for scrutiny, rendering subjects implicitly complicit in the closure of systems to much needed change. Following a book overview, the chapter discusses wellsprings, including lived experience as well as literatures on critical race theory and racial capitalism, critical data studies, digital geographies, digital humanities, science studies, feminist scholarship on agency, the anthropological and feminist strategy of ‘studying up,’ Michel Foucault’s scholarship on governance and ethics, critical geographic inquiry, and feminist epistemology articulated by Donna Haraway.
