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SocioTech Impact

Consider the societal impact of your innovations

Technological products and services continue to propagate harm and ‘unintended’ impacts. In response, innovators alter their design and development processes, resulting in small changes to their product or service. And still, the product propagates harms. This has become a game of whac-a-mole because we’re not anticipating socio-technical impacts.

Sociotechnical impact refers to the effects that technological systems have on social systems, organisations, and individuals, and reciprocally, how social factors influence the design and use of technology. It recognises the interdependence of technology and society, emphasising that technological systems are not isolated entities but are deeply embedded in and influenced by social contexts.

To shift from responding to harmful impacts to anticipating how technologies shape and are shaped by social systems requires two significant mindset shifts:

Technological products are not ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ — they shape social systems. The only way to anticipate the impact of technology is to adopt a mindset that interrogates how one’s tech product — the beliefs and biases embedded in it, the institutional and technological affordances reflected in it, etc. — shape social systems like race, gender, and power.

Technologies do not impact social systems in a causal, deterministic way — social systems shape how tech products impact people. To anticipate impact, then, requires a mindset that interrogates how social systems themselves — cultural norms, narrative, structures of inequality, etc. — shape the product or service offering.

Organisations must recognise the need for a holistic understanding of the dynamic interplay between technology and society.

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Social systems are shaped by technological innovations due to:

The beliefs and values of designers becoming encoded in the innovation.

The affordances and agency innovations provide or restrict.

Shifts in power driven by new technology.

Changes to ecosystems when new innovations are adopted.

Social systems shape new technological innovations because:

The interaction between people and technology is a complex system.

Societal position influences people’s experience of technology.

Technology narratives shape and hide societal impacts.

Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, communities form around it.

Implementing

Impact Checkpoints⁠

is a practical way to conduct regular analysis of the impact of your innovations. This involves considering the past and potential impact of your innovations on society at the macro level, your users at the micro level, and how the two interact.

In this page on SocioTech Impact we consider the interplay between technology and social systems.

Use

The SocioTech Impact Canvas⁠

to run a workshop to get people thinking about the interplay between your products/services and society.

Technologies shape social systems

1. Tech products are shaped by values and beliefs of its designers.

The beliefs and values of engineers and designers become encoded in tech products. Technologies don’t originate out of thin air. They are designed by someone, somewhere, whose beliefs and normative commitments subtly shape its development, which often result in “specific ways of organizing power and authority,” as Langdon Winner writes in

“Do Artifacts Have Politics?”⁠

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Winner tells the story of Robert Moses, an infamous urban planner in NY from the 1920s to the 1970s. Moses built the overpasses on Long Island so extraordinarily low to prevent public buses, which were more likely to be used by racial minorities and low-income groups, from visiting Jones Beach State Park. The

details of this story⁠

have since been challenged, but Winner’s overall point remains: Moses built his beliefs into the overpasses. This isn’t just a phenomenon in the physical world — scholars like

Ruha Benjamin⁠

and

Safiya Noble⁠

have showed over and again how engineers and designers encode racism in technical systems. Or take

a recent study Nathanael Fast and Maya Cratsley on inventor bias⁠

which found that inventors perceived their creation as fairer relative to others even when they received feedback on the tool’s low performance. Worse, the study also found that the bias contributed to the continued use of the HR algorithm despite its inaccuracy.

While the intent behind these values matter, impact matters more. Even if it’s clear that a designer wasn’t malicious, the technological product still had a discriminatory impact.

Action - Beliefs & Biases

To anticipate impact, reflect on your own values, beliefs, and normative commitments, and how they might be reflected in the technology you’re designing. For example, ask yourself questions like:

What beliefs and biases might I hold as a result of my background and upbringing?

How might these be reflected in our innovation?

2. Tech affordances shape people.

Tech products and services shape the way our bodies are read and represented, where we focus (or don’t!) our attention, the actions we can (or can’t!) take, the decisions we make, etc. If you start thinking about how different technologies alter your behavior, you’ll start to see these affordances everywhere, hiding in plain sight.

While there are myriad affordances, we can collapse most affordances into two broad categories: technologies that extend our capabilities and those that restrict them. Here is Ivan Illich, Catholic priest, philosopher, and social critic, making a variation on this point in 1973:

“There are two ranges in the growth of tools: the range within which machines are used to extend human capability and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over—first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client, and second imposing its own logic and demand on both.”

But affordances aren’t just baked into the product itself — they’re entangled in the business model and operations of a company. For example, the internet of today is nothing at all like the internet of the 1990s, which emphasised affordances like anonymity and ephemerality. What changed wasn’t a technological change but an accomplishments of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Action - Affordance Check

To anticipate impact, you must consider how the product you’re developing shapes human agency— whether it extends or constrains our capabilities. But don’t analyze the technology in a vacuum, analyze it within a system that accounts for the business incentives that might shape the affordances over time. Ask yourself questions like:

How might our innovation shape or constrain people? Is human agency constrained or extended?

How might this differ for different marginalised groups? For example, does the technology increase the self-determination and agency of the poor?

How might the business model or culture of the company impact the affordances of our products and services?

3. Tech products shift power

Tech products can shift who has power. Lewis Mumford, a historian and philosopher of technology, divides technologies into “authoritarian technics” and “democratic technics.” Here’s a brief breakdown:

Democratic technologies are “human-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.” These are tools; they are used by people in service of their objectives. The objectives might still be really bad — a hammer can be used as a weapon — so it’s the user’s objective that matters. Bad actors can and will abuse the innovation.

Authoritarian technologies are “system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable.” These are technologies that become a system — which then acts on people, rather than the other way around: power shifts from the people, to the system.

For example, take the Moses’ overpass again. The story isn’t simply that Moses embedded his beliefs and biases into the overpasses, but that together, the overpasses became a system that regulated behavior.

In short, tech products can empower people, putting the objective’s of their user first.

For example,

38 Degrees⁠

enables people to launch a digital campaign to support something they care about, and build awareness for it.

Or they can shift power from the individual user to the broader technical system.

For example, this is often the case in digital products, which as Lawrence Lessig writes in “code is law,” regulate our behavior, determine how we’re classified and who can access our data, and constrain the kinds of decisions we can make.

Action - Power Analysis

To anticipate impact, you must contend with power — who has it, who might lose it, and how the tech product might shift power from the user to the technical system. Ask yourself questions like:

How might bad actors abuse our innovations and cause societal harm?

How might power be shifted by our innovation — either intentionally or unintentionally?

4. Tech products alter ecosystems.

No technological system is simply additive — it is always ecological.

“A new medium does not add something; it changes everything.”

Neil Postman

Systems don’t remain the same, but just with ‘more technology’; they become altogether different ecosystems.

“In the year, 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on.”

Neil Postman

For example, the use of image and video based algorithmic recommendation systems isn’t just society plus those technologies. TikTok is changing the kind of relationships we have with one another — disrupting the social graph, ushered in by Facebook and earlier social media sites, and encouraging more para-social relationships.

What this new ecology looks like isn’t clear, nor is it fixed — it’s ever evolving in combination with other technologies that nudge social dynamics and rearrange culture.

Action - Think Change, Not Addition

To anticipate impact, you must consider how the introduction of a technology alters the surrounding ecosystem. Ask yourself questions like:

What new cultural norms, relationships, or social dynamics might our innovation encourage or change?

What could the potential impact of our innovation be (both in line with our intent or otherwise)?

Social systems shape technologies

1. Complex dynamics emerge from the interaction of people and technologies

Ordered systems are those that respond to cause-and-effect, wherein if I do X, Y will occur, and we can verify that X caused Y — and so, the future is always a neat theory of change away. ‘Unordered’ systems are systems wherein complex structures and patterns emerge from the interactions of simple components, all without the help of a central control mechanism. You can't predict the outcomes of introducing a new tech product into a complex system because they're non-linear and the component parts are interdependent. You don’t know what to do until you act because you can’t know for sure how the system is likely to respond. So you probe it, or run “safe to fail” experiments, as Dave Snowden, founder of the Cynefin Company calls them. As you test novel ideas, possible solutions start to reveal themselves. It’s also in complex, unordered systems wherein you need multiple, diverse perspectives on the problem — because again, it’s not clear what to do.

For example, recommendation algorithms aren’t optimised for hate and bigotry from the start. Rather, they’re often optimised for engagement or time-on-platform, and for various reasons, many of us find hateful content engaging, whether we subscribe to the ideas expressed in it or not. But then the longer we stick around and consume that content, the more the algorithm learns to serve that impulse. This leads to a feedback loop, which is what starts to build on itself, leading to horrible outcomes.

Action - Ordered or Not?

To anticipate impact, determine whether you’re in an ordered or unordered system. If the latter, pursue ‘safe to fail’ experiments to determine how your tech product might interact with the dynamics of the system, and proactively solicit diverse perspectives on the problem you’re trying to solve. Ask yourself questions like:

Can I assume cause and effect in this system?

What might contribute to a non-linear response?

What feedback loops — either reinforcing or dampening — might my innovation contribute to?

2. How one experiences a new technology depends on their societal position

Tech products disproportionately harm those at the margins of society. This is especially true of data-driven tech products like algorithmic systems, which are themselves trained on historical data.

For example, In 2014, Amazon developed an algorithmic recruitment tool to support its hiring process. Amazon hoped the tool would increase efficiency while avoiding bias against women by eliminating social identity markers. The thinking went: if women are underrepresented in the tech sector, using an anti-classification system will lead to a more fair outcome. But the recruitment tool was trained on the previous 10 years of employment data, and technology was —and is — a male-dominated sector. So the algorithm assigned higher scores to men. Since this inequity is systemic, it is possible that in the entirety of the tech sector’s history, there is not one piece of employment data that isn’t biased against women.

That technologies tend to disproportionately harm those at the margins of society runs into conflict with the propensity to design for scale and bridge ‘access divides.’ Too often we design for the median user, rather than leaving space for contextually sensitive technologies, which might account for a range of societal positions. We’re also quick to extend access to prospective users without understanding what Tressie McMillan Cottom calls

“predatory inclusion”⁠

or the “technique of including marginalized consumer-citizens into ostensibly democratizing mobility schemes on extractive terms.” To avoid repeating the pattern of disproportionately harming those at the margins of society requires centering them in the design, deployment, and governance of your tech product.

Action - Center the Margins

To anticipate impact, consider how different groups might be affected differently based on their societal position. Ask yourself questions like:

How might one’s societal position impact their experience of the technology?

How might you incorporate the perspective of marginalized groups in the design, deployment, and governance of your tech product in a non-extractive, empowering manner?

3. Technologies have narratives that shape or hide the societal impact of those technologies.

We use narratives to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. The frames we select — ”fraud,” “empowerment,” etc. — make certain elements of a narrative salient, and hide or downplay others. Frames aren’t neutral — indeed, they’re often intentionally created and marketed. This is why they’re extremely powerful. You know how we say “climate change” rather than “global warming?” That was a

strategic choice.⁠

In tacitly adopting a frame, we’re aligning ourselves with a set of interests, values, and politics, often without knowing it.

Moreover, we tend to legitimize narrators who are experts in technology, and not the social systems that the technology is entangled with — and how this reaffirms or exacerbates the status quo. Who we select to help us understand the future is ultimately about power in the present — it’s about whose experience, expertise, and epistemology gets to decide what problems matter and how we understand them.

For example, someone with a techno-determinist mindset — one that sees technological change as determinative of social change — will see a ‘tech problem’ very differently than an Afrofuturist, who believes that what needs reimagining are the social systems that shape and are shaped by technology.

Action - Narratives & Narrators

To anticipate impact, you must interrogate the narrative frame used to characterize the problem you think you’re solving, and the tech product you’re developing. Ask questions like:

Who’s perspectives are missing and whose interests might not be considered?

What is the narrative frame that describes the problem we are solving and for whom?

Whose perspective and expertise is being privileged, and whose is being sidelined?

4. The communities that form around a technology are shaped by culture — which in turn shapes how those technologies are used and governed.

The same underlying technology can be used by very different communities shaped by different cultural norms, leading to very different outcomes. Often then, the best way to understand technology’s likely impact on society is with an anthropological lens — it’s in understanding the beliefs, rituals, and practices of communities that we can see future use cases more clearly.

For example, some crypto communities see blockchain technology as a mechanism for reinvigorating democratic governance, while others see it through a libertarian, anti-state lens. Across these instances, we see the same underlying technology, but very different communities shaped by different cultural norms and movements, leading to very different use cases.

Action - Vibes Matter

To anticipate impact, consider the community you are building around the technology. Ask yourself questions like:

What are the beliefs, rituals, and practices you want to encourage and discourage in the community we will build around our innovation?

Related resources

The SocioTech Impact Canvas

Use

The SocioTech Impact Canvas⁠

to run a workshop to get people thinking about the interplay between your products/services and society.

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Untangled

This is a newsletter about technology, people, and power. It synthesises conceptual frameworks and social science research to help you untangle the strange, technologically-mediated world around you.

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