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Digital dreams have become nightmares

Digital technologies are essential for learning, health, politics, and commerce. We have innovative products and greater control over the universe. Dangerous physical labor is done by robots. Computational medicine lengthens our life span. And tech supports collaboration and community, essential during the pandemic. Ethical technology use has been expanded by digital heroes such as Tim Berners-Lee, Doug Engelbart, Batya Friedman, Steve Jobs, Alan Kay, J.C.R. Licklider, Ada Lovelace, and Joe Weizenbaum. Yet much is troubling. We depend upon software that nobody fully understands and is vulnerable to cyberterrorism. Privacy has been overrun by governments and surveillance capitalism. Totalitarian control is beyond that envisioned by Bentham with his panopticon and Orwell in 1984. The Internet serves us news matching our prejudices, with an increasing inability to tell true from false. Our children are addicted to their devices, while ubiquitous tech has helped us become workaholics. Jobs are demolished without social safety nets. Digital leviathans threaten to control all commerce. A tech person can become a conscientious objector. Like soldiers refusing to serve in any war or a specific war, this is the refusal to work for a firm or on a project. The distinction between general and selective objection is key. My friend Louis Font, who in 1969 became the first West Point graduate to become a selective conscientious objector and refuse to serve in the Vietnam War, was not objecting to all war. One can object to a specific task or to all work at a firm. The final action is whistleblowing. Whistleblowing occurs when an employee is so convinced of the immorality of a firm's confidential actions that he or she announces to the world what it is doing.