When Microsoft programmer Kentaro Toyama was sent by his employers to India in 2004, charged with using technology to improve education, he expected to swoop in armed with gadgets and effect whizzy social change. It didn’t quite pan out like that. Toyama had some early successes at Microsoft Research India, including the invention of a device that allowed multiple mice-wielding pupils to control one computer at the same time. (MultiPoint, a problem-fixer for classrooms that had too few computers, won awards.) But he quickly came to see that technology was not the “magic cure” export his employers – and, indeed, many in Silicon Valley – seemed to expect.
In his new book, Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, he writes that this was “hard to take. I was a computer scientist, a Microsoft employee, and the head of a group that aimed to find digital solutions for the developing world. I wanted nothing more than to see innovation triumph… But exactly where the need was greatest, technology seemed unable to make a difference.” He worked in schools that had been given computers but had no tech support, the broken-down hardware quickly ending up stacked in cupboards. He watched teachers struggle to cope with screen-enthused kids, for whom “a computer was less a help, more hindrance”.
Back in the US, Toyama began to think more widely about the difference in expectation and reality as to the assistance afforded by technology in education. He tried teaching computer science in a classroom full of kids with laptops. He spoke to many parents who felt that, without lessons in the use of digital tools, their kids would be left behind. He saw CEOs and NGOs and politicians try to deal with social problems by hurling tech at them, and began to wonder if they weren’t missing the point. “I worked at a company whose soul was software,” he writes. “I felt disloyal doubting its value.”
In 2010, Toyama left Microsoft to take up a research fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, and began to work on a thesis that finally became Geek Heresy. His beliefs, indeed, are fairly heretical, given modern assumptions about the social benefits of technology – what Toyama now believes has a tendency to be “empty sloganeering that collapse[s] under critical thinking”. Tucked up beyond our laptops, smartphones, and tablets, Toyama writes, “we are unable to entertain alternatives to tech-driven, capitalist, liberal democracy, so we pronounce [technology] the ultimate salvation”.
Currently a professor at the University of Michigan, Toyama calls me from his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to discuss his thesis. Appropriately enough, my iPhone crashes just as the call connects and I have to switch it off, wait for it to restart, email him, and wait for another call before we can speak.
Did you fight tech-disillusionment at first?
It was a gradual process and I fought it. I was in India, overseeing something like 50 different research projects, each one looking for a way to use digital technology to alleviate poverty in some way, through education, healthcare, government, agriculture and so on. And in quite a few of these projects the research pilots would go well. We would be able to show that under certain conditions technology seemed to help people. But as soon as we tried to take the project to other environments – especially environments where we thought the challenges most severe – we found that it didn’t make a difference how good the technology was, other factors prevented positive impact.
When I looked closely at what those issues were, repeatedly it was lack of human capacity, lack of institutional capacity – in some cases corruption – dysfunction of various types. I’m a researcher, so my tendency is to want to find a pattern, and why this pattern persists. The only conclusion I could come to is that technology is secondary – ultimately the people and the institutions matter the most.
Was that hard to accept?
I grew up in a mentality in which science and technology and engineering are the ultimate salvation for civilisation. And I’ve come to think that beginning with such an assumption is dangerous, because it rules out all kinds of other solutions that would seem to be more suited to addressing problems. I routinely hear people say, “You suggest technology doesn’t solve social problems” – and then with a completely straight face they add, “But what else is there?” Well, there is no end to other types of solution! It’s just that if you think of technology as the primary one, then it’s hard to even think of others.
Can you give an example?
If a large corporation becomes sufficiently powerful, maybe what we need to do is have policies that ensure some percentage of the board is elected by the public. The current way corporations work is that, as long as they’re not breaking specific laws, they can almost do as they please with the money they accumulate. But increasingly we’re in a world where a few powerful corporations have tremendous influence over the lives of billions of people and not all of that is accountable to the public in any way, shape or form. That to me is a political issue. That could be fixed, perhaps by having half the board of directors elected. That’s not a technological solution.
Will you have horrified your old colleagues at Microsoft with this book?
Responses I get from people who might have held similar views to mine before [I went to India] are mixed. There are people from whom I get a somewhat hostile reaction. From some there’s begrudging acceptance. You know, very few people will stand firm on a perspective that technology in and of itself solves deep social problems. And yet I do think people tend to act in a way that suggests they believe that.
Why the disconnect there?
I think there’s a natural, almost instinctive desire to want to see ingenious innovations triumph. And to a great extent, those of us who are wealthier and better educated in the world have benefited from the last 200 years of technological innovation. So it’s hard to shake that. That was true even for me. I was never an extreme techno-utopian, but I had this intuitive feeling that in general more technology was better, and it took seeing that it doesn’t actually work in practice for the realisation to sink in.
Do you risk becoming a pariah?
Certainly I don’t get a huge amount of support from the technology community in saying these things. But I have to say, on my book tour I went to several places that could be argued to be centres of the belief that technology is going to save the world, and they were at least listening to the message even if they didn’t thoroughly agree.
The technology industry has become better and better at saying the right things, even if their [outward-looking] tendencies do not necessarily align… It’s not just the technology sector, by the way. It’s also organisations like the World Bank. Their focus is international development, and often when you look at their projects, they’re technology-centric – even though the people there themselves, in a common refrain, would say, “Technology only addresses 10% of problems. The remaining 90% of problems are human issues.”
So it’s almost a case of: “This is true for us, that’s true for them?”
Absolutely. I’ve noticed a tendency in America for richer, better-educated parents to work harder and harder at trying to keep technology away from their own children. In Silicon Valley there are these Waldorf schools, very expensive, a lot of the children are the children of technology company [employees]. And these schools ban electronics until the pupils are 13 or 14. Isn’t it hypocritical for those same parents to turn around at their jobs and try to push more technology into disadvantaged children’s lives?
So your suspicions apply to the developed world too?
Yes. One thing I’m coming across is that among less-educated parents there is a belief that greater exposure to technology makes your children more likely to have a job in the technology sector. Which is as silly as believing that if you can drive a car, you could be hired as an engineer at a car manufacturing plant.
To me it seems as if there’s some preying on parental fears. There’s something fishy going on – among politicians you can see this very clearly. It’s really easy to get a great photo op out of handing a child a computer. And children, of course, will be overjoyed at the beginning because they’re basically being handed a terrific toy. On the other hand, it’s very difficult to take a photograph of improvements to the management of a school… I think politicians understand this very well.
You write: “There’s a big difference between learning the digital tools of modern life… and learning the critical skills necessary for an information age.” Do you think there should be less focus in schools on learning to use computers?
You know, the funny thing is, as the technology gets better and better, it gets less and less important we teach our children how to use it, because it becomes so much easier to learn the technology. What’s not being taught through exposure to technology, in and of itself, are things like the basic mathematics that you need to become a good engineer, or the writing and communication skills you need to be a good journalist. It’s not the tools that we use that define us, it’s the underlying capacities.
For some reason we treat visual technology in a completely different way than we treat other technology. We wouldn’t sit a five-year-old in a car and let them do whatever they want, because we believe when they grow up they’ll need to learn how to drive. Putting a child in front of a computer and assuming they’re going to do the right things is a great mistake… Look at any child with a smartphone today. They’re not doing maths problems. They’re playing Angry Birds.
As a teacher you taught computer studies to a room of eight- to 10-year-olds with laptops. What happened?
I thought it would be a breeze. It turned out to be the hardest class I’ve ever taught. I was amazed how quickly they could find games, even after I thought we’d cleaned the laptops of games completely… as soon as my back was turned. Even in a class that was supposed to be promoting computer literacy, the other teachers closely managed how often the laptops were even open.
Another fail for tech.
Simply having screen time is not equivalent to a real education.
Away from education, what do tech advocates get wrong when it comes to trying to address other social problems?
The overall mistake people make is that they associate Silicon Valley with being a successful hub of activity, period. They think there must be something about Silicon Valley that you could spread. And then there’s a generalisation that because Silicon Valley generates technology, it must be the technology that makes things better. But what really makes Silicon Valley work is not that they use technology, but that they’re highly talented, highly motivated people who are constantly thinking about being entrepreneurs. It’s that human side that is resulting in them producing technology that the rest of the world wants. You know, if you could bottle the talent, and the entrepreneurial drive, and spread that around, I think that would have some value in the developing world.
Have you changed any minds yet?
It’s been difficult. Often when I talk about this the people in the audience are open to be persuaded. But they’ll tell me it’s the people above them in management – the senior executives, the CEOs, who simply won’t entertain the idea that it’s not technology that’s going to change the world. Maybe that’s what it takes to be that kind of executive. You have to so solidly believe in the technology mission, you can’t entertain other ideas.
Geek Heresy is published by Perseus Books (£18.99). Click here to order a copy for £15.19
