Anticipating and Responding to Challenges Regarding Digital Technologies and Valuing

In this paper, we contribute to the discussion on the future of the relations between human values and the widespread adoption of Digital Information and Communication Technologies. In particular, we discuss ideas coming out of our collective efforts to address this relationship by fostering Socially Robust and Enduring Computing (SREC), forms of computing that support rather then disrupt social relations and foster societal transformations. In particular, we aim to argue that it is possible for us humans to build an alternative future by supporting digital technologies with specific, chosen social affordances. Drawing upon a combination of STS contributions (Actor Network Theory in particular) and neo-Marxist thinking, we describe the steps needed to promote SREC, to: 1) Identify actual digital practices that could, taken together, provide a basis for a deeply transformed processes of social formation reproduction by fostering different values and alternative valuation processes; 2) Explore how institutions might support these practices and discourage practices that undermine them; 3) Specify measures that would allow judgments to be made regarding the extent to which practice in the institutions support the desired transformations. In the paper, we also need to carry out a series of theoretical clarifications to legitimate our empirical project. First, we need to engage with an ongoing critique of contemporary practices regarding value and values, valuing, and “valuesing.” This critique has been prompted by efforts to come to terms with, on the one hand, new forms of labor emerging in digital practices (e.g., playbour), and, on the other, efforts to develop an approach to valuing processes which overcome the neo-liberal exclusive focus on markets. Second, we explain why we need to include the establishment and use of commons-based concepts and practices. This move leverages the work done in the social sciences on common pool resources, commons-based peer production, and the common. Third, we reframe the relationship between values and digital things in STS terms of co-construction, rather than framing it strictly in terms of the consequences for values of digital technologies. This allows us to draw upon Callon's concept of devices, shifting it from market to non-market, common devices. And, finally, We shift attention to the future, moving away from current social formation dynamics likely to foster ever-expanding degrees of crisis. This allows us to project a more direct view on how base a deliberate intervention on re-shaping the reproduction of current dynamics. This should be based on re-aligning digital technologies with a renewed set of human values and how the activities of institutionalizing and measuring them can actually contribute to the constant, progressive, renewal of the values themselves. Anticipating and Responding to Challenges Regarding Digital Technologies and Valuing