Background

When I sat down to think about what I wanted to say, I began by reflecting on the ethos that drives my work in software. I have a quite particular approach to software systems, and this is the reason I describe what I do in general as socio-technical.

As pretentious as it may sound, I don't actually mean it to be that way. For me, it's the simplest way to think effectively about software systems - they're inseparable from the people they impact. Whether it's systems for use by other software people, or systems for use by the general public, none of them can truly make sense without considering and understanding the way in which they influence the people who use them - and how the differences in people who use them will define the success of the systems themselves.

In short, software - and technology more generally - is political. Every choice we make when designing any non-trivial system is in some sense a political one - how we expect people to engage, what behaviour we're trying to enable, the impacts on wider society that this behaviour might have. I believe that "leave politics out of software" is a fundamentally misguided mantra, and potentially a wilful blindness to the consequences of what we build, and how we build it.

Sometimes that might have relatively localised and benign consequences - a tool we build solely for our fellow technologists might be harder to use and of less value than we hoped. Other times, when we develop something for the public at large, it might be altogether more momentous - changing the society on which we unleash it, for better or worse.

This way of looking at software as part of a broader system encompassing people and their behaviours means that I can't draw a line around a narrow view of technology and ignore anything around it. It means that ignoring the consequences of technology on our wider society isn't really an option. And that means that sometimes I'm going to have to write about people, and about politics, and about all of the messy things that make technology and change complicated.