Embodied Authority and Resistance
Complementary Efforts to Technology Law and Policy
Recently a crossing guard stepped into the path of my car. My right-hand turn on a red light was too aggressive for his liking. He gave me a severe look, paired with a whistle blast. I’ve been thinking about our exchange ever since, with a lot of gratitude for how he does his job.
Crossing guards offer a helpful way to think about the use of authority and the nature of scale in the context of large systems. Regardless of the extensive rules that govern our roads, there is still a lot of room for us to decide “how” we follow them. The work that crossing guards do is a local response to what happens in the grey of the law. I’m allowed to turn right on a red light, it’s legal, but being allowed to do it hinges on how I do it.
What happens if we take the localization of the crossing guard and imagine technology governance from the ground up? To what extent might we reconsider the local and small-scale when facing down ongoing waves of technological development? The approach inverts the norm of accepting the frame of the laws and policies that are created at the federal or national level and work their way down to us.
It might be that historical reliance on national and international law and policy as the main tools to manage the governance of technology has contributed to a sense of inevitability about technological change. While these laws and policies steer things in necessary directions, they’re not prescriptive enough (by good design) to get into the operational weeds of our everyday digital lives in ways that don’t map neatly onto privacy, security, or data protection.
As critical public and private spaces continue to be targeted for ever-encroaching market-driven automation, history points to the possibility of regulatory intervention in only the most egregious cases of harm, and oftentimes not even then. Adopting the use of technology because it’s not outright malicious or in support of illegal activity is not a good floor for a healthy society and democracy. It’s certainly not the kind of thinking that paradigm shifts are made of.
Convenience, efficiency, and productivity will never be illegal. But their primacy is informing how we communicate, relate, and make decisions about each other, and about ourselves, in ways that do not serve us all well, or do not serve us all well equally. The “problem owner” of these cultural impacts on our relations is unclear — but it’s not happening in the neatly demarcated space of law and policy.
Law is not written to breathe. It’s flat and unanimated, and made alive through our actions. The laws we’re creating to manage data and technology, most recently with artificial intelligence, make it hard to get a sense of how our bodies relate to the rules. How do we know if the interpretation of tech law, the places where things are grey, are happening according to shared norms and values? There are few people engaged in the manner of the crossing guard in the deployment and use of our digital systems.
Crossing guards, when funded, tend to be funded locally. The position is still tied to the idea of law and policy — but one that is grounded, literally, in embodied authority. Law with breath in it. And law supported in a less punitive way. I don’t walk away from a crossing guard with a ticket or a record.
We have a persistent instinct to think inside the technology rather than around it that is holding us back from intervening more effectively. There are spaces where the use of technology — or its refusal — falls under our direct existing control. From professional associations to organized labor, from purchasing and maintenance decisions to individual care in creating accessible community meeting spaces. From the decision to go to meetings in person or send a recording and synthesizing AI bot.
There are a lot of different contexts — outside the realms of policy of law, and as complements to it — that offer us ways to protect each other by engaging with the dull and inconvenient. Holding the red paddle up for the ninety-nine cars of a hundred that were already going to turn right at an appropriate speed.
By seeing the existing authority we hold to intervene in our local use of technology — at city hall, in our neighborhood, in our jobs, in our civic lives in all shades and shapes — we can take on more of the crossing guard function. We can use power and authority we don’t have to ask anyone for, to show up for each other in ways that law can’t. We can insist on being more careful with each other, even if it means stepping in each other’s way sometimes.
With gratitude to Daniel Munro and James McLeod for the encouragement to write this down a while back, and with a particular nod to Daniel in particular (I think?) for the “embodied authority” phrasing to describe a crossing guard.
