Humanist IT manifesto

Information is a complex tool. It has within it vectors and adjacencies, formal and informal connections that build a fuller and/or more nuanced picture. The ways it can derail are equally complex. All of it is inextricably intertwingled with human cognition.

Information is the core of information technology, not the technology. But for what we're building to be technology – a tool – it must not manipulate information, and it must be clearly focused on the primary usefulness of information architecture: orientation, findability, and navigability. In other words, mapping.

We're failing. Massively, and to mass misery.

It seems to have mostly started for business decisions (profit! growth! shareholder value!), and then corrupted more deeply for political goals. We leaned into the manipulation that increases information trustlessness, and away from the mapping that increases usefulness. We didn't do just one thing to fuck this up, we fucked it up in a multi-faceted effort.

I'm saying "we" because we can fix it. We do not have to ask for permission and beg for change.

• We, the people who work the code and design, can build in patterns that support humanity.
• We, the people who love information, can educate about information literacy whenever it's relevant, effectively circumventing dictates to silo it and ignore what's happening behind the curtain.
• We, the people who care about individuals, can work to more deeply understand the combination of environment, reactions, responses, and convoluted logics to learn how to remove manipulation from information mapping.
• We, the people who care about humanity in both the present and future, can work for effective regulations to rein in our worst actors.
• We, the people who don't want to understand the construction but still want the infinite potential usefulness of the maps, can choose to learn about information literacy and chase effectiveness before marketing and hype claims.

We all have a part to play. Play them together, and we fix it. Continue to think we're in it alone and have to follow the seemingly leaderless herd, and we go deeper into manipulation and trustlessness.

Right now information technology is like a hammer with a shredded handle. Grab it thoughtlessly, and you get gashes and splinters. Push through and use per direction, and you ram in splinters with every swing. Do it several times a day, and your hand starts looking like the shredded handle. Pain, frustration, anger, and cognitive dissonance increases.

And how we're currently dealing with it? Staying the course. Gaslighting to keep using it – "or get left behind". Pressured adherence through top-down mandates and sunk cost fallacy. Invectives to take it as-is or leave it, while using social pressure to make leaving it detrimental to survival (paying for food and shelter) in a capitalist society.

It's time to fix it. It's time to treat it like an agnostic tool, not a manipulation device. It's time to make it a hammer again, not a way to inflict self-harm. To do this:

• Normalizing information literacy
• Privacy
• Self-management of personal data
• Security
• Human-centered everything
• Accessibility, because people still don't seem to understand that the non-median human is "human" with a descriptor
• Increased implementation of effective, multi-faceted mapping
• Tightening all our metadata to describe precisely, instead of reaching for adjacencies and near-misses