What opposition to delivery drones shows about big tech’s disrespect for democracy | John Naughton

Scratch a digital capitalist and you’ll find a technological determinist – someone who believes that technology drives history. These people see themselves as agents of what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as “creative destruction”. They revel in “moving fast and breaking things” as the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, used to put it until his PR people convinced him it was not a good vibe, not least because it implied leaving taxpayers to pick up the broken pieces.

Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, “all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future”.

But for the narrative of inevitability to translate into widespread general deployment of a technology, politicians eventually have to buy into it too. We’re seeing a lot of this at the moment with AI, and it’s not clear yet how that will play out in the long run. Some of the omens are not good, though. One thinks, for example, of the toe-curling video of Rishi Sunak fawning on Elon Musk, the world’s richest manchild, or of Tony Blair’s recent soppy televised conversation with Demis Hassabis, the sainted co-founder of Google DeepMind.

How refreshing it is, then, to come across an account of what happens when the deterministic myth collides with democratic reality. It takes the form of “Resisting technological inevitability: Google Wing’s delivery drones and the fight for our skies”, a striking academic paper soon to be published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, ie a pukka journal. Authored by Anna Zenz and Julia Powles of, respectively, the Law School and Tech & Policy Lab of the University of Western Australia, it relates how a big tech company sought to dominate a new market, regardless of societal consequences, using a shiny new technology – delivery drones. And how alert, resourceful and determined citizens saw off the “experiment”.

The company in question is Wing, an offshoot of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Its mission is “building delivery drones, and working towards the day when these aircraft can deliver everything from consumer goods to emergency medicine – a new commerce operation that opens up universal access to the sky”. Australia is home to Google’s biggest drone operation in terms of number of deliveries and customers served, a fact apparently celebrated by both state and federal governments, with the latter leading the charge.

Zenz and Powles argue that in persuading Aussie politicians to allow it to provide (on an “experimental” basis, of course) a kind of airborne Deliveroo, Google made extensive use of the inevitability myth. Public officials who already believed that delivery drones were inevitable could see the advantages of surfing the wave and offered passive or active support. (And, of course, sought kudos for being in favour of “innovation”.) Next, the company used the inevitability myth to seek “community acquiescence” on the grounds that if citizens believed that delivery drones would inevitably be coming they were more likely to be silent or passively tolerant – stances that could be creatively interpreted as “acceptance”.

One of the Canberra suburbs chosen for a trial beginning in July 2018 was Bonython. It didn’t go well from the outset. Many residents were annoyed and distressed by drones suddenly appearing from nowhere. They were outraged by the impact of the aircraft on the community, local wildlife and the environment. They resented unplanned landings, dropped payloads, drones flying close to car traffic, and birds attacking and forcing down the devices.

In many other places, people would probably just have complained and shrugged. But Bonython turned out to be different. A group of professional residents (including a retired aviation law expert) set up a Facebook page and a functioning website, produced regular newsletters and knocked on doors. They lobbied federal and local MPs, contacted local, national and international media, and deluged local authorities with freedom of information requests.

And in due course it paid off. In August 2023, Wing quietly announced that it would cease its operations in the Canberra area because it had, er, “shifted [its] operating model”. More significantly, though, the campaign triggered a parliamentary inquiry into drone delivery systems to look at (among other things): the decision to allow the trials in the first place; the economic impact of the technology being tested; the extent of regulatory oversight of the technology at various levels of government; and the extent of any environmental impact of drone deliveries. In other words, an investigation into why and how public officials had been suckered by the inevitability myth. Or, more bluntly, the kinds of question that government and regulators should always be asking when tech companies come up with guff about “innovation”, “progress” and the like.

The big takeaway, as Marshall McLuhan once observed in a different context, is that “there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening”. The inevitability myth can – and always should – be challenged by citizens.

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