Tech Excepcionalism

Tech excepcionalism is the believe that conventional rules, wisdom, and stats don’t apply to technology. But Just wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true.

Cory Doctorow, in his podcast The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, gives some clear examples of tech excepcionalism:

• The idea that you can loose money on every transaction but make it up with scale.

• The idea that you can take an unjust system like racist policing practices and fix it with technology.

• The idea that tech itself can’t be racist because computers are just doing math and math can’t be racist.

Exceptionalism is not exclusive to technology.