Time is a Flat Circle

(And so is a lot of technology policy)

I smiled this morning when re-reading the beginning of Marianne Bellotti’s book, “Kill It With Fire – Manage Aging Computer Systems (And Future Proof Modern Ones)“. The title of the first chapter is ‘Time is a flat circle’. Time being a flat circle is a great way to summarize déjà vu, a feeling you get often in tech policy circles.

In the chapter, she talks about trends and cycles that occur within the technology landscape. It’s a great read, well recommended. And it came to mind again later this morning while I was attending a webinar hosted by the Canadian government about the G7 member countries’ approach to AI policy.

The event was focused on efforts to get small and medium sized businesses to adopt artificial intelligence. What I heard in the webinar rhymed a lot with stories we were told about unleashing the power of big data roughly a decade ago. But with the stakes made out to be much higher this time around.

Whether ten years ago or now, there is a common effort in tech policy circles to talk about technologies in the abstract, and to try to resolve challenges about them in the abstract as well. There is also a constant effort at erasing history, putting all of our focus on the future, on the unknown. Books like Bellotti’s help with seeing different kinds of patterns in technology – market patterns and product patterns – that yield a lot of help in reconsidering what is happening now.

Context context context makes conversations about technology use make sense. Good governance and thoughtful technology operations will always need to be contextual, and will require lots of time and thought and awareness of history. Good governance isn’t a product to adopt, or a toolkit to implement, but rather a way of doing business with both creativity and care.