What kind of tech are you building?

This question is largely inspired by my reading of the "Why Nations Fail" book. It talks about the importance of inclusive economic and inclusive political institutions and how they feed into the strengthening of each other in a virtuous circle.

Vice versa, excluding/absolutist political institutions and extractive institutions re-enforce each other as well in a vicious circle.

As builders of technology we must ask ourselves what kind of economic and political institution building are we contributing to. What kinds of technologies promote more inclusiveness and which ones lead to extractive institutions.

This I feel is also deeply linked to my discomfort in working with companies I feel are morally questionable in their impact on the world. Towards the end of college I had a very strong notion about not working in companies that are primarily attention extractive(Youtube, Tiktok etc) and instead wanted to work for comoanies that provide tools that helped you do whatever you wished to, but better and faster(Samsung, MS, Atlassian). After working in the AR/Metaverse domain while at Samsung, seeing no useful usecases beyond gimicks, I decided this was not for me. Moving to Nutanix (IT infra company), seemed like a far more interesting choice for various reasons amongst which was the fact that they are building technology that acts as the infrastructure layer to run software. As I then understood it, creating the plumbing of the internet felt like a much better use of my time and talents than slinging vapourware.

A few key examples come to mind:

Inclusive

Tools: Tools enable people to perform actions that were not available to them before. They lower the barrier to entry, they make production cheaper/faster, they
Open Source: Enshrined in its very nature is the idea that because of its marginal distribution/creation cost, computer technology is freely reusable and distributable. By providing the building blocksThis leads to more participants in the economic arena.
Nutanix: Feels like by trying to commoditise the server market as well as the cloud market, it is opening up options for anyone to manage large-scale infrastruture on non-propreitary x86 hardware and by allowing free movement across cloud for your data and apps, it is opening up the field by preventing the extractive tendencies of the cloud(data egress charges and whatnot). Maybe these kinds of open policies are only here while we are the challengers and will be replaced by extractive business practice evantually, but that is a future problem ig. ATM we dont even stop customers from migraing their entire stack off nutanix I believe.
ONDC: Is probably the biggest free market play enabled by the govt to compete against e-commerce and food delivery platforms. It is essentially commoditising marketplace platforms by providing a free access to suppliers, buyers, and delivery partners. It is a great example of a politically and economically inclusive institution.
UPI: UPI is setup as a free to use instant digital inter-account payment system. This infrastructure has led to the creation of a booming fintech field in india and enabled countless B2C brands to break free of the proprietary Visa/mastercard/others payment fees. It has also provided unprecedented access to digital payments for consumers in India.
MOOCs: Open access to vast amounts of learning

Extractive

Large scale data collection: It is being used to undermine the right to self determination/free-will in some ways.
E-commerce manipulation:
Social media: Inducing hatred, self loathing, fear, disharmony. By expliting users to create content, they are effectively monetising the efforts of its vast user base and selling their attention to advertisers. Marketplace for buying and selling attention. Where what the user gains is questionable when compared to what other parties involved gain. (Soshana zuboff talks about it too when asking how much does the user benefit in terms of features when google processes their data vs how much does google benefit. There's a diagram also in the book)
AI? It has taken all of the internet and content from authors, artists etc. Is it providing a net benefit to humanity? Jury's out ig. Also just realised that by technically scraping all of the internet, AI companies are essentially violating people's "Right to property" since I doubt that they ever consented for their IP to be used in this manner. It is similar to all the examples in the book about the elites taking over vast swathes of land to produce/grow benefits for them and nothing for the natives/labourers etc. In that sense nothing has changed really. The elite in a system continue to take whatever they wish and a truly inclusive political system shouldn't allow it without appropriate payment/recourse.

I also wonder wheather it is technology itself that is more inclusive or extractive or the business practicies within which it is utilised. Might have to dig further into the affordances of various technologies to figure that out(Similar to the argument Tarun referred to about making guns vs knives. One is clearly meant for killing while the other has myriad uses)