Accountability in Practice: Technology against Democracy

Practice theory offers a way for understanding technology as a facet of our collective existence and a condition for our conceptions of community. It is especially useful when joined with an idea of technology as a way of revealing and converting the world into a reserve for action. This notion, that the essence of technology is not merely instrumental but in reality constructive and creative, is behind Heidegger’s idea of enframing. The point is that technology is in essence a part of practice, not merely an instrument for practicing. I propose to understand this by way of exploring the development of the idea of accountability. In the English language, we speak relatively less of the notion of responsibility and more of the notion of accountability. What this means for practice, I propose, is profound once we are able to see accountability as a technological concept. This is not to deny the relationality of accountability; the idea that accountability is technological underscores better how the relations imbued in accountability differ from responsibility. The difference is ultimately about notions of control. We have come a long way from the sense of accountability in the giving of an account (as in an explanatory story) to a group. We are no longer even centrally concerned with the sense of accountability derived from liberal political theory, the sense that is anchored in representation. Accountability has been wrested from the arms of liberal political theory and is now firmly situated in the Administrative State. This shift, I stipulate, is an important one. It is a move from a political conception of accountability to a technological one. I say technological rather than simply technical because I want to make the case that accountability is more than just an instrument of some kind; it is an ordering of the world (Heidegger). A common claim is that accountability is an essential feature of democracy, but I am skeptical of this claim. Accountability is a social consequence of technology, marked by its orientation towards assurances of right action. It is not only a social consequence, though. Accountability plays a pivotal conceptual role in the developing technology of artificial intelligence, which is best described as accountable where it literally accounts for its decision making. Thus, accountability is a concept of and for technology and one, I will argue, that is in practice against democracy.