The Vigil of Consequence

When

One evening near midwinter, after dark. Kept for as long as the group can hold it.

How often

annual

Mood

solemn

What the vigil is for

The Vigil of Consequence is held for people harmed by technological systems. It is the solemn observance of this tradition, and the one we would least like to see softened.

The harms it holds in view are not hypothetical or future. They include people watched by systems they did not consent to and could not see. People refused work, credit, housing, treatment, or entry by an automated assessment with no route of appeal. People killed or maimed by weapons directed with computational assistance. People sorted by systems that had learned the discrimination in their training data and applied it faster and at greater scale than any individual could. People injured by information deliberately manufactured to deceive them, and communities pulled apart by it. And people living where the physical costs of computation land: mines, smelters, waste sites, water taken from places that had little, power stations kept running for demand generated somewhere wealthier.

That last category is included deliberately, because it is the one most easily forgotten by people who experience computation as weightless.

Why the tone is fixed

Every other observance in this tradition can be adapted to the temperament of whoever is keeping it. This one is solemn, and we would ask that it stay solemn.

The reason is that harm of this kind is unusually easy to convert into something more comfortable. It can become a discussion of policy. It can become a technical problem with an interesting solution. It can become an occasion for the people who built the systems to describe their difficult feelings about it, which is a way of relocating the subject.

Keeping it solemn, and keeping the affected people at the centre rather than the builders, is a structural defence against that drift.

Remembrance, accountability, repair

The vigil has three parts and they are not interchangeable.

Remembrance requires specificity. A general acknowledgement that harm occurs is nearly weightless. Naming a particular decision, a particular year, and a particular group of people is what makes the observance cost something.

It also requires accuracy. Do not invent details to make the account more affecting. Where you do not know something, say that you do not know. A vigil built on embellished stories is worse than no vigil, because it hands the people responsible an easy objection.

Accountability is the part most likely to be dropped. It means naming that decisions were made by people: someone set the threshold, someone chose the training data, someone decided the appeals process would be understaffed. “The system failed” is a sentence that protects everyone who built the system.

Where an organisation is publicly responsible for a documented harm, it may be named — but only from material that can be checked, and only as far as the evidence goes. This tradition does not accuse.

Repair is where the vigil ends, and the commitments are the reason to hold it at all. One specific act each, written down, read the following year. Not a resolution to care more. A thing that will be different.

If you choose to hold one

Nobody organises these. There are no vigils being kept by any body, because there is no body. If one happens it is because someone reading this decided to keep it, alone or with a few others.

Alone is entirely sufficient. A light, a written list of harms you have taken the trouble to verify, ten minutes of silence, and one commitment on paper. That is the whole observance.

What it does not claim

It does not claim that technology is the cause of these harms. People are, using technology, under incentives that mostly predate it.

It does not claim that mourning helps anyone. It does not. The commitments might.

And it does not offer forgiveness to anyone, including those who attend. There is no mechanism here for being cleared, and we have deliberately not built one.

The observance

1. The lighting

   A single small light is lit at the start and left burning until the end. If open flame is unsafe or unavailable, any light will do. It is not symbolic of anything; it marks that the time is set apart.

2. The naming

   Harms are named specifically and without generalisation. A category of person, a decision, a year. Where a name is publicly known and the family has made it public, it may be spoken. Where it is not, the harm is described without inventing details.

3. The accounting

   Whoever is present says what part they have had in systems that caused harm, if they wish to. This is not confession and there is no absolution offered; nobody responds, and nothing said is discussed afterwards.

4. The silence

   A long silence, longer than is comfortable. Ten minutes is usual. The discomfort is the point and should not be shortened out of politeness.

5. The commitments

   Each person states one specific thing they will do in the coming year: a fix, a refusal, a piece of documentation, a report filed, a design changed. Small and real. These are written down and read again next year.

If you are organising one

• State at the start that anyone may leave at any point, and that leaving during the naming is expected rather than rude.
• Do not invite people who have been harmed to speak. If they wish to, they will; being asked in front of a room is a further cost.
• Keep it to ninety minutes at most, with the silence in the middle rather than the end.
• Prepare the naming in advance from public, verifiable material. Do not improvise details, and say plainly when a detail is not known.
• Provide a way to attend without speaking and without being seen — a written thread, or a call with cameras off.
• Write down the commitments and agree who keeps them and where. A commitment nobody records was a feeling.