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Have you heard of tech bros? They're all over Silicon Valley. In this episode, I continue to reflect on Ruined by Design by Mike Montiero by looking at my own upbringing and how the valley is full of people like me.
A critique of the design of the internet today. This show deconstructs our assumptions and looks at the implementation of technology rather than the intent.
Mark Zuckerberg is morally bankrupt, but I’m sure he doesn’t see himself that way.
I think a lot of that has to do with the ethos of Silicon Valley.
To understand this ethos, a good place to start is Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand is a Russian American writer. She left Russia in 1926 for the United States. She’s the author of Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead, works of fiction that promote objectivist philosophy.
Atlas Shrugged is a very long read, so I’ll just summarize it for you:
It’s good to be an asshole.
Objectivism is a reaction to Soviet style communism. The Bolshevik Revolution had recently established the Soviet Union. When Rand left Russia, Joseph Stalin had been in power for 4 years.
Ayn Rand watched the rise of the Soviet Union from America. She rejected collectivism and statism.
She embraced laissez faire capitalism, probably because it was perfectly anti-communist.
Her guiding principle is something like “What’s Communist Russia doing? We should do the exact opposite.”
The central thesis of objectivism is that being selfish is a virtue.
Objectivism states that an individual’s moral obligation is to achieve his own well-being.
I’m not attacking Rand from an outsider perspective. I used to be a libertarian and I totally bought into what Ayn Rand was selling.
How did that happen? I grew up in Southern California, which for the most part is very liberal.
I was conditioned to believe that racism is binary. You are either a good person, or you’re a bad person because you hate people that are different.
In high school, I was in a band with a closeted gay guy on lead guitar, a black guy on bass, an Asian American guy on rhythm guitar. I think our singer’s parents were Latin and Asian American. We even had a Indian American as a designated dancer. Our drummer was a white guy who would probably describe himself as a recovering mormon, although he was still very connected to the church community.
In other words, my group of friends felt fairly diverse. As a teenager, I felt I had no bias towards people of color, different genders or sexual orientations. When friends disclosed their sexual orientation to me, it was unsurprising.
My family was also fairly affluent.
The fatal flaw of my perspective was assuming that the access I had to opportunities was the same for everyone.
I have always been socially liberal. Your body, your choice. You do you.
It was a natural logical progression to think of the economy in the same exact way. Any bias or hardships in the system would be eliminated if you just removed all of the barriers. Things like getting yourself out of poverty really felt like a personal choice: study hard, work hard, be rewarded.
It never occurred to me that someone living in poverty wouldn’t have access to the same educational opportunities that I had. Nor did it really dawn on me that the opportunities for good jobs to fall back on came from my social network full of highly privileged people. Today, when I put my designer hat on, my privilege is a rabbit hole. And I’m still blind to what I don’t know.
Silicon Valley is full of people like me. White. Male. Cisgender. Straight. When you are socially liberal and you create a platform that appears to allow everyone to have a voice, it’s hard to stomach that your beliefs and ideology might not align with reality. And when you’re blind to the realities of other people, it’s easy to dig a hole for yourself.
It starts with money.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” -- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)
It’s hard to recognize your own implicit bias and the damage you might be causing when you’re making a lot of money.
And there’s so much money to be made in Silicon Valley.
Everyone wants a piece of the action.
That’s where venture capital comes in.
Venture Capital firms invest in new companies in exchange for a percentage of the company.
VC firms place a lot of bets. And they don’t expect the majority to pan out. But when they do, the goal is a liquidity event.
A liquidity event is a merger, purchase or sale of a company.
For Silicon Valley, the goal is usually the Initial Public Offering (IPO).
A venture capitalist doesn’t prioritize a company’s sustainability.
They don’t prioritize making the world a better place.
A venture capitalist’s goal is to simply make a profit.
This is the reality that Silicon Valley lives in.
Profit is king and being selfish is a virtue.
Most people in the valley are socially liberal, which makes their implicit bias hard to accept.
And regulation? That’s an attempt to subvert the free market. Of course you would fight against that.
There is also a fundamental misunderstanding of the first amendment.
Tech moguls are quick to trot out the first amendment as a reason they won’t censor their platforms.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The only thing the first amendment says about freedom of speech is that Congress can’t make a law prohibiting.
Last time I checked, Facebook and Twitter were private companies.
A company can’t refuse service based on race, color, religion or national identity. That’s the Civil Rights Act, not the first amendment.
Think about bars or clubs. If you don’t dress appropriately, some won’t let you in. If you do get in, and you drink too much… maybe say something offensive?
The bouncer will throw you out. In this case, the bar is trying to let everyone have a good time. They have a choice to make: kick the asshole out, or let that one asshole ruin everyone else’s night.
Germany has strict laws banning Nazi symbols, incitement of the people, and hate speech. In order to operate in Germany, Twitter has to filter out hate speech.
But they only do it in Germany.
Twitter could do the same thing in the United States, it just doesn’t want to do it.
Why wouldn’t Twitter want to eliminate hate speech from their platform? It would affect their profit margins.
What do you do when you see a ridiculous post full of hateful things on social media? Twitter has learned that those types of posts increase engagement.
Social media companies profit from your engagement.
The more you fight with people online, the more time you spend on whatever platform you’re using.
I don’t think hate reading online is good for your mental health, but it is engaging. The more time you spend on a platform, the more ads it can show you. More ads, more money.
In 2015, during the Paris Terror attacks, Uber used surge pricing. Uber has also done this during natural disasters.
It’s a good way to make more money.
In February 2019, it was reported that Uber has changed surge pricing so that drivers don’t see any of the extra money charged to riders.
So when government regulators began to focus on Uber, it was natural for the company to label them enemies.
In 2017, Uber designed a tool called Greyball to flag riders they believed were associated with cities officials and regulatory bodies.
Greyball tracked those riders and told them that no cars were available when they used the app.
You can’t regulate what you can’t use, right?
At an event in November, 2017, Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, called himself a “conscientious objector” to social media, saying “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
A few days later, Chamath Pali hapi tiya, the former VP of user growth, told an audience at Stanford,
“The short-term, dopamine driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works-- no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”
This is a prominent Silicon Valley figure who worked at Facebook from 2001 to 2011. He also said “I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds.”
When asked about his children, he added, “They’re not allowed to use this shit.”
Before iPads and iPhones were mainstream, the average person had an attention span of about 12 seconds. New research suggests that there’s been a drop to eight seconds.
A goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds.
We’re completely distracted, yet we live in an attention economy.
Unsurprisingly, an evaluation in 2017 of legal practices for deleting criminal content on social networks revealed that deletions of hate comments were insufficient.
90 percent of the punishable content would be deleted on YouTube.
Facebook? 39 percent.
Twitter? 1 percent.
The study called for further increased pressure on the networks, did they listen?
You may know Alex Jones, the host of Infowars. He’s the nut job that espouses conspiracy theories involving school shootings.
He has spread the theory that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting were false flag operations by gun control advocates.
He has said that no one died in the Sandy Hook Massacre.
He’s also said that David Hogg, a Stoneman Douglas survivor, was a crisis actor.
Obviously, these claims have been proven false. The dead bodies of children should be enough proof.
And in 2018, some tech companies grew a spine and suspended his social media accounts.
Not Twitter though. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO said this:
“We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.”
It took the President of the United States inciting a mob to siege the Capitol Building of the United States and go wild for Jack Dorsey to suspend his account. And it remains to be seen if Donald Trump will be permanently banned from the platform.
After ICE started separating refugee families at the US/Mexican borders and putting children in cages, in 2018, it came to light that Microsoft had subcontracted with ICE on face-recognition software they were using to identify undocumented Americans.
Microsoft employees gathered 300,000 signatures (including 500 employees) and confronted Satya Nadella and demanded it stop working with ICE. They did, but it took extreme outrage for a tech executive to cut the ties. And the software? It still exists.
Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement have laid bare many of the underlying problems that critics have been talking about for years, especially in technology.
So if you still want to work in technology, perhaps as a designer, how can you make sure that you are part of the solution rather than the problem?
Mike Montiero, author of Ruined by Design, looks to the moral and political philosopher John Rawls, who came up with the idea of the Veil of Ignorance.
The Veil of Ignorance is a method of determining the morality of issues.
It asks a decision-maker to make a choice about a social or moral issue, and assumes that they have enough information to know the consequences of their possible decisions for everyone but would not know, or would not take into account, which person he or she is.
What would it look like if Silicon Valley practiced this?
When Google was categorizing photos of black people as gorillas, it’s a fairly safe bet to assume that the team didn’t have many if any Black people on it. If there were, they’d probably realize during testing that they and many of their friends were showing up as gorillas. Instead, the team probably tested it using their own photos that lacked diversity.
If you’re making a product, the best way to make sure you make an inclusive product is to have an inclusive team. A team full of affluent white dudes isn’t going to realize their implicit biases that they are designing into a product.
How would Silicon Valley practice tracking locations?
Uber tracks riders for five minutes after they get out of the vehicles.
Philz Coffee used a service named Euclid to track customer movements in the store.
Tinder’s Places feature keeps track of every place you’ve been through your phone’s GPS.
This all makes sense because location data can be extremely useful for companies to make their product more profitable.
But we’ve all heard stories of people being stalked on the internet.
Tinder is a dating app. Unless you’re asexual, you’re a potential user. The design team should be full of people across sexual and gender spectrums. It’s not just inclusive design, it’s good design. It’s making the app more useful to more people.
Tech companies are gluttons when it comes to data. They’ll tell you it makes their product better, which is definitely possible.
Then again, data breaches aren’t rare. By the middle of 2018, the number of breached records surpassed the entirety of 2017.
No company is immune to hacking attempts.
5 million user records were exposed at Lord & Taylor.
19 million exposed at the Sacramento Bee.
27 million exposed at Ticketfly.
37 million exposed at Panera Bread.
92 million exposed at MyHeritage.
100 million exposed at Facebook.
150 million exposed at UnderArmour.
That’s in one year and that list is not exhaustive.
These data breaches are the result of hackers exploiting bugs in software.
Even if you trust a company like Facebook to not use your data maliciously, it is still waiting to be exposed through an attack.
The first step in regulating data hungry companies is to create transparency for users so they know what data companies have collected about them.
The General Data Protection Regulation is a European Union law that regulates what a company can collect as well as how soon they need to report a data breach.
This applies to any organization with business ties to the EU. The cost of compliance is a fine of up to 20 million euros or 4% of your annual global turnover (whichever is higher).
Obviously the tech giants operate in Europe. Their technology can be adapted to collect less data. Their technology can be adapted to be transparent about what data they are collecting. The tech companies just don’t want to do it because it doesn’t increase their profits.
But if we’re stuck using data hungry apps, the least we can do is pressure lawmakers to regulate them and require transparency.