The legislative heat on large US-based tech companies has been ratcheting up in the last few years. Most recently, in March 2021, Facebook, Google and Twitter testified in a congressional hearing about how their platforms enable the spread of misinformation. We could spend a long time talking about the systemic forces that got us here: the funding ecosystem and business models that created the chase for endless scale; the algorithms that became increasingly opaque and got out of control; the feature-sets that appeared exciting and harmless in the short-run but irreversibly changed modern society. For this snippet though, I’d like to zoom-out even further to see how humans have fared across the arc of last century.
Below is a very simplistic assessment of the promises and pitfalls of innovations we’ve all benefitted from:
- Automobiles: Pros – faster mobility, access to broader employment. Cons – use of non-renewable resources, air pollution, rise in obesity and cardiovascular diseases.
- Mass produced clothes: Pros – affordability, ability to look suave. Cons – forced labor, use of non-renewable resources, greenhouse emissions, water-pollution from dyeing textiles, microplastics in oceans from laundering synthetics like polyester.
- Ecommerce: Pros – access to a wide selection of goods at affordable prices. Cons – excessive consumerism, cardboard footprint of packaging, transportation emissions.
- Satellites: Pros – communication and navigation; weather and climate monitoring; oceanography and astronomy. Cons – space trash.
Are we noticing a thread yet? Every innovation has had a positive impact on some aspects of society and a pretty negative impact on some others (Side note: is anyone else observing that the environment takes a huge hit every time we innovate? Yikes!).
We think the “move fast and break things” motto is a tech mantra. And it is when we think of it as a way to engineer an MVP (minimum viable product) and iterate but when we zoom-out further, we see that humans create progress living by this motto. We tend to zoom-in on a goal and build as fast as possible knowing that we’ll break things in the process, and we tune out any breakages that occur outside the circumference of our ambition. Arguably this myopic view is necessary to make any real progress and not freeze in the face of massive goals. But when we see over and over again that these broken things eventually become the bane of our society and almost impossible to fix, expanding our vision to understand unintended consequences while we’re building isn’t just a nice to have; It’s a must have.
“Like compost, our work is not linear in a static timeframe…
Our success can be measured in more than one way. How did we learn from our hiccups, errors, mistakes, fuckups, drama, and difficulty that goes into an action, our “shit”?
How can future generations learn from and build on what we do, our work and intentions now?” ― Sierra Pickett
