Dear Tech Company,
Be Better. Do Better.
TEN YEARS AGO, a young tech entrepreneur sat down with a pen and paper and calculated that one of his inventions was responsible for wasting the equivalent of more than a million human lifetimes every day. That techpreneur’s name is Aza Raskin, and he’s the inventor of the “infinite scroll,” the feature on our phones that keeps us endlessly scrolling through content with the simple swipe of a finger.
Back in 2006, Raskin was trying to solve the frustrating experience users faced when clicking the “next page” button over-and-over again. Ironically, his goal was to STOP disruptions to a user’s attention. “My intention was to create something that could focus our attention and control our tempo when on websites and apps,” Raskin explained in a recent interview for the Rethink Moments podcast. The infinite scroll fixed this problem by making new content load automatically. No clicking required.
Raskin didn’t foresee how tech giants would exploit his design, creating apps that automatically serve endless amounts of content without your consent, nor being able to opt out. We have all experienced watching a video on YouTube when a new video loads instantly afterward. Or, find ourselves mindlessly swiping through Facebook or Instagram for hours, when our sole intention was to quickly check in with our network.
“I think when I look back, the thing I regret most is not packaging the inventions with the philosophy or paradigm in which they’re supposed to be used,” says Raskin. “There was a kind of naive optimism about thinking that my inventions would live in a vacuum, and not be controlled by market forces.” He deeply regrets the unintended consequence of his invention hours, even lifetimes of mindless surfing and scrolling.
Confessions
Raskin is not alone. Over the last decade, we’ve heard former tech gurus confess how they couldn’t imagine the negative effects their ideas would have on a grand scale. For example, the founders of AirBnb didn’t foresee the negative impacts of short-term rentals on local communities. When Justin Rosenstein invented the Like button, he didn’t imagine the effect that receiving hearts and likes (or not) would have on teens’ self-esteem. As I’ve expressed in previous articles, I’m not a fan of Facebook AKA Meta, but Mark Zuckerberg didn’t start the social media giant as a tool for political interference. Yet we’ve seen how a platform intended to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” to quote Zuckerberg, has ended up having devastating unintended consequences, such as the storming of Capitol Hill last January 6. Creators and entrepreneurs want to build products that will “change the world.” And often they do, but not in the way they imagined.
The failure to predict the unintended consequences of technology is deeply problematic and raises many ethical questions. Should entrepreneurs be held responsible for the harmful consequences of their innovations? And, is there a way to prevent these unintended consequences?
UNINTENDED or UNCONSIDERED CONSEQUENCES
Innovation has been accelerated by new technologies, but they are not a 21st-century problem. The question at hand is should entrepreneurs be held responsible for the harmful consequences of their innovations? And is there a way to prevent these unintended consequences?
In 1936, social scientist Robert Merton proposed a framework for understanding different types of unanticipated consequences: perverse results, unexpected drawbacks, and unforeseen benefits. Merton’s choice of words (“unanticipated” rather than “unintended”) was by no means random. But the terms have, over time, become conflated.
“Unanticipated” gets at our inability or unwillingness to predict future harmful consequences. “Unintended” suggests consequences we simply can’t imagine, no matter how hard we try. The difference is more than semantics, the latter distances entrepreneurs and investors from responsibility for harmful consequences they did not intend. I like the term “unconsidered consequences,” because it puts the responsibility for negative outcomes squarely in the hands of investors and entrepreneurs.
Merton outlined five key factors that inhibit people’s ability to predict or even consider longer-term consequences: ignorance, short-termism, values, fear, and error, assuming habits that worked in the past will apply to the current situation. I’d add a sixth: SPEED.
Speed is the enemy of trust. To make informed decisions about which products, services, people, and information deserve our trust, we need a bit of friction to slow us down, basically, the opposite of infinite, easy swiping and scrolling. And speed is a two-pronged problem.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
According to Our World in Data, it took more than 50 years for more than 99 percent of US households to adopt the radio for listening to programs in their homes and cars. It took 38 years for the color TV to reach similar mainstream adoption. In comparison, it took Instagram just three months to reach a million users when it launched in 2010. TikTok landed its billionth user in 2021, just four years after its global launch — half the time it took Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram to achieve the same milestone, and three years faster than WhatsApp. When the time frame of consumer adoption is compressed from decades to months, it’s easy for entrepreneurs to ignore the deeper and often subtle behavioral changes those innovations are introducing at an accelerated rate.
Techpreneurs will often tell themselves that they’re still in the “novelty” or “sandbox” or “beta” phase when in reality millions of people are using their product. It’s reflected in the fact that big tech companies’ original mission statements, such as “Don’t be evil” (Google) or “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Facebook), are used well beyond their expiration date, sometimes even years after the founders have been forced to acknowledge not only the severe shortcomings of their innovations but the serious consequences of those shortcomings.
MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS
Simultaneously, most entrepreneurs are largely focused on accelerating the speed of their growth. I’ve only ever once seen in a pitch deck a “slow growth” strategy. “The old mantra of ‘Move fast and break things’ is an engineering design principle. It’s is not a society design principle,” writes Hemant Taneja, a managing partner at the venture firm General Catalyst, in his book Intended Consequences. Taneja argues that VCs need to screen for “minimum virtuous products” instead of just “minimum viable products.” A powerful question for determining the virtues of a product over time is this: If you were born in a different era or different country, how would you feel about this idea?
Where will this idea lead? How will it change as it grows? The answer is, that sometimes we just don’t know. The twists and turns of human behavior and technological progress can make it hard to see what lies ahead. I’ve found even while writing this article that many tech starts and investors are reluctant to talk about the impact of technologies at scale. Raskin points out, “an inability to envision the impact at scale is actually a really good argument as to why one shouldn’t be able to deploy tech at scale. If you can’t determine the impacts of the technology you’re about to unleash, it’s a sign you shouldn’t do it.”
Unintended consequences can’t be errdicated, but we can get better at considering and mitigating them.
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR unconsidered consequences is a complex problem. Take social media. Right now, the original inventors of platforms: Zuckerberg (Facebook, Meta), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Chad Hurley (YouTube) can’t be held responsible for the content that users choose to post. But they should be liable for any content that algorithms write, employ, spread, and promote. Regulation can’t force people to use a product or service in a responsible way but entrepreneurs should be held responsible for the design decisions they make that either protect or violate the best interests of users, and society overall. Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the internet, published a letter on the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web in which he pointed to the “unintended negative consequences” of the web’s design, including “perverse incentives” from ad-based business models that many tech giants like Google and Facebook use, which reward “clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.” As unanticipated consequences become apparent, it’s up to entrepreneurs to implement, upgrade, or completely rethink the business models and structural mechanisms they have in place to reduce the negative impacts.
An unconsidered consequence is different from an undesired outcome. A car crash that kills people is an undesired outcome. It’s different from an impact that is generated from a deliberate policy or purposeful action, such as an ad-based business model that sets in motion a series of harmful behaviors and negative events in the future.
RASKIN’S STORY
The infinite scroll shows, that it’s very easy for creators to lose control of the things they create when those inventions are manipulated by the free market. A feature he intended to help people focus was exploited by others as a tool for mass distraction for the benefit of tech giants’ bottom lines. But over the past decade, Raskin has been doing a lot of thinking as the co-founder, along with Tristan Harris, of the Center for Human Technology, about how to embed the design philosophy into an invention or product itself. He explained three ideas he’s been developing:
Number one, he would like to see a new open source license introduced that comes with a Hippocratic oath. It would contain a “bill of rights and a bill of wrongs,” outlining specific situations or usages of the tech that would cause the license to be revoked. The idea would help prevent a creator’s technology from being misused with impunity.
Number two, he would like a practical solution that holds entrepreneurs responsible for the scale of liability — tied to the scale of power. “If your product or service is being used by less than 10,000 people you should be bound by different regulations than if your user base is bigger than a nation state,” says Raskin. He’s talking about an idea called a“permission at scale” license. Every time an invention hits an adoption milestone, 100,000 users, a million users, a billion users, and so on, an entrepreneur would need to reapply for their license based on the positive and negative impacts of their invention. Raskin explains: “A progressive scale of liability would mean you have lots of innovation at the small scale, but as soon as it has the surface area to create harm, you have the responsibility that pairs with it.”
Number three, he recommends building your own “red team” independent of the board or investors. Raskin sees their role as naming all the ways the tech could be abused for good and for harm. “It would create a ‘we know, you know’ shame around using the tech for nefarious purposes,” he says.
Raskin has set up his own “Doubt Club,” a forum for entrepreneurs who are working on noncompeting ideas to share doubts about their product, company mission, or metrics. They have a pact that whatever is being shared at the Doubt Club won’t leave the room. The goal is to reduce ignorance and encourage what Raskin calls “epistemic humility.” To be willing to say those three magic words: I don’t know.
THE PLEASURE OF FINDING THINGS OUT
Renowned theoretical physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: “It is our capability to doubt that will determine the future of civilization.” The principle applies urgently to tech innovations. Entrepreneurs and investors need to be responsible for asking “What happens when ” types of questions:
- What happens when people are left behind by my invention?
- What happens when my system becomes susceptible to bias?
- What happens when the interests of my business model don’t align with the best interests of users?
We believe too deeply in our clarity and confidence in our own interpretations. Identifying and reducing unintended consequences calls for greater humility and acceptance of doubt; it requires us to take the time to explore what we don’t know and actively seek alternative possibilities. For entrepreneurs and investors, it requires essentially believing in yourself and your ideas but doubting your current knowledge.
The “Dear Tech Company…” is a collaborative video response to IBM’s “Dear Tech…” ad that speaks to the potential of technology without addressing the role of tech companies in propagating harms. Amused by the unreflective nature of the IBM ad, a group of scholars, authors, and tech workers came together to produce a counter-narrative. Learn more about the work of the speakers www.DearBigTech.org