Gathering thoughts…
A world of little thoughts.
Tagged responsible tech × Clear
"The technological enthusiasm and hobbyism of today is strikingly similar to at the turn of the 19th century, and it has led a comparable degree of willful blindness about the risks. In 1903, the managers of a big New York dynamite manufacturing company begged publicly to The New York Times for new laws to abide by.…
Imagine if technology treated our attention as sacred rather than a resource to extract. Imagine if technology was accountable to those affected by it rather than to those who profit from it. Imagine if technology helped us make better choices rather than incubating helplessness in the face of catastrophe. Imagine…
Extractive systems exhaust resources by removing them faster than they replenish. These systems are parasitic, while regenerative systems are symbiotic. Regenerative systems protect and enrich what they depend on. Consider a few regenerative examples: - A regenerative economy would protect the natural energy systems…
Understanding and addressing the side effects and consequences of technology early can prevent them from becoming the foundation on which a product or an entire industry rests. Instead of hiding or ignoring these negative side effects, we can use them as design criteria. Any technology that mediates human attention…
Human biases and vulnerabilities are inherent and hardwired. They have evolved to help us survive in an ancient environment, not our modern one. These evolutionary tendencies are now being exploited by technology. It’s important that we begin to see products in terms of human vulnerabilities. Just because we look at…
Notifications control our lives. Every minute of my day, as my phone buzzes, I can't stop this unending desire to see what the notification was. I'm consumed by the apps on my phone. In a day, it doesn't seem so noticeable. But as the days add up, I live my life by the notification, more than by the moments. We all…
Historically, overly-extractive business models eventually face pressure from the public, shareholders, and regulators. Once-unstoppable cigarette companies have been forced to pay the public health costs of their products and fund billion-dollar anti-smoking marketing campaigns. The market conditions for renewable…
1. Protect attention Help users control their attention. Don’t rely on growth and retention strategies to hijack attention with unnecessary demands, distractions, and requests. - Can we design to minimize the consumption of attention, both on and off screen? - Can we consider where adding delays or friction could help…
Technology is not, and can never be, neutral. Since it is impossible to present all available choices with equal priority, what we choose to emphasize is an expression of our values and priorities. Choosing defaults, providing recommendations, or identifying what content is shown and in what order. These are all…
Emotionally-charged, moralizing content wins the virality lottery most often: - For each "moral-emotional word" used, content receives between 17-24% more engagement. - Moral anger and disgust increase virality across the political spectrum. - Content that’s written in more divisive, inflammatory language is…
When a technologist designs a solution for a specific community, particularly one they live in, unintended consequences are more manageable. But when that same solution is massively scaled, we have to carefully consider three concepts: 1. The technologies we create reflect what we value, but they don’t necessarily…
Venture capital has funded many of today's most successful tech companies ("Big Tech"). As those companies rapidly scaled, small harms that perhaps initiated as unknown risks, ballooned. I'm not going to list them all here because I would need way more than 300 words, but here's a selective subset: - online…
