That was disillusioning to me, because I had really bought into the ideology that building a business was the best way to make the world a better place. That was something that was drilled into my head at my elite college. I had completely bought into it.
But over the years, as I saw what products were being funded and built, I felt disappointed. It changed how I thought about my own success. I wasn’t actually solving problems—I was just riding a wave of ridiculous overinvestment in social apps.So your own success started to feel more like a failure—not a personal failure, perhaps, but the failure of the industry more broadly. Recently, a number of high-level people in Silicon Valley have expressed some degree of disillusionment as well. Early Facebook investor Sean Parker, among others, seems to regret his role in building a platform he now considers psychologically damaging. How do you see this disillusionment playing out more broadly in the industry?
Get wealthy and solve the world’s problems—this was the message that I absorbed early on. You couldn’t do one without the other, the argument went, so don’t feel bad about becoming rich. The profit motive is the only way that we can possibly solve problems at scale.
I truly believed that. And it remains a widespread belief in the industry, and in the engineering departments of elite institutions. But to move forward, I think we are going to have to challenge that belief very directly. That’s why I’m skeptical of some of these newfound regrets expressed by Sean Parker and others. I don’t think they’re actually attacking the core notion that the profit motive is the best way to make the world a better place. They still believe they can centralize large amounts of capital in these massive corporations and pay themselves well and solve the world’s problems. I think there are some inherent trade-offs that they’re not yet acknowledging.Sean Parker is also a billionaire. Do you see rank-and-file tech workers expressing doubts about what they’re building as well?
When you’re an engineer, you’re constantly being told to do things that are clearly not good for the user. If you’re building any kind of app or platform that makes its money from advertising, you are trying to maximize “time spent”—how long a user spends with your product. Time spent is considered a proxy for value delivered to the user, because if your product wasn’t useful, the user wouldn’t be using it.
Here’s how it typically works. An order comes down from on high: the board says to increase revenue. What’s the best way the management team knows to increase revenue? To increase time spent. So they issue the order, which gets percolated down the tree, and now everyone is working on increasing time spent. This means making the product more addictive, more absorbing, more obtrusive. And it works: the user starts spending more time with the product.
But every worker knows this is bad. Every engineer and designer knows this is awful. They’re not happy making these features. But they can’t argue with the data. The engineer and the designer who care about the user don’t want to put these features out in the world. But the data says those features are increasing time spent—which means they’re good. Because more time spent means selling more advertising, which means making more money.And so long as you’re working for an advertising company, what other metric besides time spent could there be?
So long as you’re working for a company, what other metric besides profit could there be? That’s a similar question. You can make small surface-level improvements here and there. But you’re not going to tackle the core problem until you tackle the profit motive.
The directives to increase metrics like time spent come from above, but the actual work is being done by tech workers on the ground. And they’re doing this work because their performance is measured by whether or not they moved that metric and whether or not they implemented those features—even if they know they’re bad for users.
But there’s no way they can push back on it. They can talk about it—in their company Slack, in their public forums, at their all-hands meetings. They can express a lot of malaise about it. But they can’t argue against the experiment succeeding, because you can’t argue against increased profits.
You could imagine different structures of the company that might not have this problem. You could imagine a world where these companies empower rank-and-file workers to make certain decisions themselves, and give users a voice in those decisions. Workers and users could together decide what metrics to optimize for, and what kind of technology they want to build.Have you seen this begin to happen in your own workplace, or in the workplaces of friends? What might it look like concretely to give workers and users a say in how products are designed and implemented?
I’ve started to see some changes. Broadly, we tech workers are starting to find our voice in saying no. No, we won’t build that weapons system at Google; no, we don’t want to game metrics.5 These small victories feel invigorating, but saying no isn’t enough.
It’s probably easier to start small. My favorite video game studio, Motion Twin, describes itself as an “anarcho-syndicalist workers’ cooperative,” and they have a close relationship with their community of gamers. These alternative structures are possible in tech, but we’re up against unbelievable amounts of venture capital that can scale for-profit ventures faster than any cooperative can.
We’re starting to ask the right questions about technology and who owns it. We’ve tried private control. Now we’re talking about worker control. There is also a lot we could do with state backing, but that has its own risks. Then there are ideas floating around like platform cooperatives, where
