In Silicon Valley, Great Power but No Responsibility

I saw a tweet today that gave me a lot to think about:

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A rather intricate example of social adaptation to technology. If I understand correctly, the cousins in question are taking advantage of the fact that liking someone’s status/post on Facebook generates a notification for the poster that remains even if the post is immediately unliked. [1]

What’s humbling is that such minor features have the power to affect so many, and so profoundly. What’s scary is that the feature is so fickle. If Facebook starts making updates available through a real-time API, like Google Buzz does, then the ‘like’ will stick around forever on some external site and users will be none the wiser until something goes wrong. Similar things have happened: a woman was fired because sensitive information she put on Twitter and then deleted was cached by an external site. I’ve written about the privacy dangers of making public data “more public”, including the problems of real-time APIs. [2]

As complex and fascinating as the technical issues are, the moral challenges interest me more. We’re at a unique time in history in terms of technologists having so much direct power. There’s just something about the picture of an engineer in Silicon Valley pushing a feature live at the end of a week, and then heading out for some beer, while people halfway around the world wake up and start using the feature and trusting their lives to it. It gives you pause.

This isn’t just about privacy or just about people in oppressed countries. RescueTime estimates that 5.3 million hours were spent worldwide on Google’s Les Paul doodle feature. Was that a net social good? Who is making the call? Google has an insanely rigorous A/B testing process to optimize between 41 shades of blue, but do they have any kind of process in place to decide whether to release a feature that 5.3 million hours—eight lifetimes—are spent on?

For the first time in history, the impact of technology is being felt worldwide and at Internet speed. The magic of automation and ‘scale’ dramatically magnifies effort and thus bestows great power upon developers, but it also comes with the burden of social responsibility. Technologists have always been able to rely on someone else to make the moral decisions. But not anymore—there is no ‘chain of command,’ and the law is far too slow to have anything to say most of the time. Inevitably, engineers have to learn to incorporate social costs and benefits into the decision-making process.

Many people have been raising awareness of this—danah boyd often talks about how tech products make a mess of many things: privacy for one, but social nuances in general. And recently at TEDxSiliconValley, Damon Horowitz argued that technologists need a moral code.

But here’s the thing—and this is probably going to infuriate some of you—I fear that these appeals are falling on deaf ears. Hackers build things because it’s fun; we see ourselves as twiddling bits on our computers, and generally don’t even contemplate, let alone internalize, the far-away consequences of our actions. Privacy is viewed in oversimplified access-control terms and there isn’t even a vocabulary for a lot of the nuances that users expect.

The ignorant are at least teachable, but I often hear a willful disdain for moral issues. Anything that’s technically feasible is seen as fair game and those who raise objections are seen as incompetent outsiders trying to rain on the parade of techno-utopia. The pronouncements of executives like Schmidt and Zuckerberg, not to mention the writings of people like Arrington and Scoble who in many ways define the Valley culture, reflect a tone-deaf thinking and a we-make-the-rules-get-over-it attitude.

Something’s gotta give.

[1] It’s possible that the poster is talking about Twitter, and by ‘like’ they mean ‘favorite’. This makes no difference to the rest of my arguments; if anything it’s stronger because Twitter already has a Firehose.

[2] Potential bugs are another reason that this feature is fickle. As techies might recognize, ensuring that a like doesn’t show up after an item is unliked maps to the problem of update propagation in a distributed database, which the CAP theorem proves is hard. Indeed, Facebook often has glitches of exactly this sort—you might notice it because a comment notification shows up and the comment doesn’t, or vice versa, or different people see different like counts, etc.

[ETA] I see this essay as somewhat complementary to my last one on how information technology enables us to be more private contrasted with the ways in which it also enables us to publicize our lives. There I talked about the role of consumers of technology in determining its direction; this article is about the role of the creators.

[Edit 2] Changed the British spelling ‘wilful’ to American.

Thanks to Jonathan Mayer for comments on a draft.

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