For some reason we’re still splitting our view of companies into two groups. We expect a fashion brand or an ice cream shop to exude a set of values to appeal to us and chime with our own. Yet we don’t apply the same expectations to companies we think of as tech businesses. Somehow, different rules apply to them.
How fair is that, especially as the definition of ‘tech company’ changes? Conventional tech companies are no longer the only tech companies out there. Adidas and H&M are now in the same classification as Uber. There is no separation. You might guess where this is going: there should be no separation when it comes to the idea of being a ‘good business’.
After all, values are more valuable than ever. In a recent survey by enso, the World Value Index, 78 per cent of millennials stated ‘they were more likely to buy products from companies that shared their values’, 59 per cent stated ‘they felt able to affect the world around them’ and 80 per cent said ‘business can be a force for positive social and environmental change’.
When will companies listen?
Change starts with the founders, their value systems and the emphasis they choose to put on their contribution to society. Need an example? Here’s one I came across the other day. T-shirt start-up Everpress could just manufacture, ship and finance garment merchandise for millennials everywhere. They could choose to ignore their responsibility to the environment, to the practice of manufacturing. They could take all the profits from a T-shirt campaign they do for the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. But they don’t. They choose to donate the proceeds back to the hospital. They work hard to ensure products are ethically sourced. Their customers love them for it. This love translates into trust.
When will we get trust online as well as offline?
Step back from the internet for a second. Revel in its strange dualities.
Here is the most powerful educational tool of all time. Yet it’s run by companies who don’t want you to learn too much – at least, not about their own practices.
Here is a realm of connectivity and transparency – for some. But certainly not when it comes to how your data is being used by Google or Facebook.
Here are companies awash with the imagery of freedom, with talk of limitless exploration, boundary breaking, ‘rebellion’, ‘punk rock’, cutting of ties, cutting wires, cutting social constraints. All these freedoms can be yours – as long as you’re bound with an unbreakable tie to the companies in powerful, secretive, ever-replenishing and shape-shifting ways embedded in their terms and conditions.
Here are companies in positions of power unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. But these positions come with dangerous vulnerabilities. There’s vulnerability in their hypocrisy.
As we live longer and longer in the digital world and learn more, there will be a growing number who see past the obfuscation and begin to fashion their online lives accordingly. There will always be a frantic, shrill chorus from the incumbent powers, telling dissenters they’re doing the wrong thing, that the status quo is natural. They’ll offer new baubles: more ‘free’ storage space; more ‘free’ products; a lot more ‘freedom’ that isn’t really freedom.
But it’s precarious. It’s all based on us accepting – and continuing to accept, ad infinitum – our new roles: endlessly used, endlessly drained, endlessly providing companies with our data, our natural resources, for free.
This is the point when the voice of Responsible Tech makes itself naggingly insistent. The thing about Responsible Tech is once you start thinking about it, it’s tough to go back, or at least all the way back, to ignorance. Once the appeal of not working for anti-democratic monopolies sets in, hey, it feels pretty good. Once you start seeing a counter-internet forming in nooks and crannies, even in its current skeletal state, you’ll begin to notice its presence.
It’s tough to extricate yourself from the existing world of Facebook and Google. Of course it is. Recently, a study showed the average Facebook user had to be paid around $1,000 to agree to deactivate their account for a year. These habits have become part of the texture of our lives. How could a day possibly unfold without them? But this nagging idea, hatched and cultivated and growing, is exactly what Google and Facebook fear. Things could be different. We might, weirdly enough, think differently. It must pain employees at both companies to read the growing literature in which their places of work are portrayed as villains. It must pain the believers to think there is now dissent at the Googleplex.
It must be frustrating for companies set on denying and discrediting the past to find that ancient, dusty ideas can morph and change too – that regulation won’t just die (or remain a European idea, like bidets). It must pain them when there’s talk of anti-trust, a concept that is becoming newly relevant, reconfiguring, acquiring a new skin for this day and age.
Sure, there are academics bought off by Big Tech but there are now academics fired up and researching. There are computer scientists bought off by Big Tech but others researching. There are hackers bought off but others … you get the deal.
The same split is happening in the business world. Gaps are opening for companies, like ours, who will approach the future with a different attitude. Now is the time, the dawn, for the inadvertent pioneers. That’s us. We’re just a few folk from the design world. We didn’t expect to pioneer anything, and I wouldn’t lump us in with any of the truly great pioneers of history, or the internet (or even data transfer), but here we are. Inadvertently.
There are times I wonder how WeTransfer got to this stage, how this role opened up for us. Sure, we were born in a different country, we came from different backgrounds, we were denied money and all that comes with it. But we also decided against adopting a stance of us against them, us (the extractors) against them (the resource). There are others out there who think this way.
A company that has become an inadvertent pioneer should, at some point, try to issue an inadvertent manifesto when it comes to Responsible Tech. Ours would read:
we felt our way along
we trusted our instincts
we listened to the golden rule.
To us, Responsible Tech is not only respect for our customers, but respect for the world at large, respect for previous traditions and modes of interacting with others, respect for the beauty of privacy, of sanctuary, of core human values that can never be disrupted, trampled and scorned.
It’s an acknowledgement that self-regulation often only helps the self-regulators. Respect – for people, for employees, for minorities, for whatever – also extends to respect for oversight. Responsible Tech, for us, means foregoing this ongoing trend in the me-me faux libertarianism tech world of what academic Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘the systematic conflation of industry regulation with “tyranny” and “authoritarianism”’. Responsible Tech doesn’t buy that. If you’re moving so fast, breaking so much, maybe there’s a consequence to the speed.
Responsible Tech is about behaviour but it’s also about construction. For us, it’s a way to examine the larger issue of what has been called ‘extraction architecture’. Are we going to keep building this architecture at all costs?
It’s a way of asking: Why do we keep building the invasive? To my fellow tech workers, I say: Were these the great structures and systems you had in mind? Mining data sources such as how many times a person changes their battery, the number of incoming messages, how many miles travelled – surplus data? Is that what you dreamed about when you were studying and learning? Becoming a creep?
For us, Responsible Tech is a way to fact-check the term ‘freedom’ and bring to life a version of that word that companies who crow about ‘freedom and connection’ don’t really want. Responsible Tech is the freedom of real rebellion, not Silicon Valley ‘rebellion’. It’s a new way of phrasing one of the oldest words: no. Responsible Tech salutes the English town that blocked the Google Maps cars from coming down their streets. Why is this right?
For us the phrase is a way of never letting behaviours that have been forced upon us by rapacious companies become normal – never letting them, as one commentator puts it, ‘shade into normalcy’. Responsible Tech is a way of saying that we still choose what normalcy means to us.
Most tech companies follow inadvertent paths. Google, upon its founding, didn’t set out to become the dredging, mining, superpower of surveillance capitalism. Facebook wasn’t invented with intrusive scraping and Russian political interference in mind. If you’re in this industry you’ll know things shift: momentum shifts; ideas change; that thing you were dedicating 20 per cent of your mind to suddenly becomes the most important idea in the company. Compass bearings change. The territory you reach doesn’t always resemble the map you unfurled at the beginning of the journey. These days, it seems companies move in a single direction. They begin with optimism and good intent and inadvertently begin to resemble Skynet, only worse. Naive CEOs lose their naivety but continue expressing the same naive sentiments in public.
‘I just want to connect everyone!’
‘I just want to index the world’s information!’
‘I didn’t mean it! Ruining the world, eroding privacy, turning every breath, every movement, every gesture into a commodity on the behavioural futures market? That was inadvertent!’
I’m no business mastermind, but from my vantage point I can see a trickle in the other direction. We didn’t plan on becoming pioneers but we’ve inadvertently found ourselves in this position. We’re inadvertently part of a movement, some weird and ragtag vanguard – one where we all look around and think: ‘Are we doing this? Is this possible? In an age of scale and buy-outs and playing fields tilted in favour of the fast-moving, rule-trampling behemoths, is this actually going on?’ It seems to be.
A divide is forming. Sometimes we can’t quite plot the steps that took us here but we can see for certain that: a) There is a way to survive as a company in this vanguard, and b) We’re not going back, we’re not flipping sides, not after what we’ve seen. And also, let’s ensure there’s a c) Join us.
I put this call out to people who admire and appreciate all that tech has given us but know, from a gut instinct or on an intellectual level, that this endless invasive extraction is a new phenomenon in history and we’ve already ceded too much to internet giants with too little given back in return.
I put this call out to consumers who want to help and support the companies that choose to ‘Ben-&-Jerry’. (Let’s use it as a verb.)
I put this call out to the tech world and the developers and the engineers who might feel that on some level, personally or professionally, they’ve inadvertently drifted. They’re working on stalking software. They’re devising bits of extraction architecture that don’t seem right.
Readers, be aware: these are intelligent people, drawn to tech for good reasons, and they’re being used to make questionable tools. We all have to call on these people, appeal to them, especially those who seem to want to rebel and disrupt – at least with their music, their literature, their food sources, their spiritual practices, their political choices, their fashion sense, their choice of pet – but then they go to work for the most man version of ‘The Man’ yet, corporate beyond any powerful corporation’s dreams.
People on the outside should know the tech world is full of ‘rebels’ and ‘disrupters’, some with really badass piercings and tattoos and personal styles and great music on their headphones, and there they are, at their desks, building the greatest tools of conformity ever devised. They might have loved reading 1984 but now, wow, they’re truly doing Big Brother proud.
Readers should know that many of them feel they’ve inadvertently ended up in this position. I’ve met these people. They shake their heads and say: ‘I didn’t know how bad it was getting.’ We’ve all got to invite them over to the other side of the divide. As long as Big Data gets bigger, so will the alternatives we hunger for – maybe never on the same scale, but they will continue to exist. So will the opportunities for those entrepreneurs who studied a little history, who can spot the new colours a monopoly might wear, or those creatives who value personal freedom and … well, let’s just leave it there before the rhetoric soars a little too high and someone in the back reminds me my company just transfers files and shows full-screen ads. We’re not exactly WeGandhi.
Scholars and writers mention the way the Big Tech companies capitalized on using our ‘digital exhaust’, the surplus of our interactions. As business people, let’s also note another kind of surplus coming from the interactions we undertake online: anger.
We’re only now starting to realize what’s been inadvertently handed over, we’re only just beginning to understand the shackles of terms and conditions. In the early 1900s, when there was a shift against the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that were starting to become widespread, there was anger over what we were being asked to consume. No one could have imagined the pushback would transform itself into a multibillion-dollar industry. Will some form of Responsible Tech ever be worth that much? Who knows? We might need more education, more research, even more scandal before we reach that point of Silent Spring.
But we do know this: behaviour changes. It’s happened before. We noticed that someone was messing with our intake. We were being pushed by corporate interests who wanted to get us to ingest more sugar, salt and fat. It went into us. The difference now is that we’re talking extraction.
Now they want to extract our behaviour, our movement, our thoughts, the stuff of our lives. And suddenly, one day, some of us will decide that’s not healthy. The next day, a few more people will decide the same. A consumer will look around for the companies offering something different. The first company they encounter, like WeTransfer, might say: ‘Hey, we just decided we didn’t need to know your data. We got big by accident.’
But the others, the next wave, will have a business plan. They might employ ex-insiders who have spotted weaknesses in the hulking edifices of the big companies. They may be riding the waves of an exposé or (another) scandal or even new regulation – opposed by the lobbyists of the existing superpowers but made law, regardless.
Look how the idea of the VPN (virtual private network) has moved, grown, become palatable, easy, necessary. Listen to what we’re hearing now. Most importantly, pay attention to how your experience feels online – what is it like when you’re hate-using Facebook? What is it like when you become aware of a queasy addiction to social media? When you read about what social media does to teenagers? How does it feel to know you’re being mined, followed, tracked? How do you feel when you’re clicking away your consent on a terms and conditions document you’ll never read?
We don’t need to get rid of it all. Not by a long shot. But we do need to change.
Think back to where we started – that stalking encounter in the shoe shop. Now look at the landscape. It’s full of stalkers, hiding, watching, pretending to be good corporate citizens. Right now, it often feels impossible to think of a different way. But we can build. We can support the new.
We’re not gonna take this any more.