Navigating the Paradoxes of Technology
Instead of perceiving challenges as mere obstacles, it's time to adapt and thrive amidst the complexities and contradictions inherent in the tech landscape.
Don’t forget, big Senate hearing today with all the tech CEOs discussing child online safety starting at 10 am Eastern. A lot of the platforms have been making announcements ahead of this.
I encourage you to read this new paper by María P. Angel and danah boyd for another perspective on this issue. In it, they “unpack the theory of change at the center of the ‘duty of care’ included in the “Kids Online Safety Act” (KOSA). [They] argue that techno-legal solutionism is both ineffective as a framework and, in the case of KOSA, potentially harmful to the young people it purports to help.”
I’m writing this on Monday before I hop on the plane to San Francisco. I had to take a mental health day today. I’m trying to be better about recognizing when I need one of those. Today was one where I just needed some quiet time to think and reset myself. The start of this year has already been so crazy, and I found myself just being reactive to the people who wanted things from me rather than being intentional about how I was spending my time.
Because of this, too, this newsletter is shorter. Or it may feel that way to me. I worry it’s not my best work, but I knew I needed to finish this before I got to San Francisco. Thank you for your understanding and grace if it isn’t!
Let’s dig in.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the dualities or polarities of life.
introduced me to this topic as part of vertical development. When you search for it, this Harvard Business Review article shows how leaders can manage a world where there will always be natural tension and things can’t be solved as problems. Last week, this popped up on my Instagram too:
This reminded me of many persistent narratives circling this year of elections and the role of technology. I’ve wanted to write this piece for the last month, and I’ve been jotting down these polarities as they pop up.
Here are six I want to dig into for this newsletter, with one additional one that is more career-focused, given how a lot of people are navigating changes there as well.
Democracy is dying vs democracy is resilient
In a little over a month, the Variety of Democracies will release its 2024 report about the health of democracy worldwide. Last year’s report showed democracy continuing to deteriorate, so this year’s will be an important marker as we go into the year of elections. Democracy has absolutely been tested over the last few years and will continue to be. However, democracy has also proven to be resilient, according to this article from the Journal of Democracy. The authors “attribute the resilience … to economic development and urbanization, and the difficulty of consolidating and sustaining an emergent authoritarian regime under competitive political conditions.”
While I’m nervous about this year, I take solace in the fact that so many people are working to ensure free and fair elections all over the globe.Journalism is dying vs the content industry is thriving
There’s no question that the journalism industry continues to go through massive change. I wondered the other day if I’d even get a journalism major in college today. Layoffs and publications are closing, and people’s news habits are changing as GenZ watches more accounts on TikTok and social media. They also don’t want business or political news but lifestyle and entertainment.
That said, according to Mike Masnik and the folks at the Copic Institute, the Internet has been great for content industries. We got some good news last week when NPR named former Wikipedia CEO Katherine Maher, the new CEO, and Jon Stewart is returning to the Daily Show. We also see campaigns in the US and India turning to influencers to help get messages out. We are seeing more journalists and others start their newsletters. It might be more accurate not to say journalism is dying but changing and morphing into something new. The question is, how do you establish good ethics and rules of the road for this change?Tech is pulling back on content moderation vs investing - This one is a doozy, and I hesitate to even simplify it down to these two things. Not a day goes by when I don’t see a story or report referencing online platforms “slashing” their trust and safety teams. However, I don’t think that’s a fair statement about the entire industry. The only platform where I think this is a provable fact is X. There have been layoffs at other platforms, but many people are still doing this work. Meta is the only company that says how much they’ve invested in trust and safety. Still, we know that Google/YouTube, Microsoft, TikTok, and others also allocate many resources.
The mistake of this thinking is also to assume that the answer is just more people. That is far from the truth because just having humans brings complications. As my former colleagues Samidh Chakrabarti and Dave Willner write in their new paper about the use of large language models for content moderation, “Large human labeling teams are complicated to set up, labor-intensive to train, and slow to redirect in the face of new rules.”
Moreover, we need to separate when discussing where companies are changing their policies versus where they are pulling back resources and attention. We also need to separate when we encourage company leadership to invest more versus how we help those on the front lines trying to do what they can with what they’ve been given.
Regardless, both things can be true: we see a pulling back in some areas but investment in others.AI is dangerous vs AI is amazing - This debate spurred my idea to develop the Panic Responsibly line. As with any new technology, it will have positive and negative uses. I am glad we are having conversations about preventing negative uses earlier than we did around social media. Things will be messy, and we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I dug into this more when I wrote the Panic Responsibly newsletter, but we need to get used to living in this tension posed by the entire Internet because it is not going away.
Silicon Valley is too right-leaning v too left-leaning - This is a last-minute add on Tuesday evening after seeing two stories - one in Axios and one in The Atlantic - about a segment of the tech sector that Axios describes as supporting “unfettered free speech, pro-artificial intelligence, anti-mainstream media, and deep skepticism of DEI, political correctness and elite consensus.” They are building support for these through donations and platforms like X and podcasting. Many supported Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK, and Trump.
This is a group to pay attention to, but it feels like just yesterday I would only hear how Silicon Valley was mainly left-leaning. I bet many of them still are, but I’m guessing both parties will be complaining about these two camps. Kara Swisher put it best in the Axios story, “It's a false dichotomy — an if-you-are-not-with-us-you-are-against-us argument by someone who cannot think clearly anymore. You can be bullish on many new innovations and still be worried about its implications."Security of one job vs hyphenated life - Before I left Facebook, I’ll never forget talking to a friend who was a consultant about my hesitation to go out on my own. He said that he doesn’t understand why people feel more stable when they’re in a full-time job because, at any point, they could lay you off (this was in 2021 before all the tech layoffs happened). In contrast, with consulting, if you had a diverse portfolio, you had other places to draw income from if one client ended their contract.
Moreover, once I left and picked up various organizational affiliations, I struggled to put what I was building into words. After reading this book called The Portfolio Life, I started saying I had a portfolio of projects. Emma Gannon calls it the Multi-Hypen Life. I’m also reading Arthur Brooks’ book Success to Success, where he talks about how we all decline in our careers and how to re-think having an impact later in life. He’s had a few distinct careers in his life. At some point, we will all have to adapt and change. The Wall Street Journal had a story last week about people wanting to change jobs, but the job market is tough. I’m seeing more and more people striking out on their own.
Even now that I’m full-time at Duco, I hope to keep a diverse set of income streams with this newsletter, the merch site, and other projects I’m considering. CNBC reports that 50 percent of GenZ want to run their own business rather than working for someone else. I find this all endlessly fascinating as we think about what change the next 20 years could bring in how we think about work. Might we have a rise in entrepreneurship across industries?
As you go about your day, I encourage you to consider the dualities in your life and work. The debates we are having could benefit from more conversation about how we live within the tension of these versus trying to find a solution.
I want to end with a quote I came across recently that struck me as a problem I sometimes have when thinking about these issues:
“My life has been one long succession of moments in which I have chosen rationality over empathy, to shut away my feelings and strike off on some intellectual quest…” from Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries: Book One of the Emily Wilde Series by Heather Fawcett
We can get so caught up in using data and logic to make a rational decision that sometimes we can forget human beings are being impacted, and maybe our work could use more empathy as well.
Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.