“Technology is hijacking our minds and society. Our world-class team of deeply concerned former tech insiders and CEOs intimately understands the culture, business incentives, design techniques, and organisational structures driving how technology hijacks our minds.”
This bit of text reads like that of a doomsayer, but yet is strangely optimistic and gung-ho about the impending doom. This is what greets you on the home page of the Center for Humane Technology. They are essentially an advocacy group formed by a bunch of Silicon Valley startup types to, and I use their own words again, “realign technology with humanity’s best interests”. And they plan to do this with what they term “humane design” — design that tries its best to make sure people are not addicted to technology and also by increasing their attention spans. They have been around since 2013, but I heard of them only recently, thanks to a conversation on Silk — one of India’s oldest mailing lists.
Whenever rich people develop a new-found sense of responsibility, especially if it comes from the world of startups, my cynicism radar starts to blip wildly. These usually tend to be just another pivot in their company’s strategy. Like Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org, for example.
In the case of the Center for Humane Technology, the ideas they seem to be espousing sound sensible enough, but that it is the same set of startup folks who were responsible for the problem, who are now trying to solve the problem, sounds a little problematic to me. They were the brains behind those addictive features in their products. They made all their money from those addictive features. There will always be a conflict of interest if they are fighting against such features. As an analogy, I would much rather trust Japan to come up with a way of making the world free of nuclear weapons than the United States of America or Russia.
Startups do have a responsibility beyond just making money. And beyond just solving a problem in the market that they are operating in. But the reality of how startup economics work is that altruistic thoughts of being humane usually become affordable to a startup only when their bottom line is sufficiently bloated. Given a choice between developing a feature that makes the startup money, and developing one that is humane but makes much lesser money, and if both choices solve the problem that they are trying to solve, startups will always go for the former and they are not really to blame. The only way startups will consistently start choosing the latter option is if societal and economic factors become such that they make the humane design the rational choice.
In a country like USA, it may either be advocacy groups like the Center for Humane Technology, or just newer startups founded by second or third-time entrepreneurs, who are funding their latest ventures from past successes. In a country like India, the third party might have to be the government, providing incentives to startups to make the humane choice.
In this weekly column, we discuss the startup workplace. The writer heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace
