A future owners test
A question we should ask more: ‘Is this technology safe in the hands of plausible future owners?’. Naturally, we assess ethical risk mostly in the present-day world, looking at today’s norms, laws, and policies. But things change.
Say you’re building a public-sector app or algorithm. The department you’re working for may have good protocols in place – regulations, perhaps, or internal processes – that give you confidence they’ll oversee this technology properly. But what about future governments? You’re hopefully building something that will stick around, and we live in unstable times. Would this system still be safe in the hands of a government pursuing different politics? A police state? An ethnonationalist government? An autocracy? Policies and laws can be overturned; you might be relying on protections a future authority could easily revoke.
Same goes for commercial work too. There’s a hostile takeover of your company, or maybe it fails and its digital assets are snapped up in a fire sale, and suddenly your system belongs to someone else. Would it still be safe in the hands of a defence contractor? A data broker? Palantir?
Or perhaps the nature of your company itself shifts, and an initially benign use case takes on different colour when the company moves into a new sector…
I’d like to see more of this thinking – maybe we could call it the future owners test – in contemporary responsible tech work. We mustn’t get so wrapped up in today that we overlook tomorrow.
Endnote: the word ‘plausible’ is, of course, doing a lot of work. The depth of this questioning should be proportionate to the risk; many eventualities can be safely ignored in many contexts. I’m not worried about, say, the far-right getting their hands on Candy Crush data, but I sure would be if they inherited a national carbon-surveillance programme.
Read a little, write a little
One emotion I didn’t expect among this year’s avalanche: I feel blunted. I can’t find the words to describe things I care about; the ground is moving faster than my feet.
I’m old enough to know this usually means I haven’t been reading enough. Makes sense, with so many stresses to juggle, so much intellectual comfort food at easy reach. I’ve tapped two new lines – ‘Read a little / Write a little’ into my daily checklist, in an attempt to rehabituate myself and resharpen those edges. Which makes this day one of a new routine, I suppose.
Kelly Pendergrast’s Home Body is a curious essay, opening with womblike hauntings and cyborg urbanism, but settling on the habit infrastructure has of binding us all together, even when we feel most isolated. However, Pendergrast warns, we mustn’t fetishise the infrastructure itself at the cost of overlooking the social forces that shape and sustain it.
All the mapping and “making visible” in the world can’t right what’s wrong, and even the most good-faith attempts at rigorous transparency can’t avoid glossing over or eliding the horrors buried in global supply chains and local power structures.
It’s a weird, nuanced, challenging piece, and exactly the sort of thing I love Real Life Magazine for.
Future Ethics flash sale
I’m running a flash sale on Future Ethics. Digital bundle (Kindle, Apple Books, PDF) now $5; signed paperbacks £9 + postage (UK & Europe only). Reduced prices on the Bezos megastore too. Cheapest it’s ever been, but the sale will last to end of next week only.
I’ve also made an overdue preview available: you can now download chapters 1, 2, and 3 as a free, unwatermarked PDF. Dip your toes in, the water’s lovely, etc.
🤯👉-> https://nownext.studio/future-ethics <-👈🤯
Responsible design: a process attempt
The most common question I get on responsible design: ‘How do I actually embed ethical considerations into our innovation process?’ (They don’t actually phrase it like that, but you know… trying to be concise.)
Although I don’t love cramming a multifaceted field like ethics into a linear diagram, it’s helpful to show a simple process map. So here’s my attempt.
IMO the first step is to spend time trying to anticipate potential moral consequences of your decisions. Ignore those who tell you this is impossible: most technology firms have no muscles for this because they’ve never seriously tried to do it.
What we’re trying to do here is stretch our moral imaginations. This can involve uncovering hidden stakeholders and externalities that might befall them – to do that, we almost always have to think beyond narrow user-centricity and embrace wider inclusion. Anticipating moral implications is also made easier when we involve techniques from the futures toolkit, e.g. horizon scanning, scenario development, or speculative design.
Then we need a way to evaluate these impacts. Complex systems create competing consequences: how do we decide whether a benefit outweights a harm? Again, industry is inexperienced at this, so this usually devolves into an opinion-driven debate, won by the most senior voice.
But, of course, people have been doing the hard work for us these last couple of millennia. We can take advantage of the ethical theory they created to break past this flawed belief that ethics is subjective. We can use structured, robust methods to examine consequences and evaluate decisions rationally but compassionately, based on well-founded contemporary thinking, and hopefully fostering the wellbeing of all.
Having identified and evaluated potential consequences, we can now take action. If there’s potential harm, we can try to minimise it or design it out of the system before it happens.
But ethics isn’t just about stopping bad things happening: there’s a growing realisation that responsible design is also a seed of innovation, a competitive differentiator. So we use this evaluation to create new products and features with positive ethical impacts, too.
Underpinning all of this, we need ethical infrastructure. This is the lever most newcomers immediately reach for: a C-level appointment, a documented code of ethics, etc. And these things can have their place, for sure. But they’re there to support an ongoing process and culture of making good ethical decisions: they achieve virtually nothing on their own. So building this capacity is important, but is only effective if it’s deployed in parallel with proper decision-making processes like this.
After dread
A short talk / article written for the Global Foresight Summit 2020. Available below as embedded audio.
It took just a fortnight for ‘these uncertain times’ to become a cliché. Sharp discontinuities like this pandemic – let’s not call it a black swan, because it was both predictable and predicted – have a habit of injecting new terminology into public consciousness. This time around: social distancing, herd immunity, furloughed workers, and flattened curves. We shake our heads at the same press reports, archive those same panicked retailer emails, stare in disbelief at the same steepening graphs. It’s an unfortunate golden age for information design. If 2019 was the year of the algorithm, 2020 is surely the year of the logarithm.
But who’d have thought it? The shock of the new is that the new turned out to be… absence. With half the world in lockdown, there’s no movement, no commerce, no economy. Covid–19 has forced the shark of modern capitalism to stop swimming. And so the only persistent narrative of our lives collapses around us, and the void rushes in.
It’s in vacuums like this that fear begins to spread. With the peak still days away, we fear for our loved ones, our health workers, our jobs, and even our votes. As part of that much-discussed group, Team Underlying Conditions, I myself feel this fear acutely. And fear changes us. We start to see our fellow human as a potential enemy, a hostile vector, and this fear turns us against the world. It undermines neighbourhoods and communities. It sours us to humanity.
But, thinking about it, fear isn’t quite the right term. The mathematics of the situation are more about statistics than probabilities. It’s not fear: it’s something more like dread. What we feel isn’t just concern that bad things might happen: we know they’ll happen, that they’re happening right now. All we can do is hope the statistics end up being less awful than they might be. Covid–19 is a progressive illness: it’s the second week that kills you. Similarly, the stress of lockdown could easily cause a gradual worsening in our collective spirit. In our darkest times, it’s not just the virus we fear, but the future itself.
For many of us, particularly the sort of person who watches or gives talks about the future in their spare time, it’s a novel experience to live amid dread. Plenty of other folks, typically the ones society has trodden upon and discarded, would contend that dread is nothing new. But here the mathematics also dictate the eventual pattern, and reassure us this dread is only temporary. Exponentiality can’t last forever in a finite population. Soon, although nowhere near soon enough, we’ll reach a point of viral saturation, of immunity, or – if we’re lucky – develop a vaccine, at which point those terrible red lines will crawl back down those log plots. So we know this dread will recede in time, to be replaced by a complex mix of relief, guilt, and anger.
But there is another dread. Just like Covid–19, climate crisis is underpinned by scientific certainty. The punishment’s in the post; the only question is how bad things will get. And so the predominant emotion about climate is also not fear but dread.
Again, this is hardly news to a particular section of society. An entire generation is already grappling with climate dread, seeing the future not as a promise but as a threat. Their reward for their noble, sad defiance – school strikes and protests against the tide of certainty – is name-calling (‘snowflake’) and scorn from the generations that fiddled with their satnavs while the planet burned.
We have to be careful here not to overextend the comparisons between Covid–19 and climate crisis. It feels crass and insensitive, whataboutery at precisely the wrong time, and it would be a category error to claim that how we experience one will foretell how we experience the other. But it’s also a mistake to overlook that future horrors act as the backdrop to today’s dread. If we can learn anything about this crisis that alleviates the next, we must.
As the RSA’s Anthony Painter describes, this crisis gives us an opportunity to forge a bridge world that crosses some of the chasm between today’s rotten systems and the sustainable versions we’ll need to survive climate change. Similarly, Dan Hill points to weak signals, glimmers of more resilient futures amid the crisis.
Because as well as the very real horror, the mass slowdown caused by the virus is giving us a glimpse of something else, aspects of another green world just within reach.
And, of course, we have the memes. Dinosaurs return to Times Square; Nessie comes ashore at Inverness. Nature is healing, thanks to this overdue pause.
Where everyone seems to agree is that things can’t go back the way they were. As Fred Scharmen says, this isn’t the end of the world, but it’s certainly the end of a world. We live in an era of ‘in an era of’s: this crisis has struck at what we’re repeatedly told is a hugely vulnerable moment, when our trust in grand narratives, institutions, and expertise has collapsed. We’ve learned the economic recovery was built of balsa-thin gig-economy precarity, and authoritarians have exploited our democratic disquiet. So we conclude this dislocation has finally demolished the fragile walls of whatever came before; that our old presents and futures are now anachronisms.
‘Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.’ —Arundhati Roy
And so, in an era of narrative collapse, there’s a scramble for new narratives. Predictably, various interest groups are already jostling for position, trying to project their own blueprints onto the ruins. Far-right accelerationists see the virus as a perfect catalyst for collapse, intensified by prepper paranoia and racist conspiracy, and allowing a world of white supremacy to emerge from the rubble. Leftists, myself included, have found a new home for our common refrain: surely capitalism really is dying this time? Writing for Al-Jazeera, Paul Mason compares Covid–19 to the Black Death (a comparison not welcomed by all), and claims the panic measures governments and banks have resorted to are one-way valves; in other words, that a new economic world is already upon us. Economic pipe dreams have become immediate, urgent reality. With interest rates having never recovered from 07/08, the only lever left to pull was the one marked ‘cash’, in the form of massive quantitative easing and the closest thing to Universal Basic Income conservative governments could conceivably offer. Along the way, claims Mason, giants across numerous sectors will have to be nationalised – airlines, retailers, railways, insurers – all humiliating concessions for die-hard believers in the power of the free market.
It’s clear the role of the nation state is being transformed, although we must remember that in some countries – the United States, India, and Brazil, say – it’s only regional government that is holding society together in the face of federal denial and incompetence. And it’s likely the Overton window has already lurched left, as voters realise capitalism is now so fragile it has to be bailed out by socialism every decade or two. But I’m not convinced by the urge to stamp set-piece futures onto the blank canvas. Nor is Richard Sandford.
Are these futures right for the post-pandemic world? They were made before the current situation, after all, using the ideas and categories and levers that were in place before the virus spread. I think it’s worth asking whether the building-blocks of these ready-to-hand futures are going to be unchanged. […] There are some big changes underway that might mean we don’t value futures the way we do now, or at least that we might value different futures.
An even larger concern is how eagerly we believe the status quo will quit without a fight. Remember, just five years passed between the starry-eyed postcapitalism of Occupy and the jolts of Brexit and Trump. Old habits have a nasty tendency to return to claim their ancient territories; the industrial growth era may be in the ICU right now, but it’s desperate to make a full recovery, and has all the resources it needs to do so.
In times of dramatic flux, it’s hard to remember the old reality, but there’s a corollary: on the other side, it’s likely we’ll try hard to forget the crisis times. The world may well find itself so pleased to have survived through the present dread that it wilfully ignores the larger dread to come. After all, the politicians have promised us a V-shaped recession, suggesting a painless rebound to the way things were. It’s easy to imagine a developed world joyfully lapsing into comforting consumption, rebooking those cancelled vacations and finally upgrading the SUV as a reward for months of enforced temperance. To paraphrase Herbert Marcuse, whatever you throw at capitalism, it will absorb and sell back to you.
This pandemic has reshuffled the deck of probables, plausibles, and possibles. Foresight professionals know this crisis is urging us to reimagine healthcare, supply chains, and urban space. Many of us would agree that the airline industry, currently elbowing its way into the bailout queue, will rightly find its power diminished in the coming decades. Some of us would contend the ideology of eternal growth deserves some overdue competition from steady-state or degrowth perspectives. But it would be a huge mistake to think these preferable futures, however appealing, justifiable, or essential, will automatically come to pass. The moral course is never a given, and should doesn’t always translate to will.
Change happens where power meets appetite, but dread stems from a lack of agency: the future is only something to fear if we can’t influence it. And lack of agency is surely a hallmark of recent years. Networked technology, worshipping the twin gods of simplicity and magic, has indeed done simply magical things, but simultaneously eroded people’s understanding of their possessions and eroded their privacy alike. The tech giants, once seen as useful innovators, have become vast repositories of power and wealth. Economies have become riddled with complex tumours of creative accounting and financial obfuscation. Inequality grows, power centralises, information overloads, and people feel control over their destinies slipping away.
Is it any surprise, then, that some turn to conspiracy for comfort? 5G masts aflame, pizza restaurant death threats, anti-vax paranoia: all stem from a need to explain a world beyond our control. Populism is of course the political wing of conspiracy, a promise that there’s been a solution to the world’s problems all along, but the elites have kept it from you this whole time.
Conspiracy is in league with dread. It excuses people from contributing to the future: why bother, when invisible hands are pulling the strings above us? Conspiracy is a withdrawal from the future, an abandonment of any prospect of agency. Conspiracy and dread both anaesthetise; they conquer all ambition.
The privilege to talk about the shape of the future is just that: a privilege. Events like the Global Foresight Summit are understandable and probably welcome ways for us to discuss challenges ahead. But we must recognise that folks like us – whether we work in technology, foresight, or design – wield disproportionate influence over the future. Surely, then, an emerging responsibility of our collective fields is to ensure this power is better distributed in years to come? We have to re-engage the public in discussions about their futures; we need to restore some of the agency they have lost in recent years. We have to help forge a future beyond dread.
If the world should never return to normal, it follows that there should be no new normal for our fields, either. For too long we’ve been serving the wrong goals: helping large multinationals and tech giants accrue more power and wealth at the expense of other actors, contributing to the atomisation of society by designing products for individual fulfilment ahead of the wellbeing of our communities. Our rethought world will need to prioritise people and societies, ecologies and environments, ahead of profit and productivity. If you use this crisis to thought-prophesise about the new era ahead, don’t you dare return to your cosy consulting gig with Palantir or Shell afterward. Own your impact. Act in the interests of this better world you espouse, and withdraw your support for the forces that brought us to the brink.
We therefore have to rethink our metrics of success. Richard Sandford again:
‘[The old goal was] to claim new ground and set the agenda, working with the ways of managing attention that cultural commentary depends on now: a combination of posts on Medium, op-eds, twitter threads, podcasts, blog posts, articles in the Atlantic/Tortoise/Guardian/the Conversation/etc. The need to produce commentary to the rhythms established by this network favours publication over reflection. It’s hard to see how this will lead to the new way of doing things that is necessary for us to avoid returning to the old normal.
To me, the primary goal of the foresight community now should be to re-empower the people of the world; to use our skills to help people feel some agency in shaping their own futures. Right now, that means helping people out of helplessness. When the industrial growth era finally breathes its last – whether it’s killed by this pandemic or by climate crisis – we’ll need to mourn it. Those of us who believe in brighter futures to come should walk alongside others through this grieving process, helping them cross the familiar waters of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. Only once the world learns to accept and understand the loss of this era can we work together to forge brighter eras ahead.
The counter to dread, we are told, is hope. Hope is another of those modern-day clichés, with climate literature in particular following a rigid template: first the doom, then the hope, carefully dosed and tempered by a demand for enormous urgency. Even then, we must be mindful and cautious that the hope we swear by might be unconvincing or invisible to others. Philip Marrii Winzer’s piece I’d rather be called a climate pessimist than cling to toxic hope makes the case for a community decimated by the modern age.
As Aboriginal people, we’ve been fighting the capitalist, colonial system that created this crisis for over 200 years. Forgive me if I find your brand of hope a little hard to swallow […] We know we’re in an abusive relationship with the institutions of power and capital that occupy our lands, but does the climate movement? Much of what the movement focuses its energy and resources on feels a lot like asking an abuser to change their ways.
To me, the message is clear: we will not succeed by simply evangelising our own paternalistic, privileged messages of hope upon others. We won’t convince others that we can conquer the climate crisis by pointing to our previous models of utopias yet unrealised. The only sustainable way to defeat dread is to give people the skills and the powers to forge their own preferable futures. Hope comes from communities, not from experts; it arises with empowerment and inclusivity, not the promises of politicians.
If we are at last able to banish the vestiges of the doomed status quo – as indeed we should – then we have a huge task ahead. Everything is now up for grabs. Our world will need root-and-branch reform, redesign, and reclamation. If we’re to prevent old inequities returning, and keep future generations out of the captivity of conspiracy and hopelessness, we need to force power and money to flow in new, sustainable directions through new, sustainable systems. We have centuries of effort ahead of us. After grief, after dread, comes the most important work of our lives.
Recent tech ethics reading
In support of a proposal and workshop I’m fleshing out, I’ve been back down the metaphorical tech ethics mines. They’re noisier now, and increasingly polluted, but there’s still some worthwhile nuggets to be found…
First: a WSJ interview with Paula Goldman, chief ethical and humane use officer at Salesforce. Advisory councils, employee warning systems, product safeguards. IMO Sf are near the forefront of Big Tech ethics in practice, so worth a read.
The Economist warns the techlash isn’t over, despite a Big Five 52% stock price surge. The next recession will kill jobs, with automation likely blamed. Regulatory experiments will coalesce, and resistance will grow to match tech’s ever-broader ambitions.
Johannes Himmelreich argues for political philosophy & a focus on pluralism, human autonomy, and qs of legitimate authority. Moral philosophy is individualised (‘how should I live?’), but this is really about how we should get along as a society.
‘Ethicists were hired to save tech’s soul. Will anyone let them?’ has done the rounds. Again, Salesforce-centric (recent Comms push?), but a fair piece acknowledging the realities of exec-level veto, the toothlessness of Yet More Card Decks, and IMO the tempting error of slotting ethics into existing practices.
Here’s Bruce Sterling, distrustful (as I am) of preemptive codes of ethics. ‘Technological proliferation is not a list of principles. It is a deep, multivalent historical process with many radically different stakeholders over many different time-scales.’
Tom Chatfield agrees. ‘We already know what many of the world’s most powerful automated systems want: the enhancement of shareholder value and the empowerment of technocratic totalitarian states.’ This is sociopolitical, not merely technological.
So is tech ethics a waste of time? LM Sacasas offers a welcome defence, arguing for a ‘yes and’ approach, pointing out that other courses of action – legal, political – still need ethical bases. Pull all the levers, as I often find myself saying.
Choose the interesting work
2020 is shaping up to be a full and unpredictable year, with a curious mix of responsible innovation/ethics training and consulting, lots of graphic and print design, increasing immersion into design futures and foresight, and a strong privacy design pipeline, alongside some good old fashioned IA, talks, panels, and mentoring.
A far cry from the frankly rather stagnant mainstream design work I was going a few years ago. Happy I chose to turn away from it, and grateful I had the privilege to be able to. Choose the interesting work, wherever you can.
Seeking contacts for Asia tour, spring 2020
Update: thanks for sharing, everyone, but I decided to decline the trip. I can’t justify the carbon emissions. Some other time, perhaps.
I’ve been invited to give a high-profile talk in Singapore. Since this trip would use up a large chunk of my 2020 CO₂ budget, if I accept I’m thinking of staying in Southeast & East Asia for a few weeks to combine other visits and work. (More on carbon budgeting and reduction another time, but essentially: cluster trips to sharply reduce long-haul flights, prioritise low-carbon local transit.)
I want to expand my global network, learn more about the direction of design in Asia (and shift my perspectives away from Western/US technocentrism), and if possible get a little paid work to help fund the trip. So I’m looking to connect with:
individuals pushing the frontiers of digital design, and people active in the areas of tech ethics, responsible technology, privacy, and speculative design/futures design/etc. Let’s chat over a coffee, or local equivalent.
teams & companies that could benefit from a talk or a workshop (ethics, futures design) about these issues. Could be client-side design, product, or engineering teams, or consulting groups in the tech space. Local or multinational both fine, so long as English isn’t a problem.
When and how?
I expect to be in the region late March through April 2020. Right now I’m looking at Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, and/or Japan as destinations; I’m open to others if schedule permits. This is likely to be my only Southeast & East Asia trip for some time. Please email if you’d like to make contact: cennydd@cennydd.com.
Who am I?
I’m a digital product designer and futurist, formerly of Twitter, and author of the book Future Ethics. My focus these days is on designing ethical and responsible technology, addressing the climate crisis, and helping companies adopt futures thinking and speculative design to think more constructively about our shared futures.
Poachers turned gamekeepers
A colleague & friend wrote to me about the ongoing Silicon Valley contrition exhibition: ‘I feel like I'm seeing more and more of these kinds of mea culpas popping up of late, and am struggling with how to interpret them.’ Struck me that my reply might be worth publishing (lightly edited):
Yeah, I see a lot of these too and share your cynicism. I see it as a way for techies to earn a second bite at the cherry: I built this, we fucked it up, but now I’m sorry, so that’s fine. It’s no accident that Wetherell is ‘cofounder of a yet-unannounced startup’ – that’s why he gave the interview, surely, to build relevance and buzz? Here’s Vice Motherboard’s take on it.
I see this outflanking move most egregiously with the persuasive design crew. For around a decade, people like Nir Eyal have been advising companies on how to manipulate cognitive weakness to sell more product; now, in the backlash era, they’ve pivoted into these awful poacher-turned-gamekeeper roles: “I know all the evil tricks companies use, so hire me to help you do all this *ethically*.” TBH I think the industry should show these people the door; they had their chance, and they blew it. I wouldn’t even complain if someone made that conclusion about me, too.
There is, as you say, a potential upside, namely that these can be positive examples, fables of thoughtless design that come back to bite the companies involved. But I mostly read these sob stories as techdudes attempting to cling to power and relevance, now they see the pitchforks on the horizon.
Building Better Worlds video online
Video of my new talk Building Better Worlds is now available. The most important talk I’ve given, pleading for new speculative, future-conscious, hopeful modes of design that contest our slide into climate ruin. Please share & let me know your thoughts.
I’ve also published the notes, slides, evidence, and credit for the talk. One erratum to the video: the idea that ‘winning slowly is the same as losing’ on climate comes from Bill McKibben, rather than Alex Steffen.
My thanks to the Camp Digital crew for the invitation, and to the many people whose work inspired the talk.
Future Ethics flash sale
I’m having a flash sale on Future Ethics. The digital edition – PDF, Kindle, ePub – is now $9 (plus VAT for EU customers), and I’ve a few signed paperbacks available for £9.99 (update: sorry, these are now sold out). Amazon prices have also come down.
Prices will go back up at midday on Thursday 9 May, so move fast.
Future Ethics workshop coming to Amsterdam
Since I started offering my new workshop Practical Ethics for Tech Teams, I’ve had quite a few people ask whether I would be holding any public sessions. Good news! In collaboration with The Master Workshop, I’ll be running the workshop in Amsterdam on 20 September (under the title Future Ethics in Technology). Learn about the three lenses of contemporary ethics, use them in lively debates about emerging technology, and apply what you’ve learned through practical, hands-on exercises and games. Early-bird tickets are available now, at a very reasonable €329.
Full details, agenda, and sample slides here: https://www.themasterworkshop.com/cennydd-bowles
Trip to Beer Temple afterwards entirely optional, but recommended. Hope to see you there.
Speculative design’s tricky future
Great piece from Tobias Revell about the wrinkles in the speculative design bedsheets: Five Problems with Speculative Design.
I have a hunch that speculative design is the next big thing, on the brink of being seized and pillaged by the digital design community. Like Tobias I worry that this process will strip away all critical angles. Without criticality, speculative design is just an anodyne horizon-stretching exercise. Vision videos, office workers moving banal UI around glass walls. A mildly useful adjunct to affirmative #ShipIt design, but saying nothing about morality, inequities, etc.
Or perhaps we’ll swing the other way, and churn out rote make-u-think dystopias that deepen designers’ reputations as obstructionists, wolf-criers, and general pains in the collective ass.
Either way, we’d squander the true power of speculative design, which IMO is to engage a diverse public in tough discussions about our futures, and to spread power from technocrats to the people. It’s not about promoting corporate goals or our own pet narratives.
Ethics Should Not Be A Luxury
New article, by me: ‘Ethics Should Not Be A Luxury’: a lament on how ethical products are commonly marketed as luxury goods, and how this hampers genuine, structural change. https://ethical.net/ethical/ethics-should-not-be-a-luxury/
Happy to have this piece published by ethical.net, a London-based non-profit doing the hard work of aggregating ethical alternatives. Think they’re trending on Product Hunt today too. Worth a look.
Evolving Digital Self podcast
For your Friday enjoyment: I was a guest on Heidi Forbes Öste’s Evolving Digital Self podcast, discussing where tech regulation might go next, what happens when global techno-utopian dreams meet nationalistic sentiment, and moving from user-centricity to community-centricity. Listen below or subscribe on iTunes.
New workshop: Practical Ethics for Tech Teams
I talk about ethics with lots of designers, PMs, and tech leaders; they usually say the topic feels important but shapeless. They need practical tips on anticipating harms and unintended consequences, on getting past gut feel to make a compelling case for doing the right thing.
Of course, I think I can help. So I’ve created a new workshop, Practical Ethics for Tech Teams. I ran it for the first time last week with a private client. Here’s what they said:
‘Brilliant. Just so relevant and thought provoking and practical and a masterclass in facilitation. Left feeling very grateful for the work you’ve done, and for making it so accessible to us.’
‘It was BLOODY brilliant! Thank you. Very interesting and engaging.’
‘The exercises, they were all fantastic. Especially the proxemic & mutually destructive [metrics]: so much from them that I can actually apply. Thank you!’
Looks like there’s something valuable here, and I’ve already had lots interest in running the workshop elsewhere. So, if you want to take ethics seriously, my new workshop might be perfect for you. Now booking for in-house clients and as a pre-conference workshop. Includes a copy of Future Ethics for each attendee.
Please share with your networks, and drop me an email at cennydd@cennydd.com to find out more.
Empiricism as anti-ethics
Jack Dorsey and Kara Swisher are having a conversation on Twitter. They’re onto harassment and user safety.
Dare I say, ‘Observe, learn, and improve’ is the ethical problem. Fence-sitting empiricism dominates the industry. Our leaders espouse innovation pace above all, and argue we can mitigate harm after it hurts the vulnerable. It’s a flimsy dodge of ethical responsibility.
Agile and Lean Startup ideologies are central to this, of course. They have convinced us that unintended consequences are unforeseeable consequences, which is untrue. They’ve tempted us to prioritise validation over values. That has to change.
There are methods and techniques we can use to both broaden our view of potential stakeholders and anticipate the ethical issues that may affect them. These methods force us to look up from our familiar UCD and Lean manuals, our experiments, our safety nets. But it’s about time.
My take on chief ethics officers
Kara Swisher’s NYT piece asks whether tech firms should hire chief ethics officers. Some quick thoughts of my own.
I talk about this in Future Ethics; in short, I’m not particularly keen. ‘We need an exec’ tends to be a (slightly facile) default position whenever someone identifies a gap in tech company capabilities. But I think the best approach is rather more interwoven. A chief ethics officer would be too distanced from product and design orgs, where most ethical decisions are made; their duties would come into conflict with those of the CFO, who is already on the hook for financial ethics; and the seniority of the role would mean this person would be seen as an ethical arbiter, an oracle who passes ethical judgment. This is IMO a failure state for ethics. Loading ethical responsibility onto a sole enlightened exec doesn’t scale, and it reduces the chance of genuine ethical discourse within companies by individualising the problem.
Better to appoint senior practitioners – product ethicists, design ethicists – and place them at the apex of decisions, ideally within those respective orgs. Granted, these folks may need someone above to organise, evangelise, and provide air cover. So a chief ethics officer might be useful if hired simultaneously with or just after some IC-level ethical roles. For this to work, this person should be given:
a bit of budget and/or headcount to bring in experts, particularly from academia
serious involvement in (or even responsibility for) updating core company values
some authority, comparable with perhaps a VP; although perhaps not full veto power
flexibility to point outward as well as inward. Tech firms will only succeed at this ethics thing if they share ideas and progress. I’ve just finished a long US tour talking ethics with a range of tech companies (Microsoft, Facebook, Hulu, Dropbox, Fitbit, IBM…): one glaring gap is knowledge sharing and external community-of-practice building, which would make progress quicker and smoother. I have some vague thoughts about how we might address this; more later.
A successful chief ethics officer would equip teams to make their own decisions, not bestow judgment from above. The best approach is a mix of theory, process, and technique to (per Cameron Tonkinwise) make ethics an ethos, not just a figurehead appointment.
Future Ethics out now
In Ho Chi Minh City I met a man who claimed, implausibly, to be a wizard. Dumbfounded by jetlag and, regrettably, the entire contents of the minibar, I followed him down a dusty side road. It split at an old tree, whose dead branches caressed the horizon. ‘Here’ he said. ‘Choose.’ I followed the path to the left; eventually I happened upon a bottle, encrusted with dust. Within it, a brittle, rolled-up piece of paper, scorched at the edges like a piratical treasure map. What else could I do? I unfurled it.
‘Don’t write a blog when you’re trying to write a book.’
Anyway, Future Ethics is out at last, and more of this nonsense will follow. I’m en route to Seattle; from there, the west coast, top to bottom. Microsoft, Dropbox, Stanford, Facebook, Hulu, EY, Intuit, Kluge, and a few public events too. I’ll be talking about the book a lot, but you bet your ass I’m going up the Space Needle and taking Hollywood sign selfies too. Expect photos.
Please buy my book, in the interim. I’m proud of it, and so far, people seem to like it.