The gradient
Things are, broadly, bad. They are bad in the tech industry and bad in the world. They are bad for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that we keep using software that happens to be run by bad people.
We don’t intend on doing this. We all started using the bad software with good intentions. In this post, I’m going to outline why this happens at a very comically high level, and then I’ll leave the “actionable steps” to all of you, because you’re smart adults who can be left to their own devices.
As a disclaimer, I’m about to diss a direct competitor of one of Draft’s clients, but it wouldn’t change what I’m about to say here.
The newsletter
Let’s say you run an email marketing platform. You seem, on face, to be a sort-of-fine type-A nerd about it. Your platform fares well, people join it, and you start to be less cool about it. Who knows what causes this! Could be the money, could be the power, could be your privilege. Either way, people used to think you were cool, until you do an interview where you point-blank cop to supporting Nazis. By that point, many people have joined your platform, including many Nazis. You are then known, in internet parlance, as “the Nazi bar”. You are now a Problem, you refuse to be called in, good people leave, and – either because of the Nazi thing, or just because you suck as a person and are owned by your investors while still not turning a profit – your platform starts to get worse and worse, even as you don't do enough.
The problem is that there’s a set of relationships here that go unnoticed by most people. People do not, in fact, subscribe to your email marketing platform. Your platform hosts numerous newsletters. People subscribe to those. They subscribe to relationships. So the chain goes like this:
You → Newsletter → Newsletter author → Platform → Nazi sympathizer ← Investors
Those arrows show the direction of control that’s happening here. Some are entities, some are humans. You pay (or subscribe to) a given newsletter. The newsletter is written by a person (or people!). The newsletter is hosted by (and pays) a platform, which is a company. The company is run by a Nazi sympathizer. And the company (and, by proxy, the Nazi sympathizer) is funded by investors, who are now stakeholders in the moves that the Nazi sympathizer makes.
The only relationship anyone cares about is that between a person and their newsletter. “Oh, a cool newsletter,” you think. You don’t think twice about who runs it or what platform it’s on. You don’t learn to read the overall graphic design & layout of the newsletter’s home page as belonging to any specific platform. You enter your email address, click a thing, and go about your life.
The network
The same thing happens with social networks. Your friends write impassioned pleas to join a new thing, and you do. The thing is run by another type-A nerd, and it’s funded by another clutch of investors. Eventually they start to accept advertising to pay the bills. That chain goes like this:
(You ←→ Friends) → Advertisers → Social network ← Investors
I’m combining you & your friends in one lump here, because you join the network for your friends. It acts as FriendOS at the beginning.
The truly crazy thing is how we keep falling for it, saying things will be different this time. They won’t.
The gradient
The reason this is so pernicious is that the rot happens several steps down the line, slowly fading as it gets to you, and so you sign up for the most unobjectionable part of it. Then the bad stuff slowly creeps towards you, and all of a sudden a few years later you have destabilized democracies at home and literal genocide abroad. The number 1 question I’ve heard from my close people over the past month is “how could this happen?” And, well, that’s how it happens, y’all. You accidentally become complicit in literal Nazism because you tried to follow all of the cool stuff your friends are doing.
The newsletter, or your friends, are fine. The platform is less fine. The owner of the platform is even less fine than that, and then they become very much not fine, and then they make the platform very much not fine in ways you may not even notice at first, because the platform’s customers are those who run newsletters, or pay for ads. The rot doesn’t affect you – not yet, at least.
The gradient here is not something we have any fluency in resisting. There is no precedent to it in human history. And because there tends to be a close relationship between technological revolutions & populist insurgence, it’s not surprising that it’s happening, but it is something that we all need to get conscious to, yesterday.
What to do
We desperately need to develop a new form of consumer education around all of technology, one that identifies and does something about the systems of power & responsibility that sit underneath what we choose to use every day.
We also need to develop technologies that read the room when it comes to actual consumer motivations. Because people will flatly never care about your cool open-source decentralized option if their people aren’t there, if the conversation isn’t there, and if the interface isn’t there. They always sign up to the first step on the gradient, not the last.
In the meantime, this has driven many people (including myself!) into the dark forest – which has its own structural problems, but honestly? It feels rather nice over here. It’s a good refuge to take while everybody else works all of this out. It’s a reasonable response to everything right now.
People far smarter than me are trying to work all of this out, but that’s my take, and it feels like enough of a finished idea that I can spray it to a bunch of people and not come to regret it. And I’m open to talking about something here, but the tasks are big and I suspect the tools we presently have aren’t sufficient to the task. I would love, of course, to be proven wrong.