seven questions about technology

When you visit the tallest floor of a London skyscraper, you realise that perspective matters. From the 39th floor, London appears to be nothing more but a whimsically assembled menagerie of various shapes clustered on the banks of a single ribbon of blue, the Thames, bending around the tongue-like Isle of Dogs on its way to the City.

I sometimes wonder what it would feel like to look at time in this way, with perspective and distance.

It sometimes seems infuriating that time is a dimension that cannot be examined in both directions. We can only look back and hypothesize about the future, but there is no skyscraper we can climb which will show us the whole view.

The future humans will look at us, our buildings and customs and cultures, and wonder why we made the mistakes we did. Perhaps, they will try to walk a bit in our shoes to too see why our choices appeared obvious.

They will look at our tablets and smart phones the way we look at floppy disks, VHS tapes and cassettes, with a wry smile and maybe an eye-roll ( full disclosure: I am a child of the floppy-disk age, but even I rolled eyes at cassettes )

Why should we let posterity have all the fun? Even though every generation is, in a way, blind to the shortcomings and dangers of the technology du-jour, that should not stop us from taking a critical look at what is happening.

Neil Postman, an influential voice on this topic, was a cultural critic and professor, a historian of technology and media. In a March 1997 speech “The Surrender of Culture to Technology” (it is available on Youtube) Postman outlined seven questions that we can use to evaluate a new technology.

Before looking at the questions, we should make note of an important distinction between the words media and technology. A technology to a medium is what a brain is to a mind, Postman says. A technology is machine, a medium is a social creation. How a technology is used by a culture is not necessarily the only way it could be used.

The seven questions about technology:

1. What is the problem to which this technology is a solution? There are technologies that are not solutions to any problem.

2. Whose problem is this? Most technologies do solve a problem. Who will benefit from this technology and who will pay for it? These are sometimes not the same people.

3. What new problems might be created, because we have solved the old problem? Technologies generate new problems, but sometimes it is hard to know what new problems will be. For example, Postman argued, that the television, while allowing for mass-communication and mass-entertainment, had permanently changed the nature of political discourse. It would have been fascinating to hear his take on Twitter in November 2016.

4. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by this technology?

5. What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies? What is lost and what is gained?

6. What sort of institutions acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?

7. What alternative uses might be made of a technology? What alternative media might arise from this technology?

Postman argued that it was not inevitable that television (the physical technology ) became the commercial television we all know today. He cited examples of countries where (in the 90s) television was not subject to any commercial interests. The crux of the argument is that the medium (the current world wide web for example) that exists of a particular technology (the physical internet network) is not the only possible medium we could have created. How a particular technology is transformed into a particular medium is very complex and involves society, politics and greed.

a cacophony of bits

In the end, I decided to leave again. There is something about the Twitter user experience that does not suite me. Most importantly of all, I find the soothing lull, which my brain slips into when I browse an endless stream of content, frightening. The signal to noise ratio is too low to justify spending hours sifting through random conversations.

I am sure there are opportunities I will miss and connections I will have to live without. I will miss the laughs of WeRateDogs and the random cats of Caturday, the serious conversations and tweetstorms. However, the positives do not outweigh the fact that there may be serious negatives that no one is discussing. This worries and frightens me.

It worries me that a father of a 5 year old Netflix and Youtube addict is posting on Hacker News, asking for tips on getting his son away from the screens. There are only 3 comments on the post. It flickers on the New page for a brief instant before drowning in the flood of new articles and posts.

It worries me that truth has become a flexible concept, ready to be molded by anyone who has enough followers.

It worries me that there is very little public research on designing non-addictive human computer interfaces and very few long term studies on the effects of shallow, rapid context switching on cognition.

“The idea of purposefully introducing into my life a service designed to fragment my attention is as scary to me as the idea of smoking would be to an endurance athlete, and it should be to you if you’re serious about creating things that matter”, writes Cal Newport in “Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It”.

I have lived with some form of social media for most of my teen and adult life. It has become my escape from boredom and loneliness, a crutch and a trap and I think I would like to try a life with less cacophony from the interwebs and more focus on the things that matter to me.

on responsibility

A note: Although this post is dated 4th of August, it was completed in early 2018 and thus references some events that took place later in 2017.

I’m writing about software here.

And perhaps some other things.

Sometimes, all of the best intentions - the carefully piled Jenga tower of checks and balances, of process and communication - collapse with a thud into - well - an epic fail.

So it is, that I find myself in this moment, looking at the face of the woman, whose work an error in the software program has just wiped out.

There isn’t much to say. But I have to say something.

“I take responsibility”?

“We’ll improve the process”?

“I’ll make sure it won’t happen again.”?

The junior developer I guided through the disastrous change is next to me. Silent. We go back upstairs to engineering, each to our workstations and wait for the fallout to start.

While the email chains are percolating further and further up the many chains that separate those who make decisions and those who suffer their consequences, I get to think about responsibility.

We didn’t read the code carefully enough. It was too long, too much copy pasta, too many lines, too many long functions. We tried, we tried, we tried, to guess what type this variable would be and how it would behave. We hoped that no one else was using any of the fields we were going modify. We sent emails and did testing in staging environments.

But here we were. The code was pulled out of prod. Apologies were sent. Data was lost. Someone, someone else, would now have a late night manually unfucking the things that got fucked.

I thought I knew what responsibility was. A ticking of boxes to make sure some sort of process was followed.

But the real responsbility is what comes after.

I did not know about Paul Kalanithi until he had passed away. A few days after his death, I read his obituary in the New York Times and then a review of his book When Breath Becomes Air. Then, a year or so later, I found the title in my local bookstore and purchased it.

When you lose data, you shrug and toss one into the bin of ‘Fuckups’.

When you lose a life, however.

Paul Kalanithi dedicated his life to being responsible for other people’s future. He did not take this lightly.

In a passage from When Breath Becomes Air, he wrote

“As a chief resident, nearly all responsibility fell on my shoulders, and the opportunities to succeed – or fail – were greater than ever. The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters.”

My failure, unlike Dr. Kalanithi’s, rarely carries consequences as dire as death of someone’s mother, father, brother, sister, or child, but on that day, on that floor with its endless rows of desks and fluorescent lights, looking into the eyes of this woman who now had to work late to get her work done, just because I hadn’t done mine properly, I felt it, the pain of failure.

Then and there, I said the only thing I could. “I’m sorry”.

“No, you’re not,” she replied. It was loud enough to echo across two rows.

I was, but I knew what she was saying.

“Things won’t change” is what I think she wanted to say. You’ll go back upstairs, there will be a few emails, a few words of apology, but next week, next month or maybe next quarter, there will be a bugfix, a feature, a push to prod and this will happen again.

And I knew, she was probably right.

A lot of software is built on good intentions. On being cool and using the latest, hottest, just-off-Github framework. It’s about being a techie kid in the candy store, except the shelves are lined with stickers, t-shirts, confs and blog posts, and tech, cool cool tech! Or as Martin Thompson phrased in his GOTO Copenhagen 2017 keynote, “intellectual masturbation”.

But some of it is really not just ‘software’. Joel Spolsky’s post “Birdcage liners” examines the fragmentation of social discourse (courtesy of our favourite platforms) and warns,

“What is the lesson? The lesson here is that when you design software, you create the future.”

Designing the future is exciting, being responsible for it - terrifying.

We should not take it lightly.

there and back again

A few months ago, I made a contribution to a genre that is so very 2010s - I wrote a quitpiece about my Twitter account. Now, I am making a contribution to another, perhaps nascent genre that necessarily follows the rise of the quitpiece, the relapsepiece, or the story of there and back again.

Everyone loves spending time in an echo chamber of curated experiences and instant internetlove, which ping up on a user’s screen and deposit an immediate microdose of gratification in her brain. The amount of time I spent staring at the notifications icon and the ever-scrolling screen of little thoughtbytes on a myriad random topics was alarming, not very productive or relaxing, but strangely satisfying and addicting. It brought memories of idle moments spent on a dial-up connection playing an ancient ancestor of Candy Crush on a Finnish gaming website. Hours could pass without anything more significant than little pictures of diamonds, sapphires and rubies flashing by in various combinations.

I’d start my mornings by wanting to reach for my tablet to check on it.

I deleted the native Android client.

And then I used the browser to access the mobile version of the site.

I also remembered the notes from pre-college alcohol addiction training program. Wanting a drink first thing in the morning is a warning sign.

So why are we more worried about people reaching for a morning whisky than we are about people reaching for their smartdevice?

Unfortunately, quitting Twitter cold turkey is hard, because the site is designed to leave you, the quitter, a window of opportunity to repent and rejoin. The 30 days that must pass before your deactivated account is permanently deleted are ample opportunity to struggle with neuroreceptors freshly deprived from a never ending stream of (mostly) low-nutrition and easy to digest infobytes.

This certainly had a big role to play in why I am writing this relapsepiece. The other, is the small nuggets of truly valuable signal that can be unearthed in the noise. One of these is definitely, Stephanie Hurlburt’s Twitter account. Stephanie’s call for other Twitter users to post offers of help and mentoring has already lead to several fruitful discussions that I hope to continue and to learn from.

For now, I will stay for the discussions and the learning. But I am also being mindful of how and for how long I visit. The advice and warnings of Cal Newport’s New York Times piece ‘Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It’ are never far off from my mind. I think there is still too much we don’t understand or choose not to understand about the consequences of embracing communication and social media technology, with open, unquestioning arms.

distance

These words, I have wanted to write for a while, but the opportunity and the impetus never presented in the right amounts. Yesterday, I had several encounters, which finally gave me the words I needed.

I am not speaking in specifics nor naming anyone. Doing so maybe helpful or harmful - I am too far from the situation to truly see the details and to truly know the extent and so I choose to be silent about the details. Instead, I can talk about my part in this sometimes wonderful and terrifying effort of being a technical community organizer.

I became part of a small and welcoming technical community in my first month after moving to BigCity. I was alone and lost, feeling unwelcome in a job where there were more managers named Steven than there were women and the community gave me a space to be who I was - a person interested in programing, mathematics, science and technology who happened to be born a woman. The environment was friendly and grassroots - the blatant tech recruiting swag and marketing were absent (there is nothing wrong with events that have recruiting and swag, but there should also be a space for simple food-and-code meetups). Instead, it was just a group of people and laptops working on things ranging from Project Euler to web apps and eating food (usually pizza).

I wanted to give back so I became involved. In the beginning, by choosing topics and giving talks, then more extensively by organizing meetups. It was good fun for a while and I hope that what I did helped at least a few people learn more about programming.

However, as of late, something has changed. What started as a study group and friendly meetup has become a ‘training provider’, or so it seems based on some of the comments the organizers are receiving. It was and will hopefully always remain without charge to allow everyone, and especially underrepresented minorities, to benefit from the spirit of learning and respect. Even if the event itself does not cost anything, it does not mean that organizing it is free. Instead, the brunt of the ‘second shift’ is borne by the volunteers who generously give their time and employees at companies who support technical communities. This time is not free. This is time that someone could be using to learn a technical skill or spend with their loved ones.

For some reason, this fact, the simple fact of respect for the time put into the community and the events by the volunteers and the employees has been lost. I’m not speaking about veneration or even gratitude. Acts of volunteering are rarely done for applause. Nevertheless, the time that is invested in making a community flourish or an event happen deserves respect and this is the respect that I find is lacking.

Moreover, (and perhaps this part is the most painful to say), I have realised my work as a technical community organizer is no longer accomplishing what I want it to accomplish. The roots of the inequality and imbalance in the technical industry (and many others ) are too long and deep to shake.

That is the impetus.

The opportunity is the conversation that I have witnessed in a series of tweets and blog posts by designer Karolina Szczur and by technologist and engineer Cate Huston. Yesterday, Karolina tweeted, “We can’t have more women, people of colour, people with disabilities and other underrepresented groups in engineering, design and leadership if they’re all busy doing community work”. Further to this, she wrote up her thoughts in this blog post. The piece is an honest look at her own journey in her career and the toll that community organizing has taken on her progress. In many ways, the words are painful to read. Juggling the desire to build up ladders and safer spaces, a wish to see the industry embrace diversity beyond the shallow marketing campaigns, and the desire to build up skills to truly lead in the industry is exhausting.

As a result, we often become spread thin over the many responsibilities, some forced, some chosen.

I used to think that this was the price that was necessary for change.

But now I am no longer sure of the direction or the speed of change. Or if the acceleration my own actions are providing is helpful or harmful.

“I have mixed feelings about lists of women. Well I say mixed: my feelings on lists are, broadly, negative.”, writes Cate Huston, in her essay Lists of Women Don’t Change anything. She is speaking about the kind of lists that are frequently publicised in the various corners of the internet: lists of women speakers or women influencers, usually in tech or STEM fields and usually compiled for the purpose of avoiding the so-called “manel” phenomenon (an all-male panel). “ ‘Diversity attention’ is at best worthless and at worst harmful. The only valuable attention is to work and/or impact”, Cate concludes and I agree. I want to work toward a future where more minorities start technology companies and become leaders in their field.

However, I no longer believe that the kind of work I am doing in the community is steering toward this goal. Instead, the ripples I had hoped to make are dissolving into the lukewarm pool of “diversity attention” and fading out. I have to consider that what I am doing may be more harmful than helpful.

Fellow community organizers, you have taught me more about perseverance, empathy, engineering and kindness than anyone ever could and it is those lessons that I will cherish forever. For that I am forever grateful.