economies and ethics of scale
Each January around the post-Christmas settling, tech companies announce (or serendipitously leak) their lineup for the coming year: software updates, “improved” smartphone models, new desk or laptops, fancy tablets, and stylish wearables to anticipate. The tragedy of this time is that no one is looking forward to getting a new gadget as much as they are excited about getting rid of an old one...
This cycle, made ludicrous by the mid-year color refresh Big Tech and fueled by the planned obsolescence of phone throttling paired with intentionally low manufacturing quality, is a net negative for society.
Nature suffers. No longer are we attuned to changing seasons as much as the changing release dates of technology. We imbibe with impunity the drug of more as islands of waste pile higher for the sake of a 9% screen size increase or a sharper quality image of progressively more trivial, and cliche photographs.
Community suffers. With subtle, chosen differences in device appearance, tech companies provide upgraders with visible status symbols to (unconsciously or overtly) lord their purchases over peers who haven't rushed to their carrier for an upgrade.
Society suffers. Attracted by the promise of new and better, we trade a piece of ourselves for convenience and quality of life. We lock our lives deeper within the identities this technology happily provides us. We become comfortable within the metaworld that looks more and more like our own as the blurred lines progress faster than our understanding of them…
...And the cycle continues. We buy, we consume, we dump, and we buy again.
Why would we assume there was any other way in the system we've built upon such competitive economic incentives?
What would an alternative to a silicon valley gold-digger look like?
How would a healthy growth model unfold in markets and across the globalized world?
Where would humane designers go to build the sorts of tech that valued our attention, cognition, and emotions?
Where once an economy produced only those inventions that were mass-marketable because of their attraction, we see a new economic incentive emerge that places the user back at the center of a holistically, healthily, humanely-designed industry.
Light. Punkt. Mudita.
Tech designed differently. Tech designed to last, to improve community, to end “the tyranny of more.” Tech designed without the incentive to distract us and keep us captive to it’s whimsy. Tech designed to catalyze a more humane future.
But we need more…
These few show us only the beginnings of a world where ethics-centered startups are able to profitably produce good tech with humane values. There are still economies and ethics of scale that are barriers to entry in production, marketing, and design.
For the economies of scale we see no path to financial success for ethical tech. Too few of us are able to break from Silicon Valley to choose healthier paths. Humane tech companies can’t cost effectively produce their innovations without the fast user acquisition that tech unicorns see because of their unethical marketing and design tactics. They fall short of their needs. They struggle to scale.
For the ethics of scale, res ipsum loquitor as humane tech suffers from a conscience absent 99% of the average tech groups. To buy back shares in the attention economy, Tragedy of the Commons-type incentives are required. No distraction-free tech can, on principle, advertise to markets that would be susceptible to purchasing their products. Your tactics of scale are bound by your ethics.
You could assume that scaling issues would limit these companies from ever reaching a critical mass. Many see the entrance of new players as something unnecessary in an already crowded space. More believe redemption for technology does not lay in the hands of these few change-makers with a restriction-filled market.
But it is true, as Wendell Berry writes, that the aims of capitalistic tools of industrialization can enrich and empower the few (for a while), but they will sooner or later ruin us all… So without a system and technology rebuild upon new incentives and ethics, our softwares and devices will crumble from their base.