An urgent reckoning with the tech industry’s digital pollution
After the uneventful presidential inauguration on Jan 20th, most of us breathed a sigh of relief that democracy had prevailed. It seems like all is right again with the world (or will be) and it’s tempting to forget how the tech industry has contributed to the events culminating in the storming of the Capitol.
Watching the events unfold on January 6th brought back memories of when I lived in South Africa during the transition to democracy. In 1993, while the government was planning a transition of power, the white supremacist party (AWB) stormed the location where negotiations were taking place.
The white supremacists incited some to take up arms to protect their rights and properties while some Black voices wanted revenge for the atrocities of apartheid. This could have been the beginning of a descent into violence, but Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk inspired the country with a shared vision. They initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to acknowledge the atrocities and to begin to make amends. They had a nuanced but inspiring message and South Africa made a peaceful transition to democracy.
Such a transition in the age of social media seems impossible. Research has shown that the messages that are reshared the most are the ones that cause moral outrage or that evoke strong emotion. Consider the following thought experiment. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, would Mandela and de Klerk’s nuanced vision with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have been popular with the masses? Or would only the radical messages and call to arms have resonated?
Peaceful transitions require nuanced discussions, and social media, unfortunately, doesn’t do nuance.
The tech industry has had a profound influence on society, but the effects of social media have been the most visible to date. The mechanics of how social media affected elections became clearer when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018. More recently, the attack on the Capitol shows that these platforms make it easy to manipulate and radicalize people, and as a result, are a danger to democracy.
The threat to democracy, however, is deeper than the issue of radicalization. We must recognize that the tech industry has created a hotbed for radicalization by increasing wealth inequality, which is worse today than just after WW1.
For decades, through de-unionization and outsourcing, the tech industry has shifted the risk of economic downturns from companies to workers. The pendulum has swung from lifetime employment with well-funded pension plans to the gig economy where workers typically don’t have health insurance. Companies hire workers as and when they are needed — any risk with an economic downturn or a decrease in demand is borne by the workers.
Economists who believed that the weakening of labor laws would spur growth in the tech sector and, in turn, lead to better pay for workers are realizing that may no longer be true. According to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, employment has fallen in every industry that used technology to increase productivity. Essentially, automation is pushing workers to lower-paying jobs in the economy.
In the same timeframe, share buybacks have reached record levels, predominantly benefiting shareholders and executives. Our business practices have increased the wealth divide and research shows that higher levels of economic inequality reduce support for democracy across all social classes.
While inequality erodes democracy, access to knowledge and information supports democracy. In the ’90s, the internet was brimming with the promise that it would democratize knowledge. Unfortunately, while the internet has given us information at our fingertips, business models in the tech industry often rely on user engagement and have led to misinformation being equally accessible. As a result, even those who spend the time looking up information, have a hard time differentiating facts from misinformation. In essence, the ubiquity of misinformation has eroded access to facts.
By increasing wealth inequality, eroding access to facts, and making it easy to radicalize people, tech platforms have often maximized profits while creating collateral damage to society. Similar to environmental pollution from unregulated industrial growth, we need to recognize this collateral damage to society as a new form of pollution: Digital Pollution.
Digital Pollution: The collateral damage to society from the unregulated growth in the tech industry.
While environmental pollution causes species to become extinct, digital pollution changes society in ways that cannot be repaired. The storming of the Capitol on January 6th was an example of irreparable damage to our democracy because of digital pollution.
Many of us, including myself, joined the tech workforce believing that our innovations could change the world for the better. Given our positive intent, it’s especially difficult for us to reckon with the toll our industry has taken on society.
But we must remember that we had to recognize and label environmental pollution before we could talk about how we were contributing to it and how we could avoid it. Companies only talked about being environmentally responsible when they recognized how business decisions were impacting the environment. Similarly, it’s only when we recognize digital pollution that we can take responsibility for the products we build. By reckoning with the digital pollution our products create, we can finally begin to change the world while avoiding collateral damage to society.
Radhika Dutt is the author of the upcoming book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, scheduled for release on 28 September 2021. Radical Product Thinking is a methodology for creating vision-driven products that bring about the change you envision in the world.
