The two faces of tech
In 2013, a couple months after the Edward Snowden story broke, I attended Strata, a data conference run by O’Reilly (the animal book people). Big data was all the rage, and the talks and vendor booths were filled with promises of streaming, sentiment analysis, and ridiculous business insights at the snap of a finger.
One of the talks that year was this one, about the Accumulo project at the NSA.
When I first saw it on the schedule, I couldn’t believe it. Did the NSA really have the gall to give a talk on the data mining tools they were building and using, only a couple short months after the exposure of Snowden in the complicity of those tools in spying on Americans through PRISM?
It turns out they did, and the presentation was mostly a technical look at Accumulo, (RIP),a key-value store on top of Hadoop (extra RIP.)
The conference room was completely packed, and as I stood in the back, I scanned it for any signs that people were angry or there to ask pointed questions about the specific use of Accumulo at the NSA. But no, everyone seemed genuinely interested in the technical aspects, and the questions afterwards were mostly about internals.
I couldn’t believe it. Were these people not reading the same news sources I was? Did they not feel violated that their personal information was being taken advantage of? I left the talk somewhat shaken and disillusioned (and not just by the bad PowerPoint.)
For me personally, the Snowden revelations made an enormous impact on me and the way I viewed America. I wrote at the time,
Richard Feynman is the spirit of America. So is driving over the Verrazzano Bridge on a muggy August day, the taste of hot dogs on the barbecue, the college admissions process, Nike sneakers, cheesy Christmas sweaters, 80s movies with Eddie Murphy, skyscrapers, Texas, MAD magazine, coffee shops with free wifi, going to McDonald’s just to use the bathroom, road trips, tabloids, tip jars with little cute notes on them, Thanksgiving, and dollar stores. It’s hard to explain what makes any single of those things American, but they are. They are all big, and open and American.
Just like the internet used to be. I spend hours in the space that’s the virtual equivalent to my America, which is not an unfair comparison since America built a lot of the internet. For me, it’s like a second home. Open tabs in Chrome. People arguing in comment sections. Thoughtful #longreads about racism in Italian football. Follow Friday. The Oatmeal. “John Smith liked your status”. Check-ins. HTML code. Weird Twitter. Gifs. Cats. Analysis. I love it.
Unfortunately, these spaces are now shattered for me. The America I woke up to last week when Edward Snowden revealed that the government is taking all of our data and sifting through it with meticulous intent is not my America anymore, and it’s no longer my internet. They are both cold places that are now hostile to me.
But it didn’t seem like there was much public outrage beyond the initial drama of watching Snowden escape Hong Kong. My friends and family certainly weren’t running out to buy Faraday cages for their devices.
But it made sense. If the very people that understood the deep technical implications of what was being built didn’t care, how, possibly, could the mainstream public?
Since then, I’ve seen examples of this duality play out multiple times: amazing technology existing simultaneously next to egregious ethical violations without anyone talking about the link between the two.
Over the past couple years, for example, the mainstream media has woken up to what the tech companies are doing, and is now reporting on it. Unfortunately, their revenue models are directly tied up in getting Facebook views and with Google advertising and infrastructure, so you get things like this:
without any discussion of the intersection of these two things.
And, just a couple days ago, as I was doing my usual perusal of Hacker News, I came across the following juxtaposition of links:
Right next to each other, an enthusiastic discussion of both how Facebook is using the latest, hottest programming language and blockchain to build a new supertechnology, and an article about how the company is also a modern-day version of The Jungle.
And yet, there is no cross-pollination of examination of the duality of these companies in the tech posts, or in the social posts, either. And, if the chatter in subreddits for new compsci grads and the New York and San Francisco tech scenes are any indication, everyone still wants to work at Facebook and Google because they “have cool problems at scale.” The six-figure paychecks definitely don’t hurt.
To be fair, these kinds of contradictions exist at most companies, the ones we all work for. Some are curing cancer and yet hiring janitors for $7 dollars an hour. Some provide excellent communities and jobs for whole cities and yet are monopolistic and cruel to their customers. Some are giving money to charities and yet underpaying women. Where is the line?
And, is there something about the microscope that tech is under that we’re just getting more exposure to these two sides of tech on full blast these days? I’m not sure.
But, what I know is that this duality is bad, and also that I’m not sure what to do about it or how to reconcile it. Maybe some philosophy majors can weigh in in the comments. All of us in the tech industry use tools that these companies built. All of us have to work somewhere, all of us have to eat. Are the tools inherently bad? No. Should we be criticizing companies in technical posts? I’m not sure how to, without turning people off or seeming overly moralizing.
Either way, I’ve noticed this trend more and more, and I’m not sure how we’ll ever be able to square this circle as the gap between the technical and the social continues to widen.
Art: The Two Masks, Giorgio de Chirico, 1926
What I’m reading:
My @washingtonpost experiment found in a week of Web surfing, Chrome would have quietly ushered 11,189 tracker cookies onto my computer.
On the same sites, Mozilla Firefox delivered zero wapo.st/2Xm2wq8
“What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?” - Apparently a lot of good stuff! A super feel-good post.
A new super cool-looking class to teach you SQL
What an intense ride for Babe.net, the site that published that expose of Aziz Ansari about a year back.
About the Author
I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia. Most of my free time is spent kid-wrangling, reading, and writing bad tweets. I also have longer opinions on things. Find out more here or follow me on Twitter. This newsletter, including warm takes about data, tech, and everything around those two. It goes out twice-ish a week for free. Paid subscribers get even more warm takes.
If you like this newsletter, support it and get friends to subscribe!