Truth and Reconciliation
Each year on September 30, Canada marks a public holiday titled the "Day of Truth and Reconciliation." It was made an official federal observance in 2021 to commemorate a tragic part of Canada's history: the Residential School system, where children of Canada's indigenous peoples were taken away from their families and suffered terrible abuse and trauma.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to speak authoritatively about this complicated legacy. I'll leave that to experts in that matter, and of course to the survivors themselves. It still puts me into a reflective mood, though.
What I can talk about here is that the tech industry is woven into just about every fabric of everyday life, and therefore has tremendous capability for doing harm at national and industrial scale. We—the experts developing and deploying tech—have to remind ourselves that we're not just solving interesting challenges. Those solutions have big, sometimes beneficial, sometimes devastating, impacts. As a German, I know our own dark history relied a lot on the technology of the day, like using IBM punch card machines to "properly" organize the Holocaust.
Everyone wrestles with these questions differently. Two thoughts I've had on this:
Inspired by a chapter about business models in Jason Cohen's great book, Hidden Multipliers, I want to make sure my services and products satisfy a need, instead of exploiting desperation
Inspired by Cory Doctorow's book, Enshittification: Don't participate in tools meant to screw over customers, subject them to mass surveillance, or drive marginalized people even deeper into trouble
Google's old motto, "Do No Evil", seems pretty solid, and while everyone draws the line somewhere else, I think not exploiting desperation, and not actively making life miserable for people who already have it rough, should be pretty defensible.
So far, these principles haven't cost me anything - I didn't have to turn away a client who wanted me to build something unethical. And it's not (yet) a principle if it hasn't cost you anything. Time will tell.
