Geek Heresy (2 page)

That tech giants are messianic about their creations is no surprise. But their outlook has possessed powerful people outside of Silicon Valley, too. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that “technology is a game-changer in the field of education – a game-changer we desperately need to both improve achievement for all and increase equity for children and communities who have been historically underserved.”
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Economist Jeffrey Sachs, author of
The End of Poverty
and the force behind the United Nations’ Millennium Villages Project, believes that “mobile phones and wireless Internet end isolation, and will therefore prove to be the most transformative technology of economic development of our time.”
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And in 2011, then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced a new foreign policy doctrine. She introduced “Internet freedom” by saying that information networks were a “great leveler” that we should use “to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want.”
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World leaders are convinced that technology will make the world a better place.

But does technology really cause positive social change?

Consider poverty in the United States. Its rate decreased steadily for decades until 1970. Around 1970, though, the decline stopped. Since then, the poverty rate has held steady at a stubborn 12 to
13 percent – embarrassingly high for the world’s richest country – only to rise since the 2007 recession.
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Over the past four decades, real incomes for poor and middle-class households stagnated. Inequality shot up to a level not seen for a century.
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During the same four decades, though, the United States experienced an explosion of new technologies. America ushered in the Internet and the personal computer. Its companies invented mobile phones and social media. US firms such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter dominate the global corporate landscape, churning out product after product used by billions of people. In 2014 there were more than 210 million Facebook accounts in the United States, outnumbering Americans aged fifteen to sixty-four. For a while now, the total US population has been eclipsed by the number of wireless subscriptions.
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So during a golden age of innovation in the world’s most technologically advanced country, there has been no dent in our rate of poverty.
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All of our amazing digital technologies, widely disseminated, didn’t alleviate our most glaring social ill.

A Tale of Two Approaches

When Smith said, “Talent is universal; opportunity is not,” she was quoting an epigraph from a memoir,
It Happened on the Way to War
, by former Marine captain Rye Barcott. Barcott was an officer-in-training in 2000 when he visited Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, and his eyes were opened to global poverty. Feeling compelled to do something about it, he worked with local residents Tabitha Atieno Festo and Salim Mohamed to found a nonprofit organization called Carolina for Kibera (CFK), which has since been honored for its work by
Time
magazine and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The organization runs health and education programs and trains youth leaders to solve community problems. Steve Juma, for example, joined a CFK youth soccer team and discovered he made a good referee and peer mentor. CFK granted him a medical school scholarship, and Juma now treats patients at its clinic.
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The founders believe that everyone comes into the world with potential, but not everyone has
the opportunity to develop it. Talent is universal, and opportunity is the nurturing of that talent.

This is very different from Smith’s take. Whereas Smith is concerned with external provision, Barcott builds up internal strengths. The difference is profound, as even Smith – and every Google employee – knows well from another context. Google posts its job announcements on its website, so in theory, anyone with access to the Internet has the opportunity to apply. In practice, though, the jobs are closed to all but a small minority of people who have the education, experience, and personal contacts to pass extensive rounds of interviews and aptitude tests. I know many low-income people who would like nothing more than a well-paying job at a global technology company. But it doesn’t matter whether they can browse engineering jobs on their phones. Online opportunity isn’t always actual opportunity.

Of course, Smith herself wouldn’t argue that a tenth-grade dropout from East Palo Alto and a Stanford computer science PhD have the same ability to hack software. Nevertheless, by equating the Internet with opportunity for underprivileged people, she has made a dubious assumption – an assumption that the Internet can make up for severe non-Internet deficiencies.

So – talent is universal; opportunity is not. The same six words capture what Smith and Barcott both believe. Yet their different interpretations lead to wildly divergent ways of trying to change the world. Smith wants to spread technology to every corner of the planet. Barcott focuses on cultivating individual talents. One builds technologies. The other fosters people.

I know very well where Smith was coming from. For twelve years I worked at Microsoft, where, like every other gizmo-happy technologist, I unconsciously embraced a peculiar paradox. It revealed itself in the most innocuous things that the company said. At corporate gatherings, executives would tell us, “You are our greatest asset!” But in their marketing, they would tell customers, “Our technology is your greatest asset!” In other words, what matters most to the company is capable people, but what should matter to the rest of the world is new
technology. Somehow what was best for us and what was best for others were two different things.
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This book is about this subtle contradiction and its outsized consequences. I explore how a misunderstanding about technology’s role in society has infected us – not just the tech industry, but global civilization as a whole – and how it confuses our attempts to address the world’s persistent social problems. The confusion expresses itself as Silicon Valley executives who evangelize cutting-edge technologies at work but send their children to Waldorf schools that ban electronics. Or as a government that spies on its citizens’ emails while promoting the Internet abroad as a bulwark of human rights. Or as a country densely crisscrossed with interactive social media that is nevertheless more politically polarized than ever.
Geek Heresy
demystifies these contradictions and seeks to illuminate a more effective path to social change.

Technoholics Anonymous

I am a recovering technoholic. I was once addicted to a technological way of solving problems.

My parents were nerds at heart, possibly reflecting the stereotypical Japanese fascination with science and technology. On birthdays, they gave me Lego blocks and Erector sets. I have fond memories of playing with a clever Japanese toy called
Denshi Burokku
. It consisted of analog electronics embedded in plastic cubes that you could arrange and rearrange to build lie detectors and radios.
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By the seventh grade, I was programming an Apple II personal computer. My bookshelves were filled with biographies of Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers as well as titles such as
How Things Work
and
Tell Me Why
.

One book that left a deep impression on me described Russian efforts to build a fusion reactor. When I was growing up in the 1970s, a series of energy crises caused long lines at gas stations and an adult obsession with turning off lights. These developments seemed connected to world events that caused furrows in President Jimmy Carter’s brow every time he appeared on TV. Nuclear fusion – as a source of
unlimited energy – seemed like it could put an end to these problems once and for all. I thought I could help make it work.

So in college I majored in physics, but, as often happens, one thing led to another, and I changed fields. I did a PhD in computer science, and after that, I took a job at Microsoft Research – one of the world’s largest computer science laboratories. What didn’t change was my search for technological solutions.

At first I worked in an area called computer vision, which tries to give machines a skill that one-year-olds take for granted but that science still toils to explain: converting an array of color into meaning – a crib, a mother’s smile, a looming bottle. Computers still can’t recognize these objects reliably, but the field has made progress. For example, these days we don’t think twice about the little squares that track a person’s face on our mobile-phone cameras. That’s a technology that a colleague of mine developed just fifteen years ago.
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In my own research, I worked on algorithms that allowed you to cut out objects in digital photographs and automatically fill in the hole with an appropriate background.
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Another project was a precursor to the software in Microsoft’s Kinect system, which does away with joysticks for Xbox games by tracking players’ physical movements with cameras.
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These advances were exciting. They proved the incredible power of technology. And they kept me engaged for seven years. But I began to feel a little dissatisfied with the kind of impact I was having. If I was overly ambitious as a child to think that I could solve big energy problems, now I didn’t feel ambitious enough. I wanted to do more than serve the world’s gadget lovers.

So in 2004, when my manager in Redmond asked me if I would join him to launch a research center in India – what would become Microsoft’s only major lab in the developing world – I jumped at the chance.
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I was excited by a new topic: How could electronic technologies contribute to social causes in the world’s poorest communities? Within months, I moved to Bangalore, expecting to spend a few years applying my technical skills to a new set of problems. What I didn’t foresee was that India would change my entire conception of technology.

Prolegomenon

America is a bubble where everyone tunes into YouTube; Amazon delivers to every Kindle; and debates of fact are quickly settled by consulting our iPhones. As a result, it’s hard to gain a true sense for technology’s real effect on society. We’re all breathing the same air. We have a perspective that some people call WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.
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Outside our bubble, there are places like India – an ocean of diversity presenting a Technicolor range of man-machine interaction. Nonliterate dollar-a-day rickshaw drivers, who are savvy users of Bluetooth file exchange on their multimedia phones, deliver undergraduate computer-science majors to campuses in which programming is taught entirely on paper. Inadequate theories of technology don’t hold together in the rough waters of such contrasts.

In
Part 1
, I’ll share what I learned in India and other places about digital technology and demonstrate that the lessons apply everywhere. I’ll describe the Law of Amplification, which concisely explains technology’s impact on society and shatters pervasive myths about social change. These myths are embedded deep in the modern technocratic psyche, and they mislead us toward mirages that vanish on closer inspection.
Part 1
will provoke tech optimists, vindicate tech skeptics, and liberate others from the cult-like hold of technology.

Part 2
suggests the path forward. It will reveal rules for the best ways to apply technology, but move beyond machines to highlight the critical role of individual and societal intention, discernment, and self-control. I’ll tell moving stories of extraordinary people, such as Patrick Awuah, a Microsoft millionaire who left his lucrative engineering job to open Ghana’s first liberal arts university, and Tara Sreenivasa, a graduate of a remarkable South Indian school that takes children from dollar-a-day households into the high-tech offices of Goldman Sachs and Mercedes-Benz.
Part 2
reanimates an ancient narrative for progress that is more relevant today than ever before: Even in a world of abundant technology, there is no social change without change in people.

Throughout, I use examples from global poverty to represent a range of societal afflictions. In part, this is because of my own focus over the past decade. But poverty is also linked to just about every social problem, either directly or by analogy. Being poor often means having lower levels of health, education, and political power. Resource scarcity and environmental destruction are everyday facts in impoverished communities. All forms of social inequality and prejudice echo the motifs of economic inequality and discrimination. By the end of this book, I hope you’ll agree that the Law of Amplification and the case for certain human values apply not just to the alleviation of poverty, but to any kind of positive social change.

Greek Geek

In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a brilliant craftsman and engineer. He designed the labyrinth that contained the Minotaur. He devised new methods of carpentry and shipbuilding. His animated statues were the world’s first robots.
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But Daedalus is perhaps best known for the invention of flight. Imprisoned in a tower with his son, Icarus, Daedalus fashioned wings out of feathers and wax. As they planned their escape, he warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun for fear that the wax would melt. Once they were in the air, though, Icarus ignored his father’s warnings. He soared exuberantly into the sky. His wings fell apart, and Icarus fell to his death.

This story is often interpreted with a moral for children: Obey your parents. Rein in hubris. But there is also a timeless lesson for the grownups: Brilliant technology is not enough to save us from ourselves. Tech proponents will insist that Daedalus needed wings to escape. Tech skeptics will say that Icarus would have been better off without them. But had Icarus exercised restraint, or had Daedalus taken more time with his son to convey the risks, they could have benefited from the technology without the tragedy. The real lesson, then, is not about technology at all – it’s about the right kind of heart, mind, and will.