Dec. 2, 2020, 9:10 a.m.
Ethical Technologist Issue 11: Discord! at the Chatroom, Automating Productivity, The Politics of Definition
The Ethical Technologist
Howdy, and welcome back.
The Ethical Technologist is back from a much-needed autumn holiday break. And as promised, we return with a newsletter full of reader submissions. We received quite a number of carefully considered reading material that we’re excited to share with you this week.
And, on that note, I’m not using the royal “we” in the paragraph above. Starting with this issue, I’m proud to announce a new collaborator on the Ethical Technologist team, Chip Hollingsworth.
> Allow me to introduce myself as your new co-editor. My name is Chip Hollingsworth. Like Don, I wear many hats: I hold Master’s degrees in both Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence, I worked for several years as a software engineer, and I’m currently a data analyst. One thing that struck me in the move from the academic world to the tech world is how little introspection there is in the tech industry regarding their goals and methods. All too often, metrics like “clicks” or “engagement” are taken as self-evident goods, and virtually any methods of reaching those goals are given approval. When I saw that my friend Don had started a newsletter on ethics in technology, I was excited; when he asked me to help out, I was honored.
It’s great to have you, Chip!
In this issue: Tools for building inclusive communities, the deliberate addictiveness of social media, monitoring productivity when you can’t come to the office, all definitions are political, and more.
If you have a recommendation for a theme, or an article you’ve seen recently that you think I ought to share, please do let me know. You can reply to this email, or hit me up on Twitter
As always, you can find back issues of The Ethical Technologist in the archives. And if you found this issue thought-provoking and informative, please share with your friends and colleagues!
[ 🍎 To The Most Inclusive ]
Let’s open with some encouraging news. Discord is quickly emerging as the favorite tool for online communities. You might its origins in the often-toxic gamer community mean it would be a welcome environment for hate speech and bullying. On the contrary, Discord is taking the problem of building sustainable communities seriously. After finding out that the far-right protests in Charlottesville were planned via Discord, the company chose not to double down on “free speech”, but rather to address the problem:
> [Discord Trust and Safety team lead Sean Li] wants to help moderators create whatever kind of community they want…but only within the boundaries set by the broader platform. Those didn’t exist for too many years. Now, Discord’s trying simply to be clear and forceful about what’s acceptable and what isn’t, and to enforce those rules consistently. It’s investing in bots and other automated mod tools, but the Trust and Safety team now makes up more than 15% of Discord’s staff.
Here’s hoping Discord helps show the rest of the tech industry that creating a safe environment for users doesn’t have to come at the expense of building a successful company.
[CH]
[ 📺 Social Media and Opioids ]
This submission from Chris Lamb relates the algorithms driving engagement at YouTube and Facebook to the science of “captology,” which studies ways to capture and hold attention. One of the founders of this field anticipated the ethically questionable ways to which the tech industry would put captology to use:
> Fogg also sounded a note of caution. Captology research would require a strong ethical component, because persuasive techniques could easily be employed by those without the best interests of their users at heart. He was concerned, for example, by the possibility of casinos using captology to make their slot machines more seductive, or corporations deploying captology to track and manipulate employee behaviour.
This article came to my attention just as news broke that consulting firm McKinsey had advised Purdue Pharma to pursue a scheme that encouraged addiction:
> In a 2017 presentation…McKinsey laid out several options to shore up sales. One was to give Purdue’s distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they sold.
For both social media and opioids, addiction was seen as a feature, not a bug, and companies deliberately ignored warnings about the ethical ramifications of optimizing for addictiveness.
[CH]
[ 🪑 Measuring Butts in Seats in the Time of COVID ]
You may have heard the news about the latest feature in Microsoft Office 365: It’s measuring how much you use the productivity suite, and gives your manager a productivity score. Pieter Lange shared with us a Twitter thread from Wolfie Christl that examines this new feature in detail, and shows us just how problematic it can be. Not only does it reduce productivity to arbitrary (and easily gamed) numbers, but it transmits this data back to Microsoft. Such measures are designed specifically to shift power away from employees and towards management: Contemporary management science has its origins in techniques used by slave owners in the American south.
[DEGW]
[ 🤑 The Idea of Paying for Open Source is a Trap ]
There are a number of schemes by which open source maintainers can solicit funding for their projects. But the actual mechanics of making funding happen are fraught with insurmountable difficulties. In this series of essays, shared with me by longtime reader Floor Drees, author Oren Eini argues that the incentive structure for funding most open source is broken. The amounts typically paid out by funding sites don’t even reach minimum wage, encouraging open source developers to seek full-time employment (and potential burnout) instead. The bureaucratic red tape around corporate funding makes it difficult to set up funding, and the legal requirements place too much liability on maintainers. If we want a system of sufficiently-funded, yet independent open source projects, we need to rework how open source funding works from the ground up.
[DEGW]
[ 📘 The Politics of How We Define Our Words ]
Nearly twenty years ago, Harper’s published David Foster Wallace’s book review of a dictionary. Dictionaries, you see, are political statements, because, as he so eloquently argued, defining our words and language is a deeply political—and politicized—topic.
So it goes with the term “open source”. Earlier this month at DevRel/Asia, I gave a talk on the politics of defining “open source”. One group insists that open source is defined in terms of the license we attach to software. I argue in this talk that in fact developers use the term in a very different way. Common usage emphasizes community, cooperation, and openness—aspects of software development not actually covered by the “official” definition. Instead, I argue that the Ethical Source Definition better captures the spirit and practice of open source development.
[DEGW]
[ ⛓ Bonus Link ]
Sepideh Miller recently shared with me this Twitter list of folks who focus on the responsible use of artificial intelligence—go and follow them!
[DEGW]
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So much for Issue 11! Thanks for subscribing and reading, and thanks to the many folks who have been sharing content with me! And thanks to Chip for joining me in this journey. If you enjoyed this issue, share with your friends! If you have an article that should be featured in an upcoming issue of The Ethical Technologist, let me know by either replying to this email (what, a newsletter you can reply to!?), or pinging me on Twitter.
Until next time, yours, Don Goodman-Wilson