A Way Forward
What Does Professionalize Really Mean?
When an industry grows up, industrial sociologists call it “professionalization.”
Professionalization is a simple word for the very complicated,
big, messy, revolutionary process whereby a trade slowly
becomes a profession, with enforceable, uniform
professional standards and a culture of accountability.
It's the story of the law catching up to the needs of practitioners and patients. It's the story of licensing and certification. It's the story of billions of person-hours devoted to hammering out the ethical edge-cases encountered by doctors, and then instructing new doctors on that wisdom.
How We’re Going To Get What We All Need And Want.
We’re not going to solve a problem as big as an unaccountable social tech industry without as many people trying as many approaches as possible. Hammering loudly from the outside. Slowly working on the inside. Antitrust. Regulation. Consumer pressure. All should be on the table. Our genuinely species-wide problems — climate change, hate, economic inequality — are all tied to getting tech back on track.
Here’s the approach no one else is taking, that we see as our lane:
We want to turn social technology into a profession, the same way that medicine, law and engineering are professions.
Who do we need at the table to professionalize social tech?
A diverse group of experts: Tech workers, tech dissidents, industry leaders, students, politicians, academics, investors, consumers, activists, and anyone and everyone with a desire to create real change in an industry in desperate need of it. Professionalization will not come easy and we need partners from within the industry and outside of it to come together to get this done.
What about other solutions? Government regulation? Breaking up big tech?
There’s no single solution in the world that is big enough, by itself, to fix all the problems social tech is creating and facing. But professionalization is one of the biggest solutions we have in our arsenal. We’re laser-focused on making social tech a profession and changing the industry from the inside out!
How do we get this done?
There are four milestones that each industry must reach when professionalizing. It’s a big job, but we can get it done!
Unify:
develop a shared vision for the industry, expressed as an oath or manifesto underpinned by a code of ethics worthy of the public’s trust
Codify:
outline a universal set of standards, including minimum standards of professional competency and rules of professional conduct
Certify:
educate and train practitioners in accordance with these standards and provide them a way to stay up to date on them
Apply:
protect the public interest by enforcing standards and imposing disciplinary action when necessary
Haven't joined us yet? Please do so.
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Why We Don’t Have It Yet.
Right now, silicon valley claim they have the power to change everything but themselves.
Wars. Genocides. Elections. Who goes to jail. Who gets the job. Who gets to live. Who
gets to die. The fate of entire nation-states. All have turned, and will continue to turn, on the private decisions of a select few, unelected programmers, in a select few, intensely guarded rooms. Mostly male. Mostly white. Utterly insulated from the fallout of their decisions. All of them crafting algorithms that in turn craft a human society from which they have increasingly set themselves apart.
The field in which these people work is best understood as social technology: technology that mediates society itself for everyday end users, and the social interactions within. Keeping track of friends on Facebook. Foregoing a trip to the corner store in favor of Amazon. Emailing coworkers and consuming media via Google. And running all of the above, via more computing power than was to get humans to the moon, thanks to Apple.
It all sounds so innocent and idyllic.
But the general public knows the reality behind that image all too well.
In a wide-ranging survey of public attitudes towards the major tech giants by Pew Research Center last year, a supermajority of Americans (72%) stated that they believed the tech companies could be trusted to the right thing either only “some of the time,” or “hardly ever.” (The number who believed the major tech companies could always be trusted was 3 percent. For reference, the U.S. approval rating of Congress consistently hovers around a relatively beloved 18 percent.)
It bodes poorly for civil society to have perhaps the single most visible center of corporate power, the makers of both the screens we look upon thousands of times each day and what lives on those screens, the ping that vibrates on our hipbone whenever an engineer decides to do so, operate with a complete lack of public trust or affection. A complete lack of public trust or affection for all-powerful actors is a good descriptor of kingdoms right before they are toppled, or monarchs before they are beheaded.
And the tech giants have earned every bit of it, moving relentlessly from data scandal to electoral misinformation campaigns to mental health scare, seemingly constantly in crisis mode — and never letting it affect their modesty.
When Uber built an inhouse tool to spy on all their customers’ whereabouts, they internally called it God Mode. They weren’t wrong. We have built a world where our tech giants have the power to track us, knowing more about our dreams, and our fears than we do, and get to decide who sees those dreams. We should call that kind of power what it is: godlike. And the gods have lost touch with humanity.
It can feel like we got here slowly, then all at once. The dream of the internet wasn’t to fuel hatred, or sell our information to malicious advertisers, or leak our data. It was to connect. To inform. To liberate. Pop-up ads were invented to fund new voices that might otherwise get drowned out. The algorithms that now embed institutional racism in courthouses were originally commissioned to curb bias. The platforms that now enable armies of division and hate were designed to help people keep tabs on their friends and family.
But the original sin was planted from the start: the myth of the garage. The hoodie-wearing CEO. The disruptors. All the myths silicon valley likes to tell about themselves as brilliant amateurs, rather than humble professionals.
The tech giants fell so deeply in love with themselves, they never found time to question what they were doing. They never found time to grow up.
It’s time for tech to grow up.
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How We’re Going To Get What We All Need And Want.
We’re not going to solve a problem as big as an unaccountable social tech industry without as many people trying as many approaches as possible. Hammering loudly from the outside. Slowly working on the inside. Antitrust. Regulation. Consumer pressure. All should be on the table. Our genuinely species-wide problems — climate change, hate, economic inequality — are all tied to getting tech back on track.
Here’s the approach no one else is taking, that we see as our lane:
We want to turn social technology into a profession, the same way that medicine, law and engineering are professions.
We want to professionalize silicon valley.
Our approach to doing that is threefold:
1. We want to unify the industry under a shared vision, with the major players signed onto a shared set of public principles.
Principles like reorienting the social tech industry away from end users as products, moving fast and fixing things before they get out of hand; and anticipating the worst-case scenarios for societal costs before releasing new tech.
2. We want those principles to be reflected in codified professional standards for building new tools and managing existing platforms.
Becoming a professional technologist should bring with it real ethics education, the real power to whistleblow as a tech worker, and oaths technologists should take, like those taken by doctors, lawyers and engineers.
3. We want to certify tech products as socially responsible.
When you go to the app store, you should be able to check that the creators of a given item went through a real process of thinking through the societal consequences of their tech.
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What We Mean When We Say “Professionalize Silicon Valley”
When an industry grows up, industrial sociologists call it “professionalization.”
Professionalization is a simple word for the very complicated,
big, messy, revolutionary process whereby a trade slowly
becomes a profession, with enforceable, uniform
professional standards and a culture of accountability.
It's the story of the law catching up to the needs of practitioners and patients. It's the story of licensing and certification. It's the story of billions of person-hours devoted to hammering out the ethical edge-cases encountered by doctors, and then instructing new doctors on that wisdom.
When professionalization has completed in a given trade (again, think medicine), there’s a. a community of professionals (think the American Medical Association), b. formalized knowledge (think medical school), c. universal standards (“First, do no harm”), and d. standards are enforceable (think laws against malpractice, or all the ways someone could lose their license).
Right now, tech in the United States has, arguably, 1 out of 4 down.
We do have some formalized knowledge, and efforts like MIT’s proposed Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing are good signs.
But there’s little community of professionals. There’s virtually no universal standards. And the laws regarding tech and the internet in the United States are not just woefully outdated, but there are precious few real incentives within the industry to act ethically in their absence. No wonder the general public doesn’t trust the tech giants.
Much like medicine and law in the 19th and 20th centuries, social technology is a trade that urgently needs to accept a degree of responsibility proportional to the magnitude of its impact. Just like medicine and the law, the incentives, mores, actions and reactions of practitioners are directly influencing the health and well-being of too many people. Only in this case, the ratio is much more worrisome: today, the intentions, assumptions and mistakes of a few unelected social technologists are forming the digital building blocks of our global society, for better and for Worse. (Almost entirely worse.)
Professionalization isn’t perfection. But it’s a crucial step to improving. It’s much easier to stop a malfeasant doctor in a society with a legal and administrative framework around doctors, than it is in one where every doctor is a freelance practitioner. And the stakes are too high to give up prematurely.
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What We
Don't
Mean When We Say “Professionalize Silicon Valley”
Professionalization is necessary. But we know it isn’t sufficient.
No single solution is big enough to tackle this problem — it’s
going to take an All Of The Above approach, and we support
the efforts of groups like Demand Progress and the Center for
Humane Technology. But professionalization is one of the
biggest solutions we have in our arsenal.
There are many proposals to regulate or break up social tech giants. Pivot For Humanity is not ideologically opposed to those goals. We're not saying "no, but"; we're saying "yes, and":
Yes, the righteous efforts to reform the tech giants from the outside are worthwhile.
And, while we're waiting for and helping those efforts to gain traction, we should be doing everything possible to internally professionalize the industry so as to reduce harm.
We stand in full support of the various efforts that work towards regulation, antitrust actions, etc.
We are not competing with those efforts. We are complementing those efforts by strengthening the voices of those inside the industry wishing to reform it from the inside out.
If the antitrust efforts underway now are 100% successful —and given the current political climate, that's a big if — we still will have to massively change the internal culture and practices at the smaller companies that come out of their break-up, so we don't end up with 100 smaller versions of the giants we started out with.
We happily work in coalition with groups pushing for antitrust, break-ups and regulation. We simply see ourselves as working in a different lane, as part of the larger battle for a more human internet.
We're not working in competition with those pushing for regulatory action or consumer pressure or antitrust efforts. We're working alongside those people, working to change those giants from the inside out, and change the landscape in which such admirable reform efforts operate.