Notes and Thoughts on Chicago Ideas Week Curiosity Series: "Navigating Modern Tech Ethics: An Evening With Facebook"

Last Thursday night, I attended a program hosted by Chicago Ideas Week as part of their Curiosity Series. The program was titled: Navigating Modern Tech Ethics: An Evening With Facebook. I was offered a free ticket to this program through my job at the Harold Washington Library Center and I took it. It was well worth the time and effort to get to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), sit for an hour and a half, and listen, because they covered a lot of things that I feel have been on our collective minds right now. It was apt that the moderator began with something like this: "It takes a lot more than dragging Mark Zuckerberg to Congress to understand what really is going on here." True.

Anil Dash did a excellent job moderating the program by asking direct, difficult questions and keeping an great sense of humor the entire one and a half hours. The two interviewees were Margaret Gould Stewart, Vice President of Product Design for Facebook, and Sudhir Venkatesh, Research Manager for Facebook (also the author of the book Gang Leader For A Day).

A lot of Anil Dash's questions centered on three topics: the ethics of data collection (as well as advertising), responses to social media's effects on society as a whole (specifically in terms of addictive behavior), and Facebook's organizational culture. As might be supposed, the need for proper transparency was a thread that ran through most of Stewart and Venkatesh's responses. While Facebook does have a clear policy available to all users, it still seems that many of it's two billion+ users (which, they made sure to note, was the population of the entire world in the year 1930) are not cognizant of the fact that Facebook is indeed a for-profit company. That being said, Facebook still holds itself accountable to use proper practices in order to extend the "lifespan" of their business. Basically, improper practices are simply not good for business; i.e. building a business model focused on getting users to stay on their devices for as long as possible is not a good business model because it, in the long run, will aggravate users as well as impair mental health.

I am aware, and was aware during the time of this presentation, that I was listening to employees of Facebook. Thus, I didn't expect them to sit there and talk s&^% about their gazillion dollars worth employer. However, it seemed that some people in the audience did. One woman laughed loudly when Venkatesh stated that many of the employees at Facebook are very self-critical and are not lacking in humility. The nature of Facebook, as stated by these two employees, is that it is inherently an interdisciplinary business. Stewart gave a perfect example by using the model of a quadrant.

On the far right end is all the numbers, the data, the particles, the atoms; all the coding stuff. On the far left is the "atmosphere" of Facebook, it's visual presence, it's online environment, it's interface. At the very top is society and at the very bottom is the individual user. The crosshair in the middle is the product. This is a huge ecosystem. Sociologists work with coders who work with graphic designers who work with engineers, who work with computer scientists who work with researchers, and the list goes on. The very fact of the business having so many people working together from different disciplines makes it unique in a very positive way (there is less to say about the backgrounds, demographics, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. of the company - which is something they seem to be aware of). One thing that Dash pointed out was the fact that they used the term society - not community - because it is now known that Facebook affects not only it's users but also non-users in different, but very big ways.

I was a bit perturbed by the people in the audience who just could not stop looking at their phones during this interview, and especially concerned when the topic turned to the abuse of apps like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram and they still did not put their phones down. So yeah, there is a real addiction to "staying connected" on social media. How does Facebook respond to this? Well, Stewart and Venkatesh honed in on the fact that there is a lot of ethnocentrism to these questions. Think about where the questions are coming from, they urged. The Western Hemisphere, Europe, the United States. While our concern is addiction to apps, the company, at this socio-political juncture, cannot make policy changes regarding how to use the app - that would be making an assumption on two billion people and counting. The question, rather, should ask: what is going on in our society right now, and what is our society's relationship to technology? Stewart made clear that staring at our phones continuously is simply not sustainable. "We'd better not be doing that in five years" was something like what she quipped to us.

As for advertising, their answer was simple. Facebook is free because of the advertising companies, not to mention that Facebook is the best way for small businesses to grow (as data shows). Facebook wants to keep it's service free (part of their philosophy is open access), thus they keep the advertisements. They have found no way around this - though they claim they have tried. This led to the conversation on the ethics of data collection. When humantarian groups asked them for data in order to help a population suffering from a natural, socio-political, or other type of disaster, they had to wrack their brains on whether or not to pull that data out. These humanitarian groups were the Red Cross, the PeaceCorps, and others. After deliberation, they decided to do it. If their data could help save lives, then they would use it. That was Facebook's decision. According to them, they keep all of the data anonymous/private.

There was one point in the program that I realized that I trusted Facebook because of how f%$#@!@ stupid and naive they are. Pardon my language, but this one story was unbelievable. You may remember Facebook's "Year In Review" service, where they pulled photos and status's from each user's year and created a montage with super cheesy music so everyone could see a compilation of the great year they had. When one of their employees saw his recently deceased daughter's face as the first picture of the montage, all the while the happy music playing in the background, he notified everyone immediately. On the other end of this, I personally have seen hilarious "Year in Review" montages where my friends are drinking themselves to death, playing lonely music alone and clearly sad, taking pitiful selfies, and much worse - all the while this extremely happy tune plays that sounds like something out of a commercial for pills that combat depression.

The fact that Facebook didn't realize while making this product that not ALL people have great, wonderful, happy-go-lucky lives every year was astounding. The level of assumption that Facebook had to make in order to produce such a ridiculous service is just plain and simply naive of the company. Suffice it to say, going from an Ivy-League based product to a world-wide one was and is an eye-opening experience for many of the longest employees of Facebook. They admit their mistake.

When asked how accessible Mark Zuckerberg is to the lower ranks of the company, they claimed he is very accesible. They have a whole-company meeting each Friday, where Zuckerberg gets grilled by tough questions and presented with dense situations the entire time. For a company that huge, a meeting each Friday with the big boss seems pretty damn good.

An artist drew this while the program was running. I saw her up at the front, sketching away. It was left outside the theater when the program ended:

- F