Maelle Quotes

Another symptom of psychopathy commonly found in larger-than-life unicorn founders is a trait termed “shallow affect,” which we might liken to emotional illiteracy or reduced emotional responses to a given set of circumstances.

One of the many difficulties in addressing these issues is the “attention economy” that tech has created. When so much competes for our attention, and when we are trained to expect and demand instant gratification, it is hard to focus on the bigger picture.

One thing that has become ever-clearer in this attention economy is that it involves the deliberate abdication of moral responsibility. Usually the leaders of unicorns in this space, draping themselves in the flag of “free speech,” justify and absolve themselves by relying on Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act, which offers protective cover every bit as powerful as Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. In the words of Wired's Matt Reynolds, Section 230 set the goalposts of the internet we have today.43

Huxley and Orwell, wrote Postman, did not predict the same future. “Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think,” As Postman explained: What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

The more a company relies on tech, the more it needs people who are curious about the world around them. People who have studied the past to try not to repeat it. People who understand how others will feel and react to a set of circumstances and changes.

That unwavering faith in technology, that blindness toward human cost in the name of a “vision,” and that greed has led many of our companies to build technology that exploits humanity's weaknesses and makes it subservient to tech, which is the opposite of what most of us intended.

I wrote Trampled by Unicorns to lift the lid on all of this and show how, in my view, many of the industry's household names sidelined morality as a price for technological leaps forward, and abandoned their original ideals.

I'll trace the origins and effects of what I've come to call the tech industry's “empathy deficit,” and argue that many of the most celebrated founders and companies share some of the key personality traits of psychopaths.3

As explained by William Davidow, author of The Autonomous Revolution, the technologies of the future (AI, robotics, Internet of Things) “not only make society more efficient and productive; they transform its structure.

The flourishing of this syndrome has helped cultivate another tech myth: that of “exceptionalism,” in which unicorn founders, execs, early hires, and certain VCs, who have all drunk deeply from the Kool-Aid, believe that because the world is a meritocratic place, they and they alone are responsible for their success, due to the fact that they are smarter and work harder than anyone else. The trouble with that theory is that it is demonstrably untrue in the vast majority of cases, not least because while, yes, they may be smart and work hard, they are also the beneficiaries of a once-in-a-century alignment of circumstances, ranging from the development of the internet itself to the Wild West–style “lawlessness” of the Valley, which was left free to roam far ahead of governments, regulators, and tax codes, to today's unprecedented surfeit of venture capital and scale culture.

This has further spawned a number of self-interested beliefs that are closely and proudly held by the tech “tribe,” including notions such as “as long as I produce outstanding results I won't be fired,” that technology itself isn't good or bad, but neutral (“there is no bias in code”), tech “solutionism” (“tech will solve everything,” “we just need better tech, more tech,” etc.), gender/race-neutral approach (“we only hire the best”), and so on.

the Silicon Valley Index: Big Tech is no longer innovating chiefly to solve problems, but perversely is now the source of many of society's problems instead. “It used to be that the things [they] were bringing to market were universally hailed and badly wanted,” he says. “Now tech companies…are [producing] tools that can be used to invade privacy, or tamper with democratic processes, or they're addictive—so they're not ameliorating the condition of mankind, they are actually making us worse. That's a really significant change.

Over the course of the past two decades, free staff cafeterias—much like some of the other perks on offer that I have described, including dry cleaning and medical and dental services—have had the effect of cutting off many of the tech from their immediate community, often in sprawling, university-style campuses. Now while it is plainly nonsensical to pin all of the blame on tech companies for the impact of the Valley's extraordinary success, this has nevertheless triggered resentment from some local businesses. They believed they were promised rich pickings of potential new customers on their doorstep, but instead saw no meaningful uplift in trade, or worse.

Whereas the industrial revolution paved the way for a new middle class and lifted overall prosperity, the tech revolution has helped to hollow out the middle class and catalyze a greater level of income inequality than at any time in modern history. And no matter what some tech executives, venture capitalists, and their investors claim, these trade-offs need not be the inevitable consequence of progress.

In this scenario, ten years from now, if the tech giants are not restrained and their power as data-monopolies becomes further entrenched, governments will find themselves increasingly sidelined and impotent. Reduced to mere gatekeepers, politicians and civil servants will likely retreat behind algorithmic government, with laws shaped by data and machine learning, with all its inherent biases and imperfections, and public services gradually surrendered to private businesses. Indeed, we should expect just about every area of human existence, currently managed by government, to be dominated by Big Tech and its outriders: from the future of finance (just about everyone), to healthcare (Google), and from low-cost housing (Apple, Google) to education (Google, again) and autonomous vehicles (Tesla, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, etc.).

I think the people who make that argument tend to confuse “affective empathy” with the cognitive variety I'm advocating. Affective empathy implies sharing, almost physically, the feelings of other people. It makes it harder to share direct feedback (you don't want to hurt people's feelings) and make tough calls (you want to make everybody feel good about a decision). Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, helps you understand how other people feel and think, and as a result helps you adapt your decisions and behavior accordingly; it thus enables better-informed decision-making. As a leader, you should still act in the best interest of your business, but by understanding how your decisions affect other people, both positively and negatively, you're better able to act with clarity and decisiveness, with fewer negative side effects.

Having said that, not everything needs to be regulated. As argued by Lisa Quest and Anthony Charrie in MIT Sloan Management Review,1 regulation should focus on three overarching objectives and be proportionate to the level of risk: Safety: protecting individuals and societies, such as governments mandating air bags, or the use of the seat belts, but not the size or form of cars Competition: ensuring that there is healthy competition and a real chance for innovation to flourish, principles that are at the core of the capitalist model upon which today's Western world is based Privacy: establishing understandable and consistent parameters for data privacy and monetization

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

As technological visionaries, they often come from an engineering culture that is long on the hubris that they alone have the answers, and short on empathy and compassion. In the name of greater efficiency, the default setting for many is to take people out of the equation whenever possible, and to put their faith in code and machines. They are in turn encouraged by an ecosystem of venture capitalists and others who prize these qualities as keys to business success.

And in the frenzy to grow, they are less likely to focus on building empathetic, durable cultures, to treat their employees well, and to be good corporate citizens.

Marc Benioff has been vocal about the responsibility of companies: “To my fellow business leaders and billionaires, I say that we can no longer wash our hands of our responsibility for what people do with our products. Yes, profits are important, but so is society.…It's time for a new capitalism—a more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism that actually works for everyone and where businesses, including tech companies, don't just take from society but truly give back and have a positive impact.

tech giants should be more aggressive in recruiting people with humanities backgrounds, people as familiar with Voltaire and Thomas Paine as with Java and Python, and create special career pathways for them in product and engineering.