Days start early in the garden. As the sun rises over the Santa Clara Valley’s Diablo Range, we’ve already gathered and prepared seed beds for planting. The smell of damp soil fills the air as we carefully place fava beans into the dark earth. The soil under our fingernails and caked onto our knees doesn’t bother us—it reminds us of where our food comes from. We fill our bellies with warm coffee and pan dulce as we plant and discuss what the day will bring.

Silicon Valley might seem like a strange place for a gardening movement to flourish. Our plantings are hidden amid the palm tree-lined technology campuses of companies like Google, Cisco, and Apple, buried under the sounds of busy freeways, and packed neatly into an urban center where millions of people live. Yet the ways these gardens have found a home here can teach us a lot. By cultivating physical spaces to grow food in the margins of modernity—in the places ecologists call “ecotones,” where habitats, or worlds, collide and the unexpected emerges—we are also nourishing political spaces to live 21st-century life.

In 2012, while researching urban agriculture in Silicon Valley, I met the director of La Mesa Verde, an organization that teaches gardening and food literacy in the low-income communities of San Jose. She gave me a neighborhood tour, and then invited me to participate in a community action research project that would change my life.

For over a decade, I have been learning from, planting alongside, and writing about the home gardeners of La Mesa Verde. They live in parts—Alma, Alum Rock, Campbell, Willow Glen, Spartan Keyes, and East San Jose—where their options for fresh, healthy, and culturally relevant foods are limited. Most of the families in the program are Spanish-speaking, but it is a multi-ethnic, multilingual group of gardeners. With the help of the UC Master Gardener Program and the extensive farming and gardening knowledge of many of its members, gardeners who participate in La Mesa Verde are more than successful growers; they are advocates for community transformation. They share surpluses to challenge market logics. Their collective efforts promote their right to food and challenge their marginality by bringing together people who might otherwise not come together. They celebrate life by centering dignity in their efforts to transform their food system.

Countless nonprofits have popped up across the country to help alleviate the lack of access to quality food in many low-income communities. The belief is that state-sponsored intervention such as food pantries or the strategic placement of farmers markets are the best way to bring food into the community. There is an assumption that people living in these communities are too poor, busy, or ignorant to fix the issues they face related to food access themselves.

These communities are not naturally occurring empty “food deserts,” but rather they are products of food apartheid, or a food landscape that has been engineered in ways that benefit some and harm others. Ironically, even well-intentioned nonprofits seeking to “fix” low food access in underserved areas can end up prolonging it because their food charity interventions address the symptoms of hunger rather than the root causes of social inequality.

As I have gotten to know these Silicon Valley neighborhoods and the people who call them home, I’ve learned that community members address issues of food access in ways that do not fit the mold these initiatives promote. Food emerges from the neighborhoods’ lost, forgotten, and marginalized places. There are orange, lemon, lime, and pomegranate trees towering over houses; pinto and green beans climbing up chain-link fences; and yerba buena, epazote, and verdolagas propagating around foundations.

In fall 2013, I met a gardener in his early 80s originally from the outskirts of Mexico City. He and his wife lived in half of a two-bedroom duplex, with his daughter and her two kids next door. The best thing, he told me, was that while they had separate living areas, they shared a backyard, which was large enough for him to grow food and his grandkids to explore.

Gardening had played a central role in his life—as a kid he grew corn, beans, and squash in his family’s huerta (vegetable garden)—but what stood out the most from that conversation was how he explained the act of gardening as a reciprocal relationship between people and places. “Ser un jardínero,” he said, “es estar en comunicación. Comunicación con la comida, familia, comunidad, y tierra.” (“To be a gardener is to be in communication. Communication with food, family, community, land.”)

That afternoon, I watched him tend to his heirloom corn, summer squash, pinto beans, and jalapeno peppers. He moved through the garden as if in sync with its rhythms. It became evident that for him, gardening was less about food production, and more about cultivating relationships with his food through his labor—something most of us have lost touch with in recent years.

Labor is the source of value in these gardens, but not in the classical economic sense of how much things cost. Rather, value manifests in what gardens can restore. Most of us living under capitalism work for a living, and the more energy and time we invest in earning money, the less time we have for ourselves. Many of the gardeners I have interacted with hold part-time, low-wage jobs—sometimes two or three—that take them away from their families and communities. They are caretakers, food service workers, housekeepers, landscapers, and retail employees. But when they garden, their labor contributes to the social and cultural reproduction of their communities and cultures. Their simple acts of gardening challenge the capitalist ideal of individualism over all else because gardening does not separate people from community; it roots them in community. As a gardener told me one afternoon, “Tener un jardín es contra este sistema.” (“To have a garden is against this system.”)

Another La Mesa Verde gardener once told me, “When I go into my garden, I greet life.” He was doing more than referring to the ways growing food supports his physical health. By growing and sharing food, home gardens allow people to root themselves, regain control over their agricultural production, re-envision communal organization, and remind themselves—and us—how to be human again.

When we grow food, we work toward a reciprocal partnership with the human and non-human communities around us: We hope to support them as we rely on them to support us in turn. Gardening regenerates healthy soils, communities, peoples, and cultures. Silicon Valley’s home gardeners are growing food to feed the physical and spiritual needs of their communities—and they’re doing it at the epicenter of modernity and technology, in one of the most expensive and alienating places to live in America today.

The post The Radical Act of Gardening Silicon Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Will was a web designer living in Los Angeles and supporting his wife, an aspiring actress. He couldn’t shake the idea that he, too, should pursue his passion. So he started a side business on a new digital platform, AllDone (a pseudonym), which connected skilled service providers with customers. Will created a profile to offer guitar lessons, quickly landed a couple of students, and signed up for a subscription that allowed him to respond to potential clients for a flat fee of $20 per month.

Will’s business grew, and he quit web design to teach full-time. A few months later, he got a call from a customer support agent at AllDone. She had bad news: The platform would no longer offer subscriptions. Will would now have to pay a fee to respond to each potential client—adding up to an unsustainable hundreds of dollars a month. Will panicked and pleaded with the customer service agent to let him keep his subscription. “You guys have shattered my dreams!” he cried, when she told him the decision came from management, and there was nothing she could do.

I learned about Will’s story when I was conducting sociological research inside AllDone, one of many Silicon Valley startups aiming to profit from “disrupting” existing industries and building a new, digitally backed gig economy. Like so many workers who rely on apps to make a living, Will had invested in his business under one set of rules only for them to be suddenly and unilaterally altered. Workers criticized—and organized against—platforms like Uber and Instacart in their early years, when they repeatedly experimented with employment policies and wages in similar fashion.

There has been no shortage of debate about the role of arrogant CEOs and harmful algorithms in defining technological innovation. But we typically hear less about the systemic forces that generate those problems. A key culprit is venture capital (VC), which provides early funding for entrepreneurs who want to transform neat ideas into billion-dollar companies. For a business to have any chance of “changing the world” with its technology, it must mold itself to meet the demands of these funders. VCs have become folk heroes in Silicon Valley, widely revered for delivering innovation. Often, they help create products that succeed in short-term disruption—with questionable or even dangerous long-term effects.

VC compels startups to engage in relentless experimentation to generate exponential growth, ratcheting up their expectations at every stage of a firm’s development. The goal is to increase a startup’s valuation so the investor can sell their stake for far more than they originally paid for it. When a startup succeeds, investors’ profits can be stunning. Sequoia Capital’s initial outlay of $585,000 to Airbnb was worth $4 billion after the company went public.

Many celebrate venture capital’s role in creating a marketplace that nurtures the most innovative ideas. But the ideas that are “best” for capital markets—and for enriching the most affluent among us—aren’t always those that are best for societies. When well-connected entrepreneurs, VCs, and the wealthy institutions and individuals whose money they invest achieve massive payouts, other stakeholders are frequently left behind. For example, following Uber’s IPO in 2019, a combined $27.1 billion—about 40% of the company’s valuation—was captured by just three investment funds and the company’s two co-founders. Longtime Uber drivers, on the other hand, received bonuses that averaged $273 per person, or the equivalent of just a few cents per ride.

Tech startups that succeed are not necessarily those that figure out how to create a stable business model that yields consistent profits. Instead, the winners are often the companies that have attracted more capital than their competitors by pursuing reckless growth. Consumers and stakeholders end up missing out on some of the best, most sustainable, and perhaps even the most innovative products and services—tethered instead to the ones able to meet investors’ ever-escalating benchmarks.

The VC business model is powerful. But it is also relatively new, fueled by policies enacted in the late 1970s that incentivized startup investors, including big cuts to the capital gains tax rate and a Department of Labor ruling that allowed pension fund managers to invest in riskier assets. Since then, a small cadre of funders, over a third of whom are based in the Bay Area, have seized an outsized voice in determining the distribution of the economic risks and rewards associated with innovation.

As a new wave of generative AI startups takes center stage in Silicon Valley, venture capital is once again setting the agenda, unleashing experimental technologies that expose us all to substantial risk. How can we come together to minimize the harms generated by new technologies, while sharing their benefits—and fueling sustainable innovation—more broadly?

It’s time to look for better ways to invest in our future—ways that reward new ideas not just for their ability to inflate a startup’s valuation, but also for the benefits they bring to society as a whole. A brief survey of the tech landscape reveals numerous examples of potential alternatives to the VC model. Craigslist is privately owned and has largely resisted outside investment. Instead of constantly experimenting with its platform to increase engagement, serve advertisements, or harvest user data, the company is free to balance the profit motive with a public-service ethos.

Nonprofit video-captioning and translation platform Amara pays higher wages than similar for-profit labor platforms. Up & Go, a platform that allows customers in New York City to order house-cleaning services, is co-operatively owned and operated by the workers themselves. Ninety-five percent of the revenue generated through the platform is paid out to workers, resulting in wages about $5 per hour above the local average.

What these models have in common is the ability to reduce entrepreneurs’ dependence on external funds, and thus external control. Other measures can loosen venture capital’s grip on our innovation ecosystem, too: federal grant and loan programs that require founders to cap prices or share profits, publicly owned investment vehicles, and eliminating tax dodges.

By promoting and investing in businesses with alternative ownership structures, consumers, workers, activists, and governments can challenge venture capital’s winner-take-all model, creating ecosystems of smaller, more localized and specialized platforms that are more responsive to the people who use them and to the communities in which they are embedded. Workers like Will could build more stable livelihoods doing what they love; consumers could have more choices, and their money could directly support their neighbors and local communities instead of serving investors’ interests. Technological breakthroughs could really make life better, which is what innovation should be about. Curbing VCs’ influence isn’t about stifling innovation—it’s about making room for the rest of us to have a say in our technological future.

The post Are Venture Capitalists Silicon Valley’s Biggest Villains? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in university admissions early this summer thanks in large part to the charge that Harvard’s practice of race-conscious admissions discriminates against Asian Americans. Whether or not the decision changes the college application process for Asian Americans, it certainly obscures the more insidious and widespread forms of bias that many Asian Americans face. It also opened up pathways to dismantling race-conscious policies elsewhere—particularly in the workplace, where assumptions about what makes a good leader are couched in ideas of race.

Asian Americans are not underrepresented in university classrooms, including at Harvard. They account for 7.2% of the U.S. population, yet 29.9% of Harvard’s incoming class. Where they are underrepresented is in the boardroom and the C-suite. Among the Fortune 500, only 2.4% of CEOs are Asian, two-thirds of whom are South Asian (with roots in the Indian subcontinent, and mainly from India). Many Asian Americans—and especially East Asians (with origins in China, Korea, and Japan)—find themselves hitting a “bamboo ceiling” akin to the glass ceiling that women face. It’s here, in the workplace, where affirmative action has an important role to play in the lives and livelihoods of Asian Americans—one that the Court has put in jeopardy.

Asian Americans lag behind all racial, ethnic, and gender groups in promotion to managerial and executive ranks in spite of their education, work experience, and job performance. Even in fields in which Asians are overrepresented, such as technology, medicine, the natural sciences, engineering, and law, they are rare in leadership.

In top technology firms in Silicon Valley, white men and women are twice as likely as Asian men and women to advance into the executive ranks. Between 1997 and 2008, Asian Americans made up 20% of medical school faculty—yet there were no Asian American deans. And while Black and Latino physicians are underrepresented in the field, Asian Americans are the only racial group that accounts for a much smaller share of medical school department chairs than their percentage of the faculty in medical schools.

A similar pattern emerges in law: Asians comprise 10% of graduates of top-30 law schools, but only 6.5% of all federal judicial law clerks. And while Asians are the largest non-white group in major law firms, they have the highest attrition rates and the lowest ratio of associates to partners of all groups at four-to-one, compared to two-to-one for Blacks and Latinos, and parity for whites. Even in academia, where Asian Americans are overrepresented as students in top universities, they are nearly absent in leadership ranks, comprising only 1.5% of college presidents.

So what forms the branches of the bamboo ceiling?

Some argue that racial and gender stereotypes—technically strong but socially weak, mathematically and scientifically inclined rather than verbally gifted—hinder Asians’ advancement in the workplace. Employers may recognize Asian Americans for their hard work, dedication, and effort without seeing them as innately brilliant, visionary, or skilled to lead.

Asian American women are doubly disadvantaged in this regard: They are the least likely group to be promoted to leadership positions, and to be perceived as fit for leadership roles regardless of their education, experience, and behavior.

Where do these stereotypes come from, and what can be done to combat them? A new strand of research points to differences in culture, and, more specifically, differences in verbal assertiveness between East Asian and white Americans. Western corporate culture prizes individual assertiveness and achievement, whereas East Asian culture promotes harmony and the stability of interpersonal relationships.

To buttress this point, researchers find that South Asians are more verbally assertive than East Asians, and, despite still not being as represented as white men in top positions, South Asian men are now even more likely than white men to attain leadership positions—pointing to a unique pattern of “South Asian exceptionalism.” A similar pattern emerges in law and business schools, where South Asians outperform East Asians in leadership, strategy, and marketing—courses in which verbal assertiveness is prized and class participation accounts for a larger percentage of the final grade. The branches of the bamboo ceiling begin to grow in the classroom.

South Asian exceptionalism may also be explained by Americans’ understanding of who counts as Asian. In the U.S., “Asian” is often shorthand for East Asian, and most Americans—including most Asian Americans—exclude South Asians from the fold. If the stereotypical perception of Asian men (i.e., East Asian men) is that they are diffident, passive, and distant, South Asian men (who are not perceived as Asian) may not be hampered by a social identity that presumes these qualities. The absence of the stereotype may change both their behavior and the way others interpret that behavior.

But a larger question underlying this debate is why we assume that leaders must be bold, brash, and assertive to be effective. Some of the country’s top CEOs have been described as listeners first, and team players who are empathetic, thoughtful, steady, and measured. Columbia University’s new president, Minouche Shafik, is the first woman to lead the university in its 269-year history. When asked about her leadership style, she quoted the 6th-century B.C. Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu: “A leader is best when people barely know they exist … When the leader’s work is done, the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’”

Thinking more expansively about the qualities that make a good leader while recognizing that different leadership models may be just as effective (if not more so) than traditional Western ones will broaden leadership opportunities for not only East Asians, but also women, and for many of us who do not fit the prototype of what an American leader looks or acts like. It would also benefit the members of such leaders’ organizations, who may work more effectively with more diverse managers and styles. Leadership comes in many forms, and recognizing and rewarding this will better prepare us to lead and serve the diverse country that we are.

It is the recognition of race, ethnicity, and gender that enables us to identify biases in our understanding of who makes a suitable CEO, president, chair, dean, or manager. Affirmative action policies in the workplace give us the tools to address these biases and remove the barriers they create. Now, even these policies are coming under attack, led by no less than the same conservative advocate who engineered the lawsuit against Harvard.

The fight to dismantle affirmative action in university admissions was never about protecting Asian Americans, yet profiling them abetted the demise of the policy. It also veiled the more rampant forms of bias that Asian Americans face that impede their career mobility. Affirmative action in the workplace paved the way for white women to shatter and break through the glass ceiling. It can help non-white professionals—including Asian Americans—do the same.

The post Where Asian Americans Need Affirmative Action appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Don’t bank on California, especially when banks are involved.

Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse is widely discussed as a harbinger of the future, a sign of problems and disruptions in the technology businesses that were its best customers. But this bank failure, the second largest in U.S. history, actually fits a very old pattern—of California and its industries putting the economies of the nation and the world at risk.

Our state’s history of precipitating economic crisis is singular, and rooted in the same California characteristic that so often makes us successful. We aren’t content to make slow, patient investments. We want to get rich as fast as possible.

Our need for speed originates in the Gold Rush that made us a state and occasioned the rapid development of banks—and often, their even faster failures.

Banks were formed in defiance of the 1849 state constitution, which barred banking. Banks also ignored the first state legislature which—in a preview of the legislative incoherence that prevails to this day—prohibited debt while also setting interest rates

The banks proliferated—and failed in damaging ways.  The history of San Francisco of the 1850s is one of financial panics and depressions, followed by attempts to climb out of them. (One San Francisco banker, the future Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, helped end an 1855 panic by keeping his institution open during a bank run.) Giant banks sprung from nowhere, and disappeared quickly. The Bank of California, the first commercial bank in the West, was founded in 1864 and soon became the second-richest bank in the country. It failed in 1875, contributing to a panic and the death of its founder. (It later reopened.)

Catastrophe only spawned new banks. After San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, banker A.P. Giannini set up a makeshift outpost in North Beach with gold and silver rescued from the ruins of an earlier venture. Eventually, he would establish Bank of America, which pioneered branch banking and, in the 1980s, was briefly the world’s largest. (After a 1998 merger with NationsBank, Bank of America moved its headquarters to North Carolina.)

Bank of America endured, but spectacular failures mark the recent story of California banking. Over the past two generations, California has regularly authored crisis and global recession.

The savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s was in part the product of bank deregulation pushed by a California president, Ronald Reagan, and furthered by California lawmakers. In the late 1970s, as inflation rose, the federal government raised interest rates, and many savings and loan associations (also known as thrifts) struggled to remain solvent. California’s lax regulatory response allowed the state’s thrifts to try to escape their woes by making speculative real estate investments, which only compounded their problems.

This deregulation was most shamelessly exploited by the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, based in Irvine, and its head, Charles Keating, who used depositors’ money to make high-risk investments. More than 20,000 people lost their life savings. Keating, seeking to evade federal regulators and keep control of his thrift, compromised state banking regulators and five U.S. senators, the so-called Keating Five, including California’s own Alan Cranston. Keating was eventually convicted of fraud, but freed on appeal.

Hundreds of savings and loans closed for good. The federal government seized some thrifts and bailed out others, at an estimated cost to taxpayers of more than $100 billion.

The 21st century has seen two California-driven busts. The first came in 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst. Venture capitalists and investment banks had been funding tech start-ups, few of them profitable or with real business plans, in great numbers in the late 1990s. The collapse of many of those startups, and of tech stock prices, helped spark a national recession.

But that recession proved minor compared to the Great Recession that arrived in 2008. That global economic meltdown is often blamed on Wall Street banks. But it, too, was invented in California.

Then, as now, the Golden State had the biggest and most expensive housing market in the country. Our middle class, in its aspirational desperation to buy houses and keep up an unaffordable standard of living, led the way to ever-growing consumer and mortgage debt. Our banks and mortgage companies—including Calabasas-based Countrywide Financial, once the nation’s largest mortgage lender—led the way in making bad subprime loans that left borrowers owing more than their homes were worth. Countrywide and its friends on Wall Street also recklessly securitized those loans; they were then traded on markets, with many investors not understanding the risks.

When the housing market crashed and foreclosures proliferated, the carnage included stock market collapse, double-digit unemployment, record bankruptcies for people and local governments, giant state budget deficits, and mass layoffs among public workers and in many industries. In California, family income declined, the middle class shrunk, and income inequality surged to the highest level in at least 30 years, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Californians are proud of the size of their state’s economy, the world’s fifth largest. But when an economy of that scale crashes, it extends beyond borders, contributing to economic malaise from Madrid to Manila.

That’s why world markets declined sharply when news broke of depositors fleeing Silicon Valley Bank. California’s leading tech companies and their workers did their banking at these institutions, so many have assumed the contagion will spread, as it did before. It remains to be seen whether aggressive action by the U.S. government to seize Silicon Valley Bank, and guarantee even uninsured funds, will contain the damage.

These days, major global institutions track and offer reports on “systemic risks” or “mega-risks” to the future of the world and its economies. The World Economic Forum has a report on risks that covers natural disasters, inequality and its impacts, climate change, democratic decline, aging infrastructure, technological disruption, war, terrorism, and infectious diseases.

Maybe they should add California, with its talent for spectacular financial failure, to the list.

The post Who Will Protect the Global Economy From California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The question feels less hypothetical after the State of the Union address, when President Biden blasted “Big Tech” and promised new restrictions on the lifeblood of Silicon Valley businesses—their ability to collect and use our data. Republicans in Congress, while rudely heckling the president in other parts of his speech, stood and applauded these threats, which makes it even more likely that Californians soon will be in a conundrum.

Because Silicon Valley is the place that exposes our state’s hypocrisy—California likes to see itself as both a public-spirited, progressive force for the future and a seat of global power and wealth.

For the most part, with the exception of some privacy regulations, California has tolerated Silicon Valley’s ruthless and reckless behavior, because we depend so heavily on it for our wealth.

We Californians will be tempted to sit on both sides of the coming war. Because Silicon Valley divides us against ourselves.

How can we not side with Silicon Valley when the feds come for its firms? The tech business fuels our economy, inspires innovation, and attracts smart people from around the world to come here. It offers compensation and stock options that make workers rich. We wouldn’t be the fourth-largest economy on Earth without it.

But how can we side with Silicon Valley in good conscience? Tech firms proudly disrupt established industries that our communities depend on. They force automation that costs jobs and lay off workers (over 100,000 so far this year) at the first sign of a slowdown. And they suck in billions in capital investment that might be more profitably devoted to public infrastructure or less speculative industries.

Of course, when we lose our jobs or our companies go under, we need support from the government. So how can we not back Silicon Valley, whose wealthy employees and investors pay the big tax bills that support our generous tax credits and programs for the poor? How bad would our schools be without all the money flowing to the state treasury from tech? Big surges in capital gains taxes patch the holes in our broken school funding system. Don’t we need to protect Silicon Valley to protect our children?

I’m sorry, but don’t we need to protect our children from Silicon Valley? Social media companies undermine kids’ mental health. Other tech firms create games and amusements that addict and isolate our children. Why shouldn’t the Biden administration make war on firms that gather up data on our kids and use it to sell them things?

C’mon, protecting children is the job of their parents. And Silicon Valley protects the working families of the Bay Area, a rich place with high wages and generous benefits. Look at the pandemic: When tech firms shut their doors, working families in restaurants and service sectors suffered.

But isn’t that the problem—that California, and the Bay Area, are already too dependent on what trickles down from Silicon Valley—at least, the little bit that trickles down, compared to what the tech lords hoard? One survey found that 10 percent of households in the Bay Area held two-thirds of the investable assets. And in the heart of the valley—Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties—did you know that eight households hold more wealth than the bottom half of households combined?

Inequality is a problem, sure. But don’t we need to fight for Silicon Valley because California is fighting for its democracy? Our tech firms provide the tools and platforms (and the campaign donations) on which our democracy runs, right? Where do we express ourselves freely except on tech platforms?

 But how can you say that when Meta, Twitter, and other tech companies routinely undermine democracy here and around the world? Social media allowed Russia and foreign actors to interfere in our elections. Overseas, tech companies collaborate with tyrannical governments in ways that put democratic advocates and activists at risk. Why should Californians fight for Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and other wealthy handmaidens of authoritarians?

Because we would be fighting for ourselves. California simply can’t allow the federal government to impose laws and regulations on any Californian—even those working in tech. We know that when Washington goes to war on us, our freedom suffers. The federal government has recently sought to strip us of the power to protect ourselves against environmental pollution, climate change, and gun violence. The U.S. Supreme Court eliminated our constitutional reproductive rights. How can we ever trust the feds?

Fair point, but Silicon Valley doesn’t respect our rights either. Tech firms steal our data, and there’s nothing we can do about it. They allow others to use their platforms to spread lies that destroy our lives—and hide behind liability shields. Silicon Valley thinks it can get away with anything because we need it.

How can we be on Silicon Valley’s side?

And how can we not be?

The post Should California Fight for or Against Silicon Valley? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Are tech bros the new Victorians? I’m sure they wouldn’t think so. In fact, I’m sure they’d be deeply insulted by the notion. The Victorians of our imagination are staid fuddy-duddies—and the captains of Silicon Valley are the cutting edge of the future.

But the Victorians, too, thought of themselves as masters of invention, just as tech bros do now. As we contemplate the role of new technology, and the men who dominate it, in everything from financial markets to climate change, the Victorians offer a cautionary tale and a glimpse of how we got to the place we’re in. By creating and perpetuating the myth that futures are built on the backs of heroic, self-made individuals, Victorians shaped today’s misbegotten sense that it’s lone genius mavericks—and not collaborative efforts—that shape our tomorrows.

Victorian innovators, like their contemporary counterparts, saw themselves surfing a wave of invention into a new technological century. Invention after invention transformed the Victorian world—steam locomotion, the electromagnetic telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, animated photographs, and of course, electricity: The list could go on.

So, who was responsible for this Victorian future? Who made it, and owned it?

In fact, progress was usually collaborative. The effort to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, linking two continents in practically instantaneous communication, for example, required the collective labor of hundreds. But Victorian popular culture celebrated men of science and inventors as the future’s authors: Individuals who had the discipline, determination, and sheer grit needed to remake the world in their own image.

Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help, a popular inspirational book published in 1859, treated readers to glowing biographies of men like these, including Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning frame, and steam entrepreneur James Watt. Smiles urged readers to regard the biographies of determined men as gospel—a truly shocking thing to say at the time.

“Watt was one of the most industrious of men,” wrote Smiles, “and the story of his life proves, what all experience confirms, that it is not the man of the greatest natural vigour and capacity who achieves the highest results, but he who employs his power with the greatest industry and the most carefully disciplined skill.” Inventors were special men, the thinking went (and it goes without saying that, just like tech bros, they were men).

The American icon of industrious, self-made inventor-entrepreneurship was Thomas Alva Edison, who famously said that successful invention was 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration and often played on his image as the self-made, all-American, plain-speaking and plain-working man of action. No fancy theory for him. The future was going to be the property of the plain man made good. When, in 1898, pulp fiction author Garrett P. Serviss wrote a quasi-sequel to H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, it was a fictionalized Edison, captain of industry, who led the avenging fleet of electrically powered spaceships to Mars.

The flamboyant inventor and self-promoter Nikola Tesla—who competed with Edison and carefully cultivated his own image as a reclusive iconoclast and rule-breaker—provided a different, but related, model for Victorian invention. Tomorrow belonged to people like him (well, actually, only him, in Tesla’s opinion). “Nikola Tesla says Men of the Future may become as Gods,” screamed a New York Herald headline in 1900. The “great magician of electricity” pronounced that “war would be abolished,” thanks to his inventions, and that he would “work a revolution of the politics of the whole world.”

Tesla worked hard to hone his outsider-hero image, and kept on working at it until his death in 1943. A series of biographies polishing his reputation began rolling out soon after, with John Joseph O’Neill’s Prodigal Genius of 1944, and in recent years he’s been namechecked by everything from Doctor Who and The Big Bang Theory to the Disney cartoon Gravity Falls. That image of the inventor as iconoclast, operating outside the rules, is clearly a very seductive one.

There’s little question which of the conflicting Victorian images of invention Silicon Valley’s tech bros prefer; that car wasn’t called Tesla by accident. But channeling the iconoclast makes aspiring tech entrepreneurs very Victorian indeed. Despite the hype, Tesla really was a man of his own time.

His is the Victorian vision that works for now. You succeed through provoking difference, not by excelling at what’s here already. It’s the cult of individual iconoclasm taken to its extreme. Tesla promised that men might become as gods, but only if they bought into his vision of the future. It’s that seductive vision that makes the values of disruption seem so attractive now, too. Disruption seems to offer a road to power—and that’s apparently true for many politicians, as well as tech entrepreneurs.

But in reality, disruption was a Victorian fantasy, rather than actuality. Tesla died penniless, his innovations abandoned for other technologies, and it had nothing to do with the excuses he promoted. Edison didn’t steal his ideas, and unscrupulous capitalists weren’t terrified by his inventions. Tesla died penniless because he made the mistake of believing his own publicity. He really did think he could single-handedly forge the future through disruption. But his example suggests the opposite.

In the end, the Victorians show us that futures are best made collectively—when we build them to address what communities genuinely need now, instead of offering castles in the sky.

The post The Victorian Vision of Disruption Is a Tech Bro Fantasy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What made the smartphone—and the rest of our unfolding digital transformation—possible? Many point to a prediction in April 1965, published in a then-little-read article toward the back end of the trade paper Electronics. The piece, written by a young chemist named Gordon Moore, outlined in technical terms how quickly the technology behind computer chips might develop and, by implication, make its way into our lives. It’s been 55 years since the article’s publication, and it’s worth revisiting its original prediction—now known as Moore’s Law.

If you ask people today what Moore’s Law is, they’ll often say it predicts that every 18 months, engineers will be able to come up with ways to double the number of transistors they can squeeze onto a tiny computer chip, thus doubling its processing power. It’s a curious aspect of the law that this is not what Moore actually said, but he did predict consistent improvement in processing technology. Moreover, the world he anticipated did take shape, with his own work as founder of the chipmaker Intel creating much of the momentum necessary to turn his “law” into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Initially, Moore had few notions of changing the world. Early in life, he discovered a love for chemistry—and though he was kept back at school for his inarticulate style, he excelled at practical activities, making bombs and rockets in a home-based laboratory. He went on to study chemistry at UC Berkeley under two Nobel laureates, and earned a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1954.

Moore’s career trajectory coincided with the rise of the transistor, a device made of semiconductor material that can regulate electrical current flows and act as a switch or gate for electronic signals. As far back as the 1920s, physicists had proposed making transistors as a way to improve on the unreliable, power-hungry vacuum tubes that helped amplify signals on telephone lines, and that would be used in the thousands in computers such as ENIAC and Colossus. In 1939, William Shockley, a young Bell Labs researcher, revived the idea of the transistor and tried to fabricate a device; despite several failures, he continued on and in 1947 he and two colleagues succeeded in making the world’s first working transistor (for which they shared a Nobel Prize in Physics). In 1953, British scientists used transistors to build a computer, and Fortune declared it “The Year of the Transistor.”

In 1955, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California, to be near his mother. He opened a semiconductor laboratory and picked a handful of young scientists to join him, including Moore and his Intel co-founder, Bob Noyce. The launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and the escalation of the Cold War created a boom within a boom: Moore and seven colleagues, including Noyce, broke away from Shockley in a group quickly branded “The Traitorous Eight,” forming the seminal start-up Fairchild Semiconductor. They planned to make silicon transistors, which promised greater robustness, miniaturization and lower power usage, so essential for computers guiding missiles and satellites.

“Our curiosity was similar, but not our approach. Noyce liked things that flew. I liked things that blew up,” said Gordon Moore (left) with Robert Noyce.
Courtesy of Intel Free Press.

Developing the core manufacturing technology was a seat-of-the-pants adventure in which Moore played a central role. In March 1958, Fairchild received an order from IBM for 100 mesa transistors priced at $150 each. Mesas, made on 1-inch silicon wafers, were so named because their profiles resembled the flat-topped mesa formations of the American Southwest. Moore’s responsibility was figuring out how to fabricate them reliably, which involved a complex chemical ballet and a considerable amount of thrift and improvisation. Unable to buy appropriate furnaces, Moore relied on glass-blowing skills to create gas-handling systems, assembled on cobbled-together aqua blue kitchen cabinets and Formica countertops. (Real lab furniture was “as expensive as heck,” he remarked.) Delivery solutions were similarly no-frills: Fairchild sent mesa transistors to IBM in a Brillo box from a local grocery store.

The mesa transistor was successful, but the company’s new planar transistor (named for its flat topography) was a game-changer, bringing more stability and better performance. Another key development was the step to connect transistors by making all components of a complete circuit within a single piece of silicon, paving the way for the first commercial integrated circuits, or microchips. Everyone wanted miniaturized circuitry—the obstacle to greater computing power was its need for more components and interconnections, which increased the possibilities for failure. Noyce grasped a solution: why not leave transistors together in a wafer and interconnect them there, then detach the set as a single unit? Such “microchips” could be smaller, faster and cheaper than transistors manufactured individually and connected to each other afterward. As early as 1959, Moore proposed that “sets of these components will be able to replace 90 percent of all circuitry” in digital computers.

Six years later, in 1965, when he wrote his now-famous article in Electronics—“Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits”—personal computers were still a decade away. Moore, who had seen the number of elements on a chip go from one, to eight, to 60, hinted at how integrated functions would “broaden [electronics’] scope beyond [his] imagination” and at the “major impact” the changes would bring, but saw his analysis as distilling merely a trend in technology that would make everything cheaper. Nevertheless, his analysis was rigorous. Doubling the number of components on an integrated circuit each year would steadily increase performance and decrease cost, which would—as Moore put it 10 years later—“extend the utility of digital electronics more broadly in society.”

As chemical printing continued to evolve, the economics of microchips would continue to improve, and these more complex chips would provide the cheapest electronics. Thus, an electronics-based revolution could depend on existing silicon technology, rather than some new invention. By 1970, Moore asserted, the transistor that could be made most cheaply would be on a microchip 30 times more complex than one of 1965. 

In 1968, Moore left Fairchild and joined Noyce to found Intel, with the aim of “putting cleverness back into processing silicon.” In 1975, he reviewed his original extrapolation. Chips introduced until that point had followed the trend he predicted, but engineers were reaching the limits for circuit and device cleverness. Moore now proposed a doubling about every two years.

The analysis in Electronics was becoming known as Moore’s Law. Having correctly observed the potential for exponential growth, Moore overcame his personal dislike of the spotlight by travelling widely to talk about his idea, taking every opportunity to persuade others. After all, the fulfilment of Moore’s Law would be as much social as technical, relying on widespread acceptance: industry needed to invest to develop the technology, manufacturers needed to put microchips into their products, consumers needed to buy and use electronic devices and functions, and researchers and engineers needed to invent advances to extend Moore’s Law.

In the 1970s, seeing progress continue, Moore grew bolder, telling audiences that silicon electronics would constitute “a major revolution in the history of mankind, as important as the Industrial Revolution.” He was so confident in his vision that he told a journalist that students who’d made headlines getting kicked off campuses (“kids with the long hair and beards”) were not the ones to watch: instead, he pronounced, “we are really the revolutionaries in the world today.” In front of a crowd, he pointed out that if the auto industry made progress at the same rate as silicon microelectronics, it would be more expensive to park your car downtown for the night than to buy a new Rolls Royce. “And,” he recalled years later, “one of the members of the audience pointed out, yeah, but it’d only be 2-inches long and a half-inch high; it wouldn’t be much good for your commute.”

The rest is history. “For more than three decades,” the New York Times pointed out in 2003, Moore’s Law “has accurately predicted the accelerating power and plummeting cost of computing. Because of the exponential nature of Moore’s prediction, each change has arrived faster and more furiously.” Its curve, shallow at first (though spawning the birth of the microprocessor, digital calculator, personal computer and internet along the way) has, since 2005, gone almost straight up in “hockey stick” style.

Despite the changes we’ve all witnessed, Moore’s Law is still widely misunderstood, even in tech circles. “[It’s] only 11 words long … but most people manage to mangle it,” said one report. Moore’s 1965 article is a sophisticated piece of analysis but many prefer to interpret it more vaguely: “The definition of ‘Moore’s Law’ has come to refer to almost anything related to the semiconductor industry that when plotted on semi-log paper approximates a straight line,” noted its originator, dryly.

Up to April 2002, Intel’s website noted that “Moore predicted that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every 18 months,” even though Moore had pointed out that he “never said 18 months.”

Why did 18 months stick? Perhaps because a projection by an Intel colleague in 1975 led to a conflation of transistor count and doubling of performance; perhaps because this timescale appeared in an influential technology column in 1992, as the modern configuration of Silicon Valley was forming—perhaps because that speed felt more accurate to the semiconductor industry.

During the technology bust of the early 2000s, people began to speculate about the death of Moore’s Law. Others suggested it would peter out because people would drop their computer fixations to spend less time at work and more with their families, or because Silicon Valley’s obsession with it was “unhealthy” for business strategy. In 2007, the year the smartphone launched, Moore pointed out that “we make more transistors per year than the number of printed characters in all the newspapers, magazines, books, photocopies, and computer printouts.” But he recognized exponential growth could not continue forever; he knew the physical and financial constraints on shrinking the size of chip components.

When people in industry circles describe Moore’s Law as a “dictate—the law by which the industry lives or dies,” it is more evidence of the law’s power within Silicon Valley culture rather than its actual predictive accuracy. As the essayist Ilkka Tuomi observed in “The Lives and Death of Moore’s Law,” Moore’s Law became “an increasingly misleading predictor of future developments” that people understood to be something more like a “rule-of-thumb” than a “deterministic natural law.” In fact, Tuomi speculated, the very slipperiness of Moore’s Law might have accounted for its popularity. To an extent, tech people could pick and choose how they interpreted the dictum to suit their business needs.

Today, Moore’s Law continues to thrive in the smartphone space, having put some 8.5 billion transistors into a single phone that can fit in our pockets. The law may now be, in the words of one commentator, “more a challenge to the industry than an axiom for how chipmaking works,” but for what began as a 10-year forecast, it has had an astonishing run. “Once you’ve made a successful prediction, avoid making another one,” Moore quipped in 2015.

Even as technology continues to pervade our lives—with the advent of more specialized chips and materials, better software, cloud computing, and the promise of quantum computing—his law remains the benchmark and overarching narrative, both forecasting and describing our digital evolution.

The post Did Moore’s Law Really Inspire the Computer Age? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For the past two decades, Silicon Valley has been the headquarters for a national nonprofit, the Positive Coaching Alliance, that is changing how youth sports are coached. Based in Mountain View, Positive Coaching Alliance has synthesized research—much of it with Stanford roots—in everything from business leadership and marriage counseling to physiology and organizational psychology into a uniquely Californian philosophy of “relentless positivity.”

As a longtime coach in Little League, one of hundreds of youth sports organizations that partner with the Positive Coaching Alliance, I’ve incorporated much wisdom from the organization’s workshops. I’ve found myself wondering how its lessons might be applied to human enterprises that might be more important than your kid’s baseball team.

At the center of Positive Coaching Alliance is founder Jim Thompson, a man distinguished not only by his accomplishments, but also by his unusual embrace of the benefits of error. Thompson led Stanford’s program for non-profit business management, and is also a founding board member of Recovery Café San Jose, which serves homeless individuals. Thompson advises youth coaches to encourage their players to make mistakes, so that they can learn more from sports experiences.

In his books, Thompson describes the Positive Coaching Alliance as the product of lessons he learned from a lifetime of mistakes. Raised in North Dakota, as a young man he took a job at a Minnesota school for emotionally disturbed children whose behaviors could not be contained in mainstream classrooms. While Thompson first tried to control their negative behavior, he learned that the kids did better when he ignored it, and instead relentlessly reinforced positive behavior. Eventually, the positive crowded out the negative.

He later switched from teaching to business, ending up at Stanford’s business school. When he coached his own son in youth basketball around Palo Alto, he was stunned at how negative the atmosphere was. He succeeded with more positive methods, and—this being Silicon Valley—in 1998, he started the nonprofit Positive Coaching Alliance to develop and spread his vision further.

Thompson wanted Positive Coaching’s methods to be grounded in research, and he was drawn to the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, best known for identifying the concept of the “growth mindset.” Dweck found that students who understood that their effort could make them stronger were more resilient after setbacks—and then went on to achieve more. That finding is one reason why Positive Coaching emphasizes praising players for effort, rather than talent.

Thompson fused Dweck’s insights with research from other Stanford faculty members. Psychologist Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy and self-control influences Positive Coaching’s guidance on giving players a strong voice in team decisions. The work of William Damon, of Stanford’s Center on Adolescence, is reflected in Positive Coaching’s emphasis on helping kids find a larger purpose through sports. Beyond Palo Alto, Positive Coaching has also drawn on the work of Harvard Medical School bullying researcher William Pollack, and of Harvard education professor Howard Gardner, whose theory of multiple intelligences shapes the advice that different kids should be coached in different ways.

If the spirit of Positive Coaching can be distilled into one phrase, it’s that failure should be met with positivity. “We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure,” wrote the late John Gardner, a former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare who supported Positive Coaching (and also founded Common Cause). “It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life.” 

Thompson has a gift for distilling complex ideas into rules for coaches—the most useful of which is the 5-to-1 ratio. I follow it in my own coaching: You should make five positive comments for every constructive criticism you offer. The 5-to-1 ratio is rooted in longitudinal studies of couples by UC Berkeley’s Robert Levenson and the University of Washington’s John Gottman, who found that a similar mix of positive and negative interactions was associated with the most stable marriages.

The Positive Coaching method is not as touchy-feely as it may sound. Thompson is fine with playing to win, and he doesn’t object to coaches’ yelling—as long as it’s done with a positive tone, and as part of a positive relationship with players. He quotes the fiery former USC football coach John Robinson: “I never criticize a player until I’m convinced he knows that I believe in him.”

Positive Coaching took off over the past decade, as pro sports leagues and coaches—among them Phil Jackson, Steve Kerr, and Bruce Bochy—embraced it. The organization also created local chapters so that it isn’t run entirely from the Bay Area. But it remains very Californian, in its sunny devotion to new ideas, its self-help-style branding (Positive Coaching has trademarked the phrases “Double-Goal Coach” and “Triple-Impact Competitor”), and its encouragement of risk-taking.

As a coach, I like how the 5-to-1 forces me to be more careful in delivering praise and criticism. And I’ve learned to be more positive after mistakes in fielding, hitting, and pitching.

But, when I spoke to Thompson recently, I confessed a failing: I still criticize kids loudly when they jog around the bases, instead of running as hard as they can. I find that lack of effort infuriating.

In response, Thompson suggested I experiment with “positive charting.” Don’t respond when someone loafs on the bases; instead keep a chart who runs hard and who doesn’t and then offer praise or other rewards to those who run hard. Having been positively coached by Thompson, I will try his idea when the Little League season starts up this March.

Thompson himself is still growing, in ways that should remind us that youth sports are about more than games. He recently gave up leadership of Positive Coaching and was succeeded by the head of US Youth Soccer. He wants to devote more time to writing about climate change and how children might be better prepared for it.

“The world that these kids are going to grow up into is going to be much harsher than the world we grew up in,” he says. “We need to use sports to develop people of character who can be leaders in that world.”

The post Why ‘Relentless Positivity’ Now Dominates America’s Youth Sports appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That—more than any other factor—is why Charlie Manson’s death produced so many remembrances in California media. Manson was a murderer, but he also represented the time, a half-century ago, when people had enough in common to share certain experiences—like fear of the crazed killers of the Manson Family.

Today, it’s difficult to think of a villain we all have in common. Politically, we’re too polarized to agree on who is the bad guy. Academically, we’ve discredited the notion of individual evil in favor of blaming wrongdoing on systems. And culturally, we’re so large and diverse that we don’t share the same knowledge or references—never mind the same enemies.

It’s too bad that we don’t share a sense of the too bad. “The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture,” Alfred Hitchcock famously said, and the virtues of villainy—of the plausible kind, not the cartoonish sort that prevails in today’s superhero-addled blockbusters—go well beyond the box office.

Villains may be evildoers, but they can also be galvanizing, energizing societies to protect the innocent, defend democracy, or address wrongdoing. And villains allow us to recognize the evil within ourselves. “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us,” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. “When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”

So our current shortage of common villains, while perhaps not as important as California’s lack of housing, or open spots at the University of California, deserves some attention.

Especially now, with villainy—like so much else—in a moment of transition. Traditional sources of villainy aren’t producing the distinctive characters they once did. Mass murder, for example, is now so routine that we’ve become desensitized to it. Is it just me, or do you find it hard to keep all the mass shootings and truck rampages straight?

An oversupply of villains can be paralyzing. Take the mortgage mess that produced the Great Recession, or the never-ending frauds at Wells Fargo. Both involve so many thousands of low-level scammers (some of whom lost their jobs) and so many hundreds of higher-ups (who weren’t punished) that it’s hard to figure out who the biggest villain is, much less whom to prosecute.

California’s power brokers of the past—from the lobbyist Artie Samish to the Assembly speaker Willie Brown—once played the villain with panache. But politics here has become too complicated and confusing—with so many different interests and inflexible constitutional amendments—that it’s impossible to assign responsibility when things go bad.

And just when it appeared that Hollywood finally had given us a singular uber-villain with the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s predations, dozens of actresses came forward to tell us that such villains are as common as casting calls.

While we once could depend on the rich to live lives worthy of our contempt, today’s Californians have come to treat the rich as saints—since, in this time of vast fortunes and a declining middle, our companies and our causes have come to depend on a few billionaires. It’s worth noting that while California’s Democratic politicians and labor union chiefs like to talk about their commitment to the poor, the person they seem to spend the most time thinking about is the billionaire political donor Tom Steyer.

Now at this point, I can hear 70-plus percent of Californians yelling at me: Haven’t you forgotten Trump? I have not. Yes, he’s waging rhetorical and policy war against California and its people. But he is an unsatisfying villain, for reasons both personal (his lies and offenses are too obvious and dumb to make him worthy of our opposition) and geopolitical (we have to root for him not to start a nuclear war and kill us all).

No, if we’re going to find a villain big and ambitious enough to fit California, we need to look in Silicon Valley, where the object of the game is not merely to dominate the world but to transform it. And if the lives and livelihoods of others are disrupted in the process, so much the better.

When I asked Bay Area people if there was one figure whose villainy might be universally acknowledged, one name kept coming up:

Peter Thiel.

The billionaire Silicon Valley investor in startups co-founded PayPal and was famously Facebook’s first outside investor. His work has shaped modern society so profoundly as to impact the lives and livelihoods of virtually everyone in the state.

California, in turn, has made him rich, powerful, and famous. And how has he thanked us? By using his renown to attack us.

Thiel is a graduate of California public schools (San Mateo High) and of our foremost institution of higher education (Stanford) who rails against government-backed schools and has encouraged people not to go to college. He’s an immigrant (his family came from Germany when he was an infant) who has supported the anti-immigrant provocateurs like Ann Coulter and President Trump. While backing nationalist politicians, he bought himself citizenship in New Zealand.

Worse still, while he has benefited from living, working, and investing in a free and democratic country, he has expressed contempt for democracy. “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in 2009, and he has argued for escaping democracy via cyberspace and outer space. He has suggested that people are too dumb to govern themselves democratically, and called women’s suffrage damaging to democracy. “The broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand,” he has written.

This is monumentally villainous. A man who has the power and technology to reach deeply into all of our personal lives betrays utter contempt for humans. Like so many villains, he’s a false prophet, claiming to liberate people with technology while actually holding authoritarian views that would enslave them.

Thiel also has written that he “stands against … the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” The notion of eternal life for some is tyrannical, but it can be useful for the rest of us. When it’s so hard to find a durable villain against which we can define ourselves, aren’t we Californians lucky to have one who intends to live forever?

The post With Charles Manson Gone, California Needs a New Villain appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A:
Test me all night, baby.

No, really. Sign me up to be the subject of A/B testing. I’d even be willing to sign a blanket consent form, right now, so that all of Silicon Valley’s biggest brains can test me for the purpose of improving the human future.

Everybody’s doing it. In fact, you’ve likely been A/B tested without your knowledge if you’ve ever used Google or Facebook.

With A/B testing, different users are given different variants of a website or an email or a purchasing button to test what small changes online make you more likely to click, or read, or buy, or spend more time in a particular online environment. (A/B typically suggests two variables but, in reality, we are in a multi-variable world.) If you’re reading this column online, you could be being A/B tested right now—it could be running in three different formats, with your reaction to each variable (different headlines, different layouts, maybe even different handsome photos of your columnist) being measured, recorded, and statistically analyzed.

The gold standard for California’s technology industry, A/B tests are also called bucket testing and split-run testing, and they neither can be detected or escaped. A/B tests are how we improve our designs, our interfaces, and even ourselves.

Conducted carefully and repeatedly, they allow for refinements to fit the needs of users and remove guess-work for those running sites and delivering more products.

This notion of tests is old—it’s often attributed to 1908 tests that were used to improve industrial processes at a Guinness brewery in Ireland. But Google has optimized its globe-dominating search business for such testing. Facebook is similarly devoted to A/B testing to continuously refine its site. On the other side is Snap, whose CEO Evan Spiegel doesn’t like to do such testing, preferring a more visceral approach. Is that why Snap is facing such challenges in keeping users?

A/B testing can feel more like a religion or a cult than a scientific procedure. It requires building unseen rituals into everything you put up online. But the disciplines of experimenting and testing help avoid the human preference for the status quo.

We should demand even more from A/B testing. The human race must redesign and improve all sorts of systems—energy, traffic, food and water supply, communications, and even governing systems —if we’re going to avoid self-inflicted disasters, from climate change to famines to wars. So why don’t we commit ourselves to a culture of continuous optimization in the real world, not just the virtual?

B:
I am not your test subject, baby.

And I have no desire to be Silicon Valley’s guinea pig. Oh, yes, I know the internet is full of fine print that lets me know that I’m being tested. But that doesn’t mean I’m being meaningfully asked for my consent. And I’m not really being compensated for all the data that’s being collected from experiments conducted on me.

My online time is now given over to companies experimenting upon me for the purpose of getting me to choose to see which variables will change my own behavior. In essence, I’m a dystopian lab rat forced to design the maze—and the reward—that will entrap me. Great.

And even the real world no longer provides an escape because the Internet of Things–with its web-connected air conditioning and appliances—tests me even when I’m relaxing in my own home, making a cup of coffee.

Facebook will tell you that all its services, provided to me free, are a form of compensation, but studies also tell me that spending more time on Facebook—which is the goal of many of their experiments—makes me less happy. Sadness is not a method of payment I accept.

Such testing has created an unacknowledged ethical crisis—and real public health concerns. The more we click, the more we’re being tested. And if experiments show the way to make us spend more time than is healthy for us in an online environment, or to spend more money than is good for our family’s finances, aren’t we being harmed by our own testimony? (Am I talking about my own behavior here, you ask? Can I plead the Fifth?)

In other fields, like medicine, society developed standards and review boards for governing the testing of human subjects. But these standards aren’t being applied to all the A/B testing to which we’re constantly subjected online.

There are questions here for our faltering democracy, too. California has hundreds of companies that will help an interest group or a politician test to determine the best ways to manipulate our emotions and online behavior for their purposes. Is such human testing a factor in the rise of polarization and fake information that is weakening our bonds to our fellow citizens?

If so, this world of testing needs real regulation—by the same authorities, and under the same laws, that allow for regulation of business practices in the name of protecting people from health and financial threats. One way to start might be to add regulation of A/B testing and other online experiments to the privacy regulations that some jurisdictions impose on tech companies.

And there are other, more prosaic problems. All these A/B tests can be wasteful, producing data that can become quickly outdated. That data creates its own gravity and a bias in favor of the status quo. That’s dangerous because the past doesn’t always predict the future, especially online.

A/B testing and multivariable varieties of it are also impersonal. Such testing doesn’t capture who the users are, and the needs of people can be as diverse and different as individuals themselves.

Of course, smart people in Silicon Valley know this, which is why they are moving beyond A/B testing to the realm of machine learning: a world of algorithms that learn about each individual user. The promise, as yet unrealized, is that the algorithms will continuously improve in giving each user customized products and answers.

Such machine learning blurs the line between human, interface, and machine. In testing their way into this future, California’s brightest brains are simultaneously hiding behind their screens and intruding into their fellow citizens’ lives and minds in a way that they would never dare in person.

Yes, their goal may improve the human experience in many fields. But constant testing and ever greater refinement can be deeply disrespectful to humans, our privacy, and our rights. Yes, we have the right to choose, A or B. But how much choice does continuous testing really leave us test subjects about the nature of our collective future?

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