MAKE A SPEECH ABOUT "MAKERS NOT BREAKERS OF COMMUNICATION"
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MAKE A SPEECH ABOUT "MAKERS NOT BREAKERS OF COMMUNICATION"
MAKE A SPEECH ABOUT "MAKERS NOT BREAKERS OF COMMUNICATION"
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For decades technology companies have enjoyed a near-unbroken run of great publicity. Products and services are lauded as shiny and covetable. Adoption is couched as inevitable. Direction goes unquestioned. Engineering genius is assumed. And a generous margin is indefinitely applied to gloss over day-to-day errors (‘oh, just a few bugs!’) — allowing problematic functioning to be normalized and sanctioned in all but a handful of outlier instances.
The worst label these companies have generally had to worry about is being called ‘boring’. Or, at a push, overly addictive.
Tech giants have been given space to trumpet their products as revolutionary! Break through! Cutting-edge agents of mass behavioral change! To, on the one hand, tell us their tools are actively restructuring our societies. Yet also fade into the background of the conversation the moment any negative impact gets raised.
Then they prefer to stay silent.
When forced, they might put out a blog post — claiming their tools are impartial, their platforms neutral, their role mere ‘blameless intermediary’.
The not so subtle subtext is: The responsibility for any problems caused by our products is all yours, dear users.
Or at least that was the playbook, until very recently.
What’s changed is that lately the weight of problems being demonstrably attached to heavily used tech services has acquired such a gravitational and political pull that it’s becoming harder and harder for these businesses to sidestep the concept of wider societal and civic responsibilities.