Technology is Not the Answer

Have you ever had a dream in which you are in absolute danger, and you open your mouth to scream but nothing comes out? Or a dream in which you can hear yourself screaming but everyone around you seems completely unfazed and unaware, as if you were invisible and inaudible? Once I had a dream that monkey men dressed as a 1950s motorcycle gang were carrying me to my doom past a massive plate glass window, behind which everyone I knew was dancing at a beautiful fancy gala. I could see and hear them, but none of them could see or hear me. I screamed and screamed, but they all kept swirling past the window, laughing and dancing.

That's how I felt for the past decade. I thought I was yelling my head off, and no one could hear me, or if they could hear me, they didn't give a shit. I felt like I was going crazy and those monkey men were real.

But it turns out I was not, in fact, yelling. I was politely, wearily, asking (begging?) people to please listen. At every job, in all my work, in everything I wrote, in every conference talk I gave. It feels like such a cliché when I look back at it now, but when you are a woman in tech, especially in a role like user research, you get worn down. You have to justify everything. Your findings, your insights, your rationale, role, your value, your existence. You have to get used to being ignored, and to saying the same thing over and over until someone finally listens. You have to advocate and compromise. You have to legitimize your ideas but also couch them carefully. And you have to do all of this while you watch people in other roles, with less experience and less knowledge, make completely unsubstantiated statements and decisions that other people immediately believe. Honestly, maybe I really was going crazy.

So in the interest of time (because we don't have a lot) and my own sanity (ditto) I will try to make this as loud and plain as possible:

Stop looking to technology and the tech industry for solutions to our problems. Stop thinking the reasons things were better before was because the technology we used was different, and that the reason things might be better in the future is because we can build something new. Stop thinking that the industry that got us to this place is somehow going to get us out. Technology is not the answer. We are the answer. YOU are the answer.

Listen. I like technology. I really do. I don't think technology is inherently bad or inherently good, and I'm not a technological determinist. I also don't believe the technology we use every day is inherently amoral because I think once you start making technology that helps people make decisions or even makes decisions for them, you've moved beyond that question. Technology does a lot of good and it does a lot of evil, not always in equal measure. And for better or worse, we live in a world whose infrastructures are almost entirely technological. Whenever I see someone talk about how they're quitting tech completely, I think it's as meaningless as anyone who buys in wholeheartedly to every bullshit concept that gets pushed out by self-proclaimed product geniuses. If you proclaim online you're quitting technology, except to regularly share updates about what it's like to quit technology, and you go viral for doing that, you are still part of the problem.

Maybe you're thinking, "I'm part of the problem? No, the problem are those assholes who run these companies and the industry (and right now the country). Don't put this on me." Yes, you're right, the industry and its leaders shoulders a lot of the blame. There's at least one person out there who is writing about these guys, banging down the door and wielding a sword, and I'm glad for that. But even if those bullies get knocked down, more will pop up to take their place. It's like Hercules and the Hydra. That golden sword will chop off those heads. We still have to scorch those stumps, close them off so no more heads can grow.

Here is the unfortunate truth about our current situation, and about our future: There is no way things get better without a lot of work and discomfort on our part. This isn't a child's tale of good and evil but a complex situation. There's no Captain America coming to avenge us and smash the Nazis. We're all Captain America now, baby.

Do you know why it feels bad to use the platforms you use, and why it used to feel better? Why year on year things seem like they're getting more awful, with fewer options? Because there is literally nothing human about growth at the rate of millions of users a month, a week, a day. No human experience has ever been designed for a billion people, and no human experience can be designed for a billion people. You cannot be a human in a system or on a platform that allows you to engage with thousands of people and millions of opinions, thoughts, ideas – especially when there are no standards or norms, no tools that help you moderate, mediate, disengage.

From now on, when you hear someone say they want to build a new tool or create a new social experience, and the first thing they do is tell you about the technology they're using to create it: Run.

I bet that, over the past few months or even years, you've thought a lot more about what makes a society function. About what allows us to coexist, what enables our neighborhoods and cities to function without grinding to a halt or crumbling altogether. Things like laws, but also things like social norms. What do we agree upon? What is okay, and what's not? How much deviance and discomfort can we tolerate, and where do we draw the line? Who even gets to decide what that line is?

Do you ever think about the fact that an extraordinary percentage of humanity piled onto these social networks and platforms, onto the internet more generally, in a mad rush and without a shared understanding of rules and norms? Old internet heads know there used to be norms, yes, these big platforms have their own rules and terms of service. But on what planet is it possible to get a billion people to agree on how everyone should behave, and then actually abide by those norms when there are few – if any – repercussions for breaking them?

The problems aren't only at this massive scale. A few weeks ago I mentioned that when I was at Instagram, I used to semi-jokingly ask if anyone in leadership understood how friendship actually happened. Honestly, I wasn't joking. Because not only do they not understand how friendship happens, they don't care. Not really. Friendship is only important inasmuch as it can be monetized. Every single day, we march onto social media and hand the most precious aspects of human existence so they can be turned into commodities.

Sometimes it feels hopeless. I know all of this – have even helped build parts of it – and yet I open Instagram and TikTok and the rest of it, often without even thinking. I still want to grow my subscriber numbers and my Bluesky followers, even though I know what it means to open yourself up to the internet like that. I want to have a big audience, despite knowing that real community forms in pockets and in manageable, human spaces, only to splinter when numbers explode. Everyday I am trying to undo these habits, and it is Sisyphean.

Moving off Substack is a perfect example of this. I wanted to leave Substack because a company backed by venture capital cannot fundamentally care about the welfare of its users above everything else, no matter what it says. At the end of the day, the company has to care more about its own survival and success, specifically perpetual growth in terms of both metrics and profit. There will always come a time when what is good for the business will be prioritized over what's good for the end user. That's just how it works!

I also wanted to leave Substack because I don't like that they willingly platform and promote neo-Nazis. I absolutely believe in free speech, but I don't for a second believe that Substack is engaging in the free speech argument out of some moral or ethical imperative. See point #1: Growth and money. Substack, like Instagram and Meta and X and all the rest, are for-profit platforms. They are driven by what the market demands. Unlike society, where we ostensibly have some say into the norms and rules that govern us, we don't have any say on these platforms. But we do have a say in whether or not we help make them more money.

Ultimately, I wanted to leave Substack because I can see the exact same path unfolding there that has unfolded countless times before, on every other platform. Instagram makes you feel bad, and you want to leave it because you don't like Zuckerberg, but do you go? X made you feel bad, and you want to leave it because you don't like Elon Musk, but where do you go? Both platforms started out with a straightforward premise, then grew to encompass critical mass and to showcase features you didn't realize you needed or would like. And when those platforms became too big, too awful, too toxic and harmful, you felt trapped. Leaving them feels like giving up a lot, including our ability to easily connect with the people we love. Where will we all go? Will we all find each other again online? That is a scary, unsettling feeling. So why are people rushing to replicate the same thing on Substack? Why does everyone think it will somehow be different this time?

I'm not going to lie to you, leaving Substack was kind of a pain in my ass. It wasn't really that hard, but it was work and it did require effort. More than that, it required me giving up a lot of things like a semi-established presence, a chat feature I kind of like, the still-untapped potential to grow my audience using the on-platform audience. I'm going to have to put more work into trying to grow this thing and building a community, without all the fancy bells and whistles that sucker us all in.

But you know what? Sometimes we have to give up convenience, ease, and flashy features. Doing the ethical thing or the sustainable thing is often a pain in the ass. We still have to do it! Or we're just going to keep suffering the consequences, and those consequences are only going to get worse.

This is what I'm talking about when I say it's up to all of us, and that we have to lead with the human aspects of what we want, rather than the technological. We have to do the work. We have to be willing to exist on a smaller, more human scale. We have to help each other break free from these platforms and build community in more intentional, manageable ways. We have to move away from the inhumanity of virality and extremes, from the impossibility of trying to exist at scale and of consuming the news, ideas, opinions, and emotions from the endless high-pressure firehose. Even people who live in a big city have to engage with it on a reasonable scale, and they also have to escape from time to time. No one is going to build that for us. We have to do it ourselves.