The moral dispute of startup culture

John Doe
John Doe
Sep 4, 2018 · 6 min read
Image by Hugh Han

I am not an eloquent writer, nor somebody who enjoys blasting his thoughts out on the internet. But I wanted to get something out there. Some thoughts that I’ve struggled with over the last couple of weeks. So take this as an attempt to write down my thoughts, and I hope this might be helpful to somebody.

I’m your 24y old stereotypical white guy who happens to be studying computer science. Oh, we need to here more opinionated pieces of those people, as they didn’t have a voice in the past, you rightfully think. Well, then you got lucky, as I got you covered! But I will hold my thoughts on diversity issues and the frat culture in computer science for another time. What I wanted to write about is the moral decay in computer science from the perspective of a student who has worked in academia, in startups and is struggling with a multitude of moral dilemmas at the beginning of his actual working life.

I want to immediately start out to highlight my personal hypocrisy in all of this. I am guilty of being a perpetrator of all of these things myself. I’ve lost my moral high ground in this debates years ago. So, this is not intended to be an excuse nor an apology. It is an observation of my own struggles with the current state computer science and startup culture in general.

In my opinion, a big chunk of software developers and designers have either no morals or no spine. Let me explain what I mean. I feel like we collectively fail society and are responsible for some of the biggest things that are currently wrong with society. We are in the driving seat on massive problems of our contemporary society. Climate change, the inability of society to agree on common facts or the transformation of an entire generation into dopamine addicts.

And of course, none of these things are exclusively the fault of smartphones, social media or individual people. I do not want to underplay the role of other factors, such as contemporary socio-political trends or rightwing media outlets. But what bothers me are the roles more and more developers, designers and startups, in general, seem to take on in society.

My main issue is the failure to take on responsibility for our creations. We see each other as builders, problem solvers, some even as noble craftsmen. In my experience, especially software developers tend to carry around a massive ego, the arrogance of being intelligent. Being powerful in what they can create and often times taking a lot of pride in their creations. But at the same time, we fail to recognize the negative consequences, or in the worst case, not caring to prevent them. We see software as tools, hell some people at Facebook still see their platform as a tool to connect people. As if Facebook or Twitter would be just a replacement for sending Email or SMS.
This mindset makes us bystanders to our own creations. We are enablers. This leads to us failing to take actions when people abuse our systems, our social media platform. But it also happens on a much smaller level.

If you are a designer or a developer, I bet you got a request to build a feature that you thought was morally reprehensible. Maybe you said something, maybe you stood up for your customers. But if we would all be a collective of brave people, then I ask myself when it became acceptable to track every action a user makes when opening our apps, our websites or just buying our devices. We build massive systems to spy on society, all in the honorable pursuit of revenue goals. Of course, every company has their legitimate reasons to do so. “How should I know which features perform well? What my customers actually want in the upcoming quarter?”… I don’t know, maybe ask them? Or for some cases maybe use your expert knowledge to make an educated guess and skip the need for a bunch of A/B tests.
What really bothers me is this hypocrisy of startups presenting themselves as the good Samaritan, making helpful contributions to society and improving the lives of millions of people, and at the same time abusing society, actually exploiting millions of people for the sake of their own benefit. Founders present themselves often with these grand aspirations, their moral guidelines and their vision for society. But for the most part, it is only a vision for their own enrichment.
And I don’t even blame the individual people for this. The entire system is flawed. Even if you have good intentions, if your goal is to grow like crazy and reach every revenue goal to keep the investments going, you will sooner or later begin to design some piece of software that might be morally reprehensible. Is it the soft paywall to get more paying users, a trial that silently converts into an active subscription, or push-notifications to lure your users back into your app.
In general, the entire concept of user engagement so flawed. The truth is, we are all competing for the user’s attention. There are only so many hours in a day and our business idea to make something more convenient, cheaper, without the middleman is, of course, worthy of our users’ attention. But now think about all the apps you have installed on your personal device and multiply them by all the people that actively work on them, every day to make you more addicted to their product. We are selfish. And we are ignorant of the problems we are creating. Most contemporary software is not helpful; it is not a tool for users. It is abusing users as a tool. We all want to grow, get our share of “the market.” A million is not cool, do you know what is?… Exactly, a society in shambles.

And you know what is especially ironic? We as a society even cherish it. We admire the successful businesses, the innovators, and geniuses behind that system. The Stockholm syndrome of the 21. century, we are in love with the companies that spy on us and turned a generation of people into addicts.

And we as part of that system? Why do we do this to other people? Are we just plain out careless and don’t think about the possible consequences of our work? Or are we just money driven assholes, willing to do everything for those 100k a month, even if it means to leave your morals at the doorstep. Or are we just plain delusional and really think that we are doing something good with our actions. I’ve seen all of this things in people and also in myself. Hanging around in the startup scene and app developer bubble, I thoroughly believe it is very harmful. We see the money, the shares, the reach, user numbers, revenue, free vacation days… Its been a long time that somebody told me that they work in IT who said that their work is very self-fulfilling because they genuinely are doing something good for other people. And no, I don’t think it is remarkable, to “build communities,” to “connect people,” to “deliver food faster”. I think it is rather remarkable how we all go to sleep each night.

So this all was a very cynical and messy rant. I am sorry that it does not offer any solutions or a bright outlook. I didn’t end it on a high note partially, because I don’t want to allow myself or you, the reader, to feel comfortable with the current situation. That we recognize these issues but are unwilling to actually take action. That we hope, somebody will come around and solve this for us. I genuinely think there are a lot of well-intentioned people in our scene and we could achieve a lot of positive change in society. But until not more of us start to speak up and actively change something, we are all complicit and our good intention means, like this post, in the end, nothing.

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