Design ethics in the age of climate change: on the inseparability of skills and ethics
Designers want to have it both ways. On the one hand, we want the upside of being right, of making a difference, of a positive result. On the other hand, we tend to blame circumstances when the results are not what we want.
On tech teams, the term ‘ownership’ gets tossed around a fair amount. For example, at Amazon, to be hired, you need to demonstrate ownership as a core tenant of your design process.
This version of ownership is what I call ‘ownership lite’: the ability to demonstrate initiative and tenacity. Both are great qualities, but the deeper and more integrity-based concept of Ownership (capital O) is non-ambiguous: the ownership of second-order effects.
Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team.
If you can reconcile the cognitive dissonance of the above statement encountering the pandemic self-censorship within tech companies on the topic of climate change, you should pat yourself on the back.
Second-order effects
If you create things in the real world, those things may or may not work as intended. Regardless, they will have what is known as second-order effects, that is, the effects of the effects.
Say, for example, say your job is to help build Facebook. Facebook, at its core, is a sophisticated behavior modification platform that gets rented out.
We call this renting out’ ads.’
The goal is to build a platform that can reliably and predictably cause people to change their behavior in ways that benefit the people who pay for this service.
As it turns out, the kind of animal that we are responds more strongly and predictably to negative threat or scarcity-based content. We have a different a lesser response to more neutral or positive content. This is why, over time, as the proprietary algorithms do their thing, feeds tend to become more and more extreme and adverse. Both the frequency and intensity increase.
In this example, behavior modification means ‘engagement.’ The way this organically happens is that we tend to interact with things that are more negative and extreme in nature.
These are the first-order effects. This is the system running as designed.
What are the second-order effects? What are the effects of the effects of building a system used by billions that have the downside of being highly biased towards both the frequency and intensity of harmful content?
One second-order effect is software addiction, otherwise known as social media addiction. This occurs because the design of the system is designed around open loops and dopamine rewards. The consequences of addiction are well documented and tend to result in things like poor mental, physical, and emotional health. Damage to relationships, negative lifestyle cascades, etc.
Another second-order effect (and personally witnessed by this author) are typically calm and sane family members rendered and reduced to raving conspiracy theory lunatics.
In his new book Fall (purchase from your local bookstore please, not Amazon), Neal Stephenson envisions a future where all content is vetted by blockchain. This essentially qualifies the real news from the fake news.
Currently, the inability to determine objective reality, plus the ease of which anyone can publish content that bears the aesthetic of ‘news’ (official-sounding URL + prose written in a journalistic style + stock imagery + boost as ‘ads’ on Facebook = hacking our ability to discern news from not-news) has resulted in epidemic levels of social chaos and harm (see election/democracy hacking, bullying, depression, etc. The list is extensive, well documented, and known to the makers and employees of Facebook).
All this leads us back to the purpose of ethics: tools for helping us make better decisions/choices/behaviors in reality.
Ethics speak to the fact that if your work is in contact with reality (and of course it is), there will be consequences beyond those that you intend.
Ignoring this (or even worse, consciously knowing it but attributing negative second-order effects, or downsides, to ‘circumstances beyond your control’ or some such idiocy) is to have your cake and eat it too. When you decline ownership of all results, you also decline to accept your share of the responsibility for the consequences of things that you helped cause through the application of your’ skills.’
To take another example, in medicine: the framing is around ‘side effects.’
There is no such thing as a side effect. The term ‘side effect’ is utterly fictitious. It’s an invented term.
There is only an effect, or more precisely, cascades of effects.
Here’s what happens: when a single or group of chemicals (what we tend to frame as a ‘drug’ or ‘medicine’) cascades through the complex system that is your body, it has multiple and not always predictable effects.
What we conveniently call ‘side effects’ are often second-order effects. The framing of ‘side effect’ uses language to create a world where the chemical (or group of chemicals) only does one specific thing. This framing undermines our ability to grasp the nature of complex systems.
It would be like saying that by putting gas in your car, there could be a side effect that turns your steering wheel blue. Clearly, these things do not happen in mechanical systems, because results in linear mechanical systems are often perceived as having a direct effect from an observable cause.
Designers, engineers, and business people are pathological when it comes to their inability to discern complicated systems (your car) from complex systems (your body), and how the differences truly are different.
All this brings us to the central purpose of ethics, which is to help us make better decisions in the real world.
Note here that the word’ decision’ is indistinguishable from the word ‘behavior.’ Not your intent, but what you actually do. And what the things you do ultimately end up doing.
The assertions laid out
Again, the first premise: what we call ‘skills’ are modalities, patterns, and classes of behavior that exist in the real world. There is nothing that we call a skill that does not touch reality in some way.
The second premise: due to the complex nature of reality (most significant reality we interact with is non-linear, with cascades of consequences, which makes the word ‘causal’ challenging to apply: for example, your body, ecosystems, population dynamics, economics, climate (!!!) and so on), any skill applied in complex non-mechanical reality will have ‘side effects,’ which can also be thought of as second-order effects, or unintended (yet often predictable, though not always) consequences.
The third premise: as designers, we want to take ownership of positive results (upside) and transfer all downside and other undesirable consequences to anyone or anything not us.
In short, we will do anything in our power to avoid having skin in the game: living in a world where when something goes wrong, we face consequences of our actions/behavior/skills.
From this inquiry, we intuitively arrive at the question: What would it look like to face the consequences of building systems with vast negative second-order effects?
5 arguments against this
To head off the inevitable whining that happens when designers read the above, let’s address some of the arguments against this line of reasoning.
- The ‘We’re only hired to solve specific problems’ argument. In this line of reasoning, we’ve shed the over-hyped sentimentality based mythology about designers being agents of change and a vast and unstoppable force for good, and are essentially saying that we are simply mechanics changing the oil on a car. This ‘second-order’ stuff is not part of our job description. Therefore there are no ethical requirements for us to consider. I would simply ask: which side of history would you instead find yourself? On the side claiming ‘it wasn’t my job,’ or the right side?
- The ‘If we addressed all the secondary-order effects, we would be paralyzed’ argument. In this line of reasoning, the quantity of information is unbounded. While this is true, it doesn’t invalidate the argument that we could and should be investing resources to account for the secondaries, as well as possible risk exposures for users/customers using our ‘solutions.
- The ‘It would cost too much to do business if we did this’ argument. In this line of reasoning, the idea is that addressing these concerns would exceed the cost of doing business. Frankly, this may be true, as in cases like Amazon, one of the largest polluters on the planet. Essentially part of their business model is simply deferring actual hard costs of business (climate change) to future generations. This is one reason why their services are so cheap. So, yeah, you could do that. And in the short term, you could be profitable, at the expense of potentially thousands of years of climate damage. Ah, ethics.
- The ‘We can’t think of everything’ argument. This line of reasoning suggests that rather than invest the time to investigate second-order consequences as a matter of integrity (and then evaluate if those potential upsides/downsides are worth the cost of the ‘solution’), we should simply throw our hands in the air and complain about this guy Issara spreading harmful ideas. You could do that.
- The ‘We shouldn’t be held accountable for things we didn’t intend’ argument. This line of reasoning, a true classic used by denialists throughout the ages, suggests that intent supersedes consequence. In this world, words matter more than actions, deeds, and results. If you find yourself in this camp, it’s time for a long hard look in the mirror, years of therapy, and pray that your spouse hasn’t already packed his/her/their bags.
Actions
So, where does this inquiry lead us?
Well, if climate change wasn’t real, and if we didn’t have less than 10 years to turn things around, I’d label this conversation as purely academic, and a robust and semi-enjoyable exercise in navel gazing.
Since we, unfortunately (as of this writing) find ourselves with less than 10 years to modify our behavior at a planetary scale (read IPCC report here) to avoid catastrophic destabilization of the systems on which we survive, (you know, just that), the question of ethics becomes more and more relevant.
Simply put, when we do things in reality, there are consequences.
As designers and engineers, we can no longer afford the luxury of kicking the can down the road and deferring the costs of our actions to future generations.
It is well past the time to begin taking full Ownership (capital O) of our secondary results.
As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is right now.
This means not just taking credit when things work out well, but accepting (nay, owning) the consequences when our skills applied, cascade into real problems for people, for society, and for the world.
At the lowest level, this would look like re-tooling our design programs and courses at colleges to factor in ethics and second-order effects that arise from designing ‘solutions.’
At the highest level, this would look like tech conference organizers prioritizing speakers who talk about ethics and climate change (otherwise known as showing leadership: a strange idea that gets a lot of free promotion but is but rarely delivered upon).
Or participants could lobby tech conference organizers directly and request speakers who address climate change and design ethics.
In the middle spectrum, you can provide Leadership (capitol L) on your team by asking difficult, often uncomfortable questions, and talking about climate change. Though due to the bizarrely high levels of self-censorship at tech companies, you may find this… shall we say… challenging.
At the very least, you can start following the inspiring folks at Amazon Employees for Climate Justice on Twitter.
Or, If you want to hire me to deliver an uncomfortable and confronting talk on the topic of design ethics in the age of climate change, you can email me here.
On a side note, much of my thinking on this topic is influenced by the writing of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Please buy his books from your local bookstore (not Amazon).
