Meet the keynotes: Mike Monteiro

🗺 EuroIA is Europe’s premier Information Architecture & User Experience conference. After travelling through Europe for the past 15 years, for its 2019 edition, EuroIA goes to Riga, the capital of Latvia.

🎤 Our keynote collection continues and without further ado we give you… Mike Monteiro!

🧳 ✍️ Hey Mike, how are you, what have you been up to recently?
I have been travelling a lot – I just came back from Finland, then went to Atlanta, now I’m back to San Francisco until Tuesday, then I’ll hopefully fly over to Riga. I’ve been doing talks, I’ve been writing. I’ve been writing a column for Modus Magazine, it’s a Medium publication called: “Dear Designer”, every couple of weeks I put an article up there. And I’ve been talking to union organizers.

🤔 Why is that? That sounds a bit intriguing!
Well, hopefully! We’ve been talking about getting tech workers unionized: just getting the conversation started; what it’s going to take and who needs to do what. It’s time for unions! If you look at what’s been happening in tech lately, it’s definitely time for something to change.

We’ve always had more power in this business than we gave ourselves credit for, we’ve always had more power than we believed we had and I think that we’re beginning to see that we need to stick together rather than tear each other apart. We need to work together as a union.

Unions take care of workers and right now, there is nobody looking out for tech workers. For decades, they saw themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires who had to work a few years before starting their own company. I think we are beginning to see that a lot of the rights we’ve traded away in exchange for options and free dinners have not paid off.

👩🏼‍💻👨🏽‍💻 IT is a world of egos, how do you make this into a community?
We need to redefine what a community actually is because companies have stolen the notion of community from us. As a Facebook employee, for example, you work at a campus, where all of your needs are met. They take care of everything. And that’s on purpose, that’s by design. Those campuses want you to think of them as your community. Companies have hijacked that notion of community and placed it in the corporate sector. These are profit-driven, capitalist companies, they will cut you loose so fast if the bottom line calls for it. That is not your community.

🛣️ Sometimes in your everyday life, we’re at the crossroads of ethical decisions. What should we ask ourselves when in doubt?
One of the things you should figure out is: What’s the absolute worst possible thing that can happen in any situation?

😈 And is it always possible to predict all the implications?
It’s absolutely not, because I’m constantly amazed at the horrible things that people do with our stuff, even if we think we’ve totally looked at it from all sides and figured out: “Okay, there’s absolutely no way that somebody can mess with this”. We feel confident about it and then somebody will come and show us some evil genius way to f_ck with something that had never occurred to us before! It requires constant vigilance. We have all of the responsibility for our work. Anything that goes out into the world we have touched we are responsible for.

The most important thing we can do is to make sure that before anything makes it out into the world, we will look at it as thoroughly as we can and that we are doing it with a diversity of experiences and a diversity of people looking at that tool.

Let’s take Twitter as an example: it took a full year before you could block anyone. You couldn’t say: “I don’t want this person to see what I’m doing” or: “I don’t want this person to know where I’m at”. Twitter was conceived and built in a room with four white dudes who all went to Stanford, who all had a pretty good upbringing, upper-middle-class and they all had pretty much the same life experience. And none of those dudes had ever come into a situation where they’ve been harassed or where somebody had followed them home or any horrible thing like that. So the idea that you might want to block someone on the service simply didn’t occur to them.

But if you widen that circle out and if you include people from different backgrounds and different upbringings, different races and genders, all of a sudden you’ve got people with a multitude of experiences, people who bring that experience to the tool. I guarantee you, if there had been a woman on that founding team, they wouldn’t have launched without blocking.

🦑 As designers, sometimes we don’t really get that power of decision. We can advise and we can give our best counsel. How can we manage to stop people from releasing the Kraken?
The power of decision is given with your labour. Nobody can force you to do something you don’t want to do. So if somebody puts up something horrible in front of me and says: “Build this!” I can either roll my eyes and say: “I wish I didn’t have to do this” and build it or I can say: “Hey, there are some things here that I think are problematic, can we talk about that?” I think that’s the best way to go because a lot of times people don’t understand they’re putting something horrible in front of you.

And honestly, I would be pissed if I ran a company and I was trying to put out a good product, hired people to ensure that the product was good and then it got put in front of them, they saw something bad and they didn’t say anything! “How come you didn’t tell me there was a problem?” And then what are you going to say: “Well, I didn’t feel it was my place?” or: “I was scared I would going to lose my job?” But I think that there are people out there who actually want to hear this shit!

🤖 Sometimes though, it’s not so black and white, there are two sides of the same coin. Thinking about artificial intelligence and facial recognition, there’s a fine line between releasing something that’s okay and knowing the damaging effects it can have. How can we prevent people from abusing the product we are creating?

Our biggest problem isn’t that people abuse our stuff. Our biggest problem is that we willingly give people our stuff to be used badly. Let me give you an example. Microsoft has been doing a ton of work with facial recognition. And there are positive reasons to do it and very good things that can come out of it. However, Microsoft decided to sell a license of that facial recognition software to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

When the Microsoft employees, who worked on the software, found out that their company had sold their license to ICE, they put down the tools and drafted a petition, presented it to Satya Nadella, their CEO, and said: “Cancel that contract or we walk!” And Microsoft cancelled the contract because they needed the talent of that team more than they needed what they were making out of that contract.

🤨 So when were you sure you were doing things right?
I’m still not. Do you know what I need? I need people around me who are willing to tell me when I’m doing things wrong. I’ve tried to do things right and as I’ve gotten older, I haven’t gotten smarter. I’ve realized how I always need people around me who are smarter than I am, who are not afraid to tell me when I’m being an idiot. If you surround yourself with people like that and you use your ears more than you use your mouth, you’re generally fine!

🧠 Is this what is called conscious incompetence, right?
I just call it: Embracing your idiocy! Act in every situation as if you are the biggest idiot in the room and everybody there can teach you something and you will always walk away smarter. So I’m excited to go to Riga, to meet people who live in a place I’ve never been to and apart from the 45 minutes I’m on stage, I’m going to keep my mouth shut and listen to what everybody has to say. By the time I leave, I’ll know a bunch of stuff that I didn’t know when I got there. That’s pretty great!

💡Is there anything you’d like our conference participants not just to take away, but to come into the room with?
Come into the room with an open mind. And understand that I’m going to go up there and do my bullshit; this is my point of view, it comes from an own set of biases, it’s not the law, it’s not genius. Take it, consider it, run it against everything you already know and trust, believe and it might change some of your opinions, or reinforce others and that’s fine.

I wrote my book: “Ruined by Design” for people who work in companies and believe they’re the only ones who care about doing the right thing. It might be that you are sitting there thinking: “Wow, I wish we did things differently” and you are afraid to bring it up. If I could convince you of one thing, it would be that you are not alone. You are not powerless!

🙌🏼 Mike, thank you for your time, we are looking forward to listening to your talk and after that, queuing to ask you some more questions!

📌 If you would like to hear more thought-provoking ideas, be sure to join us this year at EuroIA19 in Riga, Latvia. You will find all the necessary information on how to do that on our website.

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