If you’ll grant me five more minutes of your time, I’d encourage you to read another essay I wrote on depression that goes into this with a little more depth: https://medium.com/@monteiro/this-is-about-the-time-i-chose-not-to-die-3c2cc97cf769

Thank you so much for reaching out.

The following are personal thoughts on depression and suicide. I am not a doctor, or a psychiatrist, or a mental health professional. I am a person living with depression and fighting to stay alive every day. My thoughts on depression are personal and they help me. Maybe it’ll help you to see how one person deals with it. But please remember that every broken brain is broken in its own way.

We lost Anthony Bourdain last week. I never met Anthony Bourdain. I saw him a lot on television. And he was important to me. He was important to me because he was a humanist. Someone who spent his time attempting to show us that not only are the people on this planet a lot alike, but the parts of us that are different are wonderful too. Anthony Bourdain was important to a lot of us. Because we need humanists right now. We need people to show us the best parts of ourselves. Anthony Bourdain was especially important to me because he was a self-admitted flawed humanist. Anthony Bourdain was Mister Rogers if Mister Rogers had spent his 20s doing heroin and banging waitresses in the walk-in freezer.

We needed both of them, and I loved both of them, but with my own fucked-up past I knew that Mister Rogers’ path was closed to me, but Bourdain had opened a path I could still follow. For personal selfish reasons, I needed and loved him a little bit more.

We’ve lost one of the last of the humanists. And I’ll miss him. But since I have no idea what was going on in his head, I’ll stop talking about him now. I don’t want to make assumptions about what was going on in his brain. I’ll leave that work to those who personally knew and loved him. We lost a celebrity. They lost family.

What I want to talk about today is how we deal with suicide. And it’s going to get personal, because that’s the only way I can talk about it with any authority whatsoever.

This is about the time I chose not to die.

If suicide is a sin, God is an asshole

As a kid, I was told that suicide was a sin. I was told this by men whose own broken brains told them it was acceptable to diddle young boys who’d just helped them say mass. And were I still a Catholic I might still be alright thinking of suicide as a sin, albeit a sin of the maker. I’d question a God that made defective products, and then blamed the user when the product broke. That’s a sin. Trust me, it’s not easy to grow up hearing that God loves you, gave you broken brain, and if you can’t deal it’s your fault and you’ll go to hell. And hearing this from an authority figure whose breath stinks of your classmates stolen childhood is particularly fucked.

If you’re cool with God, please rest assure that I have no intention about making you feel uncool with God. You take your support where you can find it and you do you. My issue is with religions that blame you for your chosen divinity’s own shitty worksmanship. I have to believe that if God were real, he wouldn’t be a total asshole, and I often wonder why religions feel a need to paint their objects of devotion as shitty parents.

So, no, suicide is not a sin. But blaming people for losing a battle with mental illness might be.

When you hear that people “struggle with depression” I want you to know that struggle is the most real word in that sentence.

Suicide is not selfish

As an adult I’ve had to deal with the suicide of more than one family member. Their stories are their own and the point of this essay isn’t to rehash them, sensationalize them, try to make sense of them, or reopen the wounds of those still dealing with the loss. But after almost every one of those suicides, and after every suicide that makes the news and gets discussed on social media, someone will utter a version of “what a selfish thing to do” or “why didn’t they think of their family” or “they had everything going for them.” And while I’m not one to harsh on how people do their mourning, let’s get one thing perfectly clear:

Suicide isn’t something you do to other people.

Suicide isn’t even something you do to yourself.

Suicide is something your broken brain does to you.

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life. My brain is broken. It lies to me. It’s a hostile organ in my body. I can’t live without my brain, but it’s also really fucking hard to live with it. It makes me believe things that aren’t actually true. It digs through my psyche, which it has full access to, and pulls out my deepest fears and shows them to me every single morning. And so far, so far… I’ve been able to win that daily battle. Some days I emerge a little bloodier than others. But there’ve been a few days where I was lucky to make it to the next day. Lucky.

When you hear that people “struggle with depression” I want you to know that struggle is the most real word in that sentence. Every day can be a fight. And every morning that struggle starts again. Someone who has to wake up and fight 365 days a year isn’t selfish, they’re exhausted.

And all it takes is one slip. Sometimes your brain tells you a really good lie. Sometimes, as is happening now, what’s happening in the outside world compounds what’s going on inside your head. Sometimes your brain uses that information to its advantage so you stop watching the news so your brain doesn’t have ammo to use against you. Sometimes your brain, and this one is especially fucked, convinces you you’re doing so well you can probably stop taking your medication!

Suicide is not giving up, it is not a selfish act. It is losing a long awful battle with your own mind. But please respect that person fought every day. Every day.

Mental health is a human right

About ten years ago I made a commitment to therapy. For five of those years I went every week, and then once I was “out of the woods” we cut it down to every two weeks. A couple of years ago my therapist moved out of the city. (Once therapists can’t afford San Francisco rent you can no longer deny there’s a problem.) She and I made a deal that if I was in trouble I would call. A few months ago I called. I felt the warning signs of depression coming down the road. From a ways off. That’s a skill I wouldn’t have without therapy.

Here’s the thing about therapy: It didn’t cure me. It didn’t fix my brain. And it didn’t make my brain stop lying to me. But slowly, over time, and with a little medication, it gave me the tools to dismiss the lies. And it gave me the tools to see when it was mounting an offensive. We should all have access to those tools and the people who help us build them.

I’m a privileged jerk who has access to therapy and chemistry. Many people don’t. Depression affects people regardless of how much money you make. You can’t buy your way to happiness, but you can buy your way to care. Walk around any major city in America and you’ll see hundreds of people struggling with mental health issues who don’t have access to the care and services they need. (We don’t have a homeless problem. We have a compassion problem.)

Mental health is a human right.

Also, I was lucky, or smart, or whatever, enough to walk away from the stigma that I grew up with around depression being a sin, or a weakness. You can no easier choose to magically get over depression than you can choose to magically mend a broken arm. Both take professional care. I was 40 years old before I made that therapy appointment. Because I grew up in shame. I grew up being told that my mental illness was a character flaw. A weakness. “Man up!” I was told, because let’s go ahead and add some machismo bullshit to that stew. Last March NBA player Kevin Love published a piece on his own mental illness, and I love that he did that, and it’s important that he did that, because it helps cut through that macho bullshit.

You learn what it takes to “be a man.” It’s like a playbook: Be strong. Don’t talk about your feelings. Get through it on your own. — Kevin Love

Dealing with mental health is a sign of strength. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

No one commits suicide

The people I know who’ve chosen to end their life have not committed suicide. They lost a battle with their broken hostile brains. Commitment implies a choice. You commit to a healthy diet, you commit to riding your bike more, you commit to giving Father John Misty a try. And obviously, you can, if you choose, commit murder.

But we can all agree that it’s odd to look at a murder victim and say they committed death.

Depression is your broken brain killing you. The person whose life is over is as responsible for that murder as any other murder victim. They committed nothing. They were killed.

The current preferred nomenclature among mental health professionals is to use suicide as a verb, as in “Bob suicided”, rather than “Bob committed suicide.” Society as a whole will keep saying the latter for a while. Change takes time. As well-meaning as that change is, I still don’t think it goes far enough. “Bob suicided” still implies that Bob made a decision, when in reality Bob was the victim of multiple things: a broken brain, belief systems that perpetuate victim-blaming, a society that stigmatizes mental illness, and medical care systems that don’t give people the access to the treatment they need to fight the disease they were born with. In reality, we take the decision away from people.

No one commits suicide. But we, as a society, are complicit in not getting people the help they need. We need to be better. As Mister Rogers taught us, “Look for the helpers.” But some of these people are looking for helpers, and not finding them.

Remember, I have no idea what I’m talking about, and the shit that works for me may not work for you at all. If you’re depressed I have no idea how to help you, but there are magnificent human beings who can. Call the suicide prevention hotline at 1–800–273–8255. They are always there and they are good at this. I love you, and I am as broken as you are.

Please also read my friend, and Earn Yr Death co-host, Robyn Kanner’s essay:

It’s time we ask ourselves who protects the ants?

A few weeks ago I was in Copenhagen giving a new talk. I get nervous with new talks, not because public speaking makes me nervous, but because you never know whether a new talk sucks or not until you’ve given it a couple of times. And you don’t even really know what the talk is about until you’ve given it a few times. And it wasn’t until I was in the middle of this talk, which was ostensibly about ethics, that I realized it had a strong undercurrent of death throughout. And maybe undercurrent isn’t the right word. It’s quite possible that if you asked someone in the audience what the talk was about they would’ve replied “Death. That was some dark shit.” Which is my way of saying that you really want to see this talk.

Death rules everything around me.

Later that evening I went out to dinner with a couple of friends. We went to a place that specialized in “Nordic”, which I assumed meant eating whale and drinking mead while Thor Ragnarok played on a giant screen above the bar. But it ended up being a very nice cozy place, with an even nicer owner. The kind of guy who grabs a bottle of bourbon, pulls up a chair for himself, and proceeds to tell you about spending ten years in the Danish military. In between stories of Finns building saunas in Kabul, the topic of “being good allies” came up. To which my new Danish friend shouted that men our age had committed too many sins and done too many things wrong to ever be good allies in any sense of the world. And the best thing we could to for the planet was to die. (Just a few days ago Terry Gilliam did a great job of hammering home the point.)

Last week I watched as American school children walked out of school in protest. Because they’re tired of going to school and getting shot. Because they’re tired of their government caring more about fleecing their own pockets than comprehensive gun control. Because they’re tired of their classes being interrupted to practice active shooter drills. And more than a few of them are tired of actually burying their classmates. And as I’m watching these brave brave kids, I’m filled with equal amounts of hope for the courage they’re displaying and shame that our generation has left this problem for them to solve. We’re a year away from the 20th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. We should’ve taken care of it then and there, before these brave kids were even born.

I start thinking that maybe my Danish ex-military friend is right. The best thing we can do for this planet is die.

Death rules everything around me.

About a month ago, I published a rather long essay on design’s lost generation. I consider myself part of that generation. We had an amazing opportunity to make the world better than it was when it was handed to us, and it’s becoming more and more apparent that we botched the job a thousandfold. We didn’t make it better. We made it significantly worse. I’ll quote part of that essay here and leave you to read the rest:

“I am part of design’s last generation. I’ve fucked up. We all have. None of us did enough. Maybe the tide was too strong, or maybe we were too weak. But as I look behind me I see the hope of a new generation. They’re asking better questions, at a younger age, than we ever did. And I truly hope they do better than us because the stakes have never been higher.”

Societies are not made up of laws as much as its made up of an agreement to follow those laws. And while laws are delivered to us in a top-down fashion, the agreement to follow those laws is upheld from the bottom-up. A code of ethics will not magically transform us into people who behave decently. It’s imposition, coming from the top, will have no transformative power. Only an agreement to follow it, made at the rank and file level, can change how we work.

This is where my hope comes from. I believe the people coming up after us will do a better job than we did. I believe that as a 5o year old white male living in America, my goal is to clear the path for the voices I’ve silenced either knowingly or unknowingly. I cannot be a good ally because I’ve benefitted too much from the world I was born into. And regardless of whether I wanted those benefits or not, I got them.

“If you are white in a white supremacist society, you are racist. If you are male in a patriarchy, you are sexist.” — Ijeoma Oluo, So you want to talk about race

As uncomfortable as it is to admit, I am both those things. And if you are reading this and you look like me, you are too. Regardless of how well you’ve lived your life, regardless of how good your intentions were, you benefited from a stacked deck. And yet, even with the deck stacked in our favor, we couldn’t do the job. So yes, the best thing we can do for the planet is to die.

Death is always a given. It is not a choice. As a culture, we spend a lot of time attempting to delay it, or comically convincing ourselves it’s not coming. But there’s absolutely nothing we can do to stop it. It. Is. Coming. And rather than spend a lifetime convincing ourselves that it’s not and wasting our energy attempting to outrun it, perhaps we are better served in attempting to earn it. Perhaps, just perhaps, the point of life is to earn the death that comes at the end. And perhaps, no — most likely!, that death is best earned by doing everything we can for those coming up after us. Earn your death by making room for the generation behind you. Might they fuck it up as well? Of course. But you already have. They still have a chance.

Death rules everything around me. Let’s do at least one thing right. Let’s die well.

This essay was originally published in a rougher draft, with even more typos, in my newsletter, which you should definitely sign up for.

It troubles me that rather than tell me I’m wrong about the AIGA, you slap my wrist for talking about old stuff. Give me good new stuff and I’ll sing it on the rooftops.

A year ago I was in the audience at a gathering of designers in San Francisco. There were four designers on stage, and two of them worked for me. I was there to support them. The topic of design responsibility came up, possibly brought up by one of my designers, I honestly don’t remember the details. What I do remember is that at some point in the discussion I raised my hand and suggested, to this group of designers, that modern design problems were very complex. And we ought to need a license to solve them.

About half the room turned to me in unison and screamed NO As if I’d just suggested something absurd, such as borrowing ten million dollars to develop a smart salt shaker. (It exists. That happened.)

“How many of you would go to an unlicensed doctor?” I asked. And the room got very quiet.

“How many of you would go to an unaccredited college?” I asked. And the room got even quieter.

(And before you weigh in on the condition of today’s health care and education, which I grant are very problematic, let me just add that it’s not the level of service that we typically take umbrage with, but rather our difficulty in accessing and then affording those services, which tend to be quite good.)

Turns out we like it when our professional services are licensed. In fact, if you’ve ever had occasion to use a lawyer, I’m sure you’ve been comforted knowing they’ve passed the bar. Their certification will be neatly framed right behind their head. Not to mention that even the cafeterias of Silicon Valley’s most disruptive companies have to hang health department grade sheets where diners can see them. So while you take a break from fighting against regulations that keep passenger vehicles safe, you can avail yourself of that burger which you know is safe thanks to the regulations inspired by the muckraking work of Upton Sinclair. A journalist. Or in libertarian parlance — the media.

Turns out we enjoy regulations. When they’re in our interest.

This roomful of designers, however, was quite taken aback by the idea that our industry, an industry which now regularly designs devices that go inside human bodies, or control our medication, or is writing logic for putting driverless tractor trailers on the street, should need professional licensing.

Who’ll decide who gets licenced, they asked.

I’m confident that if other professions have figured this out we can figure this out as well. We can even look to their examples. The last runner off the blocks can generally find their way by following the asses in front.

Yesterday I sat down for coffee with a colleague who teaches design at the local art school. (Why design is taught in art schools is worth another 10,000 words. I’ll save it for later.)

“How goes it with the new crop of kids?” I ask him.

“Good! You know, they’re surprising me. They’re asking about things like sustainability, working in civic organizations, and ethics.”

“This is new?”

“Yeah. Up until recently they wanted to know about startups, funding, and money.”

“There’s hope.”

“There is.”

And that’s when I decided that we — and by we I mean those of us currently drawing paychecks for professional design services — are design’s lost generation. We are the Family Ties era Michael J. Fox of the design lineage. Raised by hippies. Consumed by greed. Ruled by the hand of the market. And nourished by the last drops of sour milk from the withered old teat of capitalism gone rabid. Living where America ends — Silicon Valley.

We are slouching towards Sand Hill Road. We are slouching towards another round of funding. We are slouching towards market share. We are slouching towards entrepreneurship. And ultimately, we are slouching towards irrelevance. If we are lucky. Because the longer we stick around, the more we’re leaving for the next generation to clean up. And we’ve given them quite a bit of job security as it is.

We are slouching because we were born without spines. When society desperately needed us to be born with them.

The center did not hold

There are two words every designer needs to feel comfortable saying: “no” and “why.” Those words are the foundation of what we do. They’re the foundation of building an ethical framework. If we cannot ask “why” we lose the ability to judge whether the work we’re doing is ethical. If we cannot say “no” we lose the ability to stand and fight. We lose the ability to help shape the thing we’re responsible for shaping.

Victor Papanek, who attempted to gift us spines in Design for the Real World, referred to designers as gatekeepers. He reminded us of our power, our agency, and our responsibility. He reminded us that labor without counsel is not design. We have a skill-set that people need in order to get things made, and that skill-set includes an inquiring mind and a strong spine. We need to be more than a pair of hands. And we certainly can’t become the hands of unethical men.

A designer who loses their hands is still a designer, but a designer who doesn’t offer their client counsel is not.

We are gatekeepers, and we vote on what makes it through the gate with our labor and our counsel. We are responsible for what makes it through that gate, and out into the world. What passes through carries our seal of approval. It carries our name. We are the defense against monsters. Sure, everyone remembers the monster, but they call it by his maker’s name. And the worst of what we create will outlive us.

There’s no longer room in Silicon Valley to ask why. Designers are tasked with moving fast and breaking things. How has become more important than why. How fast can we make this? How can we grab the most market share? How can we beat our competitors to market? (And for those of you thinking that I’m generalizing, and that your company is different — I am, and you may be. But you can’t argue even if you’re truly different there are days you feel yourself swimming upstream.)

The current generation of designers have spent their careers learning how to work faster and faster and faster. And while there’s certainly something to be said for speed, excessive speed tends to blur one’s purpose. To get products through that gate before anyone noticed what they were and how foul they smelled. Because we broke some things. It’s one thing to break a database, but when that database holds the keys to interpersonal relationships the database isn’t the only thing that breaks.

Along with speed, we’ve had to deal with the amphetamine of scale. Everything needs to be faster and bigger. How big it can get, how far it can go. A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? You know the rest of the line. When we move fast and break things and those things get bigger and bigger, the rubble falls everywhere.

Facebook claims to have two billion users. (What percentage of those users are Russian bots is currently up for debate.) But 1% of two billion is twenty million. When you’re moving fast and breaking things (this is Facebook’s internal motto, by the way) 1% is well within the acceptable breaking point for rolling out new work. Yet it contains twenty million people. They have names. They have faces. Technology companies call these people edge cases, because they live at the margins. They are, by definition, the marginalized.

Let me introduce you to one of them:

Bobbi Duncan was “accidentally” outed by Facebook when she was a college freshman. When Bobbi got to college she joined a queer organization with a Facebook group page. When the chorus director added her to the group, a notification that she’d joined The Queer Chorus at UT-Austin was added to her feed. Where her parents saw it. Bobbi had very meticulously made her way through Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings to make sure nothing about her sexuality was visible to her parents. But unbeknownst to her (and the vast majority of their users), Facebook, which moves fast, had made a decision that group privacy settings should override personal privacy settings. Bobbi was disowned by her parents and later attempted suicide. They broke things.

A year later I gave a talk at Facebook. I told Bobbi’s story, which was public at that point. An engineer in the audience screamed out “It was the chorus director’s fault, not ours.” And that somehow managed to be the scariest part of this whole story. We’re putting the people who need us most at risk, and we’re not seeing our responsibility. And to this I must both ask why and say no.

We’re killing people. And the only no I hear from the design community is about the need for licensing. If why and no are not at the center of who we are, and they must be, the center has not held.

We need to Slow. The. Fuck. Down. And pay attention to what we’re actually designing. We’re releasing new things into the world faster than Trump is causing scandals.

Why we failed, the first reason

“I want to do the right thing, but I’m afraid I’ll lose my job.”

“Must be nice to afford to take a stand.”*

“I have rent to pay.”

“If you’re telling people how to work then you’re the fascist!”

I’ve heard variations on all of these phrases thrown at me from designers I’ve spoken to all over the world. Sometimes they’re apologetic about it. Sometimes they’re angry. Sometimes they’re looking for absolution, which I’m not in a position to give. But mostly they feel tired and beaten down.

Yes. You will sometimes lose your job for doing the right thing. But the question I want you to ask yourself is why you’re open to doing the wrong thing to keep your job. Without resorting to the level of comparing you to guards at Japanese Internment Camps, I’d argue there are paychecks not worth earning. An ethical framework needs to be independent of pay scale. If it’s wrong to build databases for keeping track of immigrants at $12 an hour, It’s still wrong to build them at $200 an hour, or however much Palantir pays their employees. Money doesn’t make wrong right. A gilded cage is still a cage.

You’ll have many jobs in your life. The fear of losing a job is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fear makes it less likely that you’ll question and challenge the things you need to question and challenge. Which means you’re not doing your job anyway.

The first part of doing this job right is wanting to do it right. And the lost generation of designers doesn’t want to do it right. They found themselves standing before a gate, and rather then seeing themselves as gatekeepers they decided they were bellhops.

We failed because we looked at our paychecks, saw Mark Zuckerberg’s signature, and forgot the person we actually worked for was Bobbi Duncan.

* For the record, it’s not that I can afford to do this. It’s that growing up as an immigrant I’ve seen a little bit of the effects of being marginalized. Certainly not as much as others, but generally more than the white boys (they’re always white boys) who say this to me.

Ethics and paying rent

Why we failed, the second reason

I also hear from plenty of people who attempted to do the job right and hit their head against the wall time after time. (If it makes you feel better feel free to put yourself in this second group.) These were the people who looked for backup and didn’t find it. Whether it was backup from within their organization, or the backup of a professional service who protects the integrity of the craft.

Let me tell you a story. My family and I drove out to Sequoia National Park a few years ago. We stopped for dinner at a diner on the way. There was an elderly couple sitting next to us. He was wearing one of those navy caps with a picture of the battleship he’d served on. When their check arrived the old man wasn’t happy with the total. He called the waitress over and informed her the check didn’t reflect the early bird price. She smiled, and in her best voice, told him they’d been seated just a few minutes too late to get the early bird price. At which point Joe, and I know his name was Joe because his wife was telling Joe not to make a scene, reached for his wallet, pulled out his AARP card and sat it on the check. That was the end of the argument.

No one fucks with the AARP. Because the AARP looks out for their old people and they will fuck your shit up. Had that waitress not given Joe the early bird price I’m pretty sure a platoon of AARP lawyers would’ve parachuted into the diner. Joe ended up paying the early bird price because Joe had the power of a professional organization behind him.

Imagine this same situation playing out with a designer standing up for the solidity of their work. Imagine the power of a professional organization having our back. We’ve never had that. Possibly the AIGA came closest, but closest isn’t even the right word because it contains the word close. They look at UX designers the same way Donald Trump looks at a vegetable. I do believe they had an opportunity to become the organization we needed, had they wanted to be it, and had they taken the time between poster contests to do some actual work.

But every designer out there fighting the good fight is doing it with the knowledge that they’re going at it alone.

Why we failed, the third reason

The history of UX design is, until very very very recently, the history of design as defined by other fields. Our field was defined first by engineers because, let’s be fair, they’re the ones who invented the internet. And their definition of design — the people in the bunny hats who make the colors — is still widely accepted by a large majority of designers working in the field today. It’s the easy path. You sit in the corner, listening to The War On Drugs on your big expensive DJ headphones, picking colors and collecting checks.

We’ve spent the last twenty years proving our legitimacy to engineers who thought we were a waste of time. Until they realized we could magnify their power exponentially.

We let other people define the job. We complained when we were told what to do. We complained when we weren’t told what to do. We became proficient in eye-rolling. (Be honest. You proved my point by rolling your eyes at that last sentence.) We fought for a seat at the table, and once we started getting that seat, we found out a lot of designers didn’t want it.

I’m a little unfair when I say that designers haven’t fought. We’ve fought to have other people define us. We’ve fought to have other people define our responsibilities. We’ve fought to give away our agency. And we’ve fought not to have a seat at the table. We were all too happy to dribbble away our time while decisions were being made around us. (Shade.)

A few months ago, Jared Spool, who‘s been doing yeoman’s work for design for the better part of forty years, tweeted this out:

Anyone who influences what the design becomes is the designer. This includes developers, PMs, even corporate legal. All are the designers.

 — @jmspool

Everything in that tweet is correct. Everyone who influences the final thing, be it a product or a service, is designing. And yet, if you click through and look at the replies, what you’ll see is the evisceration of Jared Spool in defensive bite-sized little vitriolic thoughts still covered with the spittle of ego. And, even more sadly, it quickly turns into a discussion of titles. We are happy to give away all the responsibilities that come with the job, but don’t take our titles. I have seen designers argue for a week with a new employer about what their title will be, without sparing one breath to ask about their responsibilities.

Design is a verb. An act. Anyone is free to pick up the ball and run with it. And if you’re not doing the job you’re being paid to do you can’t be upset when someone else starts doing it. You cannot not design. What a professional designer brings to the act is intention. But for that, the designer needs to behave intentionally. Designers are dead. Long live design.

You just rolled your eyes. You should’ve thrown an elbow.

We are the children of capitalism’s last gasp

We are all working in a system that measures success financially. We are about how much money a movie makes on opening weekend (go Black Panther!), we pay attention to music climbing up the charts, and Jack Dorsey’s leadership was finally vindicated when Twitter posted their first profit-making quarter.

The first sentence of that linked Mashable article is chilling:

It turns out cutting back, focusing, and maybe a little Donald Trump can help make money.

Let’s look at the price of that profit-making quarter. Twitter’s profit came at the cost of democracy. When an American autocrat chose it as his platform of choice to sow hate, disparage women and minorities, and dogwhistle his racist base, Twitter rallied. Rather than shut him down for violating their terms of service, Twitter chose to expand those terms of service to accommodate the engagement Trump was bringing them. Twitter, and every employee working within Twitter, failed their moment. Their ethics failed them. The reason Donald Trump has access to nuclear weapons is, in no small part, thanks to Twitter.

Why is there no tool *built into Twitter* to identify and neutralise Russian bots? Because bots stir the pot. Raise the temperature. And keep us engaged. Twitter's engagement model is different from Facebook's. But arguably no less toxic. https://t.co/Y4HHQMxrXE

 — @mpesce

And yet, all is forgiven because they’ve now turned a profit. Profit justifies everything. Silicon Valley, the engine that powers the end of America needs to profit in order to survive, and it needs profit at scale. We remain enamored with our ideas, and blind to their effects. We award golden parachutes for failing big, because Silicon Valley rewards failing big over succeeding small.

The biggest sin in Silicon Valley is a small victory.

The path forward

In August of 2017, James Liang, an engineer for Volkswagen, was sentenced to 40 months in jail. A court in Detroit, Michigan sentenced him for knowingly designing software that cheated federal emissions tests. He wasn’t the only Volkswagen employee sent to jail for this. (Thankfully.) But he’s the one important to our story. He knew he was designing something deceitful and he did it anyway. That’s an ethical breakdown.

In March of 2017, Mike Isaac published an exposé in the New York Times about Greyball, a tool at Uber designed to purposely deceive authorities. Authorities that were looking out for the safety of Uber’s riders. No one at Uber has yet to go to jail. But the stories are the same.

Two companies, both of which knowingly designed software with the express purposes of deceiving regulating bodies. Volkswagen got caught because the automotive industry is regulated. We know cars are dangerous. Uber got away with it because they claim to be a software company, (Narrator: they’re not.) and we’re just beginning to realize how dangerous software can be, especially in the hands of companies led by ethicless feckless men. But Travis Kalanick, Uber CEO when Greyball was designed, should be in jail as well.

We need to be held accountable for our actions. We’ve been moving fast. We’ve been breaking things. Sometimes on purpose. Sometimes out of ignorance. The effects are the same. The things we’re building are bigger than they used to be, and have more reach. The moment to slow down is here. Because what we’re breaking is too important and too precious. Much of it is irreplaceable.

I am part of design’s last generation. I’ve fucked up. We all have. None of us did enough. Maybe the tide was too strong, or maybe we were too weak. But as I look behind me I see the hope of a new generation. They’re asking better questions, at a younger age, than we ever did. And I truly hope they do better than us because the stakes have never been higher.

For this younger generation to succeed they’re going to need the following:

A body of oversight

You’re going to need someone to have your back. Look to history. Long hours and working weekends are still long hours and working weekends, regardless of whether the cafeteria is serving swordfish. Human resource departments do not work for you, as Susan Fowler and many courageous others have found out. They work for your boss.

I am the son of a Philadelphia construction worker. Every winter my father got laid off because it was too cold to build, and every winter someone from the union showed up with groceries. The only ones who will ever stand up for workers are other workers. Not only do you need licenses, you need a union.

And when one of you is trying to do the right thing, let them (and their bosses) know that there’s an entire brotherhood and sisterhood standing behind them.

Educational autonomy

Art has as much in common with design as a potato has with a Honda Civic. So why are we still cramming design departments into art schools? Not to disparage art schools — they’re a wonderful place to get an art education. I’m also not disparaging existing design programs here as much as I’m trying to get you more room! Design is too important and too big a field now to be given a wing in someone else’s school. It’s time to create our own. A few years ago Jared Spool and Leslie Jensen-Inman did just that. They started Center Centre, a small school in Chattanooga, Tennessee to specifically train UX designers. I hope it succeeds and that it’s the first of many.

License to practice

My friend Ryan is a professional dogwalker. Dude loves dogs. Which I totally get because at our best, our goal should be to be the people our dogs think we are. Before Ryan could become a professional dogwalker he had to get a license. He had to pass a test. As someone who loves my dog more than I should, I’m glad he had to do that. It reassures me that my dog is in good hands. I know that if my dog does something stupid, which he does plenty, Ryan will know how to handle it.

My dentist is licensed. My doctor is licensed. My lawyer is licensed. My accountant is licensed. Almost every professional I interact with is licensed. There are really good reasons for that. Not only does this let me know they’ve passed some sort of test, some sort of proficiency, but it also gives me a way to measure a standard of expectation for their level of service, and a way to address any grievance with a lack of it.

Closer to home, architecture is the hardest design profession to study and get into and has incredibly high standards. Architects can debate style and aesthetics all night, but at the end of the day, their shit has to be up to code. Architects have to make sure that engineers and contractors carry our their intention and are ready to make changes to their vision to accommodate reality. There’s no minimal viable product in architecture because bad architecture kills people. Bad UX is now just as deadly. And yeah, even Howard fucking Roarke had to be licensed.

And while I’ll be the first to agree that licensing doesn’t solve all of the problems listed in this article, I do believe that it’s the first step in addressing those problems. It gives us a chance. Let’s not spend the next ten years looking for the perfect solution at the cost of implementing a good one.

As professionals in the design field, a field becoming more complex by the day, it’s time that we aim for a professional level of accountability. In the end, a profession doesn’t decide to license itself. It happens when a regulatory body decides we’ve been reckless and unable to regulate ourselves. This isn’t for our sake. It’s for the sake of the people whose lives we come in contact with. We moved too fast and broke too many things.

Amateur hour is over.

A Designer’s Code of Ethics

Hi. My name is Mike and I run workshops all over the world. I enjoy doing it. A lot. One of my favorite workshops is about teaching people how to present work with confidence. At some point during my favorite workshop I ask my favorite question: What’s the most confident statement that can come out of your mouth?

“I got this.”

“I know what to do.”

“I’m right!”

Then, and this is how I know if the workshop is going well, there’ll be a tentative voice from the back, and it’s usually someone who hasn’t said much all day, someone who was doing more listening than talking. “I don’t know?” And yeah, they usually frame it as a question. But I know they don’t mean it as a question.

“You, in the back! What did you just say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Correct!”

I’ve been teaching this workshop for a couple of years now. The goal of the workshop is to teach people, people like you, how to talk about your work to other people — usually people who pay or can fire you — and to do it like an expert. How to do it with confidence.

I’m betting half of you got a dirty feeling in the pit of their stomach just seeing the word confidence. Dirty, dirty word. So slick. Confidence is gonna save your career.

The point of confidence isn’t to bullshit your way through a presentation. I won’t teach you to lie. (Your babysitters should’ve done that.) And I won’t teach you how to sell crappy work. My target audience is people who do amazing work, but were never taught how to sell it correctly. Thankfully our industry is full of them.

Why is confidence important? It’s important for a few reasons.

Firstly, confidence is a transitive property. People feel confident about work they’re receiving when the person delivering it is doing it confidently. They want to know they hired the right person for the job. Makes them feel smart. And they are smart. They hired you, didn’t they. Show them how smart they are.

Secondly, confidence saves time. Your humility in presenting good work is expensive. It slows things down and it keeps other people from doing their work. If you’re not sure about what you’re showing me why should I be sure about it. Meanwhile the rest of the team is waiting on you.

Thirdly, the words you use to describe your work are the same words the people you present it to will use when they describe it. So if you want your boss to tell her boss the work is awesome, you need to model those words for her. Also, make sure the work is awesome.

Last but not least, and this is where our original point kicks back in, at some point during the presentation, as much as you may have prepared and practiced, the person you’re presenting to will ask you a question that stumps you. (This moment is where careers are made, btw!)

You have a few options here:

• You can lie. But only assholes lie.
• You can try to make something up on the fly. But they’ll see right through that, plus it’ll probably be wrong, in which case it’s a lie.
• You can buy for time with a strategically stretched out series of ummmmmmms until a co-worker bails you out. But every ummmmmmmm that comes out of your mouth is decreasing the room’s confidence in you. Or, or, OR! You can say the most confident thing that has ever come out of your mouth:

“I don’t know.”

Also, you need to follow that up with something like “I’m excited to find out.” or “Give me until the end of the day/week to look into it.” And then follow up.

“‘I don’t know’ has become ‘I don’t know yet.‘“— Bill Gates

It’s easy to look confident when you know what you’re talking about. (And to be clear, you should know what you’re talking about most of the time.) But on that rare occasion that you don’t, letting people know that you’re confident enough to admit that you’re at a loss is when you beat the level boss. No one has all the answers, and pretending you do doesn’t make you look confident, it makes you look a fool.

Being calm and collected while expressing a missing piece of knowledge? Amazing. Confident. If anything people’s confidence in you has grown. Now they trust you. They know you’ll admit when you don’t know something. And that’s huge.

I do these workshops all over the world. They’re great. Everybody comes in nervous and leaves happy. Some of them even email me things like “I totally nailed my presentation this week!” I save every one of those emails. If you’re interested in having me do one at your organization, let me know. Except now I have to come up with a new trick, I gave this one away.

Presenting Work With Confidence - Mule

“I don’t know“ was originally published in Mule Design Studio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I left Twitter on January 1st.

Yet, I am jonesing.

I’ve been on Twitter for over 10 years. I’ve met a ton of great people on there. And up until recently it’s been fun! (I wrote about my whole history with Twitter a while back.) It was often the first thing I checked in the morning and the last thing I checked at night. It was like air. And then it wasn’t fun anymore. (Some would argue that for them, it was never fun. And that distinction was/is often based along gender and racial lines.) And now it’s gone from not being fun to being toxic.

I’ve written about depression before. Like a ton of people, I have to deal with it. (Like, less-than-a-ton of people I’m lucky enough to have access to care when I need it.) One of the warning signs for me is when I can’t tell the difference between a big problem and a small problem. My brain stops prioritizing. Every problem comes at me at exactly the same size. This is depression taking away a major coping mechanism. And that’s exactly what was happening on Twitter. Every outrage was becoming the exact same size. Whether it was a US president declaring war on a foreign nation, or an actor not wearing the proper shade of a designated color to an awards ceremony. On Twitter those problems become exactly the same size. They receive the same amount of outrage. They’re presented identically. They’re just as big as one another. Twitter works like a giant depressed brain. It can’t tell right from wrong, and it can’t tell big from small. It needs help.

The thing is, my brain works that way because it’s broken, so I get it treatment. Twitter works that way by design. Twitter is working exactly like Twitter’s leadership team wants it to be working. The constant outrage, the hatred, the anxiety, the harassment — it’s all by design. It’s engagement. And engagement brings them money and raises their stock price. They have no interest in changing it. If they wanted to change it they would’ve taken real steps to do so.

Twitter’s never taken a step against harassment. They’ve taken steps to stop bad PR. That is very different. And you might think that’s a cynical viewpoint, but when Donald Trump tweets about nuclear war with North Korea, Twitter packages it into an email blast to make sure you see it. They are monetizing that moment of panic.

So I left. I left because I believe Twitter has a social responsibility to help make the world a better place. All companies do. We need to challenge the idea that a CEO’s primary mission is to make money for shareholders. That may be one of their missions, but to single that out as a primary mission is irresponsible. Society simply can’t afford for your business to make money without regard to the impact it has on the environment. We learned this when McDonald’s cleared the Amazon to raise beef. Society simply can’t afford for your business to make money without regard to the impact it has on your clients physical well-being. We learned this when Philip Morris was knowingly shoving cancer in our lungs. Society simply can’t afford for your business to make money without regard to the impact it has on our mental well-being. We’re learning this now as Jack Dorsey lines the bank accounts of his shareholders with the fruits of our anxiety.

Twitter has purposefully, knowingly used anxiety and fear to build a business. Donald Trump may indeed be the instrument of our destruction, but Jack Dorsey handed him the platform to do it. Twitter is the most dangerous company in the world, and it’s run by an idiot.

At this point I truly believe Twitter to be a toxic product. It poisons your mind. It’s harmful and hazardous to your mental health. And furthermore I believe everyone in a leadership position at Twitter knows this as well, and they continue to peddle the toxicity. (If you’re arguing they don’t realize the toxicity of their product, please consider that may actually be worse.) Twitter makes money by hurting you. They are no better than big tobacco or big pharma. They’re willing to trade your health for profit.

So I left. But before I left I wrote Jack Dorsey’s resignation letter. Because I wanted this to be the kind of universe where that object existed.

Jack Dorsey’s Resignation Letter to Twitter

It’s been two weeks since I’ve sent a tweet. The app’s still on my phone. (They say the best way to quit is with a pack still in your pocket.) The account’s still up for practical reasons. First off, I use it to log in to several things. Yeah, I can change that, but it’s a pain in the ass. More importantly, people still DM me once in a while, and some of those are business leads, which I don’t want to lose. Plus, I’ve got embedded tweets all over the place, and other folks have embedded my tweets in their own articles. So if I actually shut down the account things break. I don’t want things to break any more than they already have.

But for all intents and purposes I am gone. At least until things change.But I’ve moved it off the home screen. Replaced it with Duolingo. I’m learning Portuguese. (I only really knew enough to chat with my parents before this.) I’m reading more. I’m no less aware of the news of the day than I was before. I read news sites I trust. I read for pleasure. But holy shit, I am not freaking the fuck out all the time.

I used to encourage you to follow me on Twitter. Now I encourage you to follow me out. You’ll be happier. You’ll be able to breathe.

This essay first showed up on my newsletter, which is the bestest way to keep up with me now that I’ve kicked the habit. Sign up!