Tech Doesn’t Drive Social Change. People Do.
In exactly two week’s time, myself, Will, and Umesh will sit down for our customary post-hackathon debrief. We will be discussing the results from our UN Hack with Connect2Effect, The Office Group, and the United Nations. This is — I hope — of no great surprise to our readers, but what may be, is the fact that the power of technology to combat inequality will likely not be the centre of our discussion.
Tech and hackathons go together like mac and cheese, or ice cream and chocolate. To have the one without the other just limits their potency. While we do not need to discuss the role that tech plays in hackathons, and in creating exciting new products and services, it is the people that lay at the foundation of true social change.
Before we were co-founders of UniHack, the three of us have spent a near decade — each — working in social enterprise. Volunteering as naive, wide-eyed teenagers, building our own ventures at university with Enactus, and even flirting with gainful employment helping others build their enterprises (social or otherwise!). One of things we have learnt through this is the importance of committed teams, driven by better outcomes for a world that needs to change: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead’s wise words have resonated ever since we first heard them a decade ago. With an upcoming hackathon tackling inequality, one hardly needs to emphasise the role that we all play in creating a more just, fair, and balanced society.
Looking more broadly, it is easy to get swept up in innovations surrounding phones, space travel, or AI. But these aren’t innovations driven by technology, they are driven by people. Names like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk will be forever tied to mobile phones and space travel respectively. No doubt a central figure will emerge as we progress towards the Terminator / Ex Machina / WALL-E world in which we may soon live (please delete according to taste/optimism!).
It’s well-documented that, despite being synonymous with the iPhone, Steve Jobs never wrote a single line of code. Neither did he develop new technology to enable touchscreens. In fact, all Jobs did (and ‘all’, here, is entirely relative) was have a vision for what an exceptional user experience should look like. His real achievement was bringing together those people who could realise that vision, and drive them to success. While Elon Musk has a more technical background, with one of his two bachelors degrees being in Physics, he famously dropped out of his PhD studies just two days in, to pursue more varied goals.
What is interesting about all of Elon Musk’s endeavours though, is that they aren’t really about technology. SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX are all part of Musk’s greater vision for a more sustainable world. The tech is incidental — the real goal is sustainable development.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Technology is quite simply, the great enabler. Just as factories and coal burning enabled the industrial revolution in Britain’s 18th Century, with James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and many others the true pioneers, charging forward into the next century.
Our central motivation for the creation of UniHack was creating the ideal environments in which people and technology can truly collide together, in the name of solving problems. We cannot wait to see what tech gets built next weekend, but it is the people we will truly be watching. It is small groups of people who stand out from the crowd, who solve problems, who are building a better world for everyone.
And when we’re hacking inequality, we really do mean everyone.
