The utilitarian web
What is the point of the internet?
As my son starts to grow up I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the explosion in child mental health issues (which appears to be widespread globally, at least in the English-speaking world).
It’s difficult to pin down a cause, but there are various credible voices pointing towards smartphone usage. I know from my own relationship with social media that it’s incredibly difficult to switch off and truly relax.
Given how embedded technology has become in our lives, it’s hard to know where to start when attempting to tackle this problem. Despite my well-founded fears about what technology is doing to society (and to young people’s mental health in particular), as somebody who has built a career working with technology, I’m also passionate about its potential to address some of the many problems faced by humanity.
The word “utilitarian” has become loaded in recent years, at least in the tech world. The rise of Effective Altruism, and indeed the rise (and fall?) of crypto/blockchain tech, has taken the idea of “utilitarianism” off on a big tangent that is not very helpful in addressing the very real problems that today’s world of technology poses (I could dive into an discussion about how the Effective Altruism movement imploded with the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, but if you want to go down that rabbit hole then you should read an article like this).
The gleeful way that Marc Andressen and other Effective Accelerationism proponents have responded to the demise of Effective Altruism is only making things worse, and the preview of Sora by OpenAI is hardly reassuring (the tech may be impressive but the “create whatever video you want” use case is the opposite of what humanity needs right now).
Rather than framing a debate about utility from the perspective of a university graduate choosing what to do with their life (which is the myopic way in which the Effective Alturism movement emerged), I think we need to be framing utility from the perspective of the user, and building tech that does the absolute bare minimum to meet clearly defined needs.
Lots of existing tech fails to pass the test. The utility of TikTok or Twitter/X (for example) is hard to justify especially given the very clear downsides in terms of destroying our attention spans, exposing us to misinformation or cyber-bullying, and generally just making us miserable.
Rather than being vital utilities that we rely on to thrive as humans, lots of existing tech platforms are arguably more like drugs that we are addicted to despite them being bad for us.
Instead we should be building technology that has a clear utility defined in terms of how it is solving an existing well-identified problem (including the problem of terminal distraction and all the other very blatant issues associated with our current use of technology).
This is the founding principle I’m striving to bring to my work in technology, and one that I plan to explore more in future posts.