This Wired expose about a few tumultuous years at Google is really something. Mostly known for their ability to handle disagreements internally (with a few well-known exceptions), Google’s culture seems to really have taken a turn, with employees actively speaking out about what the company values—including how the company is enabling an out of control U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Read MoreSomething to keep your eye on: this week, tech community leaders with a stake in digital equity launched Build Tech We Trust, a collective effort to hold themselves accountable to fighting hate.
Here’s hoping this will gain some traction within the industry. Many of the signers have already been outspoken critics of its direction over the last few years, including Anil Dash and Ellen Pao.
Read MoreElizabeth Warren made headlines last week by outlining several proposals to break up Big Tech, including tighter regulation of acquisitions and mergers, and prohibiting companies from offering a marketplace for commerce and competing in that marketplace—or often choking off competition. (Watch Hasan Minhaj’s excellent outline of how Amazon does this, if you haven’t already.)
The policy proposals seems to have been met with excitement by consumers (including me) who think Big Tech is getting too powerful, and hasn’t done enough to self-regulate. But some of the specifics have been met with criticism.
Read MoreHappy International Women’s Day! Just a quick reminder: we’re not doing enough globally to close the gap between men and women.
Read MoreLast week I attended a one-day conference called “Leading For Good” at Loyola’s Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility, aimed at bringing together social and civic minded corporate executives from around the Chicago area. The connections and conversations were good, but in all honesty, I left frustrated that the conversation still mostly centered around whether or not a business should be doing good, rather than how it should go about doing it.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. We have no common definition of business “purpose”, and no shared ethical framework for how to evaluate whether or not the decisions made by a business can be considered “good.”
Read MoreIf you haven’t yet read Derek Thompson’s excellent essay in The Atlantic about “The Religion of Workism,” I highly recommend it. Thompson’s thesis—that in American society we’ve replaced religion with “workism” as a way to find meaning—strikes at the very heart of many occupational ambitions. (Including, if I’m honest, my own.)
“For today’s workists,” Thompson says, “anything short of finding one’s vocational soul mate means a wasted life.”
Read MoreEarlier this week I spoke at a class at Loyola University on Ethics & Communication—a topic highly relevant to our time. I was specifically asked to give my opinion on “Ethics in a Digital World.”
Here’s what I listed as the five biggest issues that concern me right now.
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