Celebrations, risks, and spending the time given to us

The last two years have been a roller coaster for me. 2022 was, from a professional perspective, both the worst and the best year in my career. Worst because I was ill for half of it. I got thyroiditis as an auto-immune consequence of contracting Covid in July. The best year because my entrepreneurial journey has gone well in spite of my illness - revenue, margins, customer base, and the recruitment situation all moved in the right direction. My health gradually improved and in spring 2023 I finally felt that I had completely left the disease behind me. The global economy turned down, however, and with it the general conditions for small innovation businesses, which affected us.

The expected recovery time of subacute thyroiditis is 2-5 months, but it took me around 9 months to fully recover - about 1.5% of my expected professional life. The company is small and dependent on my engagement as a founder, so it has taken all my focus to keep the company running. As a result, I have reevaluated how I spend each week's hours and eliminated everything non-essential.

During 2022 and 2023, I was nominated to three different "person of the year in category X" lists, by different organisations. As a company founder, it is of course flattering, but also useful - every form of attention is well needed marketing. I nevertheless decided to decline the nominations and to be left out of the celebrations. It is difficult to explain without sounding arrogant or snobbish, but I need to be able to point to an explanation, so I want to give it a try.

It has now happened a few times that I am nominated for something or put on a list. (I am not counting the stream of "For only 2500 EUR, we will put you on the AI startup founders of the year list" solicitations.) I have also been invited to attend many award ceremonies and other celebrations of professional success. As an industry, we have lots of achievements to celebrate. We have together created marvellous things with great positive impact on the world. Some of the things we create, however, also come with significant risks. The Cambridge Analytica scandal awakened us - a scenario that only two years earlier was depicted as a digital dystopia in the "House of Cards" TV series was actually harsh reality. The rise of right wing populism in the west, Brexit, and Russian manipulation of elections are probably phenomena that the tech community inadvertently have contributed to. Then there are cryptocurrencies - a fantastic gift to the criminal world that has not only given them a more convenient currency than drugs, but even enabled digital criminals to efficiently monetise computer takeovers and thereby effectively created two new forms of digital crime: cycle stealing and ransomware. For the first time in history, criminals can execute and profit at scale from crimes thousands of kilometres away, at a safe distance, often in countries that approve of the crimes and protect the criminals.

I had an unpleasant realisation when I spoke to an old friend, also one of the Swedish government's top finance politicians, and asked him about their position on cryptocurrencies. It turned out that the finance department was not aware of how cryptocurrencies enable international crime and thereby impact national security. They viewed cryptocurrencies from a financial perspective - as a bubble expected to burst due to the lack of underlying value. Unfortunately, the utility as the most convenient payment method for crime might be sufficient underlying value for the bubble to endure. They had not realised that we might need their intervention to regulate or prohibit cryptocurrencies if we want to put an end to ransomware and involuntary Western funding of Russian and North Korean state sponsored hacking groups. There are different views on whether cryptocurrencies should be prohibited, but we want such decisions to be made consciously in democratic processes, not by accidental omissions due to ignorance.

We, the tech nerds that create these powerful inventions, are clearly not talking enough about the negative impacts of what we create and how to mitigate them. We cannot expect politicians or others outside the technical community to understand the implications of what we build. We barely understand them ourselves.

I feel that I have been lucky with my professional path - I have some kind of talent for skills that are valuable in our time, and I have been fortunate to become employed in rare places where I could learn them. Technical evolution changes and shapes the world. We who work with modern technology have an unproportional impact on where the world is heading. For me, it is important that the impact I have and the contributions I make have a positive impact and that I avoid making things worse. Avoiding harm and mitigating risks with technology are areas where I would like to spend more time and energy.

I have made some contributions to education on risk management within data engineering (https://youtu.be/UsF-E_QgBUU, https://youtu.be/IitY9yZFPSA ). There is so much to do, however, and we do not spend focus and effort in proportion to the risks involved.

In contrast to the many celebration invitations, I can only recall being invited once to discuss risks with the technology we create. (Credits to Norstedts Juridik and Bonde Advokater for the initiative.)

We all have the same amount of time per day, and there are so many things we want to do with it. The success of the company I founded is still dependent on the time I put in, so I have little work time for other activities. I want to keep talking about technology risks, but most other things have to go. In that pruning, I choose to discard celebrations. We do have to meet within the community, but I find that celebrations provide less value for the community and myself in comparison to conferences, podcasts, and other activities where we share knowledge.

Some celebrations are organised by companies that do fantastic things for the community and I really want to support them, but will do so in other ways. I have nothing against celebrations, I don't mind that they happen, I am not boycotting anything, and I might participate in the future. I have only made a conscious decision about how I want to spend my working time. I hope that I got the tone right explaining my decision. I apologise for rejecting those that are enthusiastic and work hard to create meeting spaces for us - you do great and important work.

Let's hope for a better 2024 than 2023, which was a gloomy year for many. But let's also not forget that even during years filled with setbacks, there are many things that have changed for the better. A new malaria vaccine became available in 2023, which will save thousands of lives, and three out of four countries saw decreasing poverty rates.