Dear Senator, Tech Got Your?Tongue?
It was just past midnight on a humid summer day in India and akin to how all reality show enthusiasts tune into the first episode of a new TV show, I logged into facebook, quickly glanced through my feed and clicked on the first media link streaming the testimony live.
It was going to be a big day for tech enthusiasts and I didn’t want to miss out. When was the last time a CEO’s testimony received such publicity that the conversation around the company’s fate seeped into our drawing room conversations?
Chairman Gassley and Chairman Thune just concluded their opening remarks and made a point to include that it was unusual for the CEO of a company to testify before half of the US senate — a fact which was not lost on the hundred and fifty odd members in the room or the millions watching online. The ranking members provided a neat context to everyone who might have been living under the rock and managed to bundle political campaigns, consumer privacy, regulation and social media in their monologues.
Cambridge Analytica, the firm which kicked the hornet’s nest just started live-tweeting its defense.
Mark Zuckerberg seemed to be on his guard. This was a defining moment for his company and he was focused on getting away with the least amount of damage. He was prepared for this moment. His army consisting of hundreds of PR personnel, public policy consultants and lawyers had briefed him and conducted mock grilling sessions to make him feel comfortable.
In hindsight, their meticulous preparation turned out to be a bit of an over kill. Like a school student who figures that he would have aced a test even with lesser amount of preparation, it sure was a more relaxed Zuckerberg who went home.
But a different set of people would come under the cross-hairs of the public.
Two hours into the testimony, I was becoming a bit restless. It was 2 am in the morning and I was wide awake waiting to see some hard questions pop up.
All that was happening was a painful episode where most of the senators were asking questions that a quick online search can give them answers to. Barring the few laughs in between (Senator, we run ads!), it was turning out to be a drab affair.
While I was watching the panel shoot on an inconsequential and tangential path, I was reminded of a personal incident which happened 5 months ago.
Back then, I was trying to break into a VC fund and was on the lookout for opportunities (I have since changed my career path but that is another story). Being from a non-target undergrad with around 16 odd months of experience, I knew that this going to be a tough climb. But I was genuinely interested towards the intersection of technology and business and it seemed to be a good space to be in.
I consumed dozens of news reports about startup financing, long reads on moves of tech companies and subscribed to several newsletters which covered these topics.
I wrote articles on the VC industry in India and growth strategies of tech startups, assisted entrepreneurs who approached me as a part of my role at an early stage investment network, found mentors from the industry, contributed to an independent project undertaken by a senior venture capitalist and was also a columnist at a top media portal related to technology and entrepreneurship.
One thing lead to the other and I had a referral and an interview at a marquee venture fund which invests across the Asian markets and had a two-member India team here in India.
By this time, I was feeling pretty confident about my chances and walked into the building with confidence.
I first met with the Partner and we spoke about the investments I was a part of, emerging trends, my bearish opinion of the consumer internet market, and a new line of enterprise startups which were focused on making cloud operations easier.
My gut feeling told me that it went reasonably well.
Then came a meeting with the Vice President (the other guy of the two-member team).
Q: Which part of the tech stack can you perform a due-diligence on?
A: ………
This was the moment that punctured my confidence.
I am not a software noob. I can give you a rough estimate of the time/resources which go into developments of apps (to be honest, maybe only mobile).
If you tell me the features or product upgrades, I can put together a bunch of numbers to understand what the business scenario might look like.
I have an overview of the different languages developers use and how the sprint cycle sessions are usually conducted.
But identifying code quality or doing an architectural review or zeroing on components of the software that cannot function at scale was not my area of expertise.
Back to the question, I knew that I couldn’t beat around the bush. And these folks were looking at people with some technical chops. I tried veering the conversation to the business side but invariably, I lost my track.
That was the first time that tech got my tongue.
Politicians work on first order thinking. Tech values second order thinking.
I am not the one to post a doomsday scenario by saying that knowing how software works is the elixir of having a thriving career in the 21st-century economy. There are too many specialized professions which demand human expertise.
But understanding how technology operates becomes important when individuals, companies or countries for that matter want to get a step ahead in discharging their duties or climb the value chain. And this value can be measured by anything — wealth, trust, safety or even regulation.
And this level of understanding might be usually a step higher than what you are currently comfortable with. For someone who is already in the VC business and has a peripheral understanding, a possible requirement could be about understanding how the code works.
For a legacy company like GM, it is about hiring top minds or buying companies which can make them move from plain car manufacturers to autonomous vehicles.
For a country like China which sees Artificial Intelligence as a tool for dominance, it could be putting its best brains together to bring out an AI roadmap after understanding the implications and use cases.
But for some reasons, politicians seem to yet wake up to the fact that they have a learning curve than most and the recent events stand as a testament to that. And being comfortable with tech is not about having a facebook account for your constituents to follow. Maybe knowing that Facebook works by displaying ads is a good place to start. ;)
What brings this issue to the forefront is that we are dependant on politicians (by choice or fate) to frame policies ranging from how we interact with people and services online to how we store our money to our choice of commute.
Do you trust a rule where the rule-maker doesn’t know what he is talking about, forget knowing the consequence of it?
That brings us to the question of why our politicians have a tough time making sense of technological progress.
What are their impediments?
When you consider politics as a possible industry (with all its lawmakers, consultants, influencers etc.) and pit it against technology, you will actually begin to think that the motivations/ incentive structures which guide it are fundamentally different from the latter.
Politicians work on first order thinking. Tech values second-order thinking.
Politics is a lot about achieving a certain end.
I want to run for Congress this time.
I want to be a part of this committee.
I want to eradicate this particular menace.
It is about being focused on a single short-term goal and aligning your resources to achieve that.
Shane Parrish of Farnam Street blog has an article devoted to the difference between first and second order of thinking but it would be worth quoting an example he mentions:
Consider a country that, wanting to inspire regime change in another country, funds and provides weapons to a group of “moderate rebels.” Only it turns out that those moderate rebels will become powerful and then go to war with the sponsoring country for decades. Whoops.
The number of times this has repeated in the history of man-kind shows how first-order thinking has seeped into a politician’s psyche.
But technology values second-order thinking. It is not about merely getting things done but about second-guessing your hypothesis and assumptions.
The same blog elucidates on what constitutes second order thinking:
Second-order thinkers take into account a lot of what we put into our decision journals. Things like 1) what are the key variables and how do they interact?, 2) where is the leverage?, and 3) if I take this action, what happens next?
When you are appearing for an interview at a tech firm, it is not only about solving the problem but about finding the algorithm with the least time complexity (speed up execution).
When you make a new feature upgrade, you are trying to understand if it drives up any engagement metric/ cannibalize an existing one — and if it does, you are trying to figure out if the trade-off makes sense in the long term.
One interesting way this played out was when Zuckerberg didn’t call out on the panel members when they asked purely absurd questions.
He didn’t bother about correcting the question when asked if Facebook could track ‘emails’ sent from WhatsApp
Senator: “If I email someone over WhatsApp about Black Panther, will I see ads about Black Panther?”
Zuckerberg: “WhatsApp messages are fully encrypted.”
When Roy Blunt questioned Zuckerberg about Facebook's ad policies, he could have easily pointed that the congressman himself was a client of Cambridge Analytica.
But second order thinking tells him that calling out on their incompetency might bring some glee to the audience on television but would only antagonize them. It poses a risk to the company’s long-term prospects.
And it is this second-order thinking that our politicians should understand if they hope to make sense of the constantly evolving technology landscape.
When Zuckerberg said that the average American uses 8 apps to communicate with people, a simple ‘how many apps do you own among them’, might have helped them make more sense of the company and its growing reach.
It is more about building consensus and less about getting things done.
Politics is about cobbling together support. You scratch my back and I will scratch yours seems to reign supreme. The concept of voting (polls/ bills) and the majority/ minority split has conditioned politicians to believe in the power of numbers and feel comfortable in groups.
10 people grilling a CEO?
Nah.
40+ people grilling a CEO?
Sounds right up my alley.
Compare this with the two pizza rule coined by Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos:
If a team couldn’t be fed with two pizzas, it was too big.
Tech doesn’t like working in groups because their second order thinking hints that the consequence would be troubled inter-personal dynamics which could decrease productivity.
It is about moving fast and putting the product out there. Agreed, this can turn out to be harmful when things get out of hand as seen with Uber and maybe facebook in hindsight, but in most cases, it has given them velocity to focus on their immediate goals.
When city agencies ordered Uber to halt services for not obtaining a taxi license or insurance, Uber ignored them and published a blogpost stating that the regulations hadn’t been written with Uber’s “cutting edge transportation technology” in mind.
If you are supposed to monitor or track the progress that comes from this sort of a ‘build at any cost’ approach, you should make sure that you are moving quickly and not letting group psychology show the light.
The job is about maintaining status quo whereas tech’s upswing is in disrupting it.
By design, a politicians job is to minimise risk and maintain status quo.
If a natural disaster is around the corner, you make it a point that you can vacate people around the surrounding area where it might strike. And it doesn’t matter if initial reports mark it as a safe area — you are optimizing for the best possible scenario.
You are rewarded for making sure that existing government schemes get implemented.
You play to the fence by keeping different communities happy. A few smiles, a few photo-ops and a properly functioning office can keep you in the good books of people.
Don’t break the status quo and you should be okay.
But that’s a luxury that tech companies can’t afford.
Your value and valuation depend on how many practices/ industries you are ‘disrupting’. Netflix killed Blockbuster to occupy the position it currently is in. Amazon was cheered when it bought Whole Foods — offline retail was a new industry it could transform. Elon Musk is The Elon Musk because he wants to make humans an inter-planetary species.
The grander your ambitions are, the higher the pedestal you are put on.
And this reward makes them creatively bend rules, identify shortcuts and figure out psychological hacks — all which are appreciated by the circle that these executives or companies are a part of.
The risk-reward structure for both these industries is vastly different.
It is necessary for politicians to break out of the mindset they are tuned to and understand that when you are dealing with technology, you always play with your front foot.
Once it was clear how bad it was and how mismatched they were, everybody had this awakening: We have made some mistakes, but these guys know even less.”
The sense of relief that the employees felt at Facebook could very well explain how anti-climatic the whole testimony was.
There is no doubt that today’s tech companies are growing at a rapid pace and there is an increasing clamor about bringing in some form of a regulation to ensures citizens are in control of their data or can reap the benefits of a particular technology.
In Aaron Sorkin’s hit TV show, The West Wing, there is a moment where one of the President’s staffers makes a comment while talking about judicial appointments:
It’s not about abortion it’s about the next twenty years. Twenties and thirties it was the role of government. Fifties and sixties it was civil rights. The next two decades are gonna be privacy. I’m talking about the internet. I’m talking about cell phones. I’m talking about health records and who’s gay and who’s not.
The fantastic show was way ahead of its time but as it predicted privacy has eventually turned out to be an important conversation point since the dawn of the new millennium.
The ability to watch half of the US Senate grilling the founder of a $450 Bn. company from around 8,000 miles afar via a $20 per month internet connection along with millions of other people across the globe makes for a powerful narrative of how technology has crept into our daily conscience — either as a tool or a medium to spread information.
And with all its advancements, if we are to ensure that the benefits of technology as a force majeure continue, we better hope that our politicians put on their thinking hats to play the long game and don’t let tech get their tongues the next time around.