{"id":6840,"date":"2017-02-15T13:51:43","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T17:51:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/?p=6840"},"modified":"2017-02-20T10:57:49","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T14:57:49","slug":"when-good-intentions-backfire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2017\/02\/15\/when-good-intentions-backfire.html","title":{"rendered":"When Good Intentions Backfire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2026 And Why We Need a Hacker\u00a0Mindset<\/strong><\/h2>\n


\nI am surrounded by people who are driven by good intentions.<\/span> Educators who want to inform students, who passionately believe that people can be empowered through knowledge<\/span>. Activists who have committed their lives to addressing inequities, who believe that they have a moral responsibility to shine a spotlight on injustice. Journalists who believe <\/span>their<\/span> mission is to inform the public, who believe that objectivity is the cornerstone of their profession<\/span>. I am in awe of their passion and commitment, their dedication and persistence.<\/p>\n

Yet, I\u2019m existentially struggling as I watch them fight for what is right. <\/span>I <\/span>have<\/span>learned that <\/span>people who view themselves through the lens of good intentions cannot imagine that they could be a pawn in someone else\u2019s game<\/span>.<\/span> They cannot imagine that the values and frames that they\u2019ve dedicated their lives towards\u200a\u2014\u200afree speech, media literacy, truth\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/span>could be manipulated<\/span> or repurposed by others in ways that undermine their good intentions<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

I find it frustrating to bear witness to good intentions getting manipulated,<\/span>but it\u2019s even harder to watch how those who are wedded to good intentions are <\/span>often unwilling to acknowledge this, let alone start imagining how to develop the appropriate antibodies<\/span>.<\/span> Too many folks that I love dearly just want to double down on the approaches they\u2019ve taken and the commitments they\u2019ve made.<\/span> On one hand, I get it\u200a\u2014\u200afolks\u2019 life-work and identities are caught up in these issues.<\/span><\/p>\n

But this is where I think we\u2019re going to get ourselves into loads of trouble.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>he world is full of people with all sorts of intentions. Their practices and values, ideologies and belief systems collide in all sorts of complex way. Sometimes, the fight is about combating horrible intentions, but often it is not<\/span>.<\/span> In college, my roommate used to pound a mantra into my head whenever I would get spun up about something: \u201c<\/span>Do not attribute to maliciousness what you can attribute to stupidity<\/span>.<\/span>\u201d<\/span> I return to this statement a lot when I think about how to build resilience and challenge injustices, especially when things look so corrupt and horribly intended\u200a\u2014\u200aor when people who should be allies see each other as combatants.<\/span> But as I think about how we should resist manipulation and fight <\/span>prejudice,<\/span> I also think that it\u2019s imperative to move away from simply relying on \u201cgood intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to undermine those <\/span>with<\/span> good intentions, but I also don\u2019t want good intentions to be a tool that can be used against people.<\/span> So I want to think about how good intentions get embedded in various practices and the implications of how we view the different actors involved<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The Good Intentions of Media Literacy<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I penned my essay \u201cDid Media Literacy Backfire?\u201d<\/a>, I wanted to ask those who were committed to media literacy to think about how their good intentions\u200a\u2014\u200asituated in a broader cultural context\u200a\u2014\u200amight not play out as they would like. Folks who critiqued my essay on media literacy pushed back in all sorts of ways, both online and off. Many made me think, but some also reminded me that my way of writing was off-putting. I was accused of using the question \u201cDid media literacy backfire?\u201d to stoke clicks.<\/span>Some snarkily challenged my suggestion that media literacy was even meaningfully in existence, asked me to be specific about which instantiations I meant (because I used the phrase \u201cstandard implementations\u201d), and otherwise pushed for the need to double down on \u201cgood\u201d or \u201chigh quality\u201d media literacy. The reality is that I\u2019m a huge proponent of their good intentions\u200a\u2014\u200aand have long shared them, but I wrote this piece because I\u2019m worried that good intentions can backfire.<\/p>\n

While I was researching youth culture, I never set out to understand what curricula teachers used in the classroom. I wasn\u2019t there to assess the quality of the teachers or the efficacy of their formal educational approaches. I simply wanted to understand what students heard and how they incorporated the lessons they received into their lives. Although the teens that I met had a lot of choice words to offer about their teachers, I\u2019ve always assumed that most teachers entered the profession with the best of intentions, even if their students couldn\u2019t see that. But I spent my days listening to students\u2019 frustrations and misperceptions of the messages teachers offered.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never met an educator who thinks that the process of educating is easy or formulaic. (Heck, this is why most educators roll their eyes when they hear talk of computerized systems that can educate better than teachers.) So why do we assume that well-intended classroom lessons\u200a\u2014\u200aor even well-designed curricula\u200a\u2014\u200amight not play out as we imagine? <\/span>This isn\u2019t simply about the efficacy of the lesson or the skill of the teacher, <\/span>but the cultural context in which these conversations occur.<\/span><\/p>\n

In many communities in which I\u2019ve done research, the authority of teachers is often questioned. Nowhere is this more painfully visible than when well-intended highly educated (often white) teachers come to teach in poorer communities of color. Yet, <\/span>how often are pedagogical interventions designed by researchers really taking into account the doubt that students and their parents have of these teachers?<\/span> And how do we as educators and scholars grapple with how we might have made mistakes?<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not asking \u201cDid Media Literacy Backfire?\u201d to be a pain in the toosh, but to genuinely highlight how the ripple effects of good intentions may not play out as imagined on the ground for all sorts of reasons.<\/p>\n

The Good Intentions of Engineers<\/strong><\/h4>\n

From the outside, companies like Facebook and Google seem pretty evil to many people<\/span>. They\u2019re situated in a capitalist logic that many advocates and progressives despise. They\u2019re opaque and they don\u2019t engage the public in their decision-making processes, even when those decisions have huge implications for what people read and think<\/span>. They\u2019re extremely powerful and they\u2019ve made a lot of people rich in an environment where financial inequality and instability is front and center. Primarily located in one small part of the country, they also seem like a monolithic beast.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a result, it\u2019s not surprising to me that many people assume that engineers and product designers have evil (or at least financially motivated) intentions. There\u2019s an irony here because my experience is the opposite.<\/span>Most product teams have painfully good intentions, <\/span>shaped by utopic visions of how the ideal person would interact with the ideal system<\/span>.<\/span> Nothing is more painful than sitting through a product design session with design personae that have been plucked from a collection of clich\u00e9s.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen a lot of terribly naive product plans, with user experience mockups that <\/span>lack <\/span>any<\/span> sense of how or why people might interact with a system in unexpected ways.<\/span> I spent years tracking how people did unintended things with social media, <\/span>such as the rise of \u201cFakesters,\u201d or of teenagers who gamed Facebook\u2019s system by inserting brand names into their posts, realizing that this would make their posts rise higher in the social network\u2019s news feed<\/span>. <\/span>It has always boggled my mind how difficult it is for engineers and product designers to <\/span>imagine how their systems would get gamed.<\/span> I actually genuinely loved product work because I couldn\u2019t help but<\/span> think about <\/span>how to break a system through unexpected social practices.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most products and features that get released <\/span>start<\/span> with good intentions, but they too get munged by the system, framed by marketing plans, and manipulated by users.<\/span> And then there\u2019s the dance of chaos as companies seek to clean up PR messes (which often involves non-technical actors telling insane fictions about the product), patch bugs to prevent abuse, and throw bandaids on parts of the code that didn\u2019t play out as intended. There\u2019s a reason that <\/span>no one can tell you exactly how Google\u2019s search engine or Facebook\u2019s news feed works.<\/span> Sure, the PR folks will tell you that it\u2019s proprietary code. <\/span>But the ugly truth is that the code has been patched to smithereens to address countless types of manipulation and gamification<\/span>(e.g., SEO to bots)<\/span>.<\/span> It\u2019s quaint to read the original \u201cpage rank\u201d paper that Brin and Page wrote when they envisioned how a search engine could ideally work. That\u2019s so not how the system works today.<\/span><\/p>\n

The good intentions of engineers and product people, especially those embedded in large companies, are often doubted as sheen for a capitalist agenda. Yet, like many other well-intended actors, I often find that makers feel misunderstood and maligned, assumed to have evil thoughts. And <\/span>I often think that when non-tech people start by assuming that they\u2019re evil, we lose a significant opportunity to address problems.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Good Intentions of Journalists<\/strong><\/h4>\n

I\u2019ve been harsh on journalists lately, mostly because I find it so infuriating that a profession that is dedicated to being a check to power could be so ill-equipped to be self-reflexive about its own practices.<\/p>\n

Yet, I know that I\u2019m being unfair. Their codes of conduct and idealistic visions of their profession help journalists and editors and publishers stay strong in an environment where they are accustomed to being attacked.<\/span> It just kills me that the cultural of journalism makes those who have an important role to play unable to see how they can be manipulated at scale.<\/p>\n

Sure, plenty of top-notch journalists are used to negotiating deception and avoidance. You gotta love a profession that persistently bangs its head against a wall of \u201cno comment.\u201d But journalism has grown up as an individual sport; a competition for leads and attention that can get fugly<\/span> in the best of configurations. Time is rarely on a journalist\u2019s side, just as nuance is rarely valued by editors. Trying to find \u201cbalance\u201d in this ecosystem has always been a pipe dream, but objectivity is a shared hallucination that keeps well-intended journalists going.<\/span><\/p>\n

Powerful actors have always tried to manipulate the news media, especially State actors. This is why the fourth estate is seen as so important in the American context. Yet, the game has changed, in part because of the distributed power of the masses. Social media marketers quickly figured out that manufacturing outrage and spectacle would give them a pathway to attention, attracting news media like bees to honey. Most folks rolled their eyes, watching as monied people played the same games as State actors. But what about the long tail? How do we grapple with the long tail? How should journalists respond to those who are hacking the attention economy<\/a>?<\/span><\/p>\n

I am genuinely struggling to figure out how journalists, editors, and news media should respond in an environment in which they are getting gamed.<\/span>What I do know from 12-steps is that the first step is to admit that you have a problem. And we aren\u2019t there yet. And sadly, <\/span>that means that good intentions are getting gamed<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Developing the Hacker\u00a0Mindset<\/strong><\/h4>\n

I\u2019m in awe of how many of the folks I vehemently disagree with are willing to align themselves with others they vehemently disagree with when they have a shared interest in the next step. Some conservative and hate groups are willing to be odd bedfellows because they\u2019re willing to share tactics, even if they don\u2019t share end goals. Many progressives can\u2019t even imagine coming together with folks who have a slightly different vision, let alone a different end goal, to even imagine various tactics. Why is that<\/span>?<\/span><\/p>\n

My goal in writing these essays is not because I know the solutions to some of the most complex problems that we face\u200a\u2014\u200aI don\u2019t\u200a\u2014\u200abut because <\/span>I think that we need to start thinking about these puzzles sideways, upside down, and from non-Euclidean spaces. In short, <\/span>I keep thinking that we need more well-intended folks to start thinking like hackers<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Think just as much about how you build an ideal system as how it might be corrupted, destroyed, manipulated, or gamed.<\/span> Think about unintended consequences, not simply to stop a bad idea but to build resilience into the\u00a0model.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a developer, I always loved the notion of \u201cextensibility\u201d because it was an ideal of building a system that could take <\/span>unimagined<\/span> future development into consideration. Part of why I love the notion is that it\u2019s bloody impossible to implement.<\/span> Sure, I (poorly) comment my code and build object-oriented structures that would allow for some level of technical flexibility. But, at the end of the day, I\u2019d always end up kicking myself for not imagining a particular use case in my original design and, as a result, doing a lot more band-aiding than I\u2019d like to admit. The masters of software engineering extensibility are inspiring because they don\u2019t just hold onto the task at hand, but have a vision for all sorts of different future directions that may never come into fruition. That thinking is so key to building anything, whether it be software or a campaign or a policy.<\/span> And yet, it\u2019s not a muscle that we train people to develop.<\/span><\/p>\n

I<\/span>f <\/span>we want to address some of the major challenges in civil society, we need the types of people who think 10 steps ahead in chess<\/span>, imagine innovative ways of breaking <\/span>things<\/span>, and think with extensibility at their core<\/span>.<\/span> More importantly, we all need to develop that sensibility in ourselves. This is the hacker mindset.<\/span><\/p>\n

This post was originally posted\u00a0on Points<\/a>. It builds off of\u00a0a series of essays on topics affecting the public sphere<\/em><\/a>\u00a0written by folks at Data & Society.\u00a0As expected, my earlier posts\u00a0ruffled some feathers, and I\u2019ve been trying to think about how to respond in a productive manner. This is my attempt.<\/em><\/em><\/p>

Flickr Image: CC BY 2.0<\/a>-licensed image<\/a> by DaveBleasdale<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2026 And Why We Need a Hacker\u00a0Mindset I am surrounded by people who are driven by good intentions. Educators who want to inform students, who passionately believe that people can be empowered through knowledge. Activists who have committed their lives to addressing inequities, who believe that they have a moral responsibility to shine a spotlight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2123,312,2011],"class_list":["post-6840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hacker","tag-media","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6840"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6842,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6840\/revisions\/6842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}