« Antepenultimate | Main | Traffic stop »

The Fregoli delusion

Anomalisa-Fregoli.pngIn biology, a monoculture is a bad thing. If there's only one type of banana, a fungus can wipe out the entire species instead of, as now, just the most popular one. If every restaurant depends on Yelp to find its customers, Yelp's decision to replace their phone number with one under its own control is a serious threat. And if, as we wrote here some years ago, everyone buys everything from Amazon, gets all their entertainment from Netflix, and get all their mapping, email, and web browsing from Google, what difference does it make that you're iconoclastically running Ubuntu underneath?

The same should be true in the culture of software development. It ought to be obvious that a monoculture is as dangerous there as on a farm. Because: new ideas, robustness, and innovation all come from mixing. Plenty of business books even say this. It's why research divisions create public spaces, so people from different disciplines will cross-fertilize. It's why people and large businesses live in cities.

And yet, as the journalist Emily Chang documents in her 2018 book Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley technology companies have deliberately spent the last couple of decades progressively narrowing their culture. To a large extent, she blames the spreading influence of the Paypal Mafia. At Paypal's founding, she writes, this group, which includes Palantir founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Tesla supremo Elon Musk, adopted the basic principle that to make a startup lean, fast-moving, and efficient you needed a team who thought alike. Paypal's success and the diaspora of its early alumni disseminated a culture in which hiring people like you was a *strategy*. This is what #MeToo and fights for equality are up against.

Businesses are as prone to believing superstitions as any other group of people, and unicorn successes are unpredictable enough to fuel weird beliefs, especially in an already-insular place like Silicon Valley. Yet, Chang finds much earlier roots. In the mid-1960s, System Development Corporation hired psychologists William Cannon and Dallis Perry to create a profile to help it to identify recruits who would enjoy the new profession of computer programming. They interviewed 1,378 mostly male programmers, and found this common factor: "They don't like people." And so the idea that "antisocial" was a qualification was born, spreading outwards through increasingly popular "personality tests" and, because of the cultural differences in the way girls and boys are socialized, gradually and systematically excluding women.

Chang's focus is broad, surveying the landscape of companies and practices. For personal inside experiences, you might try Ellen Pao's Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, which documents the experiences at Kleiner Perkins, which led her to bring a lawsuit, and at Reddit, where she was pilloried for trying to reduce some of the system's toxicity. Or, for a broader range, try Lean Out, a collection of personal stories edited by Elissa Shevinsky.

Chang finds that even Google, which began with an aggressive policy of hiring female engineers that netted it technology leaders Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, Marissa Mayer, who went on to try to rescue Yahoo, and Sheryl Sandberg, now COO of Facebook, failed in the long term. Today its male-female radio is average for Silicon Valley. She cites Slack as a notable exception; founder Stewart Butterfield set out to build a different kind of workplace.

In that sense, Slack may be the opposite of Facebook. In Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, Roger McNamee tells the mea culpa story of his early mentorship to Mark Zuckerberg and the company's slow pivot into posing problems he believes are truly dangerous. What's interesting to read in tandem with Chang's book is his story of the way Silicon Valley hiring changed. Until around 2000, hiring rewarded skill and experience; the limitations on memory, storage, and processing power meant companies needed trained and experienced engineers. Facebook, however, came along at the moment when those limitations had vanished and as the dot-com bust finished playing out. Suddenly, products could be built and scaled up much faster; open source libraries and the arrival of cloud suppliers meant they could be developed by less experienced, less skilled, *younger*, much *cheaper* people; and products could be free, paid for by advertising. Couple this with 20 years of Reagan deregulation and the influence, which he also cites, of the Paypal Mafia, and you have the recipe for today's discontents. McNamee writes that he is unsure what the solution is; his best effort at the moment appears to be advising Center for Humane Technology, led by former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris.

These books go a long way toward explaining the world Caroline Criado-Perez describes in 2018's Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Her discussion is not limited to Silicon Valley - crash test dummies, medical drugs and practices, and workplace design all appear - but her main point applies. If you think of one type of human as "default normal", you wind up with a world that's dangerous for everyone else.

You end up, as she doesn't say, with a monoculture as destructive to the world of ideas as those fungi are to Cavendish bananas. What Zucked and Brotopia explain is how we got there.


Illustrations: Still from Anomalisa (2015).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://WWW.pelicancrossing.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/wendyg/managed-mt/mt-tb.cgi/867

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Archives