Regulators, employees, and users are increasingly fed up with Silicon Valley. Will their anger lead to meaningful change?

After Donald Trump won the presidency, many citizens began considering how much social media platforms influenced the election. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter were accused of hosting misleading Russian ads, dividing people into filter bubbles, and allowing Cambridge Analytica to pilfer data from millions of Americans. 

Since then, the backlash against Big Tech has only grown larger. But have the numerous congressional hearings, think pieces, and awareness campaigns actually led to meaningful change? “I think there’s power in the current moment of so many people being dissatisfied,” said Anil Dash, the CEO Glitch, during a conversation at Unfinished Live. “Many meaningful movements arise from, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.’ ”

Now, a new wave of decentralized systems powered by blockchain technology are growing more popular and gaining power. Proponents say these platforms are different from the Big Tech offerings that came before them, but plenty of questions still need to be answered. “It’s an early gold rush,” said Baratunde Thurston, an activist and writer. “Only certain people have pickaxes.”

Dash said the blockchain ecosystem includes well-intentioned people who want to do good in the world, but it’s also rife with scammers looking to get rich. Ultimately, it can’t be understood as a binary that’s completely bad or good. “It’s just technology,” Dash explained. What matters most is the communities and norms that people build around it.

Watch the full conversation below, and scroll for a written transcript. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Statements by these speakers have not been fact-checked by Unfinished and represent their individual opinions.

Baratunde Thurston

For those who don’t know, you have been in this industry for a very long time—and that’s not me saying you’re old.

Anil Dash

Yeah.

Baratunde Thurston

I can do that by saying you’re old.

Anil Dash

Right.

Baratunde Thurston

Instead, I’ll just express a bit about you that folks may not know. CEO of a company called Glitch. Tech developer community where coders collaborate, create, share millions of web apps together. Some of which even inspired me. If you ever saw my TED Talk, he was part of the foundation of that talk about deconstructing racism one headline at a time. Glitch supported the early version of that. He’s also co-created one of the first implementations of the blockchain technology known as NFT. So can we blame you? We’ll come back to that. And he’s been recognized as a leading advocate for more humane, inclusive, and ethical technology. Not just by me, but by people who don’t know what a good person he actually is. So Anil, welcome to the stage.

Anil Dash

Thank you so much.

Baratunde Thurston

And thank you for being here.

Anil Dash

I’m glad to be here. I’m glad for everybody making it through to the end of the day. So appreciate everybody hanging in there.

Baratunde Thurston

What do you think of what you’ve been hearing today?

Anil Dash

That’s a good question. I gravitate towards the technological conversations … It’s been social and political and all these contexts. The technology parts jumped out to me because I am excited and optimistic about one part. People talking about decentralization is like, this speaks to my soul. Literally 20 years ago being in conference rooms with people where we’re like, “Can you imagine if we could make these decentralized technologies?” And talking to these brilliant engineers that we’re building some of this stuff. Like true blue, true believer. This is something I’ve cared about for a long time. Adjacent to that is, where is it all at? How long are we going to be at this? What wins do we have to show? So a little bit of fatigue and doubt.

I’m not a cynic. I’m not a skeptic. But you can’t help but lose faith after a while. And how many times are we going to… It’s Charlie Brown with the football. Right? How many times are we going to see this?

It’s so interesting because the best and the most scary are really closely adjacent, and they’re both tied to the same thing. And this is what technology is about, I think in every aspect. Is the promise. It’s the best stuff we can do. It brings us these amazing moments that we love. Then they’re like, “Man, they’re doing that again?” Like that part of how this could go wrong and being able to see that I think is there. So those are the parts that resonated.

Then seeing, actually it’s been really good for my heart to see people talking about their optimistic view. We’re going to use this tech and we’re going to do these good things because it’s good to be reminded of it because once you get to a certain phase and you’ve done this for a bit, then it’s a little bit of like, “Yeah, but the last time somebody tried this, this what happened.” Or, “Here’s why that’s hard.” Maybe just needs more energy from folks that are not as jaded on that.

Baratunde Thurston

I have been in some of those rooms with you along this journey. A lot of people… Raise your hands if you’ve been a part of some version of this before. You feel like, “I kind of been in the room where it was supposed to be happening and then different things happened, but I’m still back in the room”. So what do you pull from that somewhat recent history, certainly in the history of our species, very recent history, of efforts to make the world a better place through the magic of technology that we should keep in the forefront now?

Anil Dash

I think there’s power in the current moment of so many people being dissatisfied. Right? So many meaningful movements arise from “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Right? There’s so much of that energy. We see it channeled in a lot of bad ways in society right now. But actually specifically amongst thoughtful people, people are not like reactionary people who are not coming in angry about things unjustifiably. But they’re saying, “Look, I know that there’s good in this phone in my hand. I know there’s positive things… But we know there is injustice going on here. We know there are things that are broken.” There are a lot of people that feel that way. You don’t have to persuade anybody if you’re whatever, sitting around the table with family and friends, you don’t have to say, “Did you know there’s something wrong with what Facebook does?” You know what I mean? It’s like the argument’s already made.

And there are real harms, for all the negatives, that’s fertile ground. That to me feels like a base from which real change, real things can happen. Again, I sort of play with that duality of it. It’s like I believe that and I think that’s important and I despair because there are people, I mean, I’m one of them, but well before me and much louder voices than me that have been banging this drum for years and years saying like, “Beware. Be cautious. This is going to go wrong”. Then it goes wrong. Say, “Look, this is the thing. Can we keep it from going wrong again”? Then that sort of waving of the red flags has finally accomplished the first thing that it aspired to do, which is get a lot of people to be aware that we can do better than what we have.

Baratunde Thurston

So there is at least consensus that there’s a problem. Which certainly wasn’t the case, say in ’95. A much smaller pool of people even being aware. “Oh, okay. That’s not for me”. It’s like a huge blue light just flashed in our faces.

So I think that this present moment is rich with possibility and that excites me. I think formal decentralization of some of the ways that apps operate is pretty cool stuff. It also makes me nervous because I’m like, “Well, who has access to these tools to begin with”. Which is a question of digital divide stuff from the early nineties. And the levels of complexity required to really have command of it. It’s an early gold rush. Only certain people have pickaxes. Only certain people know where to mine for the gold. In this case, literally mine. That it’s blockchain particularly, decentralized, but also there’s still risk of concentrated power through mining pools. Of course, the proof of waste that we heard [Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood] mention earlier. In terms of how you verify all this stuff.

So those are a few of the things on my radar, as well as I think a conceptual… Really the philosophical orientation of, is this really a fancy way of trying opt out of commons? And opt out of messiness and opt out of humanness? I’m not really down for that. I’m talking, I’m unqualified. I’m not down for that. What do you see as the things we need to be looking out for? How do you respond to any of those prompts that I shared?

Anil Dash

I mean, there’s so much there. I think most people that come in to build any technology are well intended. Part of my background is, I helped build some of the first early blogging tools, which were predecessors to the current era of social media in a lot of ways. It was actually a small community of folks that did it. I like to describe it like a bunch of bands in a certain scene in a town where everybody knows everybody and if the drummer is sick one day for one band, the other guy will fill in. So there was a comradery, which is a weird thing. You can’t imagine, like these big companies, they hate each other now. Right? But it was like, because there wasn’t, well, there wasn’t that much money, but also there wasn’t a lot of attention and awareness. People were sort of very genuinely building out of intent for this.

So there was a lot of innovation at that time and a lot of ideas sharing. But also thoughtful criticism. Right? So you could sort of say, “Well, if you do that, have you thought about how it could go wrong”? Actually, one of the areas was around just being able to sign into a website. The funny thing is, not just emails, but you’ve all probably signed a site using your Google ID or your Facebook ID. These are the predecessors to that technology. There was tremendous hand ringing about the potential of being tracked that way. There were literally years-long discussions of people thoughtfully engaging with each other. How do we make sure that somebody couldn’t accidentally track you from a place where you were buying something to see on your own website? You know what I mean? And it seems so quaint.

Baratunde Thurston

It does.

Anil Dash

Right?

Baratunde Thurston

Because that’s our economy now.

Anil Dash

That’s it. It’s a multi-billion dollar economy. It’s rife with fraud… But here’s the thing, those technological underpinnings were taken, remixed, made open source, shared, and became the underpinnings to Facebook sign-in and to all these other things. So even with the best intentions, these people genuinely cared about this issue. And even with really great technology, it was good enough that it’s still in use. Right?

Baratunde Thurston

Yeah.

Anil Dash

The same underpinnings are still in use. That it’ll go away when you don’t expect. That’s really, really hard to believe. I mean, we have this in every system. Like we look at representative democracy. We’re like, “Well, that couldn’t be hacked.” We think our systems are much more resilient than they are, until they aren’t. So that’s the part I sort of look at here, which is that I don’t question the motive of anybody who’s talking today. I don’t question the motives of anyone who builds this technology. But I look at something specifically, like what’s happening around blockchain and this sort of crypto technologies that’s being developed. The norms of that culture are, well, there’s going to be grifters around. There’s going to be some people around that. Just use it for crime. There just is. And yes, okay.

Baratunde Thurston

There’s a crime allowance.

Anil Dash

Exactly. That happens in fiat currency. Those are things that are real. But also, we’re not treating those as norms. We’re not saying you just have to accept some of them. We’re sort of saying, well, when infrastructure and regulation and policy doesn’t rein it in. There’s a real reluctance to sort of say the norms are actually really odd. They’re really shifted. That’s what’s hard. It’s like, okay, well we have these well-intentioned people, want to use this technology, want do something good in the world, and they’re sitting adjacent to the other advocates who are saying, “It’s a free for all in the wild west and we’re going to allow harms to happen because it doesn’t affect me directly”. I think that’s a really tough reckoning because it doesn’t mean the well’s already poisoned. I mean, there’s some poison next to the well tipping. You know what I mean? And you ought to look into that. That’s a hard thing to say, because there’s sort of this binary thing. You’re either like, “It’s all bad. Throw it all away,” or the triumphalism: This is going to solve democracy and it’s going to solve injustice. And it’s like, it’s probably not. It’s just technology.

Baratunde Thurston

Yeah. My last thought for you, to elicit from you really, is you can sometimes, your criticisms and your perspectives are very grounded I think in part, because you’ve been in the industry for a while. But you’re in a different position in the industry now than you’ve had for a while. Which is, you’re a CEO. Of a tech company. You’re #CEO, #tech CEO. So how does it feel to criticize yourself? And more specifically, what are you seeing from this vantage point? What challenges are you aware of now that you might not have been as an employee, as a developer, as a digital citizen, shall we say? I won’t call you a user.

Anil Dash

I get to talk to CEOs as peers. We’re much smaller. Right? I’m talking about these big tech companies. We’re smaller. I’d say a couple things. By and large, the technology industry in particular does not respect its workers and does not respect its users. Behind closed doors, they are way more disrespectful. They know not to do it in a press release.

Baratunde Thurston

It’s like racism.

Anil Dash

Yeah. And they assume… It’s a lot like that. It is that. They assume that you are of like mind with them when you’re in the room—

Baratunde Thurston

Because you’re there.

Anil Dash

Yeah. Yeah.

Baratunde Thurston

And you wouldn’t be there unless you… Okay.

Anil Dash

So that’s been discomforting. I don’t love that part. There’s some positive reckonings that are happening. Right? I think the sort of broad cultural change. Actually talk about workers. There’s such a shift in workers’ rights in the tech industry right now. Obviously some organizations are going to fight that and try to crush it under the heel. But actually I think there’s a real honest engagement at a lot of places where they’re like, “Okay, this change is coming. What do we do about it?” And I sort of tell them, it’s like policy regulations in the EU, like GDPR. It’s like, it’s just coming. How are you going to handle it? And rather than being defensive, I know there are some extremes. Like you look at… And it’s telling, because it’s really to blockchain, Coinbase saying like, “We’re not talking about politics at work at the same time as they’re trying to write memos to the SEC. Right? And I’m like, “There’s something here you’re not telling us”.

What it really is, is they’re reacting to, “We don’t like our workers being empowered [or]] critical from within about this institution. And we’re going to set a standard, and we don’t do that.” Some companies are taking that path. The folks I prefer to talk to and that I think are actually going to sustain themselves longer over the long run are those who are going to say, we have to take this seriously because it makes the workers happy. It makes the products better. And it makes it more likely the tech that we create is going to have a positive impact on the world.

Baratunde Thurston

We’re running out of time fast. What else do you want to say with the limited time we’ve got?

Anil Dash

Take a look at the phone in your pocket. Take a look at the tabs in your browser. Ask yourself how many of those apps were made by people that you know of, know who they are. They’re from your community. Maybe they’re local, homegrown, organic, just like the food that you eat. You know where it’s sourced. And do they share your values and care about the things you care about? If you don’t feel as good about what you’re putting into your eyes as what you’re putting into your mouth during a meal, then make some changes. We do have a lot of power to make that thing a lot better.