How Do We Build Ethics Into Innovation?

An article in TechCrunch by Denis Mars, formerly director of admissions at the Y Combinator seed money start-up accelerator, “Moving fast and breaking things cost us our privacy and security”, refers to Facebook’s motto and blames the company created by Mark Zuckerberg for the disaster that is social networks today.

While I broadly agree with Mars and his critique of the growth-at-all-costs mindset that characterizes Facebook, I have one main caveat: a company should approach innovation as a blank page, pursuing research and development even if it seemingly defies convention. That said, this should only apply to the research and development stages, when the company is designing products or services, when it is, so to speak, in the experimental phase. At that stage, practically anything goes, albeit within the limits of common sense, because there are many occasions when innovation arises precisely from pushing those limits, testing them or considering them as something that can be surpassed. Innovation, in its design and development phases, should not be constrained.

The difficulties, however, arise in the next phase: when we see the consequences of a product or service’s mass adoption. This is when we must consider the suitability of its launch, or even its withdrawal if we see any harmful effects. Withdrawing a product when you see that it is causing major problems that threaten society is not about how quickly it was developed or about innovation: it’s about ethics. When you see that your product has been used to manipulate electoral processes, to provoke genocides or to exploit its users’ personal information, you know something is wrong. If you lack an inner voice to tell you that, you have a serious problem.

If Facebook and its founder have demonstrated anything over the years, it’s not exactly their capacity for innovation, but their total lack of ethics. Driven by the obsession that the world of social networks was moving so fast that a company could find itself obsolete in a matter of months (Friendster, MySpace, Orkut and many others), Zuckerberg became paranoid, and decided to adopt an anything goes policy, and not just in the development phase, but in all of them. I launch a product or service, and even if after having done so it is clearly doing a lot of harm, I keep going and extend it. Because I can. Because the market is essentially unregulated. Because it improves my bottom line. And because I don’t care about anything else.

The problem, therefore, lies not in Facebook’s ability reinvent itself as a development factory capable of turning ideas into code efficiently and quickly, but in the fact that, despite being fully aware of the problems it was generating, it continued with its roadmap. What really amazes me about a person like Mark Zuckerberg is not his capacity for innovation, but that he is able to sleep soundly at night knowing what he has created.

The problem does not come from moving fast, nor from breaking things occasionally. Sometimes the potential consequences of an innovation may not be clear during its design, or even in the early stages of its launch. But when everyone warns you about the consequences of what you’ve done and you just keep going, because you believe everyone else is going in the wrong direction, you’ve got a problem, and that problem is the lack of any moral compass. That’s why it makes no sense to let companies like Facebook self-regulate, because they lack precisely what it takes to be able to do so. The excuse of “it wasn’t me, it was others using my product”, trotted out this week by Israeli company NSO as it sought to evade responsibility for the widespread use of its spyware by governments is ridiculous and simply indicates the cheap moral relativity of arms manufacturers (“it’s not guns that kill people”) or oil companies (“it’s not the oil, it’s you burning it”).

Society doesn’t need protection from innovation, it needs protecting from people without ethics or scruples of any kind.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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