Silicon Valley Is Suffering From A Lack of Humanity

Deep Down We All Know Silicon Valley Needs The Humanitarian Vision of Steve Jobs

The genius of Steve Jobs lies in his hippie period and with his time at Reed College. With the deep ethical problems facing technology now, we need Jobs vision more than ever.

To his understanding of technology, Jobs brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party. His worldview was shaped by the ’60s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Cupertino in 1972, he said, “the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there. After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.

Decades later Jobs flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” a 1960s counterculture publication. Jobs’ experience rings with my own experience in the Santa Clara Valley at that time. Jobs and I were both deeply affected by Stewart Brand, the visionary behind The Whole Earth Catalog.  Stanford professor Fred Turner has documented this period in his book “From the Counterculture to Cyberculture, Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. 

For me this journey also began with the extraordinary vision of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian professor of communications, who literally predicted the emergence of the World Wide Web and “The Global Village,”  like some kind of modern day Nostradamus.

Stewart Brand is also featured in Tom Wolfe‘s book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” along with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and The Grateful Dead.  I had the great good fortune to formally meet Brand at a COMDEX Microsoft event in a hangar at McCarren Airport in Las Vegas and was immediately impressed by him, as was Jobs. Not surprisingly, Brand was an invited guest at the Microsoft event, having already seized on the importance of the personal computer and the prospect of a networked World. Recently, in another anecdote on that time, Tim Bajarin shared a wonderful story about Job’s counterculture friend and organic gardener who remains the manager of the landscape at the new Apple campus, retaining the feeling of the original Santa Clara Valley orchard economy, that some of us can still remember.

It is important to think back to that time in the Bay Area and the euphoria of the vision of “digital utopianism.”   It grounds me and helps me to understand where we have gone so terribly wrong.

Digital utopianism is now dead. I have written about its sad demise on this blog. The wonderful vision of digital utopianism and the Web has been perverted by numerous authoritarian governments, now including our own, resulting in a Balkanized Web and a dark Web pandering all kinds of evil. This is the problem we face and the urgent need for greater emphasis on ethics. What about human life, culture, and values?  So many areas of technology are on the verge of deep philosophical questions.  Uber has become the poster child for everything that is wrong with Silicon Valley. I ask myself, “What would Steve Jobs have said about Travis Kalanick and Uber?” I think we know the answer. Ironically, Silicon Valley has a center for research and study in ethics, the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Mike Markkula was an Intel marketing guy who quit Intel to join with two crazy long-haired guys in Cupertino.

I am a Liberal Arts & Humanities graduate myself, including graduate study at Oxford University. When I returned from England I asked the obvious question: Now how do I make a living?  As it happened, I very improbably landed my first real job at Intel Corporation. When I asked why I was hired, the answer was that I was judged to have the requisite talent and aptitude if not the technical knowledge.  I later developed a reputation for being very “technical” by the process of “osmosis,” by simply living in a highly rarified technical culture and receiving whiteboard tutorials from friendly engineers. I was thrown into a group of Ivy League MBA’s. We wistfully shared a desire to have the others’ educations, but simply working together made us all more effective. Amazingly my career grew almost exponentially and I attribute my success to that cross-fertilization.

While with Intel in Hillsboro Oregon, someone approached me to represent Intel at a talk with Reed students. I was cautioned that few if any Reed students would be interested in working for Intel, but they would be very intellectually engaging.  That proved to be a significant understatement.  In the end, I believe that perhaps two dozen “Reedies,” as they are known, joined Intel, one of whom went on to a stellar career as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.  A significant part of my later career has been devoted to using my Humanities education background to assess and translate deep technology in human terms for the benefit of both management and potential customers.

Today, nothing of my story would ever happen, but the influence of the Humanities and Arts in business seems more sorely needed than ever.

Read more: Why We Need Liberal Arts in Technology’s Age of Distraction – Time Magazine – Tim Bajarin

Read more: Digital Utopianism of Marshall McLuhan and Stewart Brand is Cracking – mayo615,com

Read more: Liberal Arts In The Data Age – Harvard Business Review

What Makes Social Entrepreneurs Different?

Reblogged from the HBR Blog Network

What Makes Social Entrepreneurs Different

by Bright B. Simons  |   8:00 AM January 11, 2013

When social entrepreneurs say that they want to “work themselves out of a job” they are not making a glib statement to sound cool. They are merely stating the obvious — they want to fundamentally solve the problem that their solution is designed to address.

Commercial entrepreneurs are different. They’re out to standardize a business model. That model might solve a social problem — but if it’s profitable and doesn’t fix the problem, that’s okay, too.

As a result, social entrepreneurs are more interested in understanding the social, economic, political, and cultural context of the problems they are trying to solve than traditional entrepreneurs are. They can be more analytical.

It is unthinkable, for instance, to imagine a social entrepreneur treating research on the health effects of tobacco use the way the tobacco industry, market analysts, and investors did in the 1960s and ’70s. It is the business of a social entrepreneur to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the social impact of various phenomena, and to be academically honest about what they learn.

That is why social entrepreneurs were among the most enthusiastic popularizers of concepts like C.K. Prahalad‘s “bottom of the pyramid,” that began life as academic research. Social entrepreneurs have also been some of the most attentive followers of the academic debate between the likes of Mark Pitt and Jonathan Murdoch about whether microfinance really helps reduce poverty. The most intrigued have even gone back to the original writings of Lysander Spooneron the subject two centuries ago.

That’s because the stakes are higher for social entrepreneurs. What may seem abstract to a commercial entrepreneur could have very practical consequences for a social entrepreneur. If Jonathan Murdoch and his collaborators are right in their calculations, then microfinance (in particular, microcredit) does not benefit the poor in the way it should, and a social entrepreneur working in the area of poverty-reduction cannot view the tool as a handy ally in her toolbox.

When I decided to get involved in finding solutions to the problem of counterfeit medicines, I couldn’t simply confine myself to investigating whether there would be a market for the solution. I had to assure myself that counterfeit medicines are indeed the primary bad stuff to go after in the complex socio-economic mix of patient abuse and supply chain crime. I read, among many others, the writings of researchers such as Roger Bate and Paul Newton. I and others in the social enterprise community had to assure ourselves that we had a sufficiently robust analytical basis in which to ground the search for solutions. I had to become not just a social entrepreneur but an analytical social entrepreneur.

True, some commercial/traditional entrepreneurs invest substantially in research too. But only to assure themselves that someone will pay enough to make the development of the solution worthwhile. That the person paying the price sufficiently benefits is actually secondary. What matters is that he’s willing to pay.

Of course, in a reasonable number of cases the benefits are real, and this leads to sustainable traditional enterprises. That’s why some have argued that ultimately all enterprises are or will be “social” enterprises. Also, in many instances, social enterprises prepare the way for commercial enterprises to follow. They till the ground when it is still not clear whether a viable commercial model exists. When social enterprises finally make headway, commercial enterprises jump into the newly created industry and seek to standardize returns from the new “value class.” Social entrepreneurs are then seen as “leaving value on the table.” But the evidence shows that over time they generate completely new value classes.

Today micro-packaging, for instance, is finally being taken seriously by giant multinational fast-moving-consumer-goods companies. A few decades ago, only social enterprises saw anything in this approach of retailing items in packages small enough to be affordable to the poor.

In Africa, where the value chains of most existing industries are fragmented, entrepreneurs struggle to standardize commercial models because they cannot simply ignore the bulk of the problem and focus on a smaller, repeatable, bit. They must often also enter partnerships, many more informal than formal, that are more organic than transactional in order to build a holistic enough value chain to attack a problem. They also need to embed themselves much deeper into the cultural and social matrix as rule of law and contractual and regulatory systems are in many African countries often rudimentary. This can make distinguishing between social and commercial entrepreneurship in Africa a tad more difficult.

But the point remains that social entrepreneurship is a vital foundation block for any system that seeks to uproot social problems anywhere. And in places like Africa, it is actually indispensable.