What anthropologists can teach tech titans
‘These leaders have been operating with dangerous blind spots’
This year, the tech giant Amazon will be engaged in a delicate political dance in New York. The reason? In late 2018, the company announced plans to base one of its two new “headquarters” in Long Island City, Queens.
Amazon’s leaders probably assumed that the decision would delight locals. After all, New York mayor Bill de Blasio was so keen to lure the company that he joined forces with his arch-rival Andrew Cuomo, New York governor, to offer incentives.
But local residents have not reacted as the city elites — or Amazon officials — might have expected. Instead of welcoming the new high-paying jobs, some locals organised community meetings to try to keep Amazon out.
As Tania Mattos, a leader at Queens Neighborhoods United, a group that promotes affordable housing in the area, told the FT: “This deal was not for our communities and, if it’s not for our communities, we’re not going to allow them into our neighbourhood.”
How should companies respond? The normal answer would be to throw money at local “charity” projects and hire a few political lobbyists. But here is another idea that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, might consider, along with other tech leaders: hire some anthropologists.
This doesn’t seem a very Silicon Valley thing to do. Men such as Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt have amassed vast wealth by handling computer programs and algorithms. By contrast, anthropologists study the human condition by watching people on the ground rather than using spreadsheets.
When anthropology emerged as a discipline in the 19th century, it tended to study so-called “primitive” cultures — tribes in the Amazon jungle, for example. That all seems a very long way from a 21st-century Amazon warehouse.
But anthropology’s focus has shifted over time. These days its adherents are more likely to study modern western societies than remote jungles. And what makes the discipline so relevant for thinking about today’s technology is its methodology.
Most notably, anthropologists try to use patient observation, without preconception, to see how all aspects of “culture” fit together, including those parts that nobody usually talks about. The core aim is to see the world through somebody else’s eyes and to understand cultural patterns.
Doing this enables them to comprehend other ways of life. But it also delivers a second — crucial — benefit: when you think yourself into the mind of someone who initially seems different, or “alien”, you don’t just give yourself a chance to understand them, you also obtain a fresh perspective on your own culture.
Outsiders see things that insiders cannot — and vice versa. Being an “insider-outsider” (someone who can both deeply empathise with a tribe’s culture and view it in a wider, detached way) can bring powerful new awareness.
This is what tech titans desperately need to take on board. In 2018, it became painfully clear that they have been operating with some dangerous blind spots: they seemingly failed to appreciate the consequences of their innovations on society as a whole — in relation to privacy, political manipulation and so on.
Critics claim this is because some techies are greedy, arrogant or evil. But I suspect that the problem is more to do with tunnel vision: they have been so obsessed by innovating, operating within an introverted world where everyone speaks the same technical language, that they have lost common sense — and the broader vision of how their actions affect the wider world or are perceived by it.
The problem is not dissimilar to the one that plagued Wall Street before the 2008 financial crash: an elite so drunk on its own power that it becomes stuck in a rarefied ghetto.
Some officials at tech giants are aware of this, and are attempting to make changes. For several years, groups such as Intel and Xerox, for example, have been quietly consulting anthropologists to help them with their product design.
But recently, companies including Facebook, Uber, Spotify and Google have started to do this too. When the business anthropology group EPIC held its annual Ethnographic Praxis In Industry Conference in October, tickets sold out within 24 hours, as technology companies, among others, scrambled to attend.
However, while techies may be ready to hire anthropologists to study consumers, it remains to be seen whether they are also prepared to use their newly gained perspective to understand the prejudices and peculiarities of their own “tribe”.
Hence my advice to Bezos and others: try to act more like an anthropologist this year — whether in Queens or elsewhere. It will not be easy; nor will it magically remove your regulatory woes. But it might help you understand the societal backlash. Or consider this: anthropologists are far cheaper to employ than the (ever-swelling) army of political lobbyists you have been hiring; and probably less controversial.