My name is Stephen Cobb and Man Made Mess is part of my effort to change the way technology is created, funded, and deployed. Why is change is needed? Just look around you at the mess that man’s technologies have made of the planet and its inhabitants. The air is polluted, the oceans are polluted, the land is polluted, as are the streams that flow through it and the creatures that live on it. Our bodies are physically polluted with plastics and our minds are cognitively polluted by digital technologies that serve the interests of obscenely rich men.
Change is urgently needed to prevent us dying out as a species due to a surfeit of poorly conceived and badly executed technology. In short, the time has come to fix the mess we’ve made of technology, and by ‘we’ I mean men, specifically the kind of men who, in the pursuit of what they think is best for themselves and the world, violate moral codes, civil norms, and the golden rule, all while refusing to heed the warnings of experts and the lessons of history.
Who am I to talk about this? I’m the son of an engineer whose father and brother were engineers. I was born within site of a car factory in the heart of car-making country. I’ve spent four decades working in and with technology. I am a technologist. (I even have an award to prove it.)
For the past 30 years I’ve focused on researching cybersecurity and data privacy, working with people whose job it is to protect information systems from criminals. In recent years that job has been getting much harder. Each new wave of technology fails to fix the problems with old technology, even as it creates a whole new set of problems.
And when I step outside of cyberspace, I can see that this has always been the way of things in technology, not just for decades, but for centuries. Some men perceive a problem and invents new technology to solve it. Other men decide that this technology has great potential. They put up the money to deploy it, despite some early warnings about its possible shortcomings. As deployment gathers pace, more warnings are sounded, but the technology now has traction. Financial upside is in sight and male egos — belonging to inventors, investors, developers, and early adopters— are on the line.
Warnings are dismissed. Critics of the cool new technology are derided as weak, nervous, labeled Luddites. However, over time, things start to go wrong, often in ways predicted by those Luddites. The new technology is creating problems, but don’t worry, there are more men ready to invent new technology to solve those problems and, by ignoring warnings about the downsides of their inventions, create yet more problems.
When I searched for the root causes of this mess, I found one consistent factor: men. By studying male attitudes to technology it is possible to understand how patriarchy has made a mess of technology. That research effort is ongoing and in this newsletter I will share past lessons and new insights, distilling more than two decades of experience as a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP), and drawing on the work that made me both a bestselling author and award-winning technologist. As an independent researcher I will be pursuing lines of inquiry that opened up as I earned my masters in security and risk management, with a freedom that only a truly independent researcher can have.
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